by Al Kooper
Mike Bloomfield’s loss was immediate and unrecoverable. He left some mighty big shoes to fill. I wrote about it:“... Although I love to play and I love to sing
I’m quite content to stand right here on the shore
With a teardrop in each eye
‘Cause I have watched most of my friends die
And they just don’t make ’em like that anymore
No sir,
They just don’t make ’em like that anymore....”5
Bye Michael. You were one in a million.
Herbie Flowers (who seemed like my agent in the U.K.) called to say he had gotten me booked on some George Harrison sessions that he had been asked to do. They would take place at George’s home studio, and Herbie would drive us there. Then the night before the sessions the phone rang about 9:30 p.m.
“Is this Al?” a voice asked. “This is George Harrison. I was just calling to see if you wanted any special keyboards for tomorrow. I’ve gotten you a Hammond B3 organ, a Fender Rhodes, and a Wurlitzer piano. We also have an Arp Omni. Will those be okay for you?”
I really thought it was Herbie having me on. Something told me to answer normally though, just in case.
“Uhhhhhh, yeah, that sounds like everything I need. Thank you and I guess I’ll just see you tomorrow.... Good night.” I hung up praying that the phone would ring right back and Herbie’s maniacal laugh would be at the other end, but there was just silence.
The next morning, after an hour and a half’s haul from London, Herbie and I pulled up to a set of gates in the village of Henley-on-Thames. Herbie got out of the car and opened the gates.
“Pretty special for a pair o’ blokes like us to be invited to a place like this, eh?” he said laughing as he got back in the car. You couldn’t even see the house yet. We drove through some really gorgeous landscaping until there it was—Crackerbox Palace. It was a damn castle! I had read it was a Catholic girls school or something like that at one time. We drove up on the tarmac and George came out to greet us. He had incredible eyes that could look right through you. I had not met anyone with that powerful a stare since Dylan.
“You didn’t think that was me on the phone last night, did you, Al?” he said, laughing. “No, I didn’t,” I admitted. “I thought it might be Herbie having a go.”
“Well, that’s all right then. Shall we go inside?” he offered.
The castle was beautiful, and it was pretty special for a pair of blokes like us to be invited there. I remember I had brown-bagged it that first day, bringing along a chicken sandwich, etc. When dinnertime came around, George had a home-cooked meal for all of us in the dining room. Absentmindedly I left that brown bag in the studio until George found it three nights later after we’d gone home.
The sessions were great: Ringo on drums, Herbie on bass, Ray Cooper on percussion, George on guitar, and yours truly keyboarding it. We even cut some tracks for a Ringo album as well. “Wrack My Brain” and the standard “You Belong to Me” were cut on those dates. But the standout tune had no title. George was still writing the words. After we cut the basic tracks, Herbie was dismissed and we did overdubs. Ray Cooper took over driving me back and forth each day in his Rolls Royce. The drives home were like something out of Annie Hall as we drove into pitch black countryside while Ray hollered out his political manifestos, hardly watching the road.
The Fab Four (for this particular afternoon) at George Harrison’s home studio: recording Somewhere in England, 1980. (Left to right) George, Ringo, Barbara Bach, lucky Al. (Photo: Al Kooper Collection.)
On the fourth night, I got home about 3 a.m. and was reading with the radio on in hopes I could get a little sleep before Ray came again at 10 a.m. An announcement came on the radio that John Lennon had been shot. I woke Patti up and we huddled around the radio, probably two of the only people aware of this event in sleepy Britain. An hour later, his death was confirmed. I got chills. Should I call George and tell him? No, I didn’t really want to be the one. At 7:30 a.m. I called Ray, and we decided to go ahead with the day’s session. We thought it might take George’s mind off his personal tragedy.
It was a cloudy day with that typical British mist-rain when we arrived at George’s gate. There were actually about thirty press people just standing out there in the rain. It was pathetic. I got out of the car to open the gate and the jackals descended on me: “Who are you? How does George feel? Does George know? Is there a funeral planned?”
I got angry quickly and shot back: “Surely, you people have something better to do today than stand out here in the rain bothering a delivery man like me?”
Yeah—a delivery man in a Rolls Royce....
George was in the kitchen, white as a sheet, real shook up. We all had breakfast. He took calls from Paul and Yoko, which actually seemed to help his spirit, and then we went into the studio and started the day’s work. Ray and I kept George’s wine glass full all day, and by six o’clock the fab lad was pretty soused. I had brought a tape of my project with Patti that was crying for George to play slide on. When we ran out of things to do on his album, I brought out the tape and we did that. Finally, it was midnight and our mission was completed. “I’m pretty knackered, lads,” George confessed.“Let’s call it a night, okay?” While driving home that night, Ray was silent and kept his eyes on the road.
Eventually all of this work coalesced into George’s album Somewhere in England, featuring that “standout tune” I mentioned before, now with lyrics which became the number one single “All Those Years Ago.” This was George’s tribute to John Lennon, featuring yours truly spankin’ the Wurlitzer piano, especially on the intro.
