Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

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by Al Kooper


  “Okay Irwin, time to do your stuff.”

  Opting to give his performance in private, Irwin temporarily banished Brass and me from the room. All this time we were convulsed, exercising a level of humor thought to have been left behind in kindergarten. Irwin emerged five minutes later wearing a self-satisfied grin, and, while fastening his belt, announced, “Boys, come in here—I got a TEXAS TWISTER to show y’all!” The sight of that smoldering pile of excrement sitting on Junior’s desk was like fitting the last piece in some scatological jigsaw puzzle. It crippled us.

  When the laughter finally subsided, paranoia set in. “Hey,” it suddenly occurred to Irwin, “we could get in trouble for this.”

  We immediately decided that it couldn’t have been us that had done this perverted thing. In a burst of drunken logic, we took magazines, office supplies, and plants and began scattering them all over the room. “We’ll make ’em think that robbers were here.” Yeah, right! Ten minutes into our campaign to make it look as though the office had been burglarized, Brass tapped Irwin on the shoulder. “You know, schmuck,” he said in an uncharacteristic moment of clear light, “robbers don’t shit on desks.” Good point. On that note, we decided it would be intelligent to evacuate the premises pronto. We killed a few minutes in another office to cover ourselves with an alibi (“But, officer, we couldn’t possibly have been at the scene of the crap. We were two floors down talking to Bob Yorey at the time.”). As we were leaving the building, we passed the doddering old janitor shuffling out of the elevator talking to himself. “Jesus,” he muttered, shaking his head in disbelief, “they done broke down the door, splinters an’ evuhthang!”

  A police car was pulling up as we made our getaway, but the Scotch had numbed our paranoia, and even the appearance of the law couldn’t dampen our spirits. “Can you imagine the cops when they find that turd on the desk! Can you imagine the janitor finding it!” So we went and treated ourselves to a Chinese dinner at the appropriately named Ho Ho Restaurant.

  Over another Scotch aperitif we realized that it would be expedient to call Hal Webman and give him our side of the story first. Okay, we’d draw straws. We took three toothpicks and made one short. Of course, always the scapegoat, I strawed the shortest pick. I stumbled to the pay phone and dialed Hal Webman’s home number.

  “Hal, we got drunk, we kicked in Junior’s door, and threw a bunch of things around; we’ll pay for all the damage. I think the police are there now, ’cause after we did it the janitor saw it.”

  “Okay,” he said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  Grinning, I hung up the phone and returned to the table. That wasn’t too difficult. The two of them were in hysterics.

  “Al, what did he say when you told him Irwin shit on the desk?”

  “I forgot to tell him.”

  “Call him back,” they screamed.

  “Do I have....”

  “Call him back,” they screamed even louder.

  I sheepishly made my way back to the phone booth. Busy. Of course it’s busy. I tried it again. This time, unfortunately, he answered.

  “Hal,” I began hesitantly, then hit full stride. “I forgot to mention that Irwin shit on Larry’s desk.”

  Long pause, followed by a disbelieving “He what... ? Oh my God, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Click.

  Early the next morning, Hal called us at home and said that if we’d apologize to Junior as soon as we came in, it would square everything; he had already made arrangements on our behalf to pay for the door. I arrived at the office first and said, “Larry, I’m really sorry, you know. We were just drunk and it got out of hand.” He said okay. He evidently never got to see Irwin’s organic buttwork.

  Irwin came in next and did the same. Everything was going fine until Brass’s entrance. He took one look at the splintered door and broke into a horse-laugh which transformed Irwin and me into instant hyenas. We almost lost our jobs thanks to Brass’s ill-timed outburst. But at least we knew shit from Shinola. There had been no Shinola on Junior’s desk.

