by Al Kooper
I sent these out two years in a row: ’77 and ’78. Then the money began to run out. The house got sold and living large changed to living medium.
I banged out a new solo album in this time period called Act Like Nothing’s Wrong. I stole the title from the inscription on Stevie Wonder’s road crew’s tee shirts (see more on this below). I had waited out my Columbia contract successfully, and not recorded since 1972’s Naked Songs. Act Like Nothing’s Wrong is one of my favorite solo albums—good songs, good covers, good arrangements, poor sales. I recorded my original arrangement of “This Diamond Ring” in an attempt to vindicate myself from the Gary Lewis record. Covers of Dan Penn’s “Out of Left Field” and William Bell’s “I Forgot To Be Your Lover” are on there, as well as some fine original new songs, especially one called “Turn My Head Towards Home,” kind of a tribute to Thom Bell. John Simon, who produced Child Is Father to the Man, coproduced it with me and wrote some great arrangements.
John’s sense of humor is quite dry. One of my fondest memories of making that album was during some lead vocal sessions. I was out in the studio singing my little heart out and John was in the control booth producing. The way they had it set up, we couldn’t actually see each other, but we were in voice contact. I had just finished singing a long song all the way through, and personally thought that I had nailed it.
“So, John,” I asked. “How was that? I thought it felt pretty good.”
No answer.
I thought to myself: What if they just got up and left or something—went to dinner, etc. Just to fuck with me. “So are you guys there? Am I in this all by myself? How was the last take?” I asked further.
Finally! A reply from John: “Yeah, Al, that was pretty good. I’m gonna save that but I think you should sing it one more time and this time see if you can take that quantum leap to palatability....”
I couldn’t stop laughing for fifteen minutes. I still use that line today.
When it came time to shoot the cover, I was ready with a wild idea . There is a Time/Life photo of a young Jane Fonda sitting nude on the beach with her limbs positioned in a casual way so that nothing naughty shows. I engaged South African photographer Norman Seef to shoot me and my girlfriend, Linda Hoxit, separately, in the exact Jane Fonda pose. Then, with a few airbrushing miracles, I just swapped the heads on the two photos. So, there I am, on one side of the cover with ample cleavage and she’s on the other side with hair on her chest. When it came time to title said album, I recalled a saying that was written in big bold letters on tee shirts worn by all of Stevie Wonder’s road crew: “ACT LIKE NOTHING’S WRONG!” It really used to make me laugh, so we plopped those words as the title on the album and shipped it out.
I was so happy with what I’d done creatively on that album, I decided that, if it wasn’t successful, I would stop making records for awhile, put my artist career on hold, and concentrate on other things like producing, writing, or playing live.
Earlier in the year, Denny Cordell hired me as musical director for a record he was producing of a new artist he discovered in Gainesville, Florida. We recorded about half an album and then the artist decided to go back to Florida and put his own band together and recut the album. His revised album was coming out at the same time mine was, so I invited him to open the show on my tour. It was to be his band’s first national tour, and I was proud to have Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers as my opening act. Their keyboard player, Benmont Tench, did the best Al Kooper organ imitation I had ever heard (and still does). We all became fast friends over the course of the tour, and it’s a friendship that is ongoing. Two tracks from that aborted first album I did with Tom are on his box set, PLAYBACK.
When it came time to tour the album, I put together a band from students at the Berklee College of Music in Boston augmented with some local pro Boston musicians. With Tom and The Heartbreakers in tow, we plowed across America in the winter of 1976. It was a huge band: Ted Lo on keyboards, Chris Morris and Les Kuipers on guitars, Vinnie Coliauta on drums (at the age of twenty, his first tour; later he made quite a name for himself with Frank Zappa and Sting), Tim Landers on bass, Stanton Davis on trumpet, Gary Valente on trombone, David Wilczewski on reeds, and Annie McLoone, Roz Bloch, and Meredith Manna on background vocals. Whewww! Quite a voluminous payroll at the end of the week.