One night, Patti and I were playing charades (!) in the house, and I looked at her and said: “We are playing fucking charades here in England. You know why? ’Cause we are bored way out of our minds, that’s why! We have got to get out of here, the sooner the better. I don’t wanna see one more darts match, greasy newspaper filled with food, or Carry On movie. We are MOVING! I don’t know quite where yet.... BUT COUNT ON IT!”
Amazingly, I located someone in Austin, Texas, who was ready to put me on salary to help him with his budding music empire. That is all I really needed. David Essex bought the TV, a video game player and refrigerator we’d bought, and the left-over magic purple gum. We filled our steamer trunks again, shipped them off, and took off back to dear, young, un-tradition-filled America! When the plane landed in Austin, I got down on my hands and knees and kissed the ground. I ate a hundred cheeseburgers that first week back and had a perpetual grin on my face all the time.
The man I was working with was Michael Brovsky, an entrepreneur who was then handling Christopher Cross, Carole King, and Eric Johnson. He had a band he wanted me to develop called The Blame. I met the principals, Bill Carter and Ruth Ellsworth, the first night I was in town and we got along famously. People were pretty friendly, generally speaking, and I liked the whole feel of living in Austin. We rented a little townhouse a ways down the road and settled in. Patti hated Texas right off the bat, as our relationship had already begun to deteriorate. This was our third city together, and Patti’s career was suffering as a result.
This kind of summer heat was brand new to me and I soon understood why every car had a crack in the dashboard. (If there had been a Weather Channel back then, I would have lasted ten minutes in Austin. Their alarmist programming for this particular geographic location would have basically frightened me to death.)
I worked with The Blame and helped them put some demos together. I assembled a four-piece band for myself and started to play around town and all around the whole state of Texas, once I got my T legs. I produced a live Joe Ely EP called Texas Tornado and began to become part of the musical community. One day, some guy I knew from San Francisco who used to work with The Grateful Dead, invited me to come hear this young guitarist he was handling. I was very impressed and offered to sign and produce him on the spot, but he kept me at bay. The lad’s name was Stevie Ray Vaughan and he was damn good
.
About three months after he and I met, and after I’d gone to see him play live a few times, he invited me to jam with him one night at the Steamboat Club on Sixth Street. I got there about 10 p.m. and there was no keyboard in sight. On his first break, I asked him about that. “Oh, shoot, I’ll lend ya a guitar and we’ll play later on,” he said. “Later on” turned out to be 1:40 a.m., and the place had a 2 a.m. closing time. I was a little disgruntled sitting around all night, especially imagining being a guitar shill for his great playing. Well, I got up on stage with one of his guitars and he started playing an easy blues shuffle. Needless to say, he was murdering me, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why he wanted to be in a cutting contest with a keyboard player. So I was grinning at the display of guitarness he was putting on, and then he put his guitar behind his head like Hendrix and kept playing. Well, shoot, I thought to myself, I can do that. So I put the guitar behind my head and started playing. I was laughing just thinking what this must look like to the audience when I looked over at Stevie Ray and, amazingly, he was angry!
He is taking this far more seriously than I am, I was thinking.
So when that song ended, with five minutes left to play, I put the guitar down, waved to all, walked off the stage, went directly to my car, and drove right home still none the wiser about what was on his mind. That was one weird night!
Another Austin evening, while Patti was out of town at her parents’, a bunch of us went to the movies together. All the members of The Blame, a photographer, and yours truly caught the Sean Connery flick, Outland, at the Metroplex. It had been raining really hard when we arrived at the theater, and as the show progressed, water began pouring in from the middle exit doors on each side, slowly creeping up from the first row of seats until there was a river covering the first eight or ten rows. We kept moving back a few rows as the river approached us. I guess they were used to that sort of thing in Texas! Every fifteen minutes or so, another usher would walk briskly down the aisle to see what was going on, only to walk right into the water, and a resounding “OH SHIT!” would fill the auditorium, to the amusement of the audience. Each usher would then turn on his or her wet heels and go back to usherland or from wherever they came. It was hard to concentrate on the movie with all this going on.
At the conclusion of the film, we exited and found an amazing sight. Half the parking lot was underwater! Marc, the drummer from The Blame, found his station wagon in water up to the windows. I had come with Jan, the photographer, and her car was okay where it was parked. We helped Marc get his car out, but its insides had been totally flooded and were ruined. The theater was on the outskirts of town, and as Jan and I navigated toward downtown, we met with many surprises. The interstate was totally underwater! At each entrance ramp, we’d go to drive on, and little by little the ramp would head underwater. We’d back up and try some other route. Of course, Jan’s radio was broken, so we had no help from broadcast advisories. It was pretty scary. Amazingly, we made it back into town. Where I lived was okay but the news on TV was not. Flash-flooding had done an incredible amount of damage. A graveyard was flooded and a bunch of coffins ended up on a supermarket’s parking lot! A bunch of pianos from a music store were floating in the creek! Stuff like that was happening all over Austin that night. The next day the waters subsided almost as quickly as they rose.
