by Al Kooper
“Well, then, how about you, me, and Dick going back out there and watching the last five minutes of the show with “Bad Boy” cut back in and seeing how it plays?” I suggested.
Michael assented, and we did just that. As the lights came up, Michael turned to me, smiled, and said: “Okay. Okay. You’re right, it’s great. You win. That’s a wrap, gang!”
And that is exactly how the first season ended.
For one of the first times in my life, I wanted to take a vacation. With a weekly TV series, there is no traveling all year, and I missed it. My friend Shep Gordon, who managed Alice Cooper, Luther Vandross, and Teddy Pendergrass, had a beautiful house on the beach in Maui. I asked him if it was available for a week in July, and before you could say “Aloha,” my new gal Vivien and I were eating papayas and lying on the sand. We had a great time, other than burning our skin real badly. Amateurs. We came home and I geared up for the onslaught otherwise known as the second season.
This year, we had our “method.” We would alternate shows. I would score the odd numbered ones (how apropos!) and Charlie the even ones. If any guy wanted help from the other guy, he could rightfully request it. I would still come in for the recording and mixing even when it wasn’t my week. I played guitar on many of Charlie’s cues, and I usually mixed the entire show anyway.
We owned the studio now, so our costs were greatly reduced. All the gear had been paid off the first season, and we’d gotten a slight raise for the second season. Things were excellent. The bad part was that NBC kept moving the show around and our core audience never knew when it was on anymore. That, coupled with a lot of pre-empts in a row, made our ratings not as good as they should have been. It was possible the end was in sight, and I psyched myself up for that eventuality as the season progressed.
The show itself was a landmark on TV. Without it, there would have certainly been no Twin Peaks or Northern Exposure. And many composers borrowed heavily from some of the ideas that Charlie and I came up with every week. There was even a bootleg MIDI sample making the rounds called “Crime Story Horns.” However, all good things must come to an end, and the close of Crime Story’s second season was indeed the end of the series. So Charlie’s and my “good thing” also came to a halt. Debbie Gold, who was representing us now, was requested to get us more work, but alas she was too busy. She was doing music supervision for a commercial film and one of Michael’s mini-series at the same time.
The momentum of Charlie’s and my scoring careers began to stall. Debbie’s career was doin’ fine, though. Does this sound familiar?
Al and Dennis Farina share a laugh on the set of Crime Story before they find out the series has been canceled. Las Vegas, 1987. (Photo: Leslie Leaney.)
One job came through, however. This was producing some prerecorded material for John Waters’ next film, Cry Baby. This was to be his first musical, and all the musical numbers had to be finished before filming began for lip-syncing purposes. Johnny Depp was the star and he actually could sing, but Waters insisted on a stand-in voice for him. James Intveldt was chosen to ghost Depp’s vocals. James was a local favorite rock-a-billy singer and bass player in the Los Angeles area. Rachel Sweet was chosen to do the singing for Amy Locane, who played the female lead. Rachel had made some records for Stiff, the English cult label. She was a joy to work with (not that James wasn’t).
There was one epic number I was worried about called “Please Mr. Jailer.” The original record from the fifties was by Wynonna Carr. I changed a lot of the words to fit Waters’ storyline, and the changes were quickly approved. We cut the track as a duet with James and Rachel and two sets of background singers, white and black, male and female. When we handed it in, they came back and wanted structural changes based on the choreography of the scene. Out came the trusty razor blade, and a plethora of edits were made to satisfy the choreographer’s demands.
Now I had been hired by the music supervisors of the film. After a short time, they called and told me never to call John Waters and to communicate only with them. I saw this as trouble. I was forbidden to talk to the person I was trying to please; the man who had the whole vision for the film. How could I really know what he wanted? Sure enough, after more tracks were sent in, the last two were rejected by Waters and my employment was terminated. I certainly saw this coming as a result of the diverted communication.
Now it’s common practice in the recording studio business not to release master tapes to a client until the bill is paid. Universal had not sent us one check (all of our recording for Cry Baby was done at our studio, the Slammer) for over a month’s worth of studio time. At this point, of course, Universal needed these tapes to shoot film to, and we needed the money to pay the studio expenses, i.e., rent, maintenance, engineers, tape costs, etc. But Universal simply refused to pay the bills.
At one point, a lawyer Debbie Gold had engaged to represent us in this venture called me and said: “You had better release those tapes to Universal or no one’s ever going to hire you in this town again.”
I held the phone away from ear and looked at it incredulously. Then I lost my cool. “Do you work for us?” I asked the attorney. “Are you trying to recover the monies that are owed to us? Or are you threatening us because Universal got to you? I don’t feel very much support here. Not to mention that uncreative cliché you ended your sentence with....”
I was furious and fired her the next day. Then Universal’s lawyer called, and she was quite nice. She wanted to know my side of the story, and she was very calm. She stepped into the middle and negotiated a deal where we got half of what Universal owed us. I still didn’t like it, but I went along with the deal to end all the negativity. Big company like that holding up the little guy for money they actually owed—not cool at all.
