Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  I rented a video camera so I could show my new bride what the future might hold in store for us as Souls of the South. I went there solo and had an appointment-filled week. I spent one day with a real estate broker, and it was extremely eye-opening. This was 1989 Nashville, and the prices for great homes were unusually inexpensive. Certainly not in the inflated Los Angeles league. I ran into other people I knew who had settled there and whom I was actually glad to see. But the thing that really got me was no matter how far I walked or drove in any direction, I did not bump into one person from Geffen Records. This was fabulous!

  I flew home to show Vivien the video I’d made, and was ready to pack up and move. Amazingly, she hated what she saw. Even without being an amateur Sven Nykvist, I admit my depiction of the town looked grey and dreary. But hell, it was in the middle of November! Still, the town looked more Bergman than DeMille, and she didn’t like it.

  “Hey—we’ll go house-hunting for a few days, then you’ll see it first-hand and be as charmed as I was,” I said hopefully.

  “I better be,” she warned.

  And, of course, she loved it. We found a house on the first day we looked, and we made our plans. The house was available May 1, 1990, and all the paperwork could be concluded easily in the time period beforehand. I was jazzed. I was finally getting out of Los Angeles. Charlie and I split up the studio fifty-fifty. He got the console, the tape machine, and the giant TV. I got all the MIDI gear, synthesizers, processors, and the computer. All that stuff had been built into these two huge metal road cases on wheels, each of which literally weighed a ton. When you added my possessions at home (which included ten thousand LPs, twenty-five hundred CDs, and four thousand singles), the movers were dealing with literally ten tons of stuff! That intimidated even me, especially when I got the movers’ cost estimate. I have always been such a pack rat, but in my later years I’ve been glad I’ve been the “keeper of the memorabilia” because that stuff has come in handy for books and archival album releases.

  Anyway, we began to pack. In this time period, someone broke into our L.A. house, but was interrupted by the maid and thwarted from taking anything. This freaked me out, because I still had Jimi Hendrix’s guitar—which was beginning to escalate in price—in the house. Glad to be getting outta here, I kept thinking.

  I had begun working with Bob Forrest, leader of the L.A. band Thelonious Monster. We were writing together and doing pre-production for what was gonna be a Bob Forrest solo album or T. Monster’s second album. Bob had a heroin problem and was in and out of rehab in the year we worked together. He was a wild talent; a good poet and singer, but a crazed personality. I asked one of my cured Narcotics Anonymous friends to sponsor him, and I hope the friend forgives me one day for that “favor.” It came time to move, and Bob and I were half done with our project. We decided we would finish it in Nashville. When the movers came to finally lead me out of California, the only tears in my eyes were from the smog and the moving bill—and, finally, still no tan.

  1990-1995

  NASHVILLE,

  THELONIOUS MONSTER,

  CREEN ON RED,

  SELLINC JIMI’S STRAT,

  JOE WALSH,

  RAY CHARLES, AND

  STEPHEN KING’S BAND

  We arrived in Nashville in the spring, which is one of the two best seasons there are (the other being the fall, natch). The blossoms were out, everything was blooming; it felt like flower power all over again. I guess that’s why I never noticed that every ten steps there was another way to break into our house. Besides, I was in this blossom-peace-love-out-of-California groove and I thought Nashvillians would never rob anybody’s house.

  After living there about a month, Vivien returned to California on some family business for a week. Bob Forrest was in town finishing his tracks with me. I had located a studio called Sound Emporium two blocks from my house that approximated Record Plant’s Studio B, and I was ecstatic. One night, I went to one of the musician hang-out bars, hooked up with some imbibing friends, and closed the place about 3:30 a.m. It was the first time I’d done that since I lived there, and as I drove up the driveway to my house, I noticed a window was broken in the kitchen area. Probably some baseball kids, I remember muttering. I got my keys out and ... the door was ajar! I put two and two together real quick and ran to the Hendrix guitar. Still there—whew! The only things I noticed missing were some glass jars of change that we kept in the kitchen. I surmised that the burglars had just broken in when I drove up and had high-tailed it out of the house taking off through the back yard. I was spooked, though. That’s when it hit me how really vulnerable the house was and that an alarm system was mandatory.

