My mother told me when I was a toddler and in the crib that they would have music playing, and the thing when I lit up was boogie-woogie or something out of the Louie Jordan period of sometimes big bands, and then all kinds of things.

Chuck Berry told me if it wasn't for Louis Jordan, he wouldn't have probably ever even got into music. That Louis Jordan changed everything and made him want to become a musician.

I asked Bob Dylan to paint the album cover for 'Music from Big Pink.' He said, 'Yeah, let me see what I can come up with.'

It's no big thing, but you make big things out of little things sometimes.

I am fascinated by the places that music comes from, like fife-and-drum blues from southern Mississippi or Cajun music out of Lafayette, Louisiana, shape-note singing, old harp singing from the mountains - I love that stuff. It's like the beginning of rock and roll: something comes down from the hills, and something comes up from the delta.

In ?66 when we were playing that music, people were flipping out with anger at that music and hated it. Then we?re doing it a few years later, and people said, ?This is the real deal, and we knew it all along.