Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  Jim Gribble died shortly thereafter, a fate most of his groups shared with him at the time. I went to his funeral; it was ill-attended and depressing. Jim Gribble was a good man, one of the few who made sure that his door was always open to unsolicited talent.

  In my junior year of high school, a talented pianist friend of mine recommended his private piano teacher to me. On Saturdays, my dad would drive me out to Long Island for two-hour classes with a Mr. Gerald Knieter. Let me tell you the reason I remember his name. The first hour of my lesson was an advanced piano lesson. The second half was music theory. After three classes, he suggested to my father that we drop the piano lesson entirely and proceed with two hours of theory class. “Your son will never be a great keyboard player,” he opined to my Dad, “so let’s not waste each other’s time pursuing that avenue.” My respect was so high for this man, that I took his opinion as gospel, and my ability to play keyboards was stunted at that early age. Subliminally he kept me from formative growth at a time I really needed it. The theory helped tremendously, but I didn’t grow up to be a theorist, did I?

  After Gribble’s passing, I drifted back to 1650 Broadway. In the building was a music publishing company that Dick Clark had owned, called Sea Lark. (C-lark, get it?) He owned a few hit copyrights, among them “Sixteen Candles” and “At the Hop.” When the payola scandal hit, Clark had to quickly divest himself of his music publishing holdings or go down in a conflict of interests. The company was purchased by a moderately successful songwriter named Aaron Schroeder (“Good Luck Charm,” “Stuck on You”), who kept the company alive in its infancy by channeling his own writing into it. He was looking for songs and writers at the same time I happened to be in need of a publisher, so right away it seemed like a mutually agreeable arrangement. He bought a few of my songs for his catalogue, and his door was always open to me.

  I came armed with a full repertoire of terrible songs. I guess Schroeder was really desperate to fill his catalogue, because the shuffling of papers was about the only action these songs ever saw. Most of them now qualify as blackmail items (for both of us).

  One Saturday morning, with nothing better to do, I hopped a subway into the city to see if I could scrounge up a session. People seldom came in on weekends, but I stopped by 1650 to check the offices anyway. Schroeder happened to be in, and welcomed my company. He had a kid coming in to audition for Musicor Records, his fledgling label—a friend of a friend from Rockville(!), Connecticut. He wanted my opinion, something I’ve never been known to be at a loss for, and invited me to stick around.

  While I thumbed through the latest Billboard magazine in the waiting room, this guy walks in wearing a salt and pepper jacket, heavily greased-down DA (“Duck’s Ass”) hairdo, and white bucks. Three dressing schools tied together; very strange. The creature was quickly ushered in, sat down at the piano, and proceeded to mesmerize us for two uninterrupted hours with his incredible songs and bizarre voice. He was an original, and the impact on me was like hearing soul music for the first time. But one of the mightiest music business ordinances encourages the “poker-face,” so Schroeder and I did our utmost to refrain from hailing him as the unique talent we knew he was. After the kid split, Schroeder nonchalantly asked me what I thought.

  “What could anyone think?” I said, knowing that we both knew the answer perfectly well. “Sign that guy!”

  “Should we change his name?” Schroeder asked.

  “Don’t make no difference what you call him,” I answered. “Gene Pitney is gonna be a big star!”

  My analysis was proven correct, with no small thanks to the energies of Aaron. He cleared out all the legal deadwood around Pitney, then signed him to a contract so thorough it might’ve included bathroom privileges. Gene even moved into Schroeder’s apartment; his campaign was carefully and intelligently planned.

  The first step was to cut demos of all Gene’s material, some of which I played on (and a few of which eventually found their way into circulation disguised as real records). When Schroeder discovered that nearly every record company enthusiastically seconded his high estimation of Pitney’s worth, he resolved to use him to establish his own boutique record label, Musicor Records.