At Paul’s Mall in Boston, I put the head of my guitar through the ceiling as a musical exclamation point, and a dead rat fell on stage. In Nashville at the Exit Inn, we broke the club attendance record for the least people at a show. But the worst was the last. My agent had booked us into a club in San Francisco called the Old Waldorf with Mike Bloomfield as the opening act. I had great trepidation about this and insisted that the show not be billed as Super Session or anything resembling that. Well, needless to say, when we pulled into town, we saw Super Session ’76 posters everywhere. The shows were sold out for two nights and I was furious. I knew that the paying customers would expect songs from that album and a set by the two of us together, and nothing like that was planned. It was a potential disaster. All I wanted to do was promote my new album and see my old friend. At soundcheck, Mike and I rehearsed a few jams with my band to approximate something we could get away with.
We played the first show, and it was shaky, audience-wise. Needless to say, they expected a night of live Super Session and we didn’t even come close to their expectations with the little jam we worked up that afternoon at soundcheck. I had caught the flu and was running a high temperature. My road manager, Elayne Angel, had improvised a little healing room backstage with a cot and medication. The club owner, who was on the top of my shitlist for employing this whole Super Session marketing crap against my wishes, tried drunkenly to enter the dressing room. Elayne barred him at the door, saying, “Al isn’t seeing anyone right now. He’s quite ill and needs to rest.” The club owner was right in her face: “I own this fucking club and I’m going in if I want to!” he slurred. Elayne stood her ground and the guy actually took a swing at her, but missed. I saw this and jumped between her and the club owner, saying: “That’s it, dickhead. You just canceled this engagement with that punch you just threw. We’re outta here!” I put the whole troupe on the bus and turned my back on three sold-out shows. I never had a chance of winning anyone over the way he had set it up anyway.
That was how the tour ended. Despite some great shows in New York, Boston, Austin, Chicago, and Detroit, the album slipped into anonymity and I kept my word to myself. No more solo albums for awhile.
The L.A. clubhouse and training ground for female Record Plant recruits was the Rainbow Bar & Grill on Sunset Boulevard. Owned by Mario Maglieri, Elmer Valentine, and Lou Adler, this place has no equal in the universe. I think this is where George Lucas got the idea for the Star Wars bar. Opened in the early seventies on the site of the old Windjammer Restaurant, where Marilyn Monroe would take quiet dinners with prospective suitors, this place was an immediate hit. Ostensibly a sensibly-priced Italian restaurant and watering hole, it became a haven for rock stars, groupies, and wanna-bes of the former and latter. In the early days, it was also the clubhouse of Led Zeppelin, The Who, and many other famous bands as well as mine. I had met Mario Maglieri in 1965 on my first trip to Hollywood. An ex-cop, he had recently (1963) moved from Chicago with fellow officer Elmer Valentine and bought the Whisky A Go Go, which, under their tutelage (and with Adler’s discovery Johnny Rivers in tow), was doing great business in 1965. We remained good friends as we were both Aquarians and he was exactly twenty years and one day older than me. He and I would hang out in the kitchen at the Rainbow, eying the waitresses and generally horsing around. Many a musician down on his luck was quietly fed gratis by Mario, who has a heart of gold.
So we’d be in the kitchen, and he would tell the waitresses that I was gay and attracted to him. I played along and little by little became friendly with all the waitresses. They really thought I was gay, and they would try and seduce me. I would eventually succumb to their seductions and mak
e them promise not to tell anyone, as I was embarrassed by it. One by one, they all fell for it until I had “had” just about the whole staff. Eventually, Mario would tell each one the truth about my sexuality and just enjoy seeing the looks on their faces as they discreetly took in that information. These are just some of the shenanigans that went on in pre-AIDS California.
On another evening, a friend of mine called to say he was taking me to a party and that he was supplying a date for me. Knowing this guy’s taste in women, I accepted this blind date and hopped in his vehicle at the appointed time. We drove to a parking lot on the edge of Beverly Hills, and then transferred to a mysterious RV that took us and others who had parked in the lot up a long, winding road to a huge mansion. My friend, David, went up to a clipboard-holding guard, slipped him some money, and we were in. This house was really something. It had a an indoor-outdoor heated pool that ended up in the living room. My date Jessica (not her real name; in later years, she married a big rock star and had a lot of kids, then divorced him; some clue, huh?) and I wandered off to look at this wild place. On the lower level you could see underwater in the pool as you walked down the hallways. In one of the hallways was a doorway that you had to kneel down and crawl through as it was so small and low. This caught our curiosity, and so we knelt. As we looked through the doorway, we were definitely not prepared to see about fifty or so writhing, naked bodies, all tangled up while lights flashed and New Age music slithered in the background. In all my years, I had never really witnessed this on such a grand scale. There we were, at an actual Hollywood orgy! Truthfully, the combination of being rendered speechless by what I saw, and my hardly knowing this woman I was with, prohibited me from actually jumping in, but my voyeuristic tendencies kicked in, and we spent the rest of the evening visiting the various rooms and just ... well ... looking. This place was actually interior-designed to house these parties. I soon found out that this went on every weekend, and it cost $20 per couple to attend if you had the phone number and placed a reservation. / knew what I’d be doing for the next few weekends!
Al plants a wet one on Mario Maglieri as Mrs. Maglieri smiles nervously. (Photo: Al Kooper Collection.)
I’ve always been fascinated by subcultures, and this was what they called the “swing” crowd. The most amazing thing to me was the sociological breakdown. There were fat people, skinny people, pretty people, ugly people, hip people, straight people, single people, married people, old people, and young people all with one thing in common. And this was most assuredly a subculture; it had its own laws, magazines, and credos. There were probably four or five other similar houses operating in the Los Angeles area at that time as well. I don’t know what the book law was on it, but there were no drugs allowed and it took place in private homes with no police around.
Anyway, the rules were pretty straightforward:• Couples only—you had to arrive as a couple and leave as a couple.
• Absolutely no drugs.
• No meant no. If someone refused your advances, you had to honor that decision. No exceptions.
• Men were discouraged from walking around by themselves. Evidently, some guys would bring nonparticipating women, leave them in the living room, and take off as single guys. This was frowned upon, and the offending couples would be asked to leave.
• Male bisexuality was frowned upon, but female bisexuality was common and encouraged. I have no comment for this; it’s just the way it was.
Obviously, I got into this for awhile. The worst part of it for me was the exhibitionist side of it. I didn’t particularly enjoy being naked in rooms with many naked people; it wasn’t my thing. But I did enjoy the “zipless” part of it: no dinner, no movie, no pretenses. Little did we all know that this sort of behavior would be fatal in just a few years. Well, I’m glad I got to experience it in my lifetime while dodging the bullet as well. In later years I can recall my son saying: “Why do I have to be twenty-three now?”
On New Year’s Eve ’78/’79, The Doobie Bros. were headlining the Forum in Los Angeles. Jeff Baxter, their guitarist at the time, and I were great friends. We had plans for after the show, so I went along and hung out backstage. I can’t remember today who the poor woman was, but she was both our dates for this crazy evening. She and I chatted while the Doobies played their set (one I had seen many times that year because of my friendship with Jeff). On the closing number, “Listen to the Music,” I was invited to come out and sit in, which I did, albeit on guitar. Après show, a limo whisked the three of us back to Jeff’s place in Brentwood, where my car was conveniently pre-parked. On the way to Jeff’s, we all downed tabs of Demerol, the evening’s entertainment. Demerol is a class A narcotic, sort of a synthetic morphine. We all had quite a buzz going as we hopped into Jeff’s hot tub to wash off the tensions of the previous part of the evening’s engagement. The next thing I remember was waking up sluggishly, still tub-bound, in nearly cold water, as the sun streamed in the windows. All three of us had passed out and it was a miracle none of us had drowned. I woke the others and hurriedly dressed to begin the drive back to Hollywood.
At this time, Kitty Bruce worked for me. She would come in for an hour every day in the morning and tidy up the house—a necessity for a seventies’ swinging bachelor. She had a key and was already there with a girlfriend in tow as I stumbled in the door that day.
“Out of the way,” commanded. “Shower alert!”
