Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  This was actually good timing, because I was about to get canned anyway. It seemed that the remaining members of the Hawks were eager for the gig, not having been at all happy with their separation from Levon and Robbie.

  One morning I called Dylan and asked him what he was doing.

  “Eating a piece of toast and listening to Smokey Robinson,” he replied.

  “I’m going to have to leave the band,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  “See ya,” I said.

  “Okay,” he said.

  And that was that.

  The release of Highway 61 Revisited elevated me to the position of an organ player in demand. People I’d never heard of were calling and offering me sessions, talking to me as if we’d been friends since childhood. I’d get a call and they’d say, “Can you make it for 8:00 p.m. Thursday at Bell Sound Studios?” And I’d say, “Yeah, I’m free. Who is it for?” I had no money to speak of, so I should have jumped on any opportunity that came my way. But I just couldn’t see sitting in some studio for three hours, being forced to play music that I found distasteful. I’d tell them up front how really inexperienced I was, that I didn’t sight-read music (I did, but not well enough to make any claims for myself), and then ask if they were still interested. Without fail they were. I remember getting a call once for a session that I had absolutely no desire to do. The only way I can do this, I told the guy, is if you pay me triple scale. This was just a joke; my way of expressing my unwillingness to play the date. So imagine my shock when he said, “Okay, triple scale,” without even stopping to think about it. It was a wonderful ego boost, but ludicrous all the same. They didn’t want me, of course, they wanted the new “Dylan sound.”

  When “Like A Rolling Stone” hit number one, all the Mister Joneses might not have known what was happening, but they sure knew what to do about it:

  Cover it!

  Copy it!

  The tip-off was when I’d tell them that my guitar playing was actually superior to my elementary grasp of the organ. “Oh no,” they’d say. “We want you to play keyboards.” They’d have a place penciled in for me, usually right in the spot where you’d find the organ on a Dylan record. Clever.

  It was embarrassing. When I got to the studio, I’d be treated a little too nicely for comfort. There I was, surrounded by some of the finest players in New York City—Gary Chester, Everett Barksdale, Eric Gale, Frank Owens, and Chuck Rainey—and I was getting preferential treatment while they were treated like hired help. I mean, these were exceptional musicians; they had ears, they knew I wasn’t shit. I was still new to the instrument; I practiced constantly and was getting better, but I still wasn’t much more than adequate. It just happened that my simplistic style of playing fit the groove of Dylan’s new approach. Taken out of context, it could be funny. Or worse.

  For kicks, I’d go out and buy all the records that aped the Dylan sound. I’d take them over to Dylan’s house, and we’d play them and laugh. The imitation Kooper organ was one of the the stellar attractions. I had a “style” based on ignorance. And then to hear these great musicians imitating my inexperience! Really.

  When they hired Kooper, though, they got everything but the Dylan sound. I wasn’t about to give them the easy carbon copy they were looking for; that would have been pure prostitution. (Not that I hadn’t whored in my Tin Pan Alley days, but my moral fiber was becoming thicker.) Without Dylan, these guys would never have been calling me, so why put his trip on sale for chump change? I just went to those sessions and played what I thought the songs required. Take it or leave it.

  In certain respects, my presence did add color to any session I was on. At this time I was trying desperately to grow long hair, and I was wearing the bizarre clothes I’d picked up on my West Coast trip. I wore a gold earring in my left ear (snap-on) just for good measure. All this was to affirm my mental departure from the old Al, and wardrobe weirdness has been a trademark of the new Al ever since. Well ... that is, until I turned fifty.

  I received a call one day from Al Grossman’s partner, John Court, to do a session for the Simon Sisters, they being Carly and her sister Lucy, in an early performing incarnation. I arrived at the session and walked smack into jazz icon Gary McFarland, who was the arranger on the session. Then, as I glanced around, I recognized nearly half of Count Basie’s band sitting there waiting to play. Oh no. How was I gonna get through this one?

  I looked at the keyboard parts and, sure enough, they were far beyond my limited sight-reading capabilities. So I walked over to McFarland and did an instant confessional.

