The secret behind the clunky organ sound on Bob Dylan’s masterpiece ‘Like a Rolling Stone’
Like a miraculous first-rate Bolognese cooked up in a festering student flat, it is true that great things can be made in very shoddy places. By all accounts, the crumby tale of a dishevelled Bob Dylan holed away in a dingy basement bracing up to braving the inevitable slings and arrows of turning folk ‘very’ electric is a testimony of this.
His anthemic 1965 masterpiece ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ became an electrically charged counterculture encapsulation that almost caused Frank Zappa to retire because he had nothing else to add. Maybe part of the reason it held the zeitgeist in amber so awesomely was because its inception was perfectly fitting of the era. It was decidedly underground, full of chancers, backstabbing, and rushed whatevers—all coming together somehow to create one of the greatest songs ever written, period.
If he was to go electric, then he wasn’t to go it alone. He had crafted his own mythology as a solo act and now he had to welcome people into it. Fortunately for him, it was bombastic enough by this point to subsume those he gathered. And, as it happens, if he was the original tousled vagabond whose tunes held a dogeared air, then fate (or maybe Dylan himself) was about to weave the right person into place to craft the iconic keyboard sound that made the anthem soar.
The musicians Dylan had enlisted in the studio were for the fateful ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ session were Paul Griffin on piano, Joe Macho Jr on bass, Bobby Gregg on drums, and Bruce Longhorne on tambourine, with the legendary Tom Wilson taking up production duties. However, that leaves the iconic Hammond organ unaccounted for, and the tale of how Al Kooper found himself behind one encapsulates the era just about as perfectly as the song itself.
Kooper was a guy on the scene type of fellow. A musician and producer who was just often about. And essentially, he just wandered into Dylan’s studio session and figured he’d flirt around the instruments, trying to get himself a credit. The session wasn’t going perfectly so he had time to try his hand in every department.
Eventually, the only thing left for him to try and impress on was the Hammond organ. Producer Wilson begrudgingly humoured him. “He just sort of scoffed at me,” Kooper recalled. “He didn’t say ‘no’—so I went out there.” His playing was far from accomplished on the organ: What can you expect, he just sort of wandered into the studio, Booker T would’ve required a booking. But he was a worthy musician with other great credits to his name, so they figured he was fine to have around.
All that being said, if you’re writing one of the best songs of all time, you might expect competency in all departments. This wasn’t lost on Kooper himself as he spends a swathe of his magnificently scathing memoir Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards discussing how the clunky delays on the chords later heralded as genius were actually caused by his lack of organ credentials.
In fact, on the first take you can even hear Wilson remark, “OK, Bob, we got everybody here, let’s do one, and then I’ll play it back to you, you can pick it apart.” He then sees Kooper and adds with amusement, “What are you doing there?” prompting Kooper to burst out laughing.
Nevertheless, when Dylan heard the song back, he shrugged off Wilson’s remarks that Kooper was “not an organ player” and insisted that his unwieldy sound be turned up in the mix. By now that song had taken its full form and on the fourth take, Wilson announced over the mic: “That sounds good to me.” Dylan would record 15 takes in total, but the fourth would remain positively the best. And the rest is history.
You can read into the metaphysics of it all you like, but to put it as concisely as possible: there is something perfectly fitting – like when Talking Heads swapped instruments to create ‘Naïve Melody’ – about the shabby inception creating a song that gloriously encapsulated an era and probed at its conceit. Kooper later saw his inclusion as pretence but isn’t that just perfect?
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