Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  In later years, when Hendrix became a worldwide legend, he invited me to play on his third album, Electric Ladyland. For my efforts, he rewarded me with one of his personal guitars. The day after I played on his session, it was delivered to my apartment in New York City. More about that guitar appears in a following chapter.

  Also on the bill were my old friends from the Murray the K disaster, The Who, and even older friends, Paul Simon and Artie Garfunkel. It was also an opportunity to take in the whole spectrum of West Coast music, from the Los Angeles bands that I already knew and loved (The Byrds, The Buffalo Springfield, and The Mamas and the Papas) to the surging San Francisco wave that, for the most part, I’d only heard about (Jefferson Airplane, The Grateful Dead, and Big Brother and The Holding Company, which had a singer named Janis Joplin that everybody was raving about; I soon found out why).

  Checking Hendrix out at soundcheck: Monterey Pop, Summer of Love ’67. (Photo: © Jim Marshall. Used with permission.)

  To digress a bit now that we’ve mentioned West Coast music, David Anderle had also been responsible for engineering a meeting between me and one of my idols, Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys. David took me up to Brian’s house, a sprawling, Spanish-style mansion in ultraposh Bel-Air, one evening about a week before Brian unleashed Pet Sounds on the world. Brian played a test-pressing of the record, jumping up and stopping cuts in the middle and starting them over to emphasize his points. He was very proud of his accomplishment, maybe even a little show-offish, but I wasn’t about to argue. Do you remember the first time you heard “God Only Knows”?

  Then Brian sat down at the piano in his living room (which featured a full-on soda fountain where the bar should’ve been) and gave us two uninterrupted hours of possible variations on “Trees”—you know, the “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as” thing—which he hoped to have The Beach Boys record. I’d brought along a copy of Music of Bulgaria, my favorite album at the time, and he got blown out by that. Then he shattered me completely by playing a track he was working on and singing along to it live. The song was “Good Vibrations.” ’Nuff said. He also played me a rough tape of “Heroes and Villains,” which had evolved, I believe, from a Wilson revamping of “You Are My Sunshine.” In all, it was a great evening; one of the few that really captured all the California magic the rest of the country only imagined from a distance.

  Through all of this, I had been sort of planning my next move. Deep in the back of my mind was a band that could put dents in your shirt if you got within fifteen rows of the stage. Like Maynard Ferguson’s band from the years 1960-1964, I wanted a horn section that would play more than the short adjectives they were relegated to in R&B bands; but, on the other hand, a horn section that would play less than Count Basie’s or Buddy Rich’s. Somewhere in the middle was a mixture of soul, jazz, and rock that was my little fantasy.

  I confided this concept to David Crosby one day, and he sent me to a local club to check out a guitar player he thought would be great for it. I loved the guitarist, introduced myself, and explained this concept to him. He thought it was a good idea, but insisted that he was committed to the band he was in. His name was Danny Weiss, and his band was Iron Butterfly. He left soon after we met anyway and joined the great but doomed band Rhinoceros.

  I was then turned on to Jim Fielder, who had just been booted out of The Buffalo Springfield, and had played with Frank Zappa and Tim Buckley before that. He was a Texas-born mother of a bass player, and we jammed a lot over at his house in Laurel Canyon with a drummer friend of his named Sandy Konikoff. We made pretty agreeable music.

  Mike Bloomfield was concurrently putting together a horn-type group up north that sounded in rumor exactly like my fantasy. This group was closing the big afternoon show at Monterey, so you know that’s what I was most interested in. Bloomfield had kidnapped Buddy Miles (from Wilson Pickett’s band at that Murray the K show already described), and together with Harvey Brooks (finally in a name band) on bass, Barry Goldberg on keyboards, Marcus Doubleday (a descendent of the inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday) on trumpet, Peter Strazza on tenor sax, and Nick Gravenites on vocals and percussion, they had rehearsed for two or three months up in Marin county, just outside San Fran.

  Simon & Kooperfunkel—together again!!! (Photo: Gerald Jacobsen.)

