by Al Kooper
The place went nuts. The audience really didn’t care about the black kid’s first day at school anyway, and no one was gonna remember they never heard the punchline to that story. All they knew right then was it was the last time they’d ever see Smokey Robinson and The Miracles live together onstage.
The sound in the monitor was perfect, and Bobby and I were having a great time. In the middle of the show, Smokey introduced us to the audience and we came out and took a bow, and thankfully, that’s all we did. After the show, we went back to the dressing room to hang and forgot all about time. We were the token white guys. Before you knew it, it was five minutes before the next show and we’d definitely overstayed our welcome. We walked outside from the stage door and it was night time. Bobby was apoplectic. To the right was a completely empty, desolate alley. To the left was a street with guys all hanging out.
“Which way, Bobby?” I asked. “It’s your choice.”
Bobby opted for the empty alley, which we raced down till we hit West 125 Street. We got a cab instantaneously and Bobby handed the driver ten bucks as we got in, shouting: “Downtown! Quickly!”
And that’s my Smokey Robinson story....
Well, there’s actually a Milton Berle story.
On a coast-to-coast flight in first class, some airline employee with a sense of humor sat me next to Milton Berle. Now, when I think of Milton, I think of the rumors I’ve heard of the comparatively giant size of his manhood. So sitting there next to him I was trying to work up the nerve to ask him about that topic, but I just couldn’t. Besides, we were having a spirited debate about whether or not I’d paid my dues in show business as compared to him. Really! He was actually very nice and respectful to me, and I was really liking him. Then, in a total non sequitur, he said:
“Al, you think you know how to fuck?”
He had caught me a little off-guard.
“Well, maybe a little bit,” I answered. “But I practice for hours on end every day, Milton.” He smiled.
“Let me tell ya, Al—you don’t know how to fuck till you get to be my age.”
Yeah, Milton—but then what do you do with that information when you’re eighty???
This was a stupefying thought to me. And to this day, I couldn’t agree with him less. As in roundball, I think my best playing years are behind me. And the day he said that to me, I bet any woman on earth would’ve chosen me in head-to-head competition, if ya catch my drift. But me Mum taught me to respect me elders and if you’re still alive and reading this, Miltie—I pretended that you were right, but in my heart I knew you were not.
Still another story: Some airline employee with a sadistic streak sat me next to an Army uniform-clad George Jessel on a long flight. After fifteen minutes, I changed my seat. And not because of the Army uniform.
Then there was the Miles Davis problem.
Miles and I were both signed to Columbia Records. Miles didn’t like me. He wrote letters to Clive Davis and Goddard Leiberson urging them to drop me from the artist roster because I was “ripping off the black man.” If only he knew that the white men were ripping me off. He would glower at me if he saw me in a store or a club. Around this time, Miles was into boxing, and he had many pictures of himself sparring in many publications. I was sure he was gonna knock me to the moon one day. I was always jumpy when he was in the vicinity.
One night, I was in the studio recording and Harvey Brooks told me that he would be in the building at the same time on a session on the second floor. I was at the soda machine and I asked some woman who walked by if she was on the session on the second floor. She said she was, so I asked her nicely if she could tell Harvey Brooks to come up and see me on the fifth floor during his break. She said she would, and that was it for about half an hour. Then the janitor walked into the control room with a note for me. On the outside it said: “Al Kooper READ THIS 3 TIMES!!” I unfolded it, and inside it said: “Don’t you ever talk to my wife again in this life!! Miles Davis.” Oh, great!!! I thought. Why didn’t Harvey tell me whose session he had been booked on? More Miles trouble. Wish I’d saved that note, though.
This bad blood went on for about two years. One night I had just finished a show at the Bitter End on Bleecker Street in the Village, and Miles walked into the dressing room. My heart beat “like a hammer,” as B. B. King once sang. Miles walked right up to me. “I really enjoyed your performance.” He smiled, shook my hand, turned, and walked out. And that was the end of the Miles Davis problem. Why hadn’t he come to one of my shows sooner??? I’ll never know.
