Backstage Passes and Backstabbing Bastards

by Al Kooper

  I’m an insomniac, so I only sleep two to four hours a night, as a rule. I was examined at UCLA and the University of Texas for this condition, and they said that when I go to sleep, I go into the deepest sleep there is immediately——it takes other people three and four hours to get to it-and that two to four hours may be sufficient for me, and not to worry about it. Which was great news. The other thing is, I sleep on the living room couch, because by the time I get upstairs, I’m awake.

  I go, “I could sleep right now.” But if I go up those stairs, I’ll be awake. So I just go right for the couch, and no rituals. I’m just going to sleep right now, and I know I’ll be up in two hours. If I sleep properly in my schedule, then getting up in the morning is sometime between 4:30 and 6:30 a.m.

  The wonderful thing about insomnia is I have so much time to work that other people don’t have. And I get so much work done in that time. And the studio is a timeless place. I’ll go down at midnight, and then I’ll see it’s 6 a.m. or I’ll see the light coming in the window, and I’ll go, Jeez, I think I should stop now! but it’s great like that. So that’s what my days and nights are primarily like.

  Around 1975-76 I stopped making solo albums because they stopped selling. I was aware of that, so I concentrated on producing records for other musicians rather than attempting to do something people were basically rejecting. Financially, I hit a low point in the early ‘80s and supported myself by playing local clubs in the L.A. area and taking an A&R job at PolyGram Records. In ’94 I released an instrumental album just for fun and followed with a strong live album in ’95.

  When I got an iPod for the first time, I made a playlist, “Unreleased Al.” And then I had a home for all my closeted solo stuff, and I took the different formats and got everything into the playlist. And then I stepped back and looked, and there was, like, 140 songs in there. And I’m going, Jeez. Maybe it’s time now, I think I can make an album. Prior to this, in 1995, the songs were yelling at me, saying, “Get us out of the basement!” and there were some very good ones there. So I went out and traipsed around and tried to get a record deal, and I couldn’t really get one because I was over fifty. I went back to the songs and said, “I’m so sorry, I tried, but I’m afraid this is what your life is gonna be-trapped in a basement!” And in 1995 I laughed it off and went on with my solo-albumless life.

  Then in 2004 I met some guy-you know, I would always keep a current bunch of the songs on the iPod-so I played him some of the songs and he said, “That’s very good,” and “I have a friend who has a label, do you mind if I play this for him?” I stammered back, “So long as it’s just that guy, yeah, okay, sure.” Then he came back to me and said, “They want to put this out.” I said, “Well, I need to re-record it. They’re sort of demos, most of them.” He said, “Let me put you two on the phone,” and it turned out to be Steve Vai, the metal shred guitarist. I didn’t really know him; we’re in completely different fields. And I’d seen pictures of him-you know, the long hair, the hand on the crotch, and like that-and I’m going, I don’t know what this phone conversation is gonna to be like. And I remember specifically that I had the current picture of him in front of me, and I got on the phone with him, and it was not the guy in the picture at all. It was so far afield I was amazed. And he was knowledgeable, he was very nice, and those are two very important things to me. And he really enjoyed the music, which was a shocker to me completely, and he wanted to put the record out.

  So he said, “Would you like to make an album?” I said, “Oh, absolutely.” Then we worked the details out, because I needed a budget to re-record the demos, and that’s how it came to be. And that was thirty years after I had released my last solo album. Like I said, I tried at fifty and didn’t succeed. So here I was at sixty-one by the time the deal and the record was done. In ’95 I was just shut down everywhere, nobody would see me. I thought I might never make a solo album in my lifetime ... it was sobering, but I could live with it. Ten years later, suddenly I was enabled again after thirty years.

  I originally was going to call this album I Am Where I Want to Be. That was the working title. And then, when I finished it and it was in sequence and I played it back, there were some very dark things in there, some dark subject matter and dark songs, and I said, This is not where I want to be! laughing to myself. I can’t call this album that! So I had to come up with another title, and it was Black Coffee. I thought, This is a sobering look at life. In retrospect, it was the perfect title for what that album became. It got the best reviews of any album I had ever done, which was interesting, as far as reviews are concerned. And I don’t think I increased my sales much, but they didn’t go down either. And then I won Comeback Album of the Year in the Memphis Blues Awards. Awards aren’t much to me, but that meant something.