  “Look, Gary, I’m a huge fan of yours and of just about everybody in this room. But I can’t read the part you wrote for me, and I’m feeling real sick about all this, and who do I have to fuck to get out of this movie?”

  He was tremendously reassuring. He told me to sit on the part and play what I felt like playing; that was why they’d hired me in the first place. I sat down at the organ and sweated through the run-throughs. But, by session’s end, I’d played decently and had certainly not sabotaged the entire day as I had feared. Once I got through that session, I felt I could handle anything.

  Sometimes session work could be great fun; prime examples were the sessions for Tom Rush’s Take a Little Walk with Me album. What was happening musically at the time was an incredible cross-pollination effected by Dylan (folk) playing electric (rock). Former folk acts were playing the old rock ‘n’ roll songs of the fifties and considering that folk music. Chuck Berry was playing the folk festival circuit along with Muddy Waters and Jimmy Reed. Fifties’ rock ‘n’ roll was now the darling of the folk set. Someday rap music will be performed at folk festivals. Rock was slowly taking over as the primary contemporary musical expression by simply incorporating everything in its path. Explosive as this takeover was, the development still caught most of the record company A&R men (for “artists and repertoire” —an early synonym for producers) with their backgrounds down.

  At Elektra Records, Jac Holzman had fashioned a fortress of folk music, wielding the formidable talents of artists like Tom Rush, Judy Collins, and Phil Ochs. Marc Abramson and Paul Rothchild were Holzman’s producers in residence, but they were comparatively inexperienced to handle the new electric music. This is not to belittle their talent, which was later proven to be immense (Rothchild, for example, went on to produce all of the Doors’ big hits), merely to point out that their output had never been channeled in this direction before.

  Tom Rush, however, had been performing stuff like Bo Diddley’s “Who Do You Love” and the Coasters’ “Shoppin’ for Clothes,” and was anxious to make a rock/folk album that would mirror his affection for this music. Marc Abramson called and asked me to put a band together for the project, and I readily assembled a tasty little unit composed of Bruce Langhorne on guitar, Harvey Brooks (ne Goldstein) on bass, Bobby Gregg on drums, and yours truly on lead electric guitar (playing all the tunes I’d played, when they were new, with the Royal Teens) and keyboards. We went into the studio and just rocked our asses off, having one hell of a time and getting paid for it to boot. Take a Little Walk with Me was one of the most enjoyable recording experiences I’ve ever had.

  There were so many sessions that my memory banks are too overloaded to recall them all. Once I played behind the daughter of the owner of one of the largest department store chains (which sold a lot of records) on the East Coast. Must have been her birthday, so Daddy bought her a recording session with the best musicians in New York. The only reason that I even remember this is that every couple of years she turns up on a different label, usually around the same month.

  I played on Judy Collins’ version of Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It with Mine,” for which Bloomfield was expressly flown in from Chicago. I cut a Spider John Koerner session produced by Felix Pappalardi, an electric version of “I Ain’t Marchin’ Anymore” with Phil Ochs, and David Blue’s “Stranger in a Strange Land” for Jim and Jean, another Tom Wilson production. I
played on a Dion album of blues and folk-rock songs. I did sessions with Peter, Paul, and Mary and the Butterfield Blues Band—just sessions every day for months and months all through 1965.

  Quite a chunk of the above session work was for Elektra, and they returned the favor by asking me to participate as an artist on an album they were compiling called What’s Shakin’.

  They asked for two tracks, I cut four, they used one: “I Can’t Keep from Crying Sometimes,” a Blind Willie Johnson tune I adapted and arranged. I played both piano and overdubbed guitar, with the asistance of two young New York musicians soon to figure prominently in my future; drummer Roy Blumenfeld and bassist Andy Kulberg. The recorded quality of the track seems almost garage-level in retrospect, but there’s a certain unselfconsciousness about it that the several subsequent versions, by myself and others, don’t approach. In the accompanying booklet that came with the album, I was identified as a “New York legend.” I thought that was nice until I read critic Nat Hentoff’s review of the album where he said: “Al Kooper may be a New York legend, but based on this track, certainly not for his singing or piano-playing....” Now that’ll bring ya down to earth real quick!

  Tom Wilson rang me up one day and requested my services on yet another session. I always gave Tom top priority because of the tremendous debt I owed him, and I gladly assented. I arrived for this date in my typical out-there fashion, earring and all, and was introduced to a roomful of my contemporaries known as The Blues Project.

  1965-1967.

  THE BLUES PROJECT,

  BLONDE ON BLONDE,

  JUDY COLLINS.

  JONI MITCHELL,

  A NERVOUS BREAKDOWN,

  CALIFORNIA.

  CROUPIES,

  BRIAN WILSON,

  MONTEREY POP. AND

  A SHEEPISH RETURN TO

  NEW YORK

  Up to this time, The Blues Project had been Elektra record number EKL-726, “a compendium of the very best on the urban blues scene.” Which was a nicer way of saying “this record contains the performances of twelve middle-class ‘white punks on dope,’ who have for the most part successfully achieved the ambience of twelve ‘black bluesmen on booze.”’ I had no idea that there was a band walking around with the same name and identical values. One of the performers on that album, a guitarist named Danny Kalb, had appropriated the name (with Elektra’s blessing) and, with the assistance of four friends, had assembled a New York Jews for Electric Blues crusade.

  To wit, Danny Kalb was an established sideman/singer on the New York blues scene, having gained his measure of prominence from appearances on recordings by Dave Van Ronk, Judy Collins, and the aforementioned Blues Project album. Danny’s love of blues was shared by Roy Blumenfeld, a neighbor of his from Mount Vernon, New York. When no one sensitive enough to play drums could be found in the Village, Roy taught himself to play and joined the group. Steve Katz had appeared on a similar Elektra white blues album, The Even Dozen Jug Band (which also featured the recording debuts and talents of Maria Muldaur, John Sebastian, and Stefan Grossman). Like Danny, Steve was a student of Dave Van Ronk. He signed on as second guitarist, replacing a not-very Happy Traum. Andy Kulberg was a classically trained flautist from Buffalo, New York, whose professional experience had been limited to a few polka bands in his hometown area. He was overjoyed at the prospect of being able to leave his heritage behind and become the group’s bass player. Tommy Flanders, a refugee from the Cambridge, Massachusetts, rock ‘n’ roll circuit, was designated the group’s Mick Jagger in an effort to increase its commercial potential.

  Blues Project ’65 (early period). (Left to right) Tommy Flanders, Danny Kalb, Steve Katz, Roy Blumenfeld, Andy Kulberg, Mr. Polka Dots. (Photo: Al Kooper Collection.)

  When I walked in, this session was just one more entry in my appointment book, but for these guys the experience was probably terrifying. It was not only their audition session for Columbia Records, but also the first time that the band in this line-up had been inside a recording studio. I was surprised to find that they’d chosen an Eric Andersen song, “Violets of Dawn,” to hang their futures on, as this was not your standard blues band fare. But as I soon discovered, this was not your standard blues band.

  The two guitarists were fingerpicking a weaving construction of the chord sequence, and I made the mistake of attempting to weave with them on the piano for the better part of an hour. I kept trimming my part until there was almost nothing there, but what little was left seemed to do right by the arrangement. All this time I had no idea whether what I was doing was even vaguely what they were looking for, which was making me more than a little paranoid. But we finally got a good take and everyone was all smiles. When the session ended, they invited me to lunch the next day. Feeling relieved, I accepted. At the appointed time I met Danny, Andy, and their manager, Jeff Chase, at the Keneret Restaurant in the Village, and we sat down for a pleasant meal. I assumed that they wanted to hire my hands for the rest of the album, and that the purpose of the lunch was to fatten me up so they could bargain me down. All of a sudden they were asking me to join their band, which caught me so completely off guard that the best initial response I could muster was a “Huh?” It took me about thirty seconds of silent mulling to sort out all the pros and cons of joining their band: The Dylan trip was definitely over, the studio work was getting a little samey, and here was a chance to practice and improve on my “new” instrument, and maybe even make a couple of bucks. “Sure. I’ll do it,” was my response. And that was the beginning of a three-year whirlwind that changed my life forever. This whirlwind, however, had modest origins.

