By Bob Cook
"Paul Stanley once told me that if I didn’t have any chutzpah, I wouldn’t have played on that session," says Al Kooper, rock 'n’ roll’s greatest utility man. If you don’t already know, Stanley (nee Stanley Eisen) is Kiss’ lead singer and like Kooper, a Jew raised in Queens; chutzpah
Photo courtesy Anthony Sanchez
is a Yiddish word connoting brazenness; and "that session" was Kooper’s big break. He bluffed his way into a Bob Dylan recording in 1965 and provided the signature, two-fingered riff that answered Dylan’s musical question: "How does it feel?"
Kooper’s chutzpah was not a one-time event, and playing the "Like A Rollin’ Stone" session was not the only piece of work that made him a rock 'n’ roll legend. More than a session man, more than a behind-the-scenes A&R guy, more than a producer, his presence, musical and otherwise, on scads of great records in the 1960s and 1970s cemented his place as one of rock 'n’ roll’s legendary figures, even if most rock 'n’ roll fans couldn’t tell you what he looks like.
Kooper says Stanley, and anybody else who wants to use the term "chutzpah" to categorize his career, has a point—especially with the Dylan session. He was watching, guitar in hand, hoping to hustle his way in, though figuring it wouldn’t be on guitar. (Kooper, in many interviews, has recalled being intimidated by the spectacular guitar player already there—that was his introduction to Mike Bloomfield.) Eventually, he bluffed his way onto the organ, though he had never played it in a recording session before. "At the time I was 21, and I was extremely ambitious, and I was a New York kid, so I was tough," Kooper says. Kooper improvised his riff, which Dylan liked so much he put on top of the mix.
However, Kooper eschews the term "chutzpah" and simply says he’s following his "muse"—like when he followed his muse out of the Blues Project and into Blood, Sweat & Tears, when his Blues Project brethren objected to him wanting to include horns. "It was the songs saying, 'You have to record me with horns,’" Kooper recalls.
He began following that muse at an early age. Born in 1944 as Alan Peter Kuperschmidt (his father changed the family name shortly after Kooper was born), at age six Kooper sat down at a friend’s piano and plinked out Patti Page’s "Tennessee Waltz," having never had a music lesson. (Kooper is a mostly self-taught multi-instrumentalist.) Around age 10, Kooper tried and failed to get his rabbi to let him play at the Conservative synagogue Kooper’s parents helped found. But he used the synagogue to his advantage a few years later. When he couldn’t find a way to get to Alan Freed’s Rock 'n’ Roll Spectacular at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theater, he organized a bus trip from the synagogue’s front door for the kids in his temple.
At the age of 12, two musical events put Kooper’s muse on overdrive. First, he discovered Elvis. Second, he discovered black gospel music. Kooper remembers that, to avoid any untoward incidents, his friends at a local black church took him in early and "put me in a projection booth with the superintendent."
"The first time I went to a black Baptist service, I thought, 'This is the way it should be,’ Kooper says. "People sing much better in gospel music because they’re so much more inspired. Having been to many churches to hear music, I can say the Jewish religion had the worst music. You certainly didn’t go to hear the cantor."
By this time, Kooper was an avid guitar player, and in 1958 he joined the revolving cast of the Royal Teens, still basking in the success of their novelty hit "Short Shorts," for his first big-time professional gig. Not that his parents were aware or supportive—Kooper says they knew he was into music, but they didn’t know how far, literally, it was taking him. "I’d tell them I was going to my friend Danny’s house for the weekend, but then I’d be in Boston, playing on Dick Clark’s Caravan of Stars," Kooper says.
But Kooper continued his formal education, graduating from high school and leaving Queens for the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut. He left Bridgeport after a year. "My teachers were passionless," he says. "My real college was 1650 Broadway."
1650 Broadway often gets misidentified as the Brill Building—which was actually down the street at 1619 Broadway. Many of the great (and Jewish) songwriters and musicians identified with late 1950s and early 1960s rock 'n’ roll were housed at 1650—Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann, Cynthia Weill, Kooper’s Queens compadres Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Kooper soaked up everything he could, learning about playing, songwriting, arranging, producing, engineering—and establishing himself as an ace session guitar player on what he calls "scads of obscure recordings."
"I was really lucky to be involved in the midtown music scene," he says. The concentration of talent "was amazing. You have to look in awe at that sort of thing." That most of the talent was Jewish was significant, Kooper says, but no one made a big deal out of it at the time. "I think we tucked in our everyday religion," he says. "Certainly, I can’t imagine anybody went to temple on Saturday."
Kooper’s big payoff came at the end of his time in the building, when Jerry Lewis’ son, Gary, and his band the Playboys took a song he co-wrote, "This Diamond Ring," to number one in 1964. The song, with lyrics co-written by Bob Brass and Irwin Levine, the latter of whom would go on to write Tony Orlando and Dawn’s biggest hits, opened even more doors to Kooper’s music career. And, as Kooper says, it also convinced his skeptical parents that there was such a thing as a music career.
That career led to more frequent playing and arranging of sessions—which would later lead him to the doorsteps of Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and the Rolling Stones, all at their peak. But he was hardly the watch-the-clock, soulless type denigrated by the Kinks in their 1966 song "Session Man." (Sample lyric: "He’s not paid to think/just play.") Certainly, a sign of Kooper’s impact is that his organ part on "Like a Rolling Stone" is likely rock 'n’ roll’s most recognizable contribution by a session player, whose virtue is practiced anonymity, not raw passion. Kooper toured with Dylan as well, playing organ at his infamous 1965 Newport Folk Festival "going electric" show. But Kooper had ambitions for his own music, and was too headstrong to merely let his muse linger in the service of someone else. So in 1965, on the heels of his initial Dylan success, Kooper joined up with the Blues Project, a half-minyan’s worth of New York-bred young Jewish men who shared a common heritage and uncommon tastes in music. They bred their separate influences in folk, jazz, blues and gospel music into one studio and two live albums that stand as the 1960’s best interpretations and extrapolations of the blues artists most white artists were imitating at the time.
