by Al Kooper
There was a folk club in Forest Hills called the Cafe Interlude, and I wandered in there one open-mike night. I wasn’t into the scene deeply enough to be anything but a weekend folkie. For instance, I had a Goya gut-string guitar; I didn’t know that you were supposed to play a steel-stringed guitar. I was a rock ‘n’ roll guitar player; what did I know from beards and bongos? When I arrived at the club and had to sign in to play, all of the above suddenly occurred to me. “Shit,” I thought to myself, “Al Kooper would never do this. It’s almost embarrassing. I’ll be—uh—Al Casey.” So I took the stage that evening and performed “Thirty-Eight People” as Al Casey. What I wasn’t aware of was that the incident the song describes had taken place right outside the club’s window, and several of those thirty-eight people I was singing about were very probably in the audience, making for a tension that I didn’t quite pick up on until the song was over.
“Hey, man,” said an agitated voice from the back of the room, “that bitch was killed right outside this club. Did you know that?”
Stop. “Well, I ... err ... thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. See you next week.” Exit Al Casey.
My first appearance hadn’t been what you could call a smash, but I stuck with it. The Cafe Interlude became my new hangout, and I quickly assimilated the exotic life-style it represented to me. Within two weeks the Goya went the way of all Goyas, and I had the right guitar (Gibson J-200), knew all the right names (Woody Guthrie, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, etc.), and even knew a few of the right songs (“Tom Joad,” “There But For Fortune,” etc.). The people who frequented the club were rigid Pete Seeger types; local communists still hung over from the Beat days and maintaining an unabashed contempt for the dishonesty they inherently saw in rock ‘n’ roll. I wasn’t necessarily falling for that part of the sales pitch, but I adapted my profile to their attitude as best I could, helped along considerably by their guidance in the finer points of dope smoking. My mom wanted to know what all those rolling papers were doing in my pants pockets. My new “friends” had sketchy knowledge of my other life, but most likely thought it was just a day gig to keep Al Casey fed. I would’ve been boiled in oil if they knew I had anything to do with Gary Lewis & The Playboys.
Through sheer persistence I was eventually offered a weekend gig, three nights opening for somebody named Henry Gibson. I had my folkie set all worked out: a few traditionals, tunes by some contemporary folk writers, Dylan’s Dylan songs, plus my Dylan songs, one of which, “Talking Radio Blues,” was an ironically self-righteous putdown of commercial radio, a toothless chomp on the hand that was feeding me. Nonetheless, the weekend was ill-attended; I guess the weather was bad or something. Henry who???
About that time, Mike Wallace was putting together a CBS radio documentary on the thirty-eight people incident. He came to the club to tape some interviews and somebody told him about my spiny topical song, which he then recorded for use as part of the presentation. Figuring this exposure to be an ideal selling point, I started pestering Tom Wilson, Dylan’s producer at Columbia Records, with the idea of getting a single of it out as soon as possible. It took five or six visits before I talked my way past his secretary, but when I finally did get to play it for him, he liked it to the extent that we went in and cut the song. He didn’t, however, like it to the extent that a record was ever released. It’s a good thing in hindsight. It would have been quite the embarrassing item today.
Still, through this experience, Wilson and I became tight. I let him in on the Al Kooper side of me, the Tin Pan Alley songs, some of which he later cut during his tenure at MGM. Our relationship progressed to the level where I could walk past the secretary and straight into his office, which I made a point of doing as often as possible when he wasn’t around. I’d sift through his records and cop all the acetates of as-yet-unreleased Dylan material, take them home overnight, and commit them to memory before slipping them back into Tom’s pile the next day. These “exclusives” would immediately be incorporated into my Al Casey act and gave it the only bit of charisma it ever had.
Tom had just cut “Subterranean Homesick Blues,” Dylan’s first electric single, and played it for me prior to its release. Of course, on that day, my folkie apprenticeship came to an end. I saw that it was now possible to be both Bob Dylan and rock ‘n’ roll Kooper at the same time, and kissed off Al Casey forever.