  I refused to leave the house until the alarm system was installed and working. I slept on the couch where I could see the back-door-scene-of-the-crime. When Vivien came back, she noticed that all her jewelry was missing, so the burglars might have been inside a little longer than I thought. It took me two or three months to trust the alarm system, but finally, I loosened up. Then someone went in the back shed and stole the power mower and the weeder.

  That did it. I called my friend Albert Molinaro, who owns Guitars R Us , a vintage instrument store in L.A.

  “Albert,” I said, “will you broker the sale of my Hendrix guitar for me? I gotta get it out of my house ASAP!”

  I know what you’re saying: Why didn’t I just put it in storage? Well, because a guitar like that, in my possession, would not have made its owner happy in storage, that’s why. Either I played it and felt safe owning it, or I sold it. It’s all Mitch Mitchell’s fault. He sold his Hendrix guitar for $250,000, and people will murder you for that amount of money. I felt my Hendrix guitar was a magnet drawing bad stuff to my new home. I had owned it for over twenty years, gotten tremendous use out of it, and now it had outlived its usefulness. I knew that in just a few short years it would fetch a cool million, at least, but I was not in a position to wait that long now.

  Albert made some calls, and a speculator in Japan bought it for six figures soon thereafter. I used the money to redecorate and furnish the house. Who would have thought that a block of wood with some wires on it could command such a price? It’s now referred to as the “Al Kooper-Hendrix guitar.” A few years ago the new owners put it up for auction at Sotheby’s. It did not fetch the unrealistic minimum they had predetermined and went back on the shelf. As of this writing, it strangely has returned to Albert Molinaro, who was asked to broker it for a second time. What a long strange trip that guitar has had. Many people think I still own it. But you know I don’t. So please stop breaking into my house if you’re reading this. Which reminds me of the classic story of that guitar:

  When we were recording Skynyrd’s first album, I brought the guitar to the studio, in case the sound of it might be suitable for any track we were doing. One of the Skynyrd boys picked it up and starting jamming with it unplugged.

  A rare shot of me in public playing the guitar Jimi Hendrix gave me. Accessorizing by the use of strap, wristband, and belt, I discreetly attempted to draw attention away from the guitar. (Photo: Gary Nichamin/BOOM! Graphics.)

  “Hey, Al—this guitar plays nice,” he said admiringly. From across the room, Ronnie Van Zant looked up and said: “That guitar used to belong to Jimi Hendrix. He gave it to Al....” The guitar player immediately let it fall out of his hands onto the couch. “0000 ... I just got some nigger on me!” he screamed irreverently. Without missing a beat, Ronnie answered him: “You better pick that guitar up and see if you can get some more of that nigger on ya.”

  And no, I’ll never tell who the irreverent one was.

  After I did what I could with Bob Forrest, China Records of England hired me to produce Green on Red. They were a band from L.A. that had made a few albums which were critically well received, especially in Europe. About three years before, an A&R man from PolyGram had tried to put us together. He set up a meeting for them at my house in Hollywood, and they came over with another producer, Jim Dickinso
n from Memphis. It kinda pissed me off. I chose to make the best of it, however, so I had them go out and get a twelve-pack, and I got Jim to autograph a copy of his solo album from the seventies that was in my collection. We sat around and told old soldier stories all night. The next morning I called the A&R guy up and chewed him out. They had already picked their producer; so why bother me?

  But now Green on Red was ready for me. We made an interesting album called Scapegoats that only came out in Europe (one of those). The deal was set up by my old PolyGram boss Jerry Jaffe, and I was happy to be involved with him again. No hard feelings. But ... no hard sales, either.

