Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  What’s wrong with this picture???? The 1969 Columbia Records convention in San Juan, Puerto Rico, gathers its A&R staff for a family photo. (Far right, in more ways than one): John Hammond, Sr., and your nattily atttired host. (Photo: AI Kooper Collection.)

  You were not allowed to bring your own wall hangings to your office; framed paintings of someone’s choice had arrived long before you did. They were permanently fastened to the prefab walls, so you couldn’t even adjust their position, or swap ‘em like baseball cards. I had a pretty nice George Gershwin portrait, so I didn’t mind. Oh. I mustn’t forget my plant. I inherited a plant; medium-sized, nice ‘n’ leafy and all that. Every day at 6:15 p.m., some nondescript guy would come around and water everyone’s plants. I mean, he wouldn’t care for them or even look at them for that matter, just pour the prescribed amount of H20 in the pot, yawn, and stumble on to the next one. When I left CBS, I replaced that plant clandestinely late one night with a plastic one that looked just like it. Wanna bet that guy’s still watering it every night???

  The eleventh floor housed the pop A&R staff, the studio booking department, the classical department, and the exec offices (relative lower echelon). Clive Davis and Walter Dean were here, but the biggies, William Paley and Goddard Leiberson, were somewhere else. The only time I ever saw Goddard Leiberson was at the annual conventions, where he would circulate quite a bit and display an engaging sense of humor. He was big-time, and Clive Davis reported to him. He had been with Columbia for decades (produced the original cast album of My Fair Lady fer chrissakes !) and was well liked. No executive has come close to replacing his charisma or integrity at Columbia since his demise in the seventies.

  After the first week of staring around, meeting everyone, and getting a new secretary, it was time to get down to business. The problem was that there was none to get down to. I hadn’t found or discovered any great bands (except for that Zombies album!), I wasn’t ready to make a solo album, and nobody from the company suggested I cut any acts that were already signed to the label. I was full of piss and vinegar; I was ready to produce someone, something, the plant in my office, anything, I didn’t give a shit. I just wanted to get turned loose in that studio!

  I was also aware of the fact that I didn’t have any up-to-date experience in the production area, but I had watched John Simon like a hawk as he produced that first BS&T album. My influences were most notably Simon, Phil Spector (king of the sixties’ producers in sound innovation), Jerry Ragovoy, and George Martin. But having good taste in the records you listen to doesn’t necessarily qualify you to create them. (Not true in the ’90s unfortunately.)

  One day, an absurdly simple solution popped into my cranium. Why not get a bunch of proven rock players into the studio and just jam in a relaxed atmosphere? This modus operandi was a staple of jazz recording, and maybe it could lend a bit of respectability to the rock genre. CBS would pay for it (hopefully) and I could finish up my post-grad record producing course. Possibly the result would sell enough to pay for itself. I decided to call Mike Bloomfield in San Francisco and find out what he was doing.

  Mike Bloomfield was the son of an amazing businessman who created one of the most lucrative businesses in the history of America. Included in his father’s giant restaurant supply arsenal were patents for the hexagon-shaped saltshaker with the steel circumcised top and the Jewish star pattern of holes, the cut-glass sugar canister with the steel doggy-door top, and the classic coffee-maker later appropriated by Mr. Coffee for home use. The coffee-maker still bears the Bloomfield name today. Mr. Bloomfield sold his business and patents to Beatrice Foods at its peak, and retired to a life of horseback riding and golfing while his two teenage sons went about the business of growing up in his extremely large shadow. My origins were comparatively humble in comparison.

  However, there had been an amazing parallel between Mike Bloomfield’s career and mine. We were both Jewish kids raised in big cities who were drawn to urban musicologies. We both came into the public eye from our playing on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album (where we met). We both served apprenticeships in pioneer electric blues bands (Paul Butterfield/Blues Project). We both started relatively embryonic horn bands (Electric Flag/BS&T) and both eventually got kicked out of of them. It seemed like destiny was throwing us together whether we liked it or not. We liked it.