Wilson felt comfortable enough to invite me to watch an electric Dylan session, because he knew I was a big Bob fan. He had no conception of my limitless ambition, however. There was no way in hell I was going to visit a Bob Dylan session and just sit there pretending to be some reporter from Sing Out! magazine! I was committed to play on it. I stayed up all night preceding the session, naively running down all seven of my guitar licks over and over again. Despite my noodling at the piano, I was primarily a guitar player at the time and having gotten a fair amount of session work under my belt, I had developed quite an inflated opinion of my dexterity on said instrument.
The session was called for two o’clock the next afternoon at Columbia Studios, which were at 799 Seventh Avenue, between West 52nd and West 53rd Streets. Taking no chances, I arrived an hour early and well enough ahead of the crowd to establish my cover. I walked into the studio with my guitar case, unpacked, tuned up, plugged in, and sat there trying my hardest to look like I belonged. The other musicians booked on the session (all people I knew from other sessions around town) slowly filtered in and gave no indication that anything was amiss. For all they knew, I could have received the same call they’d gotten. Tom Wilson hadn’t arrived as yet, and he was the only one who could really blow the whistle on my little charade. I was prepared to tell him I had misunderstood him and thought he had asked me to play on the session. All I bases covered. What balls!
Suddenly Dylan exploded through the doorway with this bizarre-looking guy carrying a Fender Telecaster guitar without a case. It was weird, because it was storming outside and the guitar was all wet from the rain. But the guy just shuffled over into the corner, wiped it off with a rag, plugged in, and commenced to play some of the most incredible guitar I’d ever heard. And he was just warming up! That’s all the Seven Lick Kid had to hear; I was in over my head. I embarrassedly unplugged, packed up, went into the control room, and sat there pretending to be a reporter from Sing Out! magazine.
Tom Wilson then made his entrance—too late, thank God, to catch my little act of bravado. All was lost, but I wanted to know the identity of the dragonslayer, so I asked Tom who the guitar player was. “Oh, some friend of Dylan’s from Chicago, named Mike Bloomfield. I never heard him but Bloomfield says he can play the tunes, and Dylan says he’s the best.” That’s how I was introduced to the man who can still make me pack up my guitar whenever his music is played.
The band quickly got down to business. They weren’t too far into this long song Dylan had written before it was decided that the organ player’s part would be better suited to piano. The sight of an empty seat in the studio stirred my juices once again; it didn’t matter that I knew next to nothing about playing the organ. Ninety percent ambition, remember? In a flash I was all over Tom Wilson, telling him that I had a great organ part for the song and please (oh God please) could I have a shot at it. “Hey,” he said, “you don’t even play the organ.”
“Yeah, I do, and I got a good part to play in this song,” I shot back, all the while racing my mind in overdrive to think of anything I could play at all. Already adept at wading through my bullshit, Tom said, “I don’t want to embarrass you, Al, I mean ... ,” and he was then distracted by some other studio obligation. Claiming victory by virtue of not having received a direct “no,” I walked into the studio and sat down at the organ.
Me and the organ: It’s difficult to power up a Hammond organ. It takes three separate moves, I later learned. If the organist (Paul Griffin) hadn’t left the damn thing turned on, my career as an organ player would have ended right then and there. I figured out as best I could how to bluff my w
ay through the song while the rest of the band rehearsed one little section. Then Wilson returned and said, “Man, what are you doin’ out there???” All I could do was laugh nervously. On the Highway 61 Interactive CD-ROM, you can actually hear this moment taking place. Wilson was a gentleman, however. He let it go.
Imagine this: There is no music to read. The song is over five minutes long, the band is so loud that I can’t even hear the organ, and I’m not familiar with the instrument to begin with. But the tape is rolling, and that is Bob-fucking-Dylan over there singing, so this had better be me sitting here playing something. The best I could manage was to play hesitantly by sight, feeling my way through the changes like a little kid fumbling in the dark for the light switch. After six minutes they’d gotten the first complete take of the day and everyone adjourned to the control room to hear it played back.
