Al Kooper Quotes

#1. The "Highway 61" album [of Bob Dylan] was produced by Bob Johnston if I'm not incorrect. And Bob Johnston was an entirely different producer than Tom Wilson. Tom Wilson had produced jazz records and was a Harvard educated.

Al Kooper

#2. The [Bob] Dylan sessions were very disorganized, to say the least. I mean, the "Like A Rolling Stone" session I was invited by the producer to watch.

Al Kooper

#3. My influences were mostly gospel. So I was playing my twisted Jewish equivalent of gospel music over his twisted equivalent of rock and roll music. And it was a very excellent marriage.

Al Kooper

#4. Unlike so many Dylan-writer-wannabes and phony 'encyclopedia' compilers, Sean Wilentz makes me feel he was in the room when he chronicles events that I participated in. Finally a breath of fresh words founded in hardcore, intelligent research.

Al Kooper

#5. Only through sheer ambition did I end up playing on [Bob Dylan sessions] and the fact that I could do that is a testament to how disorganized it really was.

Al Kooper

#6. Mike Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa! Because I had never heard any white person play like that before. And he was about my age, and he just, that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.

Al Kooper

#7. If you'd done a good job you'd just step back and let all these different chemistries interact and let it go.

Al Kooper

#8. I liked being challenged by music. It's good for me.

Al Kooper

#9. Every now and then we could steal somebody else's stuff.

Al Kooper

#10. In the, uh, '30s and '40s, the Brill Building was the hub of, uh, musical activity in Tin Pan Alley in New York City. I believe Irving Berlin was there, and uh, and everything just centered around there.

Al Kooper

#11. Musically Bob [Dylan] is a primitive. He's not a Gershwin, or somebody that uses eloquent music terms.

Al Kooper

#12. The first generation from the '50s that were in 1650 [Broadway] were pretty much all crooks, I mean just out and out crooks. And the next generation had a little more finesse. But I mean those first wave of people, you know, definitely would take all your money, no doubt about it.

Al Kooper

#13. Still being ambitious to want to play on the record, I was a mediocre keyboard player. And uh, I seized the opportunity and played the organ.

Al Kooper

#14. You couldn't help being influenced by Dylan.

Al Kooper

#15. I started in the music business I was first introduced to 1650 Broadway, uh, which was in reality where everything happened in the '60s.

Al Kooper

#16. Producing Bob Dylan was pretty much a spectator sport.

Al Kooper

#17. I think it was Columbia politics, Columbia Records politics that, that, Tom Wilson left [Bob Dylan] after "Like A Rolling Stone".

Al Kooper