I got in the shower and tried to wash off the Demerol as best I could. This took almost an hour, and I still had a wicked drug hangover. I walked into the living room, where the two gals were toiling away. “I wanna die!” I complained as my bathrobe-encased body hit the couch. Now just at that very instant, a rather formidable earthquake began, and scared the living shit out of the girls. They were screaming at the top of their lungs.
“Please don’t yell!” I begged. “Let’s just stand in this doorway here like they say on TV.” The three of us huddled there as the quake wound down after twenty seconds or so.
This was not a great way to start the day, I remember thinking. God sure has a bizarre sense of humor to do this on the morning after New Year’s Eve. I was sure I was not the only person in L.A. having trouble standing when the quake hit. After about five minutes of calming, an aftershock shook us at about the same intensity and started the girls squealing again. It’s a privilege to live in Los Angeles. Really!
I had built up a very strong following in Japan over the years, but had never really done anything about it in terms of appearing there. It was primarily the twenty-hour plane trip that held me back. I just couldn’t imagine, short of temporarily freeze-drying myself, what on earth a guy like me would do on a commercial flight for twenty hours nonstop. In 1968, when I was voted the number one recording artist in Japan, I just turned down all the offers that came in. In retrospect, that was probably a bad idea. In 1978, Jeff Baxter and I were offered a two-week “clinic” tour of Japan by Roland Corporation (a musical instrument manufacturer Jeff and I endorsed at the time). I accepted the offer, while I was still young and strident. At this time they had quasi-sleeping compartments in first class on planes, and that appealed to me. I took a heady sleeping pill dose after the plane took off.4 The “sleepers” were up the spiral staircase and were really just bastardized versions of three seats together without armrests. Nonetheless, I quickly lopped six hours off the flying time with a fitful, drug-induced nap upstairs. I repeated it for about three hours without drugs toward the end of the flight, and when we landed I hit the ground runnin’.
The people from Roland met me at the gate and introduced me to our interpreter, whom I immediately dubbed “Ike,” which is what his real name Akira sounded most like. In the days of no political correctness, I said to him, “Just tell me how to say ‘Blow me’ and ‘Thank you,’ Ike. That should get me started!” If this offends someone today, go pick on Rod Stewart or Kiss, who were fifty times worse than I was. Besides, it was a joke, okay?
We had a four-piece band for the
tour. Jeff played guitar, I played Roland keyboards and a B3 organ, Keith Knudsen (from The Doobie Bros.) played drums, and we were aided by a local Japanese bass player, whose name now escapes me. Jeff complained about his marijuana withdrawal and wondered if the bass player would “score” for him. Japan is a drug-free country. I don’t know if you remember the mess Paul McCartney got in when pot was found in his luggage, but it’s serious over there. Rick Danko picked up a Fed Ex package that had heroin in it and languished in a Japanese prison for months! So we didn’t bring any marijuana with us.
Japan is a police state. The locals are truly frightened of the police. Uniformed officers are everywhere; at airports, streetcorners, etc., brandishing firearms and wearing deadly serious demeanors. So at about our third gig, the bass player took Jeff and me into the corner of the dressing room. He took out a packet of folded paper that usually contained cocaine or heroin. This packet had pot in it. First time I ever saw that. He had rolling papers, and Jeff twisted one up. He walked over to the window and opened it. “I’ll just smoke it out the window so it doesn’t stink up the joint,” Jeff offered. The bass player freaked! “No! No!” he cried. “Police watching EVERYWHERE! Close window and pull shades, PLEASE!” He put three towels under the door, opened the windows just a crack, and lit up. He was truly careful—and brainwashed. American law enforcement should take a lesson from Japanese fear tactics today.
I had brought a prescription bottle of Quaaludes with me. Naturally, the prescription made them legal. We dispensed them one at a time to some of the ladies we met, and to a one, they all passed out cold! No drug experience. We soon ascertained we only had to dispense a quarter of a pill to get the desired effect. While arriving at this dosage, we left about six unconscious bodies in various hotel rooms, sleeping off our unintentional overdoses. Don’t tell me, I know I’m going to hell.