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Al Kooper has been a key contributor to American music for most of our
lifetimes; like the engine under the hood of a purring culture-mobile.
He has cruised in every gear, from the 1958 novelty hit "Short Shorts"
(The Royal Teens), and his 1965 pop classic "This Diamond Ring" (Gary
Lewis and the Playboys), through the 1965 emergence of Folk-Rocker Bob
Dylan on the groundbreaking LP Highway 61 Revisited LP. And then
there were his further explorations with Mike Bloomfield and Stephen
Stills (1969's Super Sessions). He was off and running at a
really young age and he doesn't seem to be finished.
By RAR
Al
Kooper can't stop, bless his musical heart and soul. The guy who snuck a
revolution in sound into the Bob Dylan track heard 'round the world
("Like A Rolling Stone") has an album out, White Chocolate, which
is blissfully out of touch with anything other than his own musical
legacy - but what a legacy!
Kooper was born in
Brooklyn, New York during World War II, in 1944. He came of age during
the 1950s, even scoring a radio hit while still in knee pants
(figuratively speaking). He came along during an era of extraordinary
coalescence in musical styles that was giving birth to a new kind of
sound. It was young but it was also smart and it had muscle. It
integrated the Chicago Blues, the Doo-Wop of the eastern seaboard, the
Folk-Pop that swept across college campuses and urban coffee shops in
the period, and the Teen-Pop born on the west coast and driven almost
entirely by the movie studios. Music had always been sexy and exciting,
but beginning in the 1960s, around the time that Al Kooper snuck into
that Bob Dylan recording session to lay the Hammond B3 organ track on
"Like A Rolling Stone", it suddenly took on a sense of urgency.
With Mike Bloomfield and
Dylan, and even with Blood Sweat & Tears, which he founded, Kooper
helped to put an edge on the sound of the times; not using the buzz-saw
artifice of musical hyperbole (it's easy to imagine that screaming,
distorted guitars represent something sort of edgy) but with
sophistication of arrangements and voicings that broadcast the weight of
deep need and feeling. The music of the '60s was emotional; that was the
basis of its sound. Heavy Metal eventually came in and exchanged
authentic musical emotion for fireworks and smoke machines and the
aforementioned screaming, distorted guitars. And Country Rock developed
like a musical sedative, and Disco reduced popular music further to a
thumping, repetitive beat. Music lost its urgency for a long time
thereafter, remaining virtually without a heartbeat during the long
ironic period when artists seemed loathe to express any real musical
feel. When urgency finally returned it was in the form of Rap and
Hip-Hop, which largely exchanged the metal guitars with attitude to only
slightly greater emotional effect. Now the urgency of those forms has
been lost to redundancy and superficiality, for the one thing that has
never returned to popular music is intelligence as it once existed in
the 1960s. That was a period of shared national experience, when there
were only three television networks, AM radio was still big, and FM
radio was ascendant. It is because of the cohesiveness of our cultural
experience of that era that we know Al Kooper at all. All you have to
say to any child of the era are the words Super Session, and
everyone will say "Al Kooper".
The extraordinary thing
is that Al Kooper himself was never a star, but instead was a sideman, a
producer, a guy who made other people sound really good. He symbolized
something though, and that's why he has stuck in our collective memories
and imaginations. It is that young lion up there in the photograph to
the right who looked like a cast member from Hair who was not
going to let the truth remain hidden anymore; that conformance and
jettisoning of high ideals was not going to be our way into the future.
We believed in that guy.
With all of that as
backdrop, it is reassuring to visit
Al Kooper's Website and
to find that at 69 years of age he is still feeling it. He regularly
posts new information on his career and he is good about communicating
with his fan base.
In 2009 he released an
album titled White Chocolate, which was only his second solo
album, following on the heals of his 2006 Black Coffee LP. The
LPs are like career summations from a guy who totally owns his era's
sound. The arrangements are old school legit, and the musicians are
excellent. Kooper's vocal performance is spotty and one gets the feeling
that he could have improved them sufficiently well with time spent, but
that is all a part of the ethos of the era: you go with the original
inspiration, and so the inspiration had better be good. Whatever, you do
what you do and you move on. That is kind of the way the White
Chocolate album feels to me, and that also probably had something to
do with the urgency in those '60s-era recordings. The world of music did
not getter better by screwing with Kooper's formula.
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Al Kooper: His
photograph above is iconic of an era and of a particular
node in the cultural history of our universe, when socially
aware musical wunderkind such as he helped to create in a
whole generation the sense that music could save the world.
A new take on Bob Dylan's "It Takes a Lot to
Laugh (It Takes a Train to Cry)," which Kooper and Michael
Bloomfield cut on the classic Super Session album 40 years
previously, is presented here as a rolling, brassy,
souled-up shuffle. And Kooper had to love cutting his song
"Staxability," a tribute to the legendary Stax Records of
Memphis, with no less than Steve Cropper on guitar and
Donald "Duck" Dunn of Booker T. & the MG's on bass. Kooper
gets to shout "Play it, Steve!," a line familiar to any fan
of vintage soul, and actually gets to hear Cropper do just
what he's asked. - JEFF TAMARKIN ( blog.allmusic.com)
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