  After awhile, we convinced ourselves that we’d outgrown Webman’s firm. When Hal’s contract ran out, we began freelancing our material. This made things a little more difficult, because instead of a regular salary, we had to sell a song or three every week to survive. This is where I really came of age in the music business. Our asses were on the line, and that is the surest way I know to bring any discussion of ethics to a swift conclusion. When desperation overtook us, we’d resort to preselling a song we’d written by getting it recorded ourselves. This involved browbeating some weak-willed producer into recording our masterpiece—the function normally reserved for the publisher. What we were doing was actually lessening the publisher’s workload by about seventy-five percent, and it was infinitely easier to convince him to purchase an already-recorded song than some turkey he’d have to go out and hustle himself.

  We’d often have appointments with three different publishers a day. Not having a championship track record to fall back on, we had to rely on sharp wits and a heavy dose of professional sweet talk to open doors. We’d go in and sing our current crop, me like the spinster piano teacher leading her charges through another recital, working our show around to the song that was presold. If they went for it—and you can hardly go wrong by appealing to the laziness in men—we might unload the thing for an on-the-spot advance of three hundred dollars and keep ourselves in burgers for another week. The three hundred was strictly “front-money”; it was understood we’d receive royalties if the song took off.

  Our hero at this time was a little African-American gentleman who went by the name of “Run” Joe Taylor. Joe was a writer who worked solo. He would start at the top floor of a building and hit every publisher’s office in the building. The problem usually was that he only had one song at a time to sell. But it usually was a good one. If he sold it on the eleventh floor, he had no compunction about selling it on every other floor on the way down. Sometimes he’d sell the same song six times in one building. This was fine unless one of the six publishers got the song recorded. Then his nickname came into quick use: “Run, Joe!!!”

  During our freelance period, we manufactured a bright little R&B item that none of us figured to be worth all that much. Nonetheless we managed to sell it for three hundred dollars to my old friend Aaron Schroeder, who, by now, had developed a very smooth and profitable publishing concern and was interested in signing us to an exclusive writers’ contract. We’d written this particular song with The Drifters in mind. They were hot, riding a chain of hits telegraphed out to them via the Aldon pipeline (among them “Up on the Roof” and “On Broadway”). The Drifters turned the song down, but a West Coast producer named Snuff Garrett, then successfully masterminding Bobby Vee’s recordings, picked up on it. By the time Garrett’s production was finished, we had quit freelancing and were signed to Schroeder for two bills a week apiece, quite a chunk by our depressed standards. Garrett had cut a white version of our tune with Jerry Lewis’s thoroughly inoffensive white son Gary and sent us a copy the day it was released.

  We were revolted. They’d removed the soul from our R&B song and made a teenage milkshake out of it. Never mind that who-were-we-to-be talking-about-soul in the first place; this was disgusting. We dismissed “This Diamond Ring” by Gary Lewis and the Playboys on one hearing, and hoped Schroeder would get us covers that might have some chance of selling a few copies.

  To our surprise, after a hype-ridden sendoff on The Ed Sullivan Show (once again; several of our songs were showcased by Sullivan acts, as you recall), all you could hear on the radio was our turkey milkshake. Suddenly we were on the charts: 82, 65, 30, 20, 12, 8, 7, 3, 2, 2, and then, after knocking Aldon’s “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” out of the top slot, our song became the number one song in the country! America had finally seen fit to recognize our “talent.” We conveniently forgot our previous animosity toward the record and concentrated on basking in as much of the glory as we could squeeze out of it. Th
e day the record hit number one, we just stared at the charts and laughed and laughed.

  We had the biggest song in the country, yet, we were still broke. Recompense for a hit record can be delayed a year or more in arriving. Let’s also not forget about the inevitable three-way-split. It’s just another music biz irony that you can be at the top of the charts and still be bumming chump change from all your pals. The only course of action is to milk your newfound reputation for dear life; hustle in a bigger ball park.

  We drew advances against our forthcoming royalties (not suggested as a great idea) and affected the trappings of success. Occasional barbershop shaves for that freshly manicured look; dinner at Jack Dempsey’s (a nearby restaurant that was a hangout for music-biz successes) to feel important. And as our milkshake Frankenstein came plummeting down the charts, another Brass-Kooper-Levine special began a hesitant climb up. This one was called “I Must Be Seeing Things,” and was courtesy of my old friend Gene Pitney.