  Though Pitney didn’t take off until “Town Without Pity,” his name was beginning to ring a few bells, thanks to Schroeder’s boundless hustle. He placed choice Pitney material with classy customers: “He’s A Rebel” with The Crystals, “Hello Mary Lou” with Ricky Nelson, “Today’s Teardrops” with Roy Orbison, and “Rubber Ball” with Bobby Vee. Before Pitney’s own records could claim the power to make teenage hearts flutter, the rest of the industry could see it coming. And when the powers-that-be accept an inevitability, it takes an act of God to prevent it (witness Bruce Springsteen!).

  Soon Phil Spector was producing sides with Gene. Then it was Burt Bacharach (whom Schroeder also spotted early on). Aaron had an eye for good combinations, a knack you can acquire only by a thorough understanding of the artist you’re dealing with and the marketplace in which his work will be peddled.

  Pitney’s influence on me was more pervasive than I realized. We became friends and spent a healthy amount of time in each other’s company. Unconsciously, I assimilated aspects of his style. I started to sing like him. I started to play the piano like him. I started to write songs that only he could have inspired. At that time, I was still a lump of clay in search of a benevolent pair of hands, and his proved to be as strong and artistic as were needed. To this day, I still possess a few Gene Pitney habits that’ve never been broken, subtle colorings that still show up on my canvases. As a point of information, “Just One Smile,” the Randy Newman song on the first Blood, Sweat & Tears album, originated on an old Pitney LP. Newman, you see, was at that time also contracted to Schroeder as a songwriter.

  I, meanwhile, had committed a drastic error in judgment by enrolling as a music major at the University of Bridgeport. I did it partially to appease my parents, who had yet to be convinced that my fixation with the music business was anything but a collision course with an unsavory fate or (at best) a slowly passing fancy. I viewed college as an opportunity to fill in the details of my not-yet-voluminous technical musical knowledge. If I was gonna be a bum, I was gonna be a bum who could read, write, and compose music.

  I should’ve guessed that higher education was not to play a part in my future when I discovered I couldn’t major in either of the instruments I played. I had the feel, but not the fingers required of a piano major; and the concept of a guitar major had not yet occurred to the faculty, so this rock ‘n’ roll animal wound up majoring in bass fiddle.

  Things were not as they are today in academia. There were no courses in popular music, and rock ‘n’ roll was looked down upon and was therefore unavailable in any college curriculum. A music major was meant to be spat out as a music teacher or a musical virtuoso. I had no desire to spend my young life teaching. I had already tasted rock blood and I wanted more. Once I became embroiled in the classes there, I realized these people could not help me.

  To keep in touch with the outside world (and to make sure I had enough money to buy magazines and records) I would write “ghost” arrangements in my spare time. (This means that I wrote arrangements for overbooked arrangers for no credit and quick cash.) I could usually earn an extra two or three hundred dollars by driving into New York City to pick up the songs on a Monday and returning the finished arrangements on Friday night. Far as I could tell, I learned more from this side trip than from any course I was taking at the time, and the comparative enormity of the task made it a cinch for me to breeze through my college homework.

  One assignment for music theory class included a simple four-part Bach chorale, with one missing part that the student was to fill in. It took me about eight seconds; it was so trivial compared to the ghost arranging I was doing. When the homework was handed back the next day, mine was covered with red marks. After suffering through hours of uninspired classes and being taught page after page of e
xtraneous information I knew I would never use, this was the ultimate insult. When class was dismissed, I approached the professor’s desk and asked him why he’d decorated my homework so colorfully. Then I sat down at the classroom piano and played my version of Bach for him.

  “It’s not the way Bach would have written it,” my teacher criticized.

  “Sir, I’m no expert in reincarnation,” I said, “but, taking an educated guess, I would say that if you picked your head up from those papers and actually looked at me while I’m speaking to you, you would immediately notice I am not Bach—just a student trying to enrich his knowledge in an effort to bolster his own creativity.”

  The teacher looked up at me for the first time in the conversation. “Mr. Kooper,” he said, “you must first learn the rules before you can break them.”

  This astonished me.

