Who Played the Organ on Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”?

EVERYBODY MUST GET STONED. Oops! Wrong song. EVERYBODY knows the words to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”! Oops, not quite right. EVERYBODY knows SOME OF THE WORDS to Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone”!

“Like a Rolling Stone” just may be the greatest rock n’ roll song of all time. Rolling Stone the magazine thinks so. They voted it #1 on their RS 500 Greatest Songs of All Time list saying, “No other pop song has so thoroughly challenged and transformed the commercial laws and artistic conventions of its time, for all time.”

“Once upon a time you dressed so fine
You threw the bums a dime in your prime, didn’t you?…
How does it feel
How does it feel
To be without a home
Like a complete unknown
Like a rolling stone?”

Oh we can wail that much out when the band kicks in. The rest of the words, well…more than a little iffy.

But that’s not what this piece is about. The OTHER thing that EVERYONE remembers about the greatest rock song ever written is THAT KILLER ORGAN PART! Neeeee, nee nee nit neeeeeeeee! HOW DOES IT FEEL!? Freaking awesome.

But who played that organ part? Dylan? (He CAN play the keys, and could have played that memorable riff, but it didn’t happen that way.)

In the shadows of rock and roll legends, and great rock and roll tracks, there are always some key (no pun intended) players that seem to remain on the fringe of fame — perhaps right where they want to be — who nonetheless leave an indelible mark on popular music, even if anonymously.

Such a GREAT fringe musician/producer/personality is the man who played that unforgettable Hammond B-3 lick in 1965 for Bob Dylan and his producer Tom Wilson: Al Kooper.

(No kids, not Alice Cooper, a legend in his own right and deserving of a separate story entirely, which we’ll deliver.)

“[Dylan’s] producer Tom Wilson invited Kooper to watch a Bob Dylan session. By the afternoon’s end, Al had played the signature organ riff on Dylan’s ‘Like A Rolling Stone,’ alongside blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield.” —AlKooper.com

How did this happen?

“Kooper had been invited to the session as an observer, and hoped to be allowed to sit in on guitar, his primary instrument. After hearing a guitar player who turned out to be Mike Bloomfield warming up, and recognizing that Bloomfield was a much better player, Kooper put his guitar aside and went to the control room. During the recording of ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ Paul Griffin moved from organ to piano.

“Kooper told producer Tom Wilson that he had a good organ part for the song (which he later noted was just a ruse to get into the session), and Wilson responded ‘You’re not an organ player, you’re a guitar player,’ but Kooper insisted that he play. Before Wilson could explicitly reject Kooper, he got a phone call. Kooper went and sat down at the organ, though he had rarely played organ before the session. Wilson soon returned, surprised to find Kooper in the studio. You can hear the organ coming in just behind the other members of the band at many places in the song, to make sure he was getting the chords right. During recording, Dylan famously said, ‘Turn the organ up,’ and a classic rock organ part was born. While the combination of piano and organ was common in church settings, it was relatively new to pop music and attracted considerable attention.

“The organ was the iconic Hammond B-3. Kooper later revealed that because it is a somewhat complicated instrument to turn on (hold one switch for a count, then flip the other switch) — had it not already been done by someone else at the studio — he probably wouldn’t have figured it out on his own, and would never have maneuvered his way in to the role as organist on these sessions.” —Wikipedia