  A call came from David Spero, Joe Walsh’s manager, about being a sideman on Joe’s summer tour for 1991. Joe had a new album out with a hit single. The Ordinary Average Guy Tour was mostly opening for The Doobie Brothers in sheds (outdoor amphitheaters that staged summer shows for between fifteen and twenty thousand people). I actually hadn’t done the touring sideguy thing in ten years since Dylan’s tour in 1981. I was kind of curious as to whether a forty-seven-year-old couch potato could physically stand up to that sort of abuse. Since Vivien would be left mostly alone for three months if I went on the tour, I left it up to her to make that final decision. She gave it her blessing, so I took the job. Rehearsals took place in L.A. during the NBA basketball playoffs, and being a Bulls fan, I was horrified to miss the actual final game the first year Jordan and company took it all. I did get to see the last five minutes at the rehearsal studio and went berserk when they won.

  The relationship between Joe and me went back to the mid-sixties. By the time The James Gang (Joe’s first band) was successful, I was working in A&R at Columbia. We met and really hit it off. I gave him some advice and kinda took him under my wing. Extremely talented, he didn’t stay where he was long. Pete Townshend “adopted” him next, and his career really took off.

  Discussing the hidden meaning of Klerkegaard’s Journals with Joe Walsh. (Photo: Al Kooper Collection.)

  Joe had assembled a buncha pirates for this sojourn: I played keyboards and rhythm guitar, Joe’s old friend Joe Vitale played drums, flute and keyboards, Chad Cromwell, a hot, new young drummer, also living in Nashville, played drumkit number two, and Joe’s running buddy, Rick “the bass player” Rosas, lived up to his nickname. I was playing much more guitar than I thought I would, but was not complaining. The set-list was new album stuff, Eagles stuff, and Joe’s greatest hits. It was a tight one-hour set, and we usually slayed ’em every night.

  About two weeks into the tour, we had a night off in Pittsburgh (one of those places that sounds like what it is ... like Flushing, New York). I called home, as I usually did, to check in. After about five minutes of chit-chat, Vivien said: “I can’t be married to you anymore.” I thought she was joking, but as she continued talking, my heart sank into the pit of my stomach. I couldn’t believe she was actually leaving me while I was out on the road! There was another guy involved (there usually is), and evidently, this had been building up for awhile. No wonder she gave this tour her blessing! Later I would write a song about it called “Women Paint Signs (That Men Cannot Read).” But at that moment, I was devastated. Fortunately, the band was off that night, ’cause I was a mess, children! For about a week, I was not a hundred percent, but everyone on the tour was really understanding. In retrospect, I’m glad it happened that way because I was a million miles away from it and had the gig to take it off my mind for an hour every night. Who knows what I might have done if I’d been back home? Could I have afforded Johnnie Cochran?

  Two weeks later, I was home on a week’s break and began to put the pieces back together. Vivien had moved out by then, taking what she pleased. And so began the period of adjustment. Can a rock guy be successfully married? I had three divorces in my life so as to think not. Marriage? I can only think I’m getting better at it. The fourth one’s da bomb!

  I got a great call that week from Jim Yukich, a director friend, who hired me as musical director for Ray Charles 50th Anniversary TV special. This was to take place in Pasadena right after the Walsh tour ended. Once again, I hired Charlie Calello to watch my back. Ray Charles was my idol. I modeled my career after his, and his influence on me can be found everywhere in my work. But I knew that he could be difficult to work with. Stories had always gone around about stuff like that. So I was mentally prepared for anything.

  The show’s stage designer had worked out a configuration for the layout of Ray’s band onstage. The first morning, everyone was setting the stage and putting the mics in place for his sprawling eighteen-piece band. At 1 p.m. Ray arrived and said in no uncertain terms that he would not perform unless his band was set up the way he was used to every night. The stage had to be ripped down and reset, microphones and all. This delayed our day by two and a half hours. Rehearsal began at 3:30 p.m. instead of 1:00. I had hired additional musicians, and I knew they were booked only until 6 p.m. Things got bogged down, performers got backed up, and at 6 p.m. my hired guns left—for other, previously booked sessions, I imagine. When Ray heard that the additional musicians “walked out on him,” he insisted that they be fired. He could not be reasoned with. This left us without a guitar player. I grabbed a guitar out of the trunk of my car, plugged it in, and started sight-reading charts. Never a dull moment!

  Now we had quite a star-studded line-up; Stevie Wonder, James Ingram, Michael Bolton, Gladys Knight, Michael McDonald, Randy Travis, and Tevin Campbell had all come to pay tribute to the Genius. We had written an arrangement of “Hallelujah I Love Her So” for Stevie Wonder to sing—one of Ray’s compositions that Stevie had recorded at the dawn of his career. After he had run through our arrangement once with the band, Stevie took Charlie and me aside, played a hip-hop arrangement on piano that he had come up with, and politely asked if a new arrangement could be struck. We recorded Stevie singing and playing the piano, and we wrote a new arrangement overnight. But the highlight of the show was Stevie and Ray performing together for the first time ever, doing Stevie’s “Living For the City.” I sat in the band playing guitar as they ran it down, having the time of my life.

  I remember when they were getting the guest line-up together, I called Steve Winwood, another Nashville resident, and asked if he would like to participate. “I could never sing with, open for, or follow Ray Charles. I’d be much too intimidated,” he confessed.

  That prospect, however, did not deter Michael Bolton, who had the unenviable task of singing “Georgia on My Mind” with Ray. Bolton had recorded a version that was on the charts at the time. We had to write the arrangement with key transitions, as each of them sang the song in different keys. The run-through went fine. Next up was Randy Travis. He was doing “Your Cheating Heart” by himself, and for fun we wrote a lot of jazz voicings in the horn parts to try and mess with the then much heralded country star. I gained a lot of respect for Travis that afternoon. The horn parts didn’t faze him in the least, and he sang the devil out of that Hank Williams classic.

  The rest of the rehearsal went fine. The next day we ran over Ray’s tunes alone. I stood about ten feet from him as he did the most amazing version of “Just For A Thrill.” The man could still easily mass-mesmerize anytime he got ready to, and at that moment he most assuredly was ready! Then there followed a discussion between Ray and the producers about the conclusion of the show:PRODUCERS: Okay, Ray.... So then you say, “I’ve enjoyed the first

  fifty years. Are you all ready for the next fifty?” The audience will say,

  “Uh huh!” and then you do the song and the credits roll.

  RAY: What song do I do?

  PRODUCERS: The Uh Huh Song [from Ray’s Pepsi commercial]....

  RAY: Well you better get you some tape, ‘cause I’m not gonna do that

  song. I get paid to do that song. Pepsi pays me to go all over the world

  and do that song. Why in the fuck would I just want to do that song for

  nuthin’?

  PRODUCERS: Okay—now let’s just calm t
his down....

  RAY: Look, this is not a song that I’m naturally inclined to do....

  PRODUCERS: Well, we did discuss it with you at the last meeting....

  RAY: I don’t know nuthin’ about no meeting.... I’m just not gonna play

  that song. If you want to play a tape of it, that’s fine with me. Now

  what’s next?

  Somehow, on Friday night, we taped the show. There were a few glitches. James Ingram’s teleprompter malfunctioned during his version of “I Can’t Stop Loving You,” and he was really depending on it for the lyrics. He improvised quite well. I didn’t play on Michael Bolton’s tune, as he was worried about walking out at the right moment in the middle of Ray doing “Georgia.” I stood in the wings with him to give him his cue instead. As the song began, I started laughing to myself. “What’s so funny?” Bolton asked. “I was just thinking how funny it would be if I sent you out at the wrong time,” I answered, giggling. “That’s not funny, Al,” he said as his eyebrows came a little closer together. I got him out at the right time anyway. I had a wonderful time playing guitar behind all these people, especially Gladys Knight and Ray and Stevie. That’s what I remember most about that event.

  Years later, I played organ in the house band at a charity show at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville. Michael Bolton was on the bill again, and our band was set to accompany him on Otis Redding’s “Dock of the Bay.” But, first, he came onstage with just his pianist backing him up and sang an aria from an opera for this stunned country music audience.

  “What were you thinking?” I asked later.

  Bolton answered: “Well, it’s the Grand Ole Opry.... I thought maybe they’d enjoy some real opera singing....” Yeah. Like these people listen to the 3 Tenors when they head to the bar for a Cold One.