  “Well, sir,” I replied, “now that I have divined your teaching philosophy, I think it’s safe to say that you will never see this face in your classroom again.” And he never did. I didn’t need Bach. I needed Burt Bacharach....

  I tried to back out of the whole college thing gracefully at the six-month mark. But my parents, in a last-ditch attempt to salvage their investment, dragged a commitment out of me to see the whole year through. I made the compromise and stayed, but nothing was said about actually studying or attending classes. So I didn’t.

  I maintained a residence in the dormitory at Bridgeport and wrote free-lance arrangements for people in New York, while my classmates fought the typical sixties’ paranoia that if they didn’t make it in college, they were doomed to sweep bus station floors and drive taxis for the rest of eternity. I also put together an eccentric little student jazz combo called the Experimental Jazz Quartet (EJQ, don’cha know) to keep my performing chops in order.

  Eventually I got so bored that I even performed manual labor at the local pizzeria, where I had the opportunity to stock the jukebox with my own material. I went so far as to have some of my own demos pressed onto singles, and thus became the “Artist of the Week” on the pizzeria Seeburg: Al Kooper, the Jukebox King of Bridgeport. That and a goatee were my only tangible college accomplishments. If you wanted to teach music to a bunch of human cookie dough cutouts who wanted to teach music to a bunch of human cookie dough cutouts, then studying music in college in 1961 was just what the doctor ordered. All the universities in the world couldn’t tell you as much about music as one tour with Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars package! Years later, schools popped up that taught exactly what I needed to know at that time (I teach at one now!) but, unfortunately, the chronology just didn’t work out in my behalf.

  It was nobody’s loss when I finally packed it in and went home. I made yet another deal with my folks: If by the end of a couple of years in the music business I hadn’t achieved anything significant, I’d return to college. I didn’t have the slightest intention of honoring my end of that bargain, of course, but it temporarily gave me the kind of freedom I needed to get on with my “career.”

  My first brush with gainful employment in the real world was as a stockboy in the record department of one of New York’s immense department store nightmares. My memory of this tenure is hazy, but I seem to recall that carting Christmas inventory up from the basement for one hellish week cured me of any notions I might’ve had about the value of honest labor. I still blanch at the sight of anybody’s Christmas Favorites album.

  My next foray into the business world was an out-and-out Kooper scam, the work of a desperate, clever lad. I’d mastered the basics of a few instruments, and while I wasn’t exactly the picture of grace on any of them, through the magical process of overdubbing (recording in tandem from one mono machine to another) I could turn out a record all by myself. This was a cheap way to make demos of the songs I wrote; they were acceptable as long as you didn’t actually listen to them.

  Backed by an extensive catalogue of limited skills, I convinced Ray Rand, the owner of Adelphi Studios at 1650, to donate space in his stockroom for my use as an office. The scheme was that I would solicit publishers to hire me for the purpose of producing their song demos. For a package price of ninety dollars a song, I’d give them a vocalist and a full rhythm section playing an arrangement, with all the studio time provided for. This was quite a bargain, as long as nobody got wise to the fact that this one scrawny kid was playing everything, and poorly at that.

  So, in January of 1963, with a hundred business cards and printed statements to prove that I was serious, Ko-op Productions came into being. Also included in my arrangement with Ray Rand was responsibility for sweeping the studio floor at day’s end. This task earned me the title “apprentice engineer.”

  At first, I did a lot of sweeping. When the boss went home, however, the engineers would loosen up and occasionally impart a few tricks of their trade. In this way, I picked up an introduction to the art of engineering, and promptly used that knowledge to make demos of my current songs, exhausting countless hours of studio time that somehow never showed up in the log books. There were no multitrack machines at Adelphi in those days—I bounced the genesis of each song back and forth between two mono machines, sometimes eight times (!), retarding the sound quality and mix with each regeneration. I had no choice at the time.

