Al Kooper
Appearances
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, I was just determined to play. I was a guitar player at the time, and I stayed up all night practicing and had actually an inflated opinion of my ability as a guitar player.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And I got to the session and at the time I was playing guitar on records as a session musician so the other musicians that were there early when I got there did not think it was unusual for me to be there with my guitar because I'd played sessions with them and they knew that I did session work. And I set up my stuff and I sat down and I waited and Dylan came in with a guitar player
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
who was roughly my age, and he sat down and started warming up, and I realized that was in way over my head. He was the best guitar player I'd ever heard in my life, just warming up. Just those things he was playing were way beyond my grasp as a player, and I said to myself, I've got to get out of here before I really embarrass myself.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
So when there was a moment I took my guitar and put it in the case and put it against the wall and I went in the control room where I belonged and watched the session and Tom Wilson came in and he hadn't seen me sitting out there with the guitar so that was very good. And then during the session, they had someone playing the organ, and they moved him over to a piano, actually.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
His name was Paul Griffin. He was a studio keyboard player. And I walked over to Tom Wilson and I said, hey, why don't you let me play organ on this? I got a great part for this. He went, oh, man, you're not an organ player. You're a guitar player. You don't play the organ. And I said, oh, yeah, yeah, I got a great part for this, Tom. And just at that point, they called him for a phone call.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And I thought to myself, well, he didn't say no. He just said I wasn't an organ player. And so I went out and sat down at the organ. And as a matter of fact, if Paul Griffin hadn't have left, the organ switched on. That would have been the end of my career because it's very complicated to turn on a Hammond B-3 organ. It takes about three separate moves. And you have to know what you're doing.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And I didn't. But it was on already, so I was saved. And... And then Tom Wilson came back out and he said, okay, this is take six. And then he saw me and he said, hey, what are you doing out there? And I just started laughing. And he was a gentleman. He just said, okay, okay, let's go. We're rolling. This is take seven.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
I guess he thought, you know, if I wanted to do this so bad, he would stand behind it because he was my friend.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, they were rehearsing for a second, and I kind of got the thing. And the speaker to the organ was very far from where I was sitting at the organ, and it was covered by baffling so that it wouldn't leak into other microphones that were on in the studio. And so I couldn't actually hear what I was playing.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And if I put the headphones on, I could kind of hear a little bit of it, but other things that were much louder, like the guitar. And I didn't have any music to read. I had to do it by ear, which I was used to doing because of playing on sessions as a guitar player. And I just kind of muddled my way through it, and it was the only complete take of the day.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
So they went in to play it back and listen to it. And during the playback, Dylan went over to Tom Wilson and said, hey, turn the organ up. And he said, oh, man, that guy's not an organ player. He says, I don't care, turn the organ up. And that's how I became an organ player.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, I mean, it was ironically hilarious, because here's a guy that really didn't know what he was doing, playing hunt-and-peck organ, and like a whole style of organ playing came out of that. It founded like a whole style of organ playing, which, as we sit here, was really based on ignorance. But that's what's so great about rock.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
That's what makes rock and roll so great, is something like that could happen.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
Well, many people came to that festival, which was a three-day festival, like Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, to see Dylan because he was like the king of folk music at the time, and he was the headliner of the festival and was playing the final set on Sunday night. And so...
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
primarily a college-age crowd came, and they sat through many musics over the three-day period under the umbrella of folk music that I'm sure that they didn't care for. And most people played 45-minute to an hour sets. And then we came out, and we played for 15 minutes three electric songs. And I think that the people were horrified and incensed that we only played for 15 minutes.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
No. No? You find me some oral record of that, and I'll be very surprised. There was an undercurrent... of the festival directors that were very upset with Dylan playing electric. That is a fact, and that is true.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
But that really had no way of making itself known to the audience that was attending the thing, other than through the press later on after the festival was over, which is how that myth came to be promulgated. After the festival, that's what the press wrote about because they were privy to the fact that Pete Seeger and Alan Lomax were very upset with the electrification that Dylan was doing.
Fresh Air
Joan Baez / Suze Rotolo / Al Kooper On Dylan
And in fact, there were other acts that played electric at that festival that nobody got bent out of shape about, like the Chambers Brothers and the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. And they didn't get booed because they played electric.