Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  I thought Nils showed great patience putting up with that nitrous episode. His album was, amazingly, moving along on schedule, no tanks to me. In addition to all this nitrous nonsense, my engineer was abusing cocaine very badly. This manifested itself in late arrivals, no-shows, and infection of band members. Warnings went unheeded, as they usually do when an insidious drug is in place. I called owner Chris Stone in L.A.: “I gotta fire my engineer. Where is that great assistant engineer that’s usually up here? It’s time for his big break.”

  At that moment, the man I was referring to—a young Bob Edwards—was crawling under the stage of the Aquarius Theater in L.A., laying microphone cable for a remote Record Plant recording. The call came, he dusted himself off, grabbed the next plane north, and began his first session as a full engineer. This is usually how it happens. Fortunately, my assessment of his talents was correct, and he was great from the moment he began. Sometimes you can be wrong. Not this time, though. Today, Bob runs the recording studios at George Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. He’s a happy guy.

  Please don’t think that every record I produced was fueled by all kinds of drugs. This record was an aberration. I never allowed cocaine or heroin usage on any session I was in charge of—I just lost it for a brief moment in time with the nitrous and poor Nils just happened to be the victim. At any rate, this fall from grace only lasted a few days.

  We went to Los Angeles for overdubs and mixing once the basic tracks were completed. On the song “Cry Tough,” we had some wonderful textures. Emil Richards played tabla (Indian drums), I played Wurlitzer electric piano, and Chuck Rainey redid the bass part. I had left a long space for a killer solo and wanted to use a color other than just screamin’ electric guitar.

  “Can you play a National steel dobro, Nils?” I inquired.

  “Play one?” he said, “I never heard of one!”

  Now, I was smiling. I called Studio Instrument Rentals and hired one. A National steel dobro is a guitar made out of steel with an arched resonator on the front to propel the sound from the pre-electric days it was invented. It has a lovely, unique, tone when played with a slide. I handed it to Nils.

  “You play it lap-style,” I instructed.

  Bob quickly set up a couple of microphones, and we went directly to the solo part of the song. “Let’s try it, Nils,” I said. “Record this, Bob,” I told the engineer without Nils hearing.

  And simply, in one take, as a young lad discovered a new instrument, we had one hell of a solo, with a sound that was quite refreshing.

  As the overdubs and vocals wore on, Nils’ vision began to take a turn that was divergent from mine. Maybe I should have kept doing the nitrous (just kidding), but by mutual consent I soon left the project. I had produced and mixed five tracks, and five tracks does not an album make. Nils went back and took some leftovers from his last album that David Briggs had produced and combined them with my five tracks. They were amazingly compatible. A listener could not tell the stories behind this album by listening to it. I was glad for Nils, because I was still a fan. In addition to “Cry Tough,” the other tracks I was involved with on that album were “It’s Not a Crime,” a cover of The Yardbirds’ “For Your Love,” “You Lit a Fire,” and “Jailbait.” Some orchestral arrangements were employed using Dominic Frontiere once again. When Nils and I bump into each other today, we are still friends and can look back bemusedly at that time period. He certainly has some Al Kooper stories to tell....

  By now, I had moved into a luxury house in Coldwater Canyon I purchased for a mere $140,000. I put another $20,000 into it, hiring the carpenters who had done the space-age woodwork at the Record Plant, and giving them some designs that no one else would’ve understood. They moved in for two months before I even took possession of the house, and transformed the interior into a spaceship of sorts.

  Lenny Bruce’s daughter Kitty was in town with her mom, Honey, and needed a place to stay. I said they were welcome to stay at the house with the carpenters if they had sleeping bags. In no time, Honey and Kitty were painting the kitchen and the living room, and enjoying the pool and the view, not to mention the bare-chest-ed young carpenters. The climax occurred one night while I was visiting and we all watched Lenny on HBO on the theater-sized screen in the living room. I can’t begin to tell you how surrealistic that was. What I didn’t tell the ladies was how, as a sixteen-year-old lad, I had gone to Carnegie Hall at midnight to see Lenny in his first legit appearance.