  Monterey was their first gig, and they were terrified. Buddy Miles had a suit on fer chrissakes; one of those jobbies like James Brown wore, with no lapels and a shirt and tie! Bloomfield came out and gave one of his great speeches about how we (the audience) were all one and it was peace, love, and incense, and here’s some music by the way.

  Heavy drama. But they played great. The crowd went nuts. I was standing backstage with Susie Bloomfield (Michael’s wife), and she was crying tears of joy and relief. Buddy Miles came off after playing to his first large, predominantly white audience, and he was sweating and crying. And, caught up in the thrill of it all, was crying. But I was smiling at the same time, because my idea was still intact. Bloomfield’s band, soon to be called Electric Flag, was sticking to tradition. They played their tunes in a faithful Stax-Volt tribute to the Memphis sound, and while it was overpowering and gorgeous to see and hear, it was flagrantly derivative. It was exactly like the differences between The Blues Project and The Butterfield Band. The band I was hearing in my head would not sound like any other band that had ever been.

  After Monterey folded up its petals, I bummed a ride to San Francisco to waste a few days. Joan had fled back to the Big Apple, in a rage, on the last day of the festival, giving my self-absorbed ass a much-deserved stiff boot. Joan Baez was throwing an annual party known as the Big Sur Folk Festival, and I drifted in that direction. I’d played at the previous year’s show as a solo act, and had been invited to perform once again.

  The get-together, held on the grounds of the tranquil Esalen Institute, had maintained a low enough profile to insure that it would be full but not overcrowded. It was as if they’d simply shifted the party from Monterey to Big Sur. Simon and Garfunkel donated their much-in-demand services for free in order to partake in the surroundings and get their hip cards punched one notch further. It was especially nice for me, ’cause I schlepped Jim Fielder and Sandy Konikoff along and took the opportunity to debut some of my new songs. “I Can’t Quit Her” and “My Days Are Numbered” went down well with the crowd, adding fuel to my fantasy of a new band.

  Owing to future politics, this is the last we will see of Sandy Konikoff. I should thank him profusely for working for insulting wages, loving the music, and inventing the sphincterphone.

  The what? Ah, a good story....

  Elektra Records West, under the direction of one David Anderle, had opened a secluded recording ranch on the Feather River in Northern California so that embryonic talents could have a relaxed environment in which to record and then, the script goes, think kindly enough of Elektra to sign with the company if the corporate faces smiled on their tapes. Sandy was the drummer in the ranch band. One night, bongos or congas were desperately desired for a particular song they were recording, but none were to be had, and it would’ve taken days to have anything shipped to their far-flung location. In a spectacular effort to please, Sandy took a pencil-thin snare drum microphone and inserted it into himself anally, beating out the required rhythm on his belly, after the engineer had jacked up the level and added appropriate echo. Not having been present on this historic occasion, I can offer only second-hand information, but I’m told Sandy didn’t miss a beat. That was the birth of the sphincterphone. I’ve heard of putting your ass on the line for a gig, but Sandy, you’re ridiculous!

  Back at the Big Sur Folk Festival, they were offering Simon and Garfunkel, The Chambers Brothers, Judy Collins, yours truly, and Joan Baez and her sisters Mimi Farina and Pauline Marden (The Baez Brothers, as I was fond of calling them). The three-day hang-out climaxed with the afternoon of the actual performances, which attracted scene fixtures as diverse as Ralph J. Gleason and Bobby Neuwirt
h and tied it all together with a peace and love ambience that was much easier to believe in in those days.

  The only loose end was Al “Not Quite the Life of the Party” Kooper, who wandered off into the woods to have a catatonic flashback. I must’ve been giving off rank vibes, because Judy Collins followed me into the woods and asked what was wrong. When I proved incapable of a reply, she took me by the hand and steered me back to my hotel room, where she then endured an all-night crying jag on my part. To her credit (and, I’ve no doubt, extreme discomfort), she was able to talk me down to a somewhat functional frame of mind—just another of the many Big Ones I owe Judy Collins. (I’ve glossed over the depths of my emotional traumas because, as I said before, that stuff is best left to soap operas. And besides, how can you take anything seriously scant paragraphs after reading about the sphincterphone?)