  First of all, I had to be initiated into the Mystic White Knights of Da Blooze. B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Son House, Blind Willie Johnson—these were names I’d seen but music I’d never heard. Danny would play me these treasures for hours on the guitar and the phonograph until he was satisfied that the sound had been strummed into my head permanently. It was a loving assimilation because the music appealed to me emotionally as well as intellectually. While I was growing up with R&B and gospel, traditional blues had somehow escaped me. In New York, R&B and gospel music were readily available on the radio, but it required some fancy dial twisting to scare up a Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf record in the fifties or early sixties.

  Then, of course, there were band rehearsals. When no one will hire you, you can’t really do anything but rehearse. Unless you could play the entire Top Forty or you had a hit single out, club work was nonexistent. Plus, we had no matching suits or other related all-American paraphernalia. (This is not to say that there weren’t a few $39.95 tux jackets from The Royal Teen days in my closet right next to the skeletons.) Everyone else in the band was far more advanced in the area of rejecting middle-class values, while I was still living in Forest Hills and taking in at least a few hundred dollars a week from sessions. But I respected their dedication, and slowly began to make that move myself.

  My first rehearsal with the band took place at the apartment of a friend named Julie on Grove Street in the Village. I still couldn’t tell Steve and Andy apart—all I could see were noses and work shirts, but I knew Roy was the tall one, Danny was ... err ... well ... Danny, and Tommy was the one with the Rolling Stones haircut. Kalb and Flanders ran the band and that was fine with me. Tommy the singer would tell Danny the guitarist how he wanted his backgrounds painted, and Danny would attempt to assign the proper brush strokes. Each player, however, had his own style and it quickly became a magical musical melting mixture.

  We rehearsed about four hours until the neighbors called the cops. It actually was not very intelligent to have a rock band in the living room of a cramped Village brownstone, but what did we know? We were crusaders. Rehearsal space was at a premium because it cost money. (The Lovin’ Spoonful were rehearsing in the foul basement of the run-down Albert Hotel at this same time for the same reason.)

  Somehow we managed to scrape together enough cash to rent rehearsal space at 1697 Broadway and move the crusa
de uptown for awhile. The Tokens and other people I knew in that building would come down to see what Al was up to, but it wasn’t the kind of music that paid the rent, so of course none of them understood or were the slightest bit impressed. But the juxtaposition of images involved in The Blues Project rehearsing at 1697 Broadway was like a symbolic farewell to a set of values that no longer applied. I knew which side I was on now.

  By this time, I was hooked on the blues crusade. I began to really understand the cultural potential of the band, and how important it was for younger fans to find out about Muddy, B. B., and the whole blues scene in general. They had probably OD’d on Bobbies Rydell, Vinton, and Vee, and I came to see what a positive alternative blues was.

  Obviously we were not a traditional blues band in the sense that Paul Butterfield’s group was. They played the tunes almost exactly the way they sounded on the original records, like a Top Forty blues band. We’d change all the arrangements, never doing a tune like someone else had done it. This is not to say that we didn’t do other people’s songs; we just did ’em our way. We also did folk-rockier things than Butterfield’s scope allowed for, like Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” and Bob Lind’s “Cheryl’s Goin’ Home.”

  Meanwhile Butterfield was out there proselytizing and making his contribution to the crusade; and as long as we’re owning up, he was probably responsible for starting it. His band had built a strong following in their native Midwest, and their much-acclaimed first album on Elektra, along with Al Grossman’s high-powered management, was causing the ripple of interest to swell into a wave. The three B’s—Butterfield on harp and vocals, and Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop on guitars—created a powerful three-pronged attack, aided and abetted by the unflagging rhythm section comprised of Sam Lay on drums, Jerome Arnold on bass, and the later additions of Mark Naftalin (his pop was the former mayor of Minneapolis) on keyboards and Billy Davenport replacing Sam Lay on drums. They were a kick-ass group, and it was dangerous for any lesser band to share the stage with them.