Al Kooper

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Al Kooper (born Alan Peter Kuperschmidt, February 5, 1944, in Brooklyn, New York) is an American songwriter, record producer and musician, probably best known for organizing the group Blood, Sweat & Tears, though he did not stay with the group long enough to share its popularity. He also joined guitarist Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills of CSNY fame and recorded the Super Session album.

Contents 1 Career 1.1 "Like a Rolling Stone" Session 2 Discography 2.1 Solo 2.2 Collaborative 2.3 Compilation 3 External links

[edit] Career

His first musical success was as a fourteen year old guitarist in The Royal Teens, best known for their novelty twelve-bar blues riff, "Short Shorts". In 1960, he joined the songwriting team of Bob Brass and Irwin Levine, who wrote the hit, "This Diamond Ring", for Gary Lewis and the Playboys. When he was twenty one, Kooper moved to Greenwich Village.

He performed with Bob Dylan in concert in 1965, and in the recording studio in 1965 and 1966, including playing Hammond organ with Dylan at the (in)famous Newport Folk Festival of 1965. He worked extensively with Mike Bloomfield for a number of years after the two met as session musicians on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited album. Kooper also played organ with Dylan during his 1981 world tour.

In 1965, he co-formed The Blues Project, and he performed with them at their most famous gig at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He formed Blood, Sweat & Tears in the same year, leaving after the group's first album, Child Is Father to the Man, in 1968.

Kooper played on hundreds of records, including The Rolling Stones, B.B. King, The Who and Cream. On occasion, he has even overdubbed on his own efforts, as on The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper album, as Roosevelt Gook. He discovered the band Lynyrd Skynyrd, and produced their first three albums, including the single, "Sweet Home Alabama". Kooper also wrote the score for the TV series, Crime Story, and has also written music for several made-for-television movies. Kooper also produced a now rare album by a group called Appaloosa.

Kooper has published a memoir, Backstage Passes: Rock 'n' Roll Life In The Sixties (1977), now available in revised form as Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'N' Roll Survivor (1998). The latter includes indictments against manipulators within the music industry, including his one-time business manager, Stan Polley.

Kooper currently teaches songwriting and production at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and plays weekend concerts with his band The ReKooperators.

[edit] "Like a Rolling Stone" Session

Kooper's most notable playing with Dylan is the striking organ parts on "Like a Rolling Stone". Kooper had been invited to the session as an observer, and hoped to be allowed to sit in on guitar, his primary instrument. After hearing Mike Bloomfield warming up, and recognizing that Bloomfield was a much better player, Kooper put his guitar aside and went to the control room. During the recording of "Like a Rolling Stone", Paul Griffin moved from organ to piano.

Kooper told producer Tom Wilson that he had a good organ part for the song (which he later noted was just a ruse to get into the session), and Wilson responded "You're not an organ player, you're a guitar player", but Kooper insisted that he play. Before Wilson could explicitly reject Kooper, he got a phone call. Kooper went and sat down at the organ, though he had rarely played organ before the session. Wilson soon returned, surprised to find Kooper in the studio. You can hear the organ coming in just behind the other members of the band at many places in the song, to make sure he was getting the chords right. During recording, Dylan famously said, "Turn the organ up," and a classic rock organ part was born. While the combination of piano and organ was common in church settings, it was relatively new to pop music and attracted considerable attention.

The organ was the iconic Hammond B3. Kooper later revealed that because it is a somewhat complicated instrument to turn on (hold one switch for a count, then flip the other switch), had it not already been done by someone else at the studio, he probably would not have figured it out on his own, and would never have maneuvered his way into the role as organist on these sessions.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Discography

[edit] Solo

• I Stand Alone (1968)
• You Never Know Who Your Friends Are (1969)
• Easy Does It (1970)
• New York City (You're A Woman) (July 1971)
• A Possible Projection of the Future / Childhood's End (July 1972)
• Naked Songs (1973)
• Act Like Nothing's Wrong (January 1977)
• Championship Wrestling (1982)
• Rekooperation (June 1994)
• Soul of a Man (February 1995)
• Rare and Well Done (September 2001)

• Fillmore East: The Lost Concert Tapes 12/13/68 (With Mike Bloomfield) (April 2003)
• Black Coffee (August 2005)

[edit] Collaborative

• Super Session (With Stephen Stills and Mike Bloomfield) (1968)

• Kooper Session (With Shuggie Otis) (1969)
• Championship Wrestling (Featuring Jeff "Skunk" Baxter) (1982)

[edit] Compilation

• Al's Big Deal / Unclaimed Freight / An Al Kooper Anthology (1975)

[edit] External links

• Official Al Kooper website
• Al Kooper's Myspace page with Bio
• Extensive audio interview with Terry Gross on NPR's 'Fresh Air' program, January 3, 2004
• The Jimi Hendrix Experience by Al Kooper
• Michael Bloomfield Discography