Thirty seconds into the second verse of the playback, Dylan motioned toward Tom Wilson. “Turn the organ up,” he ordered. “Hey, man,” Tom said, “that cat’s not an organ player.” Thanks, Tom. But Dylan wasn’t buying it: “Hey, now don’t tell me who’s an organ player and who’s not. Just turn the organ up.” He actually liked what he heard!
If you listen to it today, you can hear how I waited until the chord was played by the rest of the band, before committing myself to play in the verses. I’m always an eighth note behind everyone else, making sure of the chord before touching the keys. Can you imagine if they had to have stopped the take because of me? At the conclusion of the playback, the entire booth applauded the soon-to-be-classic “Like A Rolling Stone,” and Dylan acknowledged the tribute by turning his back and wandering into the studio for a go at another tune. I sat, still dazed, behind my new instrument and filled in a chord every now and again. No other songs were gotten that day. Later, as everyone was filing out, Dylan asked for my phone number—which was like Claudia Schiffer asking for the key to your hotel room—and invited me back to play the next day. Elated, I walked out into the street realizing that I had actually lived out my fantasy of the night before, although not quite exactly as I had planned it.
I was twenty-one at the time of this incident, married, and residing uncomfortably in the suburb of Forest Hills, Queens. My hair was relatively short, and I wore a shirt and tie because I liked the way it looked. You have to admit—the freakier a man looks, the more dashing he becomes in a suit and tie. Imagine Frank Zappa in black tie versus Bill Clinton—who would you wanna chat with? I was very confused about what was wrong or right, a condition compounded, I believe, by a great deal of pot-smoking done at the time. Though I wasn’t aware of it, my life was changing in ways I wouldn’t begin to comprehend until much later (like now).
I returned to the studio the next day with a little more confidence. My moment as a daring organ commando was behind me, and that release of pressure allowed me to get down to figuring out what the hell I was doing sitting behind an organ in the first place. The other keyboard player was Paul Griffin, who, with a strong Baptist church background, was probably the best damned studio keyboard player in all of New York City and certainly the funkiest. I leaned in his direction heavily that day, borrowing a bass line here, a rhythm part there, and generally picked up a lot of basics and the beginning of a style that can only be traced directly to Paul’s playing.
Listening to the playback of the keeper take of “Like A Rolling Stone. ” (Left to right) Roy Halee (engineer), Tom Wilson (producer), Pete Duryea (assistant engineer, standing), Albert Grossman, Artie Mogul, Dylan, Vinnie Fusco (partially obscured) Sandy Speiser (foreground), Al (pondering his future). (Photo: Al Kooper Collection.)
We cut two tracks that day: “Tombstone Blues” and “Queen Jane Approximately.” I was adequate. And delirious. That was the last date on Dylan’s recording schedule for awhile, and thus ended my contact with him—unless he planned to use that phone number I’d given him.
Eventually the time rolled around for one of the grandest East Coast traditions, the Newport Folk Festival, and my wife and I made our annual trek north. Despite my pop songwriting and Broadway habits, I had always maintained a healthy affection for this event. Whatever your musical proclivity—even if there was no proclivity at all—Newport was one of the nicest social gatherings you could possibly attend. Most of the musicians from downtown made the pilgrimage annually, and it was like a Greenwich Village block party moved to the seaside. There was a lot of new electric folk music being played on the barbarian AM radio airwaves that summer, and some of it found its way past the guardians of the Newport tradition.
Afternoons were given to slow-paced workshop sessions, which one (this one, that is) would browse like a bookstore, doing more socializing than serious perusing. On one such late afternoon stroll, I was accosted by Albert Grossman, Dylan’s manager. “Bob’s looking for you. Here’s some passes; meet us backstage tonight.” And then he was gone. Backstage! Wow! We quickly sold the remainder of our tickets and got prepared for our preferred ringside accommodations.