Charlie Calello did a lot of jingle work. He was always trying to talk me into turning those jingle tricks, but I noticed when I was a sideman on some of his dates how obnoxious the ad guys were, and frankly didn’t think I could interface with that nonsense. Finally, one day, he broke through.
“They want you for an international Pepsi spot, Al,” he said. “This is worth a fortune. Please take this meeting. I’ll go with you. It’ll be a cinch. Tell them what to do and collect a huge check.”
After years of pestering, I relented and “took the meeting.” So there’s Charlie and I seated at this conference table with the ad guys. I had brought along some LPs of music I thought would be good for Pepsi ads. We watched the sixty-second spot, and I reached for that first Elton John album. I played them “Border Song,” which actually would have been fabulous for the spot. This incredibly stupid anal debate began that I instantly tuned out. Frank Zappa said it best: “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.”
I sat in quiet horror and watched these guys completely misunderstand everything in the world. Finally, I could sit no longer. They were treating Charlie and me like we were hockey refs who had just thrown the puck in the huddle. They ignored us. I told Charlie that I was really sorry for what I was about to do and I hoped I wouldn’t get him in trouble. He gave me that “oh no” look that he reserved for my worst behavior as I stood up to leave. The conversation in the room stopped dead.
“Hey, Al, ya thirsty?” asked one of the ad guys. “Ya want a Pepsi or somethin’? I’ll have the girl get ya one.”
I lost it.
“You know,” I said, packing up my LPs and moving toward the door, “when you guys get up in the morning, you don’t put your clothes on ... you put yourselves on.” And out the door I sailed, leaving Charlie with the dirty laundry.
I was told that the business changed shortly thereafter, when many more people my age infiltrated the ranks of ad agencies. I even tried again in 1997, but it was just as disastrous. Hey, you can’t do everything!
As I mentioned previously, I was touring quite a bit at this time. One particular scenario comes to mind: We were in some town, early seventies, and I lost control and took some wild-looking-dreadlocked-ring-in-her-nose young woman back to my room that night. This was in the days when one in six hundred young women opted for this particular haute couture. We were scheduled to leave at eight the next morning and drive to the airport. I tried to sneak this young woman out without the other musicians seeing her, but it didn’t work.
They were giggling like girlie-men!
As we got into the station wagon for the half-hour-haul to the airport, the giggling continued and I turned around to them and said:
“I don’t want to hear one word from you guys on this trip, okay? And that includes that stupid giggling, too.”
Silence.
For ten whole minutes.
Then, from drummer Roy Markowitz, way in the back:
“Hey! I thought you said her father was a rich doctor!”
Even I had to laugh at that one.
There came a time when I realized that, even if I recorded an album as great as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, CBS would put it out, but basically ignore it. My contract had another two years to go and I decided not to record until I could sign with another label. I owed CBS one more album, however, and that would have to be done. I went up to Commander Clive Davis’s office and asked for a relea
se. Flat out. He smiled at me, saying: “Oh no, my friend. We have far too big an investment in you to just let you go.” Well, that didn’t work, I thought to myself.
Clive’s reply was from a man who juggled company funds to remodel his apartment and pay for his son’s $100,000 bar mitzvah (speaking of big investments). When the latter tidbits of information were uncovered, Clive was unceremoniously ushered out of his posh job to the relative discomfort of his newly remodeled apartment, while some of his underlings who also had wives and children went to prison on drug-related charges that Clive never had to face. After a few years, he was resurrected to run a new label, which he named Arista—ironically, a synonym for “honor society”—and to this day the world still wrestles with Whitney Houston and Kenny G as a result.
The week after this conversation with Commander Clive, I was scheduled to play Atlanta for a few days. Little did I know how much that trip would change my life.