  Finally the Ko-op bait landed someone—an old-line publisher in the building who sent down music sheets to three songs he needed immediate demos of. A paying customer! I slaved for three days, and though the outcome was every bit as crude as you might imagine, I felt like Phil Spector when the demos were sent to the publisher for his approval. When he heard them, however, he let out a shriek that is reported to have stopped traffic as far away as Newark. And the next day he was in the studio himself, re-cutting the songs with authentic musicians. My cover was blown, and I was back to soliciting the halls of 1650.

  While I was “patrolling the halls” one day, a publisher named Hal Webman suggested that I might work well with a pair of lyricists he had under contract. Bob Brass and Irwin Levine had already enjoyed a couple of hits—“A Thing of the Past” by The Shirelles and “Little Lonely One” by The Jarmels—but they needed a bona fide musician to work with. Bona fide? I’m sure that if they asked the publisher from the Ko-op debacle an estimate of my musical worth, he’d have given them a whole other set of adjectives. However, I was always one for challenges and took on the task of catching up to their level of professionalism. Ko-op was abandoned and Hal Webman’s company, We Three Music, assumed the responsibility of paying me the princely sum of the twenty-five dollars a week that Adelphi Studios previously had.

  The alliance between the three of us was an easy one to forge. Brass and Levine were about three years my senior, had gone to high school together in Union, New Jersey, and had also embraced the let’s-dispense-with-college philosophy to take a stab at the music biz. With two hits under their belts, they were confident, fairly talented, and Jewishly fearless. My background was reasonably similar, and while my comparative youthful inexperience made me their scapegoat too often for my liking, it was a workable situation that taught me a lot.

  Our environment consisted of a little corner in Hal Webman’s office where there happened to be a piano, and we wrote “follow-up” songs for a living. In other words, if Bobby Vee had a hit out called “Please Don’t Ask About Barbara,” we’d compose a ditty called “Don’t Mention Martha” for him in the same key and tempo with roughly the same chord changes. We repeated this process for every hit record that was out. Unfortunately, the hit artists never recorded our follow-ups but, with credit to Hal Webman, they did get the opportunity to hear them. Meanwhile, there were enough has-beens and carbon copy performers to insure fairly steady action on our songs.

  First Keely Smith recorded one (she sang it on The Ed Sullivan Show; my folks loved that), then (the original) Johnny Thunder (remember “Here We Go Loop-de-Loop” ?) included one on the Loop de Loop album. None of these were hits, but they kept our names out there and removed the Christma
s inventory from my back.

  The job was so mechanical that every now and then we’d have to resort to some bizarre caper to preserve our collective sanity. I remember there was a power struggle going on in the office between Webman and his partner, Larry Spier, Jr. I’m not sure that we even knew the details of the conflict, but Hal Webman was the one who signed our paychecks, and so that automatically tipped the scales in his favor.

  One night the three of us stayed late to work after the office staff had departed, and a bottle of Scotch was discovered in an unguarded desk drawer. Between the three of us it was emptied in no time at all. It must have been a particularly tough day for me because I had already been diagnosed as a probable ulcer victim, but didn’t think twice about downing the Dewar’s. All of a sudden we were seized by the inspiration to break down Junior’s door.

  “Okay,” Irwin said, “if we can actually break his door down, I’ll take a shit on his desk.”

  Really drunk.

  It became imperative to break the door down, because Brass and I desperately wanted to see Irwin do the dump.

  Had to have it.

  So we did the thing like in the movies. The three of us grouped at the far corner of the room and barreled into the door. The only thing that happened, of course, was that we hurt ourselves. This wasn’t the movies, obviously. (In the movies guys don’t promise to shit on desks, either.) Then we decided we’d kick the door down. First we tried kicking around the handle, three rounds of ten kicks apiece. Again nothing happened. Coming to the conclusion that our heads must have been as thick as the door, we tapped all over it until we ascertained that the middle was the weakest section. It was here that we concentrated our ten-kicks system until the first crack appeared. We collapsed in a drunken pile on the floor, hysterical ’cause we knew it was only a matter of time. We smashed at that fuckin’ door with a vengeance; it looked like some crazy animal had attacked it. When we had a big enough hole in the door, I reached in and opened it.