  The next day I caught a ride to San Francisco and proceeded on to Berkeley. Sally Henderson (the sister of Jill, in whose Cambridge apartment I’d written “Flute Thing”) was running the Jabberwock, the club where I’d first met Joan, and she booked me in and gave me room and board. I played solo for the first time since I’d joined The Blues Project; I almost felt like calling myself Al Casey.

  Opening the show was another man in limbo at the time, Taj Mahal. I was familiar with Taj from an L.A. band he’d been in called The Rising Sons. He had a National steel guitar and he had the blues. He dispensed them in such a forthright manner that the stage would be smoking each night after he’d come off, and it took some severe rising to the occasion for me to hold my own on the bill with him. There was no Energy + Volume to save me or Blues Project to surround me to blast my way through this confontation. I played my Blues Project favorites and the new songs I was developing and, in retrospect, it was probably one hell of a show, historically speaking, for $3.50.

  A nice gesture for history, perhaps, but monetary rewards from this venture weren’t enough to sustain me for more than a few days. It was clearly time to face the music, both personally and professionally, back in New York. I caught the first available plane east. I had been gone ten weeks, and had pissed away in excess of two thousand dollars. I had barely enough money in my pockets to get myself home from the airport ... and I didn’t even have a tan.

  Backing up lovely Baez Brother Mimi Farina at the Big Sur Folk Festival. (Photo: © John Byrne Cooke.)

  1967-1968:

  BLOOD, SWEAT & TEARS:

  KOOPER WAS A BOTHER TO

  THE BAND

  I arrived in New York, as best as I can recall, during the first week in July of 1967. On the plane ride home, I had constructed a scheme of complex proportions for:1. Changing my environment

  2. Getting some cash together for myself, alimony, and child support

  3. Putting my dream band together

  I got home and took inventory: no money, no Joanie, no gigs. My rat-infested apartment (I walked in the door from California, only to be greeted by the scurry of little feet) was a depressing base of operations. The one thing I had going for me was friends (not the furry, rodent kind, although some turned out to be more like that later on).

  I got on someone’s phone and called all my friends who were musicians. I talked Howard Solomon, the owner of Cafe Au Go Go, into giving me two nights there so I could throw a benefit for myself. In retrospect, this was even ballsier than crashing the Dylan session! Then I called Judy Collins, Paul Simon, and Eric Andersen, among others, to ask them if they’d play for nothing as a favor so I could raise enough money to at least function for a couple of months. Well, everybody agreed to play and soon we had us a show. We advertised, peddled tickets at reasonable prices, and sold out in advance.

  I decided to get a pickup group together ’cause now I’d gotten the fever and wanted to play at my own show. I got an advance from Howard Solomon and flew Jim Fielder in to play bass (he was all I had to show for that hunk of time spent in L.A.). Steve Katz knew of a good drummer, his close friend, Bobby Colomby, who had been playing backup for Eric Andersen and Odetta. Steve came to the first rehearsal to watch and ended up joining on guitar. We rehearsed about five days and worked up most of the new material I had written, plus my “hits” from the Project.

  My plan was to take the proceeds from the gig, buy a one-way plane ticket to London, and put my band together there. I thought the change of scene would do me good, England was musically charismatic at that time, and I found it romantic to consider myself an “expatriate.” Not a bad scheme, I thought; it looked great on paper and it had worked for Jimi Hendrix, P. J. Proby, and Scott Walker.

  The shows went on, and it was incredible seeing Judy Collins, sweat pouring off her (as Howie’s air conditioning rudely bit the bag the night she played), appearing in a small club again, showering her rekindled intimacy and perspiration on a loving audience. Everybody in the Village came down to play; there were jams and too many acts to even fit in at each show. It made me very proud and thankful that people can be so thoughtful and philanthropic. We stretched it out through a third night and then it was over.