  I got him on the phone and it turned out he was not doing much of anything. “Why don’t we go in the studio,” I proposed, “and just jam? I don’t think your best playing is on tape yet and this might just be the best way to get it there. Columbia will pay for it and release it and ... ya know ... big deal.”

  “Okay,” he said, “let’s just do it in California.”

  We picked the sidemen (I chose bassist Harvey Brooks, Mike’s recent bandmate from The Flag and my boyhood buddy; Bloomers chose Eddie Hoh, The Mamas and the Papas’ drummer, known as Fast Eddie) and set the dates. I got all the proper permissions, filed all the correct paperwork, and away I went.

  To make sure everyone was comfy, I commandeered a rent-a-house in L.A. It was a nifty joint with a pool that fellow producer David Rubinson had been using while recording blues singer Taj Mahal. It had two weeks to run on Dave’s monthly rental, and it seemed like a drag to just waste it. I got there a few days early and swam my New York ass off ’til Harvey and Bloomfield hit town.

  Michael always had some problem that he carried around with him; it’s like a cross he enjoyed bearing (part of his American-Jewish suffering heritage). This time around he arrived with an ingrown toenail, which he kept insisting was gangrene. As soon as he walked in, he took the most expensive crystal bowl from the kitchen cabinet and soaked his big toe in it for an hour. His injured toe is immortalized in a photo on the back of the album for all you blues purists and foot fetishists.

  That first night in the studio, we got right down to business. Barry Goldberg, also late of The Flag, came down and sat in on piano for a few tracks. We recorded a slow shuffle, a Curtis Mayfield song, a Jerry Ragovoy tune, a real slow blues number, and a six-eight fast waltz modal jazz-type tune, and in nine hours had half an album in the oven.

  Two Jews Blues: The barefoot boys discuss the finer points of jammin’: Alan and Michael recording Super Session, Los Angeles, 1968. (Photo: © Jim Marshall. Used with permission.)

  Jim Marshall and Linda Ronstadt came down to visit, and Jim snapped away on his Nikon documenting the evening on film, while Ronstadt quietly sat in the corner watching. There was a real comfortable feeling to the proceedings, and while listening to one of the playbacks I noted that I had gotten the best recorded Bloomfield and, after all, that was the whole point of this exercise. We piled in the rent-a-car and made it back to our palatial surroundings, crashing mightily with dreams of finishing the album the next night.

  What happened next is one of those quirks of fate that you can’t explain, but you never question in retrospect. The phone started jangling at 9:00 a.m. and it was some friend of Bloomfield‘s, asking if he’d made the plane ’cause she was waiting at the airport to pick him up.

  “Huh? Michael’s fast asleep in the next.... Hold on,” I said, doing a gymnastic hurdle outta bed into the next bedroom to find ... an envelope? And, inside: “Dear Alan, Couldn’t sleep ... went home.... Sorry.”

  Shit!

  Raced back to the phone.

  Nobody there.

  I got half an album, studio time, and musicians booked, and this putz can’t sleep in the $750-a-month dungeon with the heated pool and the crystal toe-soaking bowl.

  My first corporate hassle.

  “Well, Clive, of course I’m aware of the costs, but he couldn’t sleep. I mean, haven’t you ever had insomnia?” No way that was gonna work.

  It was 9:15 in the morning and my mind and ulcers were havin’ a foot race for the finish line. I was actually on the verge of packin’ it in myself, but a cooler part of me fortunately prevailed. I methodically made out a list of all the guitar players I knew who lived on the W
est Coast. At noon, I started callin’ ’em—Randy California, Steve Miller, Steve Stills, Jerry Garcia. By 5:00 p.m. I had a confirm on one player and left it at that. Once again, fate stepped in to save my ass, this time in the persona of Steve Stills, also unemployed by the breakup of his band, Buffalo Springfield.

  Steve was primarily known as a singer-songwriter, and mainly on the West Coast, but I knew he was a hot guitar player and I was more than willing to give him a try. (Besides I didn’t have a choice, did I?) At 5:00 p.m. I tried Ahmet Ertegun in New York, but it was three hours later there and Atlantic Records was closed for the night. Steve was signed to Atlantic, and you just don’t make records for other labels without permission—another corporate hassle. Steve was one of my favorite singers and to have his voice on the album would’ve upgraded it two hundred percent, but at that point I felt it would’ve endangered the release of the album by tying up Atlantic and Columbia in one of those red tape battles that pencil pushers are so fond of. It’s bad enough he’s gonna play without permission, I thought. Let’s leave it at that and cross our fingers, hoping Atlantic will let us just use his fingers. In retrospect, the negotiations included a swap so that Graham Nash (signed to Epic/Columbia as a member of The Hollies) was allowed to record for Atlantic on the first Crosby, Stills, and Nash album in exchange for Stills appearing on our album. Steve had just gotten his first stack of Marshall amps and was chompin’ at the bit to blast his Les Paul through ’em.

  At seven that evening Steve, Harvey, Eddie, and yours truly sat down at our instruments and stared at each other.

  Now what?

  One of the songs I wanted to do was inspired by an English album I had recently acquired. It featured the performances of a spectacular young organist named Brian Auger and a trendy jazz singer named Julie (Jools) Driscoll. The album contained their version of Dylan’s “This Wheel’s on Fire,” which was a top single in Europe, and a rambling version of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” that I had heard coming out of every shop on Kings Road when I had recently visited London. I thought it would be nice for us to do it, ’cause it provided a lot of room for improvisation and everyone already had the basics of the song down. We did two takes straight off, and the version we kept was edited from the two. Since this was the first big-time record I’d ever produced, I was kinda green in some areas. Editing was one of them. During “Season of the Witch” there are a few edits between takes 1 and 2. The problem is that the two takes were different tempos. I didn’t care. I just hacked away and got the bad parts out and the good bits in. So at every edit point the tempo changes. Either you hear those edits or you think we were musicians so attuned to each other that we sped up and slowed down perfectly together. Not!

  When I’d played on Highway 61 Revisited, we’d cut some songs two or three times with different arrangements each time. One such song was Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to Cry.” We originally recorded it as a fast tune, but Dylan opted for the slower version cut a few days later as the keeper for his album. I pulled out the fast arrangement and taught it to everyone and we had song number two.

  A staple number in Buddy Guy’s and Junior Wells’ repertoire was Willie Cobb’s “You Don’t Love Me.” It was usually done as a shuffle, but I found it lent itself well to a heavy-metal eighth-note feel. Later, when I mixed the album, I put the two-track mix through a process called “phasing” that gave it an eerie jet-plane effect.

  It was 3:00 a.m. and we had three tunes under our belt, leaving us one or two tunes short of an album side. We racked our brains, but to no avail. Then Harvey said he had just written a tune that we might like, and played it for us on the guitar. We did like it and that became the final tune on the album. It was called “Harvey’s Tune” at that time, but was later included with a lyric on an Electric Flag album as “My Woman Who Hangs around the House.” Nice title, Harvey.

  I left for New York a day later with the tapes and continued working on the album there. I put on all my vocals, added some horns for variety, and mixed it slowly and deliberately. After all, this was my debut as a producer, and I wanted it to be as competent as possible. I played it for the big boys at CBS and they thought it was okay enough to release. Bruce Lundvall, a kindly V.P. (later to become president of Blue Note Records) named the collection Super Session. Six weeks later, it was in the stores.

  Fully aware that this was just a furthering of the Grape Jam concept, and considering the relative infamy of Bloomfield, Stills, and myself, I didn’t delude myself that the album was going straight up to number one or anything. It was merely something for me to do while I learned my new craft. I was back in L.A. the day it was released, and ambled into Tower Records to see the initial reaction. I swear they were sailin’ ’em over the counter like Beatles records!

  The gentle grizzly bear watches the funky cowboy consult with the neo-foppish producer. With Harvey Brooks and Stephen Stills recording Super Session, Los Angeles, 1968. (Photo: © Jim Marshall. Used with permission.)

  In a matter of weeks, it was in the Top Twenty and finally peaked at number eleven. But that was plenty. This was a first for me. It only cost $13,000 to make, and soon it was a gold album (for sales exceeding 450,000). I found this particularly ironic. All my life I’d busted my ass to make hit records. Now me and these two other goons went into the studio for two nights, screwed around for a few hours, and boom, a best-seller.

  In retrospect, I think that’s what sold the record. The fact that, for the first time in any of our careers, we had nothing at stake artistically. Also, we had brought another ounce of respectability to rock ‘n’ roll by selling a jam session as “serious” music, something that had only been done in jazz circles up ’til then. All of a sudden, I had the respect of the CBS shorthairs. Shortly thereafter, because of the tremendous success of Blood, Sweat & Tears’ second album, my BS&T album turned to gold, and then there were two (gold albums, that is). In retrospect, I might add that as of this writing, I still have not received one cent in royalties for these albums that sold millions of copies.

  With Super Session’s success, things became a lot more comfortable around the corporate HQ. Instead of being just the company freak, I was the company-freak-with-the-number-eleven-LP-on-the-charts, an important distinction. I had already been through three frightened “straight” secretaries (who quit or asked to be transferred), and I still didn’t understand the ramifications of the “paperwork system.”

  As Super Session began making its way down the charts, I needed some product on the street. I got a bad case of commercial fever and decided to cut a follow-up to our quasi-hit. One of the only criticisms of SS was that it was a studio album and, therefore, “uninspired.” Always one to want to shove it up critics’ asses, I decided to cut a live jam album, possibly at the Fillmore in San Francisco. I called Bloomfield and he said sure, I owe you one (for when he snuck out of the first album).

  This time he chose his friend and neighbor, John Kahn, on bass, and I selected Skip Prokop on drums. Prokop had just quit The Paupers, a Canadian group I was friendly with. I couldn’t get Steve Stills because of prior commitments on his part—but mostly on instructions from my higher-ups, who evidently were still embroiled in the legal aspects of our last venture.

  I called Bill Graham and asked if he would book us in for a weekend at the Fillmore, and could we record it? He said sure. We scheduled it about five weeks in advance, and I began making arrangements. I figured on ten days of rehearsal in Marin County, where Michael lived. I booked Wally Heider’s remote truck to record the proceedings, and got a budget OK. Things were lookin’ good. Skip arrived from Toronto, and we were scheduled to begin rehearsing the next day.

  I left rehearsal arrangements up to Bloomfield, ’cause it was his home turf and he had all the grease in town. He booked us into this strange place called the Mill Valley Heliport. Actually, it’s the upstairs to the waiting room and repair shop of the heliport. For some reason, bands had been renting out the top floor
and rehearsing there for quite a few years.

  When we arrived, we found the band that had loaned us their room and equipment had got a last-minute gig out of town, and the place was padlocked. Peering through a crack in the door, I noticed that the lion’s share of their equipment was gone as well, so efforts to obtain a key were abandoned. After a few frantic phone calls by Michael, we piled into the rent-a-wagon and drove thirty-five miles into the woods to a house owned by a friendly bunch of freaks who called themselves The Anonymous Artists of America. They were a band that played “avant-garde poetic music” and featured a topless female bass player named Trixie Merkin. They had just returned from a weekend’s work (can you imagine where?) and we all pitched in unloading their equipment to facilitate the beginnings of a first rehearsal.

  Soon we were jamming away, and the combination of musicians seemed to work very nicely, considering we had never played together before. Everything went real smoothly but, at the end of the second day’s rehearsal, we were pleasantly evicted in deference to The AAA’s rehearsals. I was starting to sweat it, but Rock Scully, The Grateful Dead’s manager, lent us their place for three days.

  All of a sudden it was Thursday, and we were to open that night. We were half ready. We had six tightly worked-out tunes and about ten frameworks for jam situations. The last few days of rehearsal Michael’s infamous insomnia had returned, and he had not slept at all in that time. He was reeling around the dressing room, and I couldn’t believe he was gonna get up there and remember all these songs and play his ass off like me and Columbia Records were counting on him to do.