A good friend of mine, Dave Alvin, replaced me on Cry Baby, and all of a sudden I was in Todd Rundgren’s position from Crime Story. Dave’s way of handling the situation was to not call me until he finished the gig. Well, we’re still friends today. And after the fuss was all over, I hired that Universal lawyer to represent me!
Cry Baby was a box-office dud (bad karma), but it’s on cable every once in awhile, and I smile when I hear the work they used that I did do in the film. Meanwhile, it was 1988 and I moved into a lovely rented home on the Valley side of the Hollywood Hills, and married Vivien, in front of the waterfall in the garden of that house. Would the third time be the charm?
Moving right along, I got a call to produce two tracks for the next B. B. King album and was very excited. During the eighties, it was fashionable to hire five different producers and have them produce two tracks each. I guess the record companies figured the odds for a hit were better that way. To me, it usually resulted in uneven sound, and a shambles of an album. The ironic part was that B. B. recorded for MCA Records, owned by Universal; so I guess I would work in this town again!
B. B. and I had been friends since 1967, when I played on his Alive and Well album. Now that was an evening I’ll never forget! Bill Szymczyk was producing B. B. then and called me two months ahead to book me for four nights of sessions. I was so excited, I was literally counting the days on my calendar until the session. The big night finally arrived, and I got there, and it was kinda ... well ... disorganized. So I jumped in, as I was wont to do in those days, to try and help the session along. As I was suggesting some arrangement changes and groove things, I said to drummer Herb Lovelle, “What if you just play it with a fatback groove right at the top?”
Well, he looked at me with the most disdain an African-American can muster to look at a Caucasian with and repeated back to me: “Fatback?”
The air, as they say, could have been cut with a knife (that is, if a knife could, in fact, cut through frozen air). I immediately got the worst migraine headache I had ever had in my life and just clammed up. Somehow I got through the session, but the chemistry between Herb and me was so bad that I couldn’t wait to get outta there. I called Szymczyk the next day and told him to repl
ace me on the rest of the sessions in an effort to end the bad vibes and have regretted it ever since. On the very next session they cut “The Thrill Is Gone” and lucky Paul Harris got to play keyboards on it. Well, although I have certainly tried, you can’t play on everything.
For these new B. B. sessions that I was producing, I had selected two songs that other people had recorded but that seemed like B. B. should have done in the first place: Joe Simon’s “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” and Benny Lattimore’s 7“Let’s Straighten It Out.” I met with B. B. to select keys for the songs, and then retired back to the Slammer to cut tracks while he went on the road. I used the MIDI system’ to cut the tracks (no musicians to argue with this time!).
I put a reference guitar track on to show B. B. where to play, and I hired a singer to do a reference vocal to show B. B. where to sing. I sent him a cassette with the guitar and vocal on it so he could learn where his parts went. I cut the tracks on thirty-two-track digital format because we had the machine available to us for a few months.
B. B. came in to sing one night, and because of his grueling road schedule he had not had time to work with the tape I had sent him. So we had to start from scratch, and he had to learn the songs right there in the studio. On “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” he was unsure where each line began in the arrangement. I physically went out into the studio and stood next to him while he sang, and tapped him on the arm one beat before each of his vocal entrances. His musicianship and a copy of the lyrics in front of him took care of the rest. We made it into a fun evening and had a good time. Hopefully, there was no pressure on him.
I did four different takes of him singing, then let him take a dinner break while I put the final vocals together from the four tracks that he had sung. This is called “comping” vocals in studio language. After you’ve recorded a few tracks of vocals, you go in and listen line by line to each performance; picking the best performance of each line from the different tracks, dissecting words and syllables from different vocals if necessary, and recording the composite of the different tracks that work onto an open master track. Painstaking, but worth the two hours it takes to construct a master vocal.
So B. B. came back from dinner, and I played him the combined finished vocal (which, incidentally, was wonderful). “How did you do that?” he exclaimed, amazed. “I don’t even know this song yet!”
I guess he had never comped a vocal before, but he appreciated the expediency involved. We did the next song the same way and called it a night. The next evening he returned, and we added his guitar to both tracks. He sounded great. We were very relaxed and laughing, and I must confess I clandestinely recorded some candid moments between us for posterity. In my entire forty years in the music business, I have not met one person nicer than B. B. King. It’s always a pleasure to work with him, and it’s an honor to be his friend today.
Unfortunately, there was a bad ending to this story from the eighties.
Weeks after I had handed in the mixes, the studio called and said MCA had requisitioned the thirty-two-track master tapes. I knew that this meant they were going to remix my mixes. I called then-president of MCA Irving Azoff, and explained to him that there were things on the tape that neither B. B. nor I would want used, and it would probably save time if I could attend the remix and show whoever was mixing just what those things were.
B. B. King and Kooper walk the runway for Tommy Hilfiger, Los Angeles, 1988. King, ever the consumate professional, pretends to enjoy Kooper’s couture and guitar playing. (Photo: Leslie Leaney.)
“Stop whining!” said Azoff, and I said, “Fine,” and hung up.
When the album King of the Blues was released, my worst fears were confirmed. In “Drowning in the Sea of Love,” there is no snare drum in the verses, and half of the guitar solos are me playing from the reference tracks I put on as guides for B. B.!
I was extremely embarrassed, to say the least, so I called B. B. to explain. He took my call right away. “I know why you’re calling, Al,” he interrupted, “and, most of all, I know it’s not your fault. So let’s not even talk about it. How are you, my friend?”
That was all I needed to hear. I just put the CD back in its case, and never listened to it again. I also never did any work for MCA again. Azoff was soon replaced by Al Teller, Killer of Kooper Albums.
This was the beginning of the end. Too many times people who had no business doing so came in with the musical equivalent of spray cans and “painted” graffiti all over my work. I was growing older and no longer wanted to be treated like that. I began to understand that I had to retire from my business life as it was, or I would end up hanging myself like those two poor guys in Badfinger. If B. B. hadn’t been the multilayered, sugar-coated, human being that he was (and is), he might have resented me for something that was not even remotely my fault. Not to mention the embarrassment of having other listeners think that what they heard on that album was the result of my decisions. And since there is only one B. B. King in the business, I couldn’t allow the record companies to constantly put me in situations like that.
I decided it was time to “get out gracefully.” But first:
Every January, the National Association of Music Merchandisers (NAMM) holds its winter convention in Anaheim, California. Since the mid-seventies, I had attended it to see what new products were being introduced, and to see old friends. This event was always an oasis for musicians from all over the world, a gathering place where we could all get together and visit with each other, no matter what the rest of the year held in store for us. It was also an opportunity to set up relationships with individual companies and beta-test their equipment in exchange for free goods. In addition, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) would hold its convention in Las Vegas, usually the week before the NAMM show. This was where all the stereo equipment, modern gadgets, and video games were displayed for the coming year. and was a blast to attend. In later years, sandwiched between those two shows was the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco (Macintosh computer stuff), and I would make a trifecta out of it and attend all three shows in a two-week period.
The wildest was always the CES show in Las Vegas. Some old friends of mine ran a video business in Los Angeles, and they would take over the top floor of one of the older hotels every year to “entertain” clients. They were nice enough to always comp me a room in their plethora of penthouse suites, and I would go along and watch the show. Not necessarily the CES show, either. My friends would arrive with a bevy of beauties from L.A., who were there specifically to please the clients. Drugs would be dispensed like company pens, and the alcohol ran like tap water. It was almost as good as the old Record Plant, but the bill was much steeper! Let me tell ya, though, these people knew how to party. Concurrently, the adult video companies (porno in plain terms) displayed their newest tapes at the show (in their own area, of course, which just happened to be in the basement of the hotel where we occupied the penthouse suites), and various of these companies brought their biggest film stars to sign posters and pictures, and please the clients. So when these supernovas collided . . . Yikes! You have never seen so much debauchery in one hotel at one time. It was a wonder I made it to the other two conventions each year. Finally, I stopped going to the CES show, so that I could live to tell the rest of this story—and here it is:
Back in Los Angeles, as the eighties drew to a close, I was reaching the end of my rope. I hadn’t made a record since 1982 as an artist, I was increasingly leery of doing business with the major record companies because of past experiences, and I was watching the city ferment all around me and become increasingly more dangerous. I never really fit into Los Angeles. Ultimately, it’s a keep-up-with-the-Joneses-kinda-town, with too much emphasis on physical beauty and no emphasis on inner beauty, especially in the film and record industries. I did not choose to wear designer clothing, did not belong to the Friars club, did not live in the 90210 zip code, and did not drive a Beamer or a Jeep. I did not love the earthquakes or smog and felt a
growing sense of dread over the racial unrest. I lived there because the weather was nice and it was good for business. Period. Now that the business was beginning to smell like the garbage, there was no reason to participate in it. So I stopped.
I actively stepped back from hustling for work. My plan, from the jump, had been to get out gracefully. If I could help it, I didn’t want to play oldies shows, I didn’t want to kiss someone’s ass who knew far less than me, and I didn’t want to be walking around in flannel shirts and speedos at age fifty-five. However, dropping out of the business but staying in town was not enough. I would still run into these bastards in the market, at concerts, in restaurants, and I never wanted to see them again.
One day, I was grocery shopping at Ralph’s Market in Studio City when I ran into Steve Cropper. Steve, an original member of Booker T. & the MGs, one of the architects of the Memphis Stax-Volt sound, and one of the best guitarists/writers in the history of soul music, was someone I was always glad to see. I asked him how he was doing, and he said: “Oh, Al, I am just trying desperately to sell my house here. I moved to Nashville, and it is fantastic. You should move down there—you’d love it!”
This seemed like the word of the Lord as channeled through Steve Cropper. Maybe this was the answer to the L.A. problem. I had spent a great deal of time in Nashville in the early seventies, but hadn’t really been there since then. So I replied: “That sounds like a great idea, Steve. I’m gonna check it out right away.”
I got home and called my friend Sam Bush, a Nashville resident who had extended me an open invitation awhile back to stay at his new home there. I asked if I could stay for a week, as I was interested in moving there and wanted to “check it out.” I believe his exact words were: “Come on down, Alvis!”