A concert was soon planned to aid the flood victims. It was called Tornado Jam for some reason lost on me. Flood Fiesta would have been more appropriate. The line-up was: The Fabulous Thunderbirds, Joe Ely, Al Kooper, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Delbert McClinton, and some band from Australia that was passing through called Cold Chisel. It took place on a sunny Sunday afternoon and evening at Manor Downs, a racetrack just outside of town. Attendance was good, but it was hot as hell. I remember having Joe Ely’s girlfriend cut my hair just before we went on, so that I could breathe on stage! Michael Brovsky set it up so that the show would be audio- and videotaped, and I was producing the audio part. A remote truck was pulled up to the site, and good ol’ Bob Edwards and I sat in there making sure that things were going okay to tape. My version of “I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know” took so long in performance that it literally went from daylight to night time during the course of the one song! It was interesting to note that people were so used to seeing Stevie Ray play around town, they were pretty blasé during his performance. The Thunderbirds headlined, however, and brought the house down. The Vaughan clan was well represented that day, and “Texas Flood” was an appropriate song for Stevie Ray to play. The show was deemed a success, but the video production never aired anywhere I knew about. It would be an amazing artifact to see today.
As time went by, I began to go weeks at a time without a check from Brovsky. Bob Edwards’ invoices went unheeded as well, and finally I couldn’t afford to stay in Austin anymore. My relationship with Patti had dwindled down to nothing. I sold my stuff to different friends. Joe Ely bought my refrigerator. He got it home and found out the door opened the wrong way for his kitchen set-up. He turned the refrigerator upside-down and I’m told it’s still working for him today! Inevitably, it seemed, I was doomed to head back to California—alone, with my tail between my legs, and believe it or not, still with no tan.
1981-1985:
LIVING SMALL,
TRAVELS WITH DYLAN,
CHAMPIOMSHIP WRESTLING,
A&R AT POLYCRAM,
RICHARD THOMPSON,
THE ST. REGIS FIASCO,
AND THE FOUR-DAY
TURNAROUND
Patti and I called it quits, leaving Austin separately but both headed for L.A. Stan Polley was able to secure a friend’s condo for me at a reasonable rent because it was a bust as a “for sale” item. It was located in the heart of Hollywood, down the street from the Directors Guild. The furnishings were from hell and that sort of made it depressing because not only did I have to look at them everyday, but so did anyone else who came to visit. But I had a home, even if three-quarters of my possessions were still in storage. Patti took a guest house in Laurel Canyon, and we somehow remained friends.
The first thing that happened was Bob Dylan’s office called my manager to offer me a spot in Bob’s touring band commencing in a week for three months’ duration. This was approximately the beginning of September 1981. Now, Bob and I had not spoken in seven years, over a disagreement the details of which are unimportant. I figured I’d had seven years of survival without Bob, and I was basically curious to see what would happen now. There was a rehearsal the next day, and I went along to see what his stance toward me would be. Well, it was like those seven years of falling-out had never existed. We just hugged and took up where we left off.
There were thirty-five songs on the set-list, and we played them all in a relatively short amount of time. The band consisted of Steve Ripley (now of The Tractors) and Fred Tackett (now of Little Feat) on guitars, Tim Drummond (he of Neil Young and James Brown fame) on bass, the ubiquitous Jim Keltner on drums, and a member of the road crew, Arthur Rosato, on another set of drums. Three female Baptist Church singers rounded out the cast.
I felt confident after the rehearsal that I could play the gig, but the business people were still haggling. The plane left in two days and they still hadn’t come to terms. I told my manager that I didn’t care if I went or not, and to make the best deal he could. With two days to go, I imagined his bargaining position was pretty secure. My suitcase was half-packed on the bed, and I calmly waited to find out if I stayed or went. Finally, the answer came, and I packed the other half of my belongings and headed to the airport. Later, I found out that Bob’s keyboard player had quit at the last minute and Dylan happened to be talking to George Harrison at the time, who recommended me. I was on a plane to Milwaukee, with a man who sang mostly religious songs in his show. Oh, boy.
Backstage at the first gig, things were tense. The road manager came to get me: “It’s time for the prayer, Al.” Yeah, I’ll say, I thought. But to my surprise, the en
tire band stood in the wings holding hands with heads bowed. Madeline Quebec, one of the background singers, led the prayer that went something like this:
“Oh Lord. Help us to remember all our parts and bless us tonight on our first show. You are an Almighty God and we love and worship You. Amen.”
We then went out and played “You Got To Serve Somebody” and “I Believe In You.” I was thinking to myself: This is a Bob Dylan show??? Why am I here??? Why aren’t we playing all the songs Bob and I recorded??? I yearned to do something about this.
The band and road manager Bob Meyers traveled in one bus, the crew in another, and Bob in his own bus. The first hotel stay was either the Hotel Milwaukee or the Hotel Wisconsin, I can’t remember which. The memory is the second thing to go; I can’t remember what the first is, either. But anyhow, it was the kind of hotel where an ambulance arrives every six hours or so to cart away another expired tenant. The blankets were made from that stuff airplane blankets are made out of, and there were dial telephones in the room. The only other place I knew that had dial telephones in 1981 was my parents’ apartment! I found out that Bob picked the hotels. Now he’s a travel agent too, I thought to myself.