  Once again, being signed to Schroeder gave us the inside track. Schroeder managed and produced Pitney, owned the record company, and could keep his house perfectly in order by recording songs he already published. But when other artists were not “appreciating” our songs, it was always Pitney who’d take one of our teen traumas and tack it onto an album or make it the flip side of a single, just so’s we could eat. When “I Must Be Seeing Things” hit the charts, it felt good to be doing something to repay Gene’s kindness for recording various gems of ours like “(We Are) The Last Two People on Earth,” “Don’t Take Candy from a Stranger,” and “Hawaii.”

  With two solid chart records, you’d think that all would’ve been peachy keen in the wonderful world of Brass-Kooper-Levine. But alien forces were afoot, and the tide of public taste was pulling out on us. The Beatles were giving Aldon the bum’s rush, and an unholy alliance between Bob Dylan and marijuana was fucking with my head in a fierce way. Grass was showing me the same pure visions that it freely dispensed to everyone else at that time, and I found that I could no longer Clearasilically compose music. I suddenly saw the inherent dishonesty in what I’d been doing, and prayed to a stack of jazz albums for forgiveness. That’s the way pot made you think, at least at first. It wasn’t until years later that I discovered that the crooks and con men had been smoking it for decades before I had stumbled upon it.

  A split was inevitable. The first to go was Brass, who renounced the vagaries of the music business in favor of a comparatively honest blue-collar job at the Fulton Fish Market, and from then on it was just Kooper-Levine. Our percentages took an instant leap from thirty-three percent to fifty percent, and that helped dry our tears. I had recently married my childhood sweetheart, Judy Kerner, and needed every extra penny I could reel in as the twenty-one-year-old newly proclaimed breadwinner.

  One afternoon Irwin and I took some organic mescaline and decided to go to the movies. (Now there’s a good family man!) We were in midtown Manhattan, and we chose the first-run The Loved One, a film I had already seen earlier in the week but was eager to see again, especially stoned and with Irwin. We arrived at the theater about ten minutes after taking the mescaline, so we weren’t high yet. About three-quarters through the show we were really loaded and all of a sudden the movie got slower and slower and finally just stopped altogether. I looked at Irwin and said, “I’m so high I can’t even see the movie anymore.” He concurrred and we realized that the movie had actually prematurely stopped. An usher announced that the power would be restored in a moment. Just then another usher of Jamaican persuasion rushed in screaming, “Come see! De lights is out all over de whole damn city!” Irwin and I laughed hysterically as everybody rushed out to the street to check it out. The staff had to coax us out of our seats for a few minutes before we’d go outside. We were immediately transported into the middle of a powerless New York in the throes of the Great Blackout (October 9, 1965) with rush hour at its peak. Heavy stuff.

  Irwin and I were quickly separated in a scene not unlike the climax of Day of the Locust. On my own, I got into a heavy Ray Bradbury trip, walking east to west for countless blocks, looking at all the weird situations: People prevented from commuting home crashed out by the hundreds in hotel lobbies. Coffee shops jammed with people eating by candlelight. Then, at the height of my high I got pushed onto this downtown bus. The bus was stopping at every block and people were forcing their way in the back doors and it was really panicsville. When the bus was as jammed as it could be, the driver passed by the lines at all the stops along his route. When he’d have to stop to let someone off, the bus was violently attacked by frustrated would-be passengers who rocked it back and forth in an attempt to get inside. By this time, the mescaline coupled with the violence caused me to be silently crying and people were looking at me like I was crazy!

  The bus headed downtown, and I was soon in relatively familiar territory. I ran into some folks I knew, and we retired back to the relative safety of their apartment. On the way there, we noticed junkies breaking into stores and cops trying to deal with them without using Gestapo tactics (New York cops were usually the sanest at that time). Anyhow, my friends fed me and cooled me out. I called home to the suburbs, chilled out my wife, and told her I’d return when the power did.