  Well, the reviews plus the award were good for my head. I don’t really make a record for anybody but myself. I try to do the best I can artistically, and if I prove that to myself, then I’ve reached my artistic goal; then I’ve made a successful record. Then I pray that the fans know of its existence, buy it, and enjoy it. I always hope that they’ll get it, because I love my fans. I have great fans. Plus, it was miles ahead of the records I had done before. Then I wanted to do another one because I was very lucky. One of the things that’s very important to understand about Black Coffee is, I had something that most artists don’t have, which is 140 songs to choose from. Now what that means is if you take the best-I took nine original songs for the last album-you take the best nine of those 140 tracks ... WOW. What are you gonna have there? It’s going to be better than what you normally have the choice of, which is what you wrote between the last album and this album. And I still have that ... there are new ones written since the last album. So I still have about 140 to choose from. Plus, on Black Coffee, I wrote a song with one of my heroes, Dan Penn. He wrote “Do Right Woman,” “I’m Your Puppet,” “Cry Like a Baby,” “Dark End of the Street,” some really great songs. We became friends when I lived in Nashville. I remember the first night we tried to write together-we did not succeed, but boy, did we laugh! We had a great time, and then eventually we did successfully write together. I love Dan, he’s a great guy, he’s very special. He’s very talented. A very underrated singer-an amazing singer, but known as a songwriter and a producer. I wish that his voice was as recognized as everything else about him.

  So one of the songs Dan and I wrote together was on the album, called “Going Going Gone,” which was about getting older, which we both knew a bit about. And because I put Black Coffee out, I was then able to realize a lifelong dream and write two songs with Gerry Goffin, who was, is, one of the major lyricists of all time. It came about because I got a note from this woman I dated very briefly in the ’70s. You know, one of those e-mails out of the blue: “Hi, how are you? I don’t know if you remember me ...” and I thought, I remember you. And it continued, “Just want to see how you’re doing. I’m living in L.A. I’m married to Gerry Goffin.” And I went, Boing! I have an intro to Gerry Goffin! so I wrote back ... Of course I remember you! “How nice to hear from you!”

  And it was, because ambitious me got to ask him if he’d be interested in writing together. I quickly mailed him Black Coffee and he loved it, and that’s all it really took. We worked over the phone and the Internet, because of geography, and we wrote two songs, and I got to meet him the next time I played L.A. He’s manic-depressive, and I think he deals with it quite well. I’ll tell you one thing, he’s not suffering as a lyricist; he’s as great as he ever was. He may speak a little haltingly. I was very nervous about meeting him, and then I met him, and he was so sweet. We had a ton of things in common, knew the same people.

  I truly understand him. He was so wonderful, and we spent a little more time, and now, he’s really become a good friend. We talk to each other on the phone quite a bit, and I think we’ll be able to write some more songs. But I adore him now, and I didn’t even know him before I got that e-mail.

  The follow-
up to Black Coffee, which is White Chocolate, contains the two new Goffin-Kooper songs. I like the album title a lot, because it really says what’s on the record. I spent more time on it than on any record I’d done before. What happened was, I called Steve Vai’s record company, Favorite Nations, and said, “I have to start this record now, and I know we haven’t finalized our deal for the second album. But I have to start now because 2008 is my fiftieth anniversary in the music business, and I want to get a certain amount of product available in 2008 to celebrate that, and this is certainly one of them. And I’m hoping for a certain amount of synergy so that people will know about these things.” So they said, “Okay,” and I said, “And we’ll work the deal out.” So we started making the record, and I invested about twenty grand to keep it going. And then they called back and said, “We’ll do the same deal as last time, but we can’t give you any front money.”

  Which is another way of saying, “No deal.”

  Because that’s really all the record companies do, in many respects, is pay for you to make another record-and because I work in an old style, I can’t really do an entire record in my home studio. I have to go to a real studio at some point. So I was really in a jam, and twenty grand in debt as well. While I waited to solve this problem, I kept working on the record at home, which didn’t cost anything except time. And then I said, “The only way I can do this is to find someone to invest in this record, and I don’t even know anybody like that.” To make a long story very short, I found someone who would do that. I needed probably at least three times the amount of money that I had already invested-because that’s what Black Coffee cost-and I got someone to do that. I can’t even put into words how much this saved my life and meant to me. It’s one of the biggest things anyone’s ever done for me. (I have preserved his anonymity to keep the sharks from his generous door.) And I really feel that this record surpasses the quality of Black Coffee. It wasn’t my initial approach, but I started paying more attention to detail than I ever had before. And I met a gentleman a few years ago, when I had to change from tape as a storage medium to hard drives, which had become the new storage-I had to change my system at home to deal with this ... going digital. So I studied, for about nine months, all the products that were available, and I went and had a demo at this company called Mark of the Unicorn, which is near my house in Boston. And the guy gave me a demo, and it was great. The most popular system is ProTools, but it’s very expensive, and I wasn’t being supported by anyone. Mark of the Unicorn would do the same thing that ProTools would do, and cost me one quarter what ProTools cost ... so it was no contest.

  Plus I was sort of angry at ProTools, because they became the industry standard, but they didn’t really pass their success on to the consumer; they actually raised their price. So this guy who did the demo for me and caused me to go with Mark of the Unicorn-I’m going to call them MOTU so I don’t have to keep saying that-their product is called Digital Performer. And when I started scoring TV shows in 1986 I found that I had to work on the computer, and I had no computer experience, so that’s when I learned how to use the computer, when I did Crime Story for Michael Mann. And the program that I picked then was Performer, again MOTU, albeit in their infancy. So to go to Digital Performer, I didn’t have to adjust my learning curve too much; I was very facile on Performer by this time.