1972-1974:
ATLANTA,
SOUNDS OF THE SOUTH
RECORDS,
LYNYRD SKYNYRD,
A MOVE TO L.A.,
DUSTIN HOFFMAN,
A MILLION DOLLARS, AND
SPEED IN MY SODA
My band and I arrived in Atlanta for a few nights’ engagement at a club in the Underground. I had not appeared there since the Pop Festival of 1969, three years previously. Things had changed.
It was looser than I remembered it. It wasn’t so ... Southern. There was a sociological gentrification in attitude that had taken place that was tangible to me. The rednecks had long hair now. They were no longer the enemy. People got along better. I liked this. The women were beautiful and willing. We had a wild time that week. My penchant for womanizing during this time-frame was akin to sexual addiction. In fact, it was sexual addiction, in hindsight, if the truth be told. This lasted, without treatment or diagnosis, until around 1979, when it got more reasonable. That was also about the same time AIDS reared its ugly head, so it was just as well. For those of you who were born in the late sixties and seventies, I have detailed a few sociological encounters of the sexual variety further along in this text to illustrate that sexual activity was not always as it is now. My motive is sociological, not misogynistical (is this a word?): I won’t be bragging about these trysts; I will just be reporting the way things were back then.
While in Atlanta, I called my friends who had been Roy Orbison’s backup band, The Candymen.They were now called The Atlanta Rhythm Section and were busy making a new album. They had their own recording facility called Studio One, and they invited us down to jam one night. My band came in with me, and all of us just jammed away. I was quite taken with the sound they got in that studio. I was extremely impressed.
When I got back home, I made a deal with Warner Brothers Records for me to produce my backup band Frankie & Johnny. We booked time in Atlanta at Studio One for a month. This time when I set foot in Atlanta, I would never return to living in New York City again.
Our modus operandi was thus: We would start work each day at noon and quit around eight. The Atlanta Rhythm Section was the backup band fronted by Frankie (Frank Ribando) & Johnny (John Paul Fetta). The ARS consisted of Barry Bailey and J. R. Cobb on guitars, Dean Daughtrey on keyboards, Paul Goddard on bass, and Robert Nix on drums. The engineers were Rodney Mills and Bob “Tub” Langford. After each session, Frankie, Johnny, and myself would repair to Funnochios, a rock club, downtown on Peachtree Street. Some guy I had gone to summer camp(!) with was the manager of said establishment, and he gave us the red carpet treatment. Each night we were shown to the VIP Balcony, where we could sit and view the whole club. We had our own waitress and security guy. If we saw any young ladies on the dance floor that were to our liking from our catbird seats, the security guard was dispatched to invite them to our private enclave. Most women were happy to join us and get that “special treatment.” It seemed like Paradise. What I didn’t know was that this club was a traditional “bucket o’ blood” establishment where shootings and stabbings regularly took place, and bodies were routinely carried out. Later, I would notice these things. But from where we sat, everything looked beautiful.
The first week we were there, a band named Boot was playing. Around midnight or so, I’d go down and sit in with them and play a few songs. This became an every night occurrence, as Boot played there for a whole week. The next Monday, Boot was gone and a new band took their place. The “tradition” immediately stopped as we sat and checked out the newcomers. The lead singer was blond and barefoot, and swung the mikestand around like a majorette’s baton. The hair of both guitarists was so long you literally couldn’t see their faces when they played. They looked like a coupla Cousin Its on stilts with guitars. And they played no cover tunes. It was all original stuff. They were really cool and I spent more time listening to them than I did searching for women. They had that sound I was looking for—that return to basic rock. The third night I worked up the nerve to sit in with them. They actually had heard of me and were flattered to have me join them. I strapped on a guitar and said: “Let’s go!!” The lead singer called out “Mean Woman Blues” in C# and counted it off. C#????
In all my years of jamming, nobody ever called C#. It’s a weird key between two relatively easy keys that would just as easily have sufficed. Later, I found out it was an intimidation process they dreamed up to keep jammers offstage. But I could play fine in C#. As Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap would say: “It’s just one more than C!”
The rest of the week I sat in with them in C#. On Friday night after the club closed, one of the guitarists and I found ourselves at the same young lady’s apartment. We ignored her and yakked all night. I was really starting to like these guys. They were playing a weird amalgam of blues with second-generation British band influences (Cream, Free, etc.). The resultant sound was unique and appealed to me. The one song that got to me every night was called “I Ain’t the One.” By the third night, I was waiting for them to play that song, although I did not know its name yet. The last night they played, I offered them a recording deal with me as producer. They said they would mull it over and discuss it with their manager. We said our goodbyes, and that was it. I hoped Lynyrd Skynyrd’s manager would call me back.
Some nights we’d go to other clubs and see more bands that were quite good. The unsigned crew back then were Hydra, Eric Quincy Tate, Mose Jones, Kudzu, and a raft of other pretty good little groups. I had not seen such a fertile breeding ground and local scene since San Francisco in the mid-sixties. I had begun to make various friends from all this meandering, and I was growing very fond of Atlanta.
As we began the final week of working on Frankie & Johnny’s album, I made a rash, crazy decision. I decided to send for my stuff, rent an apartment in Atlanta, and move there permanently. I never even went back to New York. Roadies back in New York packed all my stuff, and I settled into a little village of townhouses on Roswell Road. The first thing I noticed was that everyone had a handgun. I was not used to this mentality. You’d see them lying on coffee tables, on the bar, or even on the kitchen table. And many of the young ladies who lived in this development waitressed and tended bar but were not above turning a trick or two to pay the rent. Between the artillery and the hooking, it was quite a culture shock. Not that hand-guns and hooking didn’t go on in New York City when I lived there; it’s just that it hadn’t been in my face there as much as it was in Atlanta. For example: In twenty-seven years of living in New York, I never witnessed a shooting. In three months in Atlanta, I witnessed two.
My business overview was thus: No record company except Phil Walden’s Capricorn Records based in Macon, Georgia, understood that something was going on in the South. If Capricorn turned a band down, they were pretty much doomed, because no other label understood this phenomenon. I decided I would start my own label as an alternative to Capricorn and base it out of Atlanta. My agent had friends at MCA Records in L.A., and I flew out to meet with them. I painted this rosy picture and told them
to surprise me with a visit so that nothing could be rigged and we’d go to a bunch of clubs and spontaneously see unsigned bands that were ripe for the picking. If they agreed with my evaluation, we had a deal. They came down soon afterwards, and we toured the town that night and saw a handful of great, unsigned bands. The next week we signed a deal. I would helm my own record company, and they would distribute its records. More importantly, they would bankroll the company, because I’ve always adhered to the first law of business: “Never spend your own money.”
I rented a large house to live in and run the company out of in Sandy Springs, a middle-class (back when there was such a thing) suburb, and dubbed this new venture “Sounds of the South.” The logo of the company was a photo of a one-hundred-fifty-year-old log cabin that was on my property.
Concurrently, I finally heard from Skynyrd’s manager, who turned out to be Phil Walden’s younger brother, Alan. This illustrated my case in point. These guys had the closest inside track to Capricorn (their manager was the president’s brother!) and obviously Capricorn wasn’t interested, or maybe some sibling rivalry was going on. None of the other labels understood what Phil Walden and I knew—and so here was Skynyrd at my doorstep with virtually nowhere else to turn; album-ready and leery of the Yankee slicker (that would be their nickname for me in their soon-to-be-written song, “Workin’ for MCA”).
Alan Walden and I pounded it out for two or three months until we finally came to an agreement. During that period of negotiation, Ronnie Van Zant called me about 2 a.m. one night.
“Al, our equipment van got broken into last night and we can’t put food in our families’ mouths without that gear. We have engagements to fulfill immediately and unless you can lend us five thousand dollars by tomorrow morning, we’re fucked!”