  My friends and I then set out on a tour of Greenwich Village, visiting friends, observing various psychodramas, and killing the whole night until we returned to their apartment to crash. By this time, I was down from the mescaline and exhausted physically and mentally. I lay my head down on the pillow and shut my weary eyes, when all of a sudden the TV went on, the radio went on, the light over the bed went on, and the garbage disposal went on. Frankly, it was the most horrendous sound ever heard as every appliance in New York swung back into action at the same time. I looked at my watch and noted that it was almost twelve hours to the second since the blackout began. Weird science, eh?

  Around this same time, one of the producers we had bombarded with our material took a shine to me and I was invited to attend a session he was producing the next day. The producer was Tom Wilson; the artist he was producing was a guy named Bob Dylan.

  1965:

  THE YEAR OF LIVING

  FAMOUSLY:

  BOB DYLAN AND LIFE AS

  A SESSION MUSICIAN

  In 1965, being invited to a Bob Dylan session was like getting backstage passes to the fourth day of creation. And make no mistake about it, a formal invitation was prerequisite. There was no just-happened-to-be-in-the-neighborhood of Columbia Studios when Bob Dylan was recording. Sessions for Dylan albums at that time might as well have been strategy meetings for the direction the new alternative culture would take, and it wasn’t very often that one of the foot soldiers got the opportunity of watching the five-star general in action.

  I’d been aware of Dylan since the beginning; you could feel his presence in the air. I bought his first two albums because I always made a point of checking out the various musical trends going on around me. Although I had played his records, nothing happened. I was coming off of a four-year intensive jazz-listening binge, and this was comparatively too primitive and antimusical to digest in one or two listens. I confess that I just couldn’t hear it at first.

  At that time I was playing occasional gigs with a neighborhood friend, the not-yet-famous Paul Simon and his bandleader dad Lou, a society bass player who’d book all kinds of big band jobs. Paul would sing and play rhythm and I would play lead guitar. We’d sit on the bandstand with our guitars, strumming along with the standards, albeit with our volume turned all the way off. Every forty-five minutes, Paul would jump up and sing two twist songs and I would take the prerequisite guitar soli. For playing eight songs in four hours we would receive fifty dollars each.

  One night we played a prom at C. W. Post College with that square band. (You’ve got to remember that the kids were square in those days, too. They still went for big bands rather than rock ‘n’ roll on those “important” occasions.) While setting up, Paul said, “Man, have
you heard ‘Baby Let Me Follow You Down’ by Bob Dylan?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Isn’t it fantastic?”

  “Well, I couldn’t dig it, couldn’t get next to his voice.”

  “Fuck his voice; listen to the way he plays guitar. Listen to this,” he said and began to spew it out note for note on the electric guitar, which made a big difference to me.

  “Yeah,” I admitted, “I’ll have to go back and re-listen.”

  And so I did, actually enjoying the records this time around. I also quickly discovered that if I played a Bob Dylan album too loud, it would bring my mother storming into the room in exactly twelve seconds. “Who is that? That’s terrible. It sounds like a fingernail on a blackboard. Turn that crap off.” His singing definitely struck a discordant note in parents; they were extremely intimidated by the sound of his voice. This helped it all make sense to me (and to millions of others my age, I’m sure, as well).

  Little by little, the Dylan influences crept into my Tin Pan Alley work. “Paper doll princesses” and the like began to show up in our songs, and I made a concerted attempt to convert Irwin Levine. I must say he was into it fiscally before he understood it intellectually. His cash register brain immediately saw that it would be advantageous to at least take a stab at understanding this weirdness that had infected so many people around him. I began fooling around composing songs on my own—blatant Dylan ripoffs. I was writing bubble-gum songs by day, working in bar bands by night, and trying to squeeze every possible alternative into the time between. I wrote a song called “Thirty-Eight People,” a topical little situation comedy based on a true incident, about a girl named Kitty Genovese, who’d been murdered at a Long Island Railroad station while thirty-eight people looked on from neighboring apartments and did nothing to help her. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) It was not a funny song.

 

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