  Nils Lofgren counting how many days producer Kooper was incapacitated by nitrous oxide. (Photo: Al “In A Haze”Kooper.)

  “Lenny Bruce at Carnegie Hall. Show begins at Midnight.”

  How could I resist going to see him all those years ago? The stately old hall was packed with jazz musicians, hookers, beatniks, and Manhattan-dwelling yuppies (the kind of white people who went to Harlem for “kicks”). At the stroke of midnight, Lenny strolled out onstage to a thunderous ovation. He walked up to the microphone, did a 180, unzipped his fly, and began to vent. And I mean vent. He had probably retained all day to achieve the effect, urinating nonstop for what seemed like close to five minutes. People went nuts. Some of the yuppies were literally nauseated and walked out on the more expensive seats (lest they should get wet). He shook off, zipped up, turned around to a standing ovation before he even spoke, and slowly shushed the audience. His first words?

  “Okay! Now that we got ridda da squares, let’s get down to business!”

  But I digress....

  Back in seventies L.A., the house was an L shape that hugged a heated pool. Deep in Manson paranoia, I installed an electric buzz-in gate and intercom entrance. One of the intercom stations was built into the headboard of the bed, so that if I heard bumps in the night, I could immediately monitor the outside perimeter of the house. And the bed itself was built by two award-winning Australian carpenters who happened to be passing through L.A. on a sail around the world. The bed was modeled after Cleopatra’s barge. The headboard area had a TV projection unit built in to it, as well as a stereo, and the latterly mentioned intercom. It was an incred-a-bed.

  A partial look inside Free Bird Mansion—Coldwater Canyon, Los Angeles, 1976. (Photo: Gary Nichamin/BOOM! Graphics.)

  The bedroom closet had one of those automated thingies from the cleaners where you push a button and your clothes come around to you. Inexpensive yet functional, I thought of it as the silliest thing in the house. The master bath had a platform Japanese soaking tub, a sauna, and his and hers vanity stations. In the living room, a custom-made stone fireplace was framed by wooden speaker enclosures and a huge projection TV screen. A handmade horseshoe-shaped couch held up to eight people. The dining room set was carved out of driftwood and gave way to the centerpiece of the house—a huge, custom spiral staircase made out of all kinds of woods, with a handrail that turned into a huge wooden phallus at the upper landing. Custom murals were painted on the walls at the top of the stairs. Enough, already. This was Free Bird Mansion and the living was far beyond what I had ever fantasized for myself.

  If I thought Nuthin’ Fancy, The Tubes, or Cry Tough were tough albums to make, then I obviously wasn’t prepared for my next two projects. It all started when I read that Epic Records signed Rick Nelson. I was a huge Rick Nelson fan and I knew exactly what to do with him: Reunite him with James Burton, his blazing guitarist from the ’50s, and stand back! I went to Epic, and they said you can produce Rick Nelson, but first you have to produce this other artist for us. I said fine. It was a Nashville-based artist named Marshall Chapman. Marshall was a six-foot, extremely headstrong woman, with not much good material at the time, but with a lot of ambition and self-confidence. Without good songs, most projects are doomed. But she was so unapproachable, the subject could never be properly broached. To add to the problem, she came with her own studio-inexperienced band. I rehearsed them at my home for a week or two, but it was doomed.

  Now here’s an omen for you: One Sunday, while we were working in Studio A at the Record Plant in
Los Angeles, the entire complex caught fire, and, if we hadn’t hit the fire alarm instantly, it might have burned completely to the ground. As it was, we could no longer continue to work there. The studio assigned me its remote truck and crew, and we finished the album at my house with a remote truck parked in the driveway. I had James Burton booked to play a few solos on Marshall’s album and warm-up for Rick Nelson. So at 10 a.m., here comes James Burton walking up the driveway at my house and sitting in my dining room playing the famous paisley Telecaster that he used on The Ozzie and Harriet Show! How outrageous is that for 10 a.m.? It was completely otherworldly.