Alas, as generally happened with Kooper’s group work, it didn’t sell well, and the band ended in acrimony. The Blues Project was collectively run, and the collective opinion was that Kooper’s plan to add horns to the psychedelic, jazzy sounds of the band was daft. So Kooper left, taking guitarist Steve Katz with him to form Blood, Sweat & Tears—a band in which Kooper was supposed to have the final word.
The band’s first record, Child is Father to the Man, released in 1968, may be the best and purest distillation of Kooper’s chutzpah ever released. About half Kooper originals and half covers of songs by artists such as Tim Buckley, Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, Kooper’s arrangements are seamless. And his originals are searing, bluesy love songs like "I Can’t Quit Her."
Like the Blues Project, it wasn’t to last. The album stiffed, and Columbia Records pressured Kooper into trying to make the band sound more commercial—including replacing himself as lead singer. Kooper bowed out to become an A&R man for Columbia (that’s how he dug the Zombies out of obscurity) though he stuck around with the band long enough to arrange one of their biggest hits, "You’ve Made Me So Very Happy."
It was at this time that Kooper also started recording his Super Session album, which, while making the Top Ten, didn’t make him an arena rock star in his own right. Not that Kooper was despondent. He was too busy following his muse, now doing so from city to city, such as his early 1970s move to Atlanta because "I liked the music I was hearing from there." Kooper discovered Lynyrd Skynyrd in one of his favorite hangouts, and formed his own label to get them going. (That label, Sounds of the South, hooked up with MCA, which was good for Lynyrd Skynyrd: Not only did it provide major-label exposure, but it also prevented them from releasing a song with the unwieldy title "Workin’ for Sounds of the South.") Kooper later took up more A&R work, this time with Polygram, where he signed Richard Thompson to his first major label deal.
Kooper, by his own description, "retired" from the music business from 1989 to 1997, though the business didn’t retire from him. Kooper’s songs and arrangements were discovered by the burgeoning rap scene, having been sampled by the likes of the Beastie Boys, Jay-Z and Pharcyde, as well as scores of lesser-known rappers. Kooper also took his muse in literary direction, with his own autobiography, 1977’s Backstage Passes—re-released with additional material in 1998 as Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards—and as a backing member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a band of music-loving authors that included Dave Barry and Stephen King. He also was a frequent contributor to high-end music equipment magazines such as EQ.
In 2001, Kooper lost two-thirds of his eyesight due to a rare condition called aschemic optical neuropathy. It’s cramped his style a bit. He had to quit a teaching position at the Berklee School of Music—though he still participates in lecturing, fund-raising, and charity work for the school. Touring also has become more problematic: Kooper now plays primarily by touch, and last year he canceled a short Canadian tour when, he says, a promoter failed to rent the exact equipment he needs. "I wasn’t asking for green M&Ms," he says. "Just a normal issue Hammond B3 organ!"
He now spends most of his time at home, in Somerville, Mass., with his third wife. Kooper has one child, Brian, born in 1966 to his first wife. The boy who dreaded becoming a music teacher and later became one secretly hoped, as his parents not-so-secretly did, that his son wouldn’t go into the music business.
"I didn’t discourage or encourage him," says Kooper, "but I prayed to God he wouldn’t go into music." Brian actually became a chef and what Kooper calls a "bass owner." He regrets that Brian was never bar mitzvah'd. "My sense of humor, my cooking skills, my whole approach to life is based on being Jewish," he says. "The one thing in which I’m so un-Jewish is that I got swindled my whole life. If I had got every dollar I was supposed to get, I’d be living more comfortably. But if I hadn’t written so many songs, I’d be tending bar. My songs support me now, they look after me in my old age."
Kooper distilled the journey of his faith and his music career in his 2001 song "Living in My Own Religion," from his album Rare & Well Done. In it, Kooper explains passionately to God why he had to follow his muse, and why his chutzpah may well have been a gift from the Lord:
I wish that I could put into words How much you mean to me And I wish that I could tell you How much you have helped me To live my life so unselfishly, Lord My parents raised me up To always live inside your shadow But I must admit there were times Some times when I would stray But now I’m living in my own religion And it’s there that I shall always stay
When I was just a boy I would hear the songs of praise The Swan Silvertones & The Harmonizing Four And though these were not my people Somehow I felt captured in your gaze And from that moment on - I never thought in terms like that Anymore Ya see, no man’s color could corrupt my vision Once I was bathed in the Glory of Your Love But I seek no House of Worship to praise your name Yes I’m living in my own religion But I worship you Lord just the same
My friends may call me up on Sunday morning saying: "Come along with us to church & we will pray..." No no you see I’m already in my House of Worship And it is there I believe I’ll always stay
So take me as I am With my love of God intact And I will serve you Lord Til I’ve sung my last song I will praise you every morning And I will thank you God each night And though some may scorn me We both know just where I belong My house will always be my church You know my temple is my mind And I will worship You while others misunderstand Cause I’m living in my own religion That’s what I’m doin’ now I’m living in my own religion But I’ll always know we’re hand in hand.
(©2001 RekoopedMusic-BMI. All rights reserved. Words & Music by Al Kooper)
Bob Cook is a sports and culture writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, NBC News, and the Chicago Reader.