  Six sold-out shows: July 27, 28, and 29; two shows a night. That’s eighteen hundred people at four dollars a head. You figure it out. So the next day, I’m sitting in Howie Solomon’s office and he hands me a check for five hundred dollars. He says the rest went to expenses—paying the help, advertising, free admission to many “friends,” and a thousand miscellaneous etceteras.

  My shot was blown. I didn’t even have enough for the plane ticket. I was stuck in New York, my lady had run off with another man, and after what everyone did for me at the benefit, there was no way I could dial a number in New York and say “please” or “could you” or even “what’s happening?”

  I was sitting in my apartment, well into a state of shock, when the doorbell rang and in marched Katz, Fielder, and Colomby. “Al, we heard what happened. But why don’t you add horn players to our existing rhythm section? We already know how good it can sound, and Jim’s offered to move permanently to New York.”

  Hmmmmmmmm.

  “Well,” I said, mulling this one over. I couldn’t realistically imagine rising to any great heights with Steve, who had tagged along and was, at best, an adequate guitarist. But there was virtually no choice. Right now, it was them or starve-o. “There is only one condition,” I said. “I know exactly what I want to do, and in The Blues Project I was prevented from doing it because of majority rule. It’s got to be set up in front that I’m the leader and will define the band’s repertoire and arrangements and anything else to do with musical policies.”

  No hesitation.

  “Oh yeah! Right on, Al baby.”

  I should have known better.

  Bobby was the only one who had any links to horn players, because they hadn’t played a role in the rest of our musical lives up to that point. Bobby said there was one guy from his neighborhood who was a local legend and had been Bobby’s boyhood idol. His name was Fred Lipsius, and Bobby set about attempting to contact him.

  Fred showed up at rehearsal a few days later, and I couldn’t believe it. Sam Straight. Short hair, square clothes, the whole bit. Then he unpacked his alto and started playing and that was it for me. I didn’t care what this guy looked like, he could play the fucking saxophone and make it cry f‘chrissakes! We played him all my tunes, and he said he was in. Freddie was as sweet and innocent as anyone could possibly be, and a corruption process was essential. He’d never listened to rock ‘n’ roll; he was a hard-core jazzer, but had soul in huge doses. We used to force-feed him marijuana and make him listen to James Brown with headphones on. He got the picture, and pretty soon we had us a rockin’ alto player.

  Freddie was put in charge of recruiting the horn section and we devised a strategy for choosing the right members. Freddie and I wrote the initial arrangements together and purposely overwrote them. That is, we had the horns playing practically all the way through each song, and executing difficult passages a player might normally confront once in ten songs, i
n every song. We decided that anyone who could play these charts and still have any desire to be in the band (thinking he would have to do this every night) was OK in our book.

  We held open auditions and went through quite a collection of characters. Schoolteachers, junkies, real old dudes, pimps, winos—it was an assortment of people we didn’t normally spend a whole lot of time around. Horn players had been sadly neglected in the white rock ‘n’ roll business. Little did I know that this band would change all that.

  While we were trying to find the right guys, I took the rhythm section into the studio and cut three demos to play for record companies in order to sell the band. I hired two trumpet players (studio musicians) and overdubbed them so that the final sound was us and four trumpets. We recorded “I Can’t Quit Her,” “My Days Are Numbered” (which are both featured on our first album), and “I Need to Fly,” a song I cowrote with a friend named Tony Powers. The overall effect was surprisingly close to our goal, and certainly indicative of what someone could expect to get if they purchased us.

  We needed $40,000 to keep the band alive while an album was in progress, and a humanistic relationship with our next corporate fathers, unlike the lack of affinity we initially got from MGM-Verve with The Blues Project. The forty Gs turned off Jerry Wexler at Atlantic (they were not known for gambling large sums of monies on embryonic talent), although I must say he was into the music. Mo Ostin of Warner Brothers came over to (or should I say braved) my ratpad to listen to the demos, but his follow-up from California seemed apathetic.