  Another day, I had male background singers booked. Now I had used these guys before and they were great. I had them go to the Record Plant for the session, where I met them with a limousine. I had gone to the store and bought four “blinders” (blindfolds you wear to sleep). I asked them if they could put the blindfolds on, as we were recording at my house, and I didn’t want anyone to know where I lived. Used to weirder idiosyncracies than that, they got in the limo and put the blindfolds on. Did I mention that they were screamingly gay and very hilarious even without blindfolds on? I’ll never forget that ride up to my house or the looks on people’s faces when they looked in the windows of the limo and saw everyone blindfolded. The banter in the car ride up to my house should have been recorded. It would’ve sold more than the album we were working on! By the way, I really didn’t care about them knowing where I lived; I was just trying to set up the funniest scenario I could think of. And when the recording crew saw the limo pull up and four blindfolded guys pile out, it was indeed hilarious.

  We finally finished that record. I had done the best I could and so had Marshall. In retrospect, I think I tried to overcompensate on the arrangements and it is not my best work, nor, I’m sure, is it hers. But ... Rick was next!

  When James Burton worked for me on Marshall’s album, I attempted to book him for Rick Nelson’s upcoming sessions. “Only way I could see my way clear to do that, Al,” said James flatly, “is if they give me two points on the entire record.”

  “I’ll check and see, James, and I’ll get right back to you,” was all I could muster.

  James had been largely responsible for the success of Rick’s early work. His trail-blazing guitar work caused many, who might not have been customers specifically lined up for Rick himself, to fork over the cost of a record just to scrutinize James. I’m sure all he got were session fees, while Rick probably went on to to make a fortune. I didn’t blame James for his stance, but Rick’s management just laughed at his demands.

  So there I was, poised to produce Rick Nelson, and my trump card had spontaneously combusted. I needed to come up with a Plan B by evaluating my pluses and minuses. Rick had a pleasant, instantly recognizable voice that had never been challenged much above or below an octave. I decided to follow the formula Linda Ronstadt had successfully employed at the time. I took her prescription for a hit album and matched it to Rick: one old song, rearranged in a modern way, plenty of California-sound writers, and some songs by traditionally great writers, all mixed together in a poppy brew, easy on the ears.

  Rick knew this was the biggest departure he had ever made to date, but he accepted it with a completely open mind. I made him a cassette of fifty songs and told him that whatever he picked was already fine with me. He chose about five songs, so I made him another cassette of fifty songs and he was able to select the rest from that one. There are some advantages to owning 14,000 records (with the exception of when you’re moving).

  I assembled a crack (sharp; not drugged) studio band sprinkled with members of Rick’s current road band. This was also a big departure for him as he had usually been recording with his Stone Canyon Band for years. We had Rick Schlosser on drums, Bob Glaub on bass, Michael McDonald on keyboards, and Jeff Baxter on guitar, while I played any utility parts that were needed on guitar or keyboards. No one had ever asked Michael McDonald to participate as a session keyboard player before, and he was actually nervous. He kept asking everyday: “Don’t you want me to sing on a track or something?” I just laughed at him and said, “No, that’s what everyone else does with you. You’re doing just fine with what you’re playing here.” And he was. He played brilliant things that I would never have thought of and was a tremendous asset to the sessions. A shy, introverted guy, he never said much except with his hands when the red light was on.

  Rick was at a strange point in his life. His marriage was very unstable. His wife Kris would show up at the studio unannounced, and have the receptionist announce her with another woman’s name—say, Rebecca or something. If Rick allowed her in, she would be all over him in a jealous rage, disrupting the session. Once we went to Vegas, where Rick had to fulfill a contractual obligation at the Aladdin Hotel during the recording time allotment. I went along and played keyboards in his band to keep the male bonding together. Every night, when the second show ended about 1 a.m., Kris would call from L.A. and keep Rick on the phone for three hours, in her mind thwarting any dalliances.

  One day, I just kinda blurted out: “Jeeez, guy—why don’cha just get a divorce??”

  In traditional Beverly Hills style, he answered truthfully: “I can’t afford it.” And there is no rejoinder to that answer.

  But Rick loved the accoutrements of his life. He drove a bright red Pantera. He doted on his kids, who would soon become successful themselves: Tracy as an actress, and the twins as the rock group Nelson. So he hung in this unhappy marriage.

  At this point, I should explain how really different this album’s content was for a Rick Nelson album. Included were ZZ Top’s “Enjoy Gettin’ It On,” Little Feat’s “New Delhi Freight Train,” Allen Toussaint’s “What Is Success?” Steve Alaimo’s oldie “Everyday I Have To Cry Some” with an Andrew Gold-type arrangement, Dylan’s “Mama You Been on My Mind” (perhaps the most traditional Rick Nelson number on the album), and two songs by favorite writers of mine: “Carl of the Jungle” by Randall Bramblett and “No Words of Love” by Fred Bliffert. Rounding out the festivities was The Atlanta Rhythm Section’s “Conversation,” and Danny Kortchmar’s “Chump Change Romeo.”

  Singing-wise, it had to be the most versatile record Rick ever made. His voice was pushed and coaxed to do things he never dreamed it could do, and he was proud of it. To a Rick Nelson fan, it would probably have taken some getting used to, but it could have been a viable direction for him to have taken at that point in his career. At any rate, Rick’s uncle, Don Nelson, and Don’s daughter, Kathy (an exec at MCA Records), who were occasional cheerleaders at the sessions, both congratulated me when we finished.

  Backstage at Universal Amphitheater, Los Angeles, 1978. (Left to right) Al, Hank Ballard, Rick Nelson, and Fats Domino. Fats’s choice of neckwear eerily forecast the details of Rick’s demise. (Photo: Jan Butchofsky-Houser.)

  At Epic, things were quite different. Lenny Petze, the man in charge, told me that it was the worst piece of shit he had ever heard in his entire life (this from the man responsible for “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”) and that they had no intention of ever releasing it. About six months after Rick’s untimely passing in a plane crash, I called Epic to suggest they release it and they said: “We don’t care if he’s dead! We still hate it! Don’t you understand? It’s never coming out!” These are a few of my un-favorite things. Somehow, in later years, four tracks were released on a compilation CD. Perhaps, after my untimely death, it will be released.

  My friend, photographer Gary Nichamin, called one day to ask if I could help him out. Playboy had hired him to shoot some photos for their “Sex in Los Angeles” issue. He suggested we adjourn to the Record Plant jacuzzi with two models and two bottles of Laurent Perrier Gran Sicle and shoot a little rock star decadence. I always liked to accommodate my good friend Gary, so of course I said yes. Gary shot about two hours of us cavorting around in flagrante delicto, and when it came time to hand it in, I decided to remain nameless in deference to my mom (much to the chagrin of
my dad). So I’m just called a rock star in the 1979 issue with Raquel Welch on the cover. Just in case you ever get asked that question in a game of Trivial Pursuit, now you know.

  During this time period, Bill Szymczyk, producer of the Eagles and others, had been surreptitiously recording the antics going on while recording Hotel California and The Long Run. At the conclusion of said recordings, he pressed up a select few of the edited foibles of Henley-Frey & Co. on his own Soul-Pole Record label and gave them out to engineers, Eagles, and crew involved with the sessions. I was lucky enough to secure a copy, and it set off a light bulb in the Kooper kranium. For years I had been collecting audio flotsam and jetsam; outtakes of the famous and infamous, and now I realized I could liberate all this stuff in a most philanthropic way. For Christmas, I pressed up three hundred LPs with color jackets and labels and sent them out instead of cards or gifts to people who understood recording studio humor. It was called The Kapusta Kristmas Album after an Ernie Kovacs character called the Kapusta Kid. The big hit on this LP was a tape I made of me calling my parents and disguising my voice by speeding it up electronically. My mom’s comment was classic:

  “Alan? Is that you? You sound like you’re on LSD!”

  This particular track got bootlegged all over the world. The next year’s album “hit” was black keyboard player Donald Blackman spelling his philosophies out for Rick Nelson to hear. It is a classic.