When my wife and I arrived backstage that evening, Dylan came running over wearing this top-hat (?) and grabbed me in a bear hug. “Al Kooper,” he said. “How are you? We’ve been calling you for days. [I had been in Newport.] Good to see you,” etc., etc., etc.
What Dylan and Grossman had in mind was to put the electric sound of the recording sessions on stage at Newport. “Like A Rolling Stone” was blasting out of every transistor radio smuggled onto the festival grounds, and Dylan wanted to make the penetration blatant. This included my incompetent organ playing, which had suddenly become a publicly recognized trademark of the “new Dylan sound.” The irony, oh, the irony....
The group Mike Bloomfield played with, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was debuting at the festival that year. So not only was Bloomfield available for duty, but Dylan also got the use of drummer Sam Lay and bassist Jerome Arnold. A friend of Bloomfield’s, Barry Goldberg, was “recruited” to play piano. (He begged for the chance!) The night before the scheduled performance, we rehearsed until dawn in one of those huge Newport mansions overlooking the ocean.
Our portion of the show opened with “Maggie’s Farm” and concluded with “Like a Rolling Stone.” In the middle of “Maggie’s Farm,” somebody fucked up and Sam Lay turned the beat around (played the snare on beats 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4), which thoroughly confused everyone onstage until the song mercifully stumbled to its conclusion. But “Like A Rolling Stone” was played perfectly and we really got it across. Dylan came off and appeared to be satisfied, and people were yelling for an encore.
If you’ve read any accounts of that infamous evening, chances are they centered on how Dylan was booed into submission and then returned for a tearful acoustic rendering of “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” A romantic picture, perhaps, but that’s just not the way it was. At the close of the set, Peter Yarrow (of Paul and Mary fame and the emcee for the evening) grabbed Dylan as he was coming offstage. These two were both managed by Grossman and were close friends. The crowd was going bonkers for an encore, as we had only played fifteen minutes! I was standing right there.
“Hey,” Peter said, “you just can’t leave them like that, Bobby. They want another one.”
“But that’s all we know,” replied Dylan, motioning toward the band.
“Well, go back out there with this,” said Yarrow, handing his acoustic guitar to Bob.
And Dylan did. That’s all there was to it. I was right there. Most other acts played a forty-five-minute set. Many young kids (like myself) came to the three-day event especially to see Dylan’s set. He was the King of Newport. Can you imagine them sitting through the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Son House, or Mance Lipscomb for forty-five minutes each, and then staring in disbelief as Dylan left the stage after fifteen minutes??? Damn right, they booed. But not at Bob—rather, at whoever was seemingly responsible for yanking him offstage after fifteen minutes. We had just run out of rehearsed material and that’s why we stopped. But these were representatives of o
ur college-age generation. They belonged to frats and sororities, swilled beer like nobody’s business, and had begun smoking the dreaded marijuana. They had journeyed many miles to p-a-r-t-y with their hero, but he just wanted to drop off his present at the front door and leave.
Bob, seizing the moment, returned to the stage with Peter’s acoustic guitar and sang “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” to these people; banishing the acoustic-folk movement with one song right at the crossroads of its origin. If ever there was a galvanizing moment in musical history, this was it. The more coherent members of the audience were the ones with tears in their eyes—not Bob. They realized that things might never be the same again, and it was a rude awakening standing there amidst the crowd at Newport. But the media misconstrued (or manipulated) the whole point. They attributed the booing to Dylan’s electric appearance. Hell, Butterfield played electric the day before, and The Chambers Brothers played electric earlier in the show. Bob wasn’t trailblazing a plugged-in performance on that stage. But when he said to everyone, “You must leave now, take what you need you think will last ... ,”1 he was pretty much telling them to hang on to his albums; that this was not the end—but rather, a genesis.