  This MOTU gentleman, Dave Roberts, who has worked there for many years, comes over to the house in his spare time and helps me with anything that’s over my head in the product, and that’s a big help. And he really came in and helped me tremendously on Black Coffee, but not as ultratremendously as he did on White Chocolate. Because I wanted to go into detail on that album and I didn’t know how to do it, and he taught me how. Digital Performer is capable of doing much more than I take out of it. And I started taking a little more on this album, and it changed the record, I think, in an interesting way. It’s a little better, for lack of a better word.

  The current Mr. K-2007. (Photo: Susan Monosson.)

  It’s not as rough. I don’t know if that’s a bad thing; I don’t think so. It’s passed my test. I think I still have the funk of The Funky Faculty; I don’t think I’ve lost that. In fact, it’s probably the most musically ambitious album I have ever attempted. There are two tracks with the rhythm section of the younger band Ollabelle and the Memphis track with Steve Cropper, Anton Fig, and Duck Dunn for good measure. At the time of this writing, I am starting the mixing process, which will take three weeks. When the album is completely finished, I will decide how it will be marketed and by whom. This is a revolutionary and precarious time for the music biz, and I must very carefully take my next step. Time will tell, my friends, stay tuned....

  For writing, like reviews and essays and things like this, I always try to speak in the same voice as the one I’m using now. Again, I’m only trying to satisfy myself. So I found a good voice for writing, and it satisfies me. And I love to write, too. I’ll do a review once in a while for the music editor at the Boston Herald. He calls me from time to time and asks me to write pieces for them, which I do very happily, because he allows me to write about new talent. If I can help those people, I’m just delighted to do that. But I love to write, and there’s a great quote, a wonderful quote, that Tom Waits said: “The bad thing about history is, that the people who were there are not talking, and the people that weren’t there, you can’t shut them up.” So I love to write about the things that I was there for, because I feel like I’m a knight on a horse with an antirevisionist sword in my hand. There are so many interesting things that I was in the room for in my life that I’ve seen reported falsely, that it makes me worry about all of history. That’s why I love that quote.

  Yeah. One thing that really annoys me is reading untrue reporting of things that I was very close to. The thing that bothers me the most about music history is calling the pop music of the early ‘60s the “Brill Building Sound.” This drives me nuts, because ninety percent of that music was not created in the Brill Building, which peaked in the ’40s, and by the end of the ‘50s, everybody had bailed out. Not even bailed out: nobody was going to the Brill Building, except the people who were already there that had survived that time period. So people who wanted to start new businesses in the late ’50s, they went to 1650 Broadway because it had a more modern look, it had been renovated. And 1619 had the frosted glass-on-brown wood doors with gold decals on them, so you could have just been going to a dentist’s office instead of to a record company or a music publisher or something like that. 1650 had black steel doors with, still, the gold decals, but there was something about those black doors that was more modern.

  I’ve never gone to a dentist’s office that had a steel black door, sorry. So people went to 1650 Broadway, and it became the building. Carole King and Gerry Goffin, Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Dionne Warwick, B. J. Thomas, Bobby Lewis, all these people ... Chuck Jackson ... Sedaka, Feldman, Goldstein and Gottehrer, who wrote “My Boyfriend’s Back” and “I Want Candy,” and me. We were all in 1650 Broadway, and it was not called any “Building,” it was just 1650 Broadway. So calling that the Brill Building Sound is completely unfactual. In all fairness, in the Brill Building were Leiber and Stoller-one of the greatest writing teams in the foundation of rock ‘n’ roll-and Hal David and Burt Bacharach. So that’s at least a good twenty percent of the music of that time between those two teams, but all the rest was at 1650, and that’s what it should have been called. So that bothers me, a lot.

  I know that when I die, nobody else will be yelling about that Brill Building Sound, and I also know that it’s too late and I can’t change it. But I like to contradict it. Because it’s true, it’s the truth.

  In 2005, a strange change began in my life. I started getting awards. It all started with the Memphis Blues Award for Black Coffee: Comeback Album of the Year. Prior to this I had been involved in albums that went rewardless, such as Odessey and Oracle, Child Is Father to the Man, Super Session, Second Helping, etc. So
I sort of grew up in the music industry just doing the best I could, and certainly not expecting any undue recognition for it. Hell, today, there are many people who have no idea of my Lynyrd Skynyrd involvement. So what? I know it, and really, that is all that matters. In 2006, Numark Industries gave me a Milestones Award, which is basically a lifetime achievement award. In 2007, I was inducted into the Rock Walk of Fame in Los Angeles, and received the Les Paul Award in New York, both lifetime achievement nods. This change makes me feel honored and quite old at the same time. When people ask me how it is being in my sixties, I usually reply: