SUPER SESSION
story as told by Al Kooper in his book
Backstage Passes and Backstage Bastards © 1998
"Mike Bloomfield was the son of an amazing businessman who created
one of the most lucrative businesses in the history of America.
Included in his father's giant restaurant supply arsenal were
patents for the hexagon-shaped saltshaker with the steel circumcised
top and the Jewish star pattern of holes, the cut glass sugar
canister with steel doggy-door top, and the classic coffe-maker
later appropriated by Mr Cofee for home use. The coffee-maker
still bears the Bloomfield name today. Mr Bloomfield sold his
business and patents to Beatrice Foods at its peak, and retired
to a life of horseback riding and golfing while his two teenage
sons went about the business of growing up in his extremely large
shadow. My origins were comparatively humble is comparison.
However, there had been an amazing parallel between Mike Bloomfield’s
career and mine. We were both Jewish kids raised in big cities
who were drawn to urban musicologies. We both came into the public
eye from playing on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited album (where
we met). We both served apprenticeships in pioneer electric blues
bands (Paul Butterfield/Blues Project). We both started relatively
embryonic horn bands (Electric Flag/BS&T) and both eventually
got kicked out of them. It seemed like destiny was throwing us
together whether we liked it or not. We liked it.
Photo by Jim Marshall©
Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield
I got him on the phone and it turned out he was not doing much
of anything. “Why don’t we go in the studio,” I propose, “and
just jam?” I don’t think your best playing is on tape yet and
this might just be the best way to get it there. Columbia will
pay for it and release it and .... ya know....big deal.”
“Okay,” he said, “let’s just do it in California.”
We picked the sidemen (I chose bassist Harvey Brooks, Mike’s recent
bandmate from the Flag and my boyhood buddy; Bloomers chose Eddie
Hoh, the Mama’s and Papa’s drummer known as Fast Eddie) and set
the dates. I got all the proper permissions, filed all the correct
paperwork, and away I went.
To make sure everyone was comfy, I commandeered a rent-a-house
in LA. It was a nifty joint with a pool that fellow producer David
Rubinson had been using while recording blues singer Taj Mahal.
It had two weeks to run on Dave’s monthly rental, and it seemed
like a drag to just waste it. I got there a few days early and
swan my New York ass off ‘til Harvey and Bloomfield hit town.
Michael always had some kind of problem that he carried around
with him; it’s like a cross he enjoyed bearing (part of his American-Jewish
suffering heritage). This time around he arrived with an ingrown
toenail, which he kept insisting was gangrene. As soon as he walked
in, he took the most expensive crystal bowl from the kitchen and
soaked his big toe in it for an hour. His injured toe is immortalized
in a photo on the back of the album for all you blues purists
and foot fetishists.
That first night in the studio, we got right down to business.
Barry Goldberg, also late of the Electric Flag, came down and
sat in on piano for a few tracks. We recorded a slow shuffle,
a Curtis Mayfield song, a Jerry Ragovy tune, a real slow blues
number and a six-eight fast waltz modal jazz-type tune, and in
nine hours had a half an album in the oven.
Jim Marshall and Linda Rondstadt came down to visit, and Jim snapped
away on his Nikon documenting the evening on film, while Rondstadt
quietly sat in the corner watching. There was a real comfortable
feeling to the proceedings, and while listening to one of the
playbacks I noted that I had gotten the best recorded Bloomfield
and, after all, that was the whole point of this exercise. We
piled into the rent-a-car and made it back to our palatial surroundings,
crashing mightily with dreams of finishing the album the next
night.
What happened next is one of the quirks of fate that you can’t
explain, but you never question in retrospect. The phone started
jangling at 9am and it was some friend of Bloomfield’s asking
if he made the plane ‘cause she was waiting at the airport to
pick him up.
“Huh? Michael’s fast asleep in the next .... Hold on,” I said,
doing a gymnastic hurdle outta bed into the next bedroom to find...
an envelop? And, inside:
'Dear Alan, Couldn’t sleep ... went home.... Sorry' ”
SHIT!
Raced back to the phone.
Nobody there.
I got half an album, studio time, and musicians booked, and this
putz can’t sleep in the $750. a month dungeon with the heated
pool and the crystal toe soaking bowl.
My first corporate hassle.
“Well Clive, of course I’m aware of the costs, but he couldn’t
sleep. I mean haven’t you ever had insomnia?” No way that was
gonna work.
It was 9:15 in the morning and mind and ulcers were having a foot
race for the finish line. I was actually on the verge of packin’
it in myself, but a cooler part of me fortunately prevailed. I
methodically made out a list of all the guitar players I knew
who lived on the West Coast. At noon, I started callin’ ‘em. Randy
California, Steve Miller, Steve Stills, Jerry Garcia. By 5pm I
had a confirm on one player and left it at that. Once again, fate
stepped in to save my ass, this time in the persona of Steve Stills, also unemployed by the breakup of his band, Buffalo Springfield.
Photo by Jim Marshall©
Harvey Brooks, Stephen Stills, and Al Kooper 1968
Steve was primarily known as a singer-songwriter, and mainly on
the West Coast, but I knew he was a hot guitar player and I was
more than willing to give him a try. (Besides I didn’t have a
choice, did I?) At 5pm I tried Ahmet Ertegun in New York. Steve
was signed to Atlantic, and you just don’t make records for other
labels without permission - another corporate hassle. Steve was
one of my favorite singers and to have his voice on the album
would have upgraded it two hundred percent, but at that point
I felt it would have endangered the release of the album by tying
up Atlantic and Columbia in one of those red tape battles that
pencil pushers are so fond of. It’s bad enough he was gonna play
without permission, I thought. Let’s leave it at that and cross
our fingers, hoping Atlantic will let us just use his fingers.
In retrospect, the negotiations included a swap so that Graham
Nash (signed to Epic/Columbia as a member of The Hollies) was
allowed to record for Atlantic on the first Crosby, Stills and
Nash album in exchange for Stills appearance on our album. Steve
had just gotten his first stack of Marshall amps and was chompin’
at the bit to blast his Les Paul through ‘em.
At seven that evening Steve, Harvey, Eddie and yours truly sat
down at our instruments and
stared at each other.
Now what?
One of the songs I wanted to do was inspired by an English album
I had recently acquired. It featured the performance of a spectacular
young organist named Brian Auger and a trendy jazz singer named
Julie (Jools) Driscoll. The album contained their version of Dylan’s
“This Wheel’s on Fire,” which was a top single in Europe, and
a rambling version Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” that I had
heard coming out of every shop on Kings Road when I had recently
visited London. I thought it would be nice for us to do it, ‘cause
it provided a lot of room for improvisation and everyone already
had the basics of the song down. We did two takes straight off,
and the version we kept was edited from the two. Since this was
the first big-time record I’d ever produced, I was kinda green
in some areas. Editing was one of them. During “Season of the
Witch” there are a few edits between takes 1 and 2. The problem
is that the two takes were different tempo’s. I didn’t care. I
just hacked away and