....and the roads were where we lived. We slept in rock quaries and on door steps of churches - I slept on the floor of the convenience store just off the cap rock in Texas, I put my head by the beer case to get some cold air, and it didn't matter that I had a condo back home or a bed because you become the character in the story you are living and whatever you were is gone...
Surprise, I learned something in school. But it had nothing to do with what I was supposed to be learning. It was supposed to be an example. But it rocked me. Listen to this story.
Once upon a time, there was a man named Al Kooper. Al Kooper was a little known musician from Brooklyn who fooled around with all sorts of instruments but had know outlandish talent in any one in particular. One day, he accompanied his friend Mike Bloomfield along to the studies where Mike was playing with some guy named Bob Dylan.
Al was supposed to just watch and listen to Mike as he did take after take with Bob of this song called “Like a Rolling Stone”. After a while, Al got bored. He began to walk around the studio and he came across an electric organ. It was the first electric organ he had seen in his life, although he knew how to play few chords on a regular organ.
Al couldn’t get past this organ. It called to him. Even though Mike and Bob were in the middle of recording, he sat down at the organ and beginning playing the few chords he knew. Before he knew it, he was rocking out on the organ in a world of his own. The record producer was yelling at him to get off the organ, telling him he was ruining the track. But Bob stopped the producer, telling him that Al was playing the exact sound the song was missing.
Al, by seeing an opportunity and going for what he wanted to do, become a part of a song that changed a generation. A song that contained a “rimshot that was heard round the world.” Even though the song really only contains about three chords played over and over again, Al Kooper has been called the greatest organist ever known because of this song, all because he saw what was calling to him and wouldn’t be deterred from it despite the consequences.
I’m a big fan of the democratic process right now.
I’m in school right now as a double major in International Studies and Peace, War and Defense with a minor in Entrepreneurship (focusing on Nonprofits).
Watching this though makes me wonder, should I do stuff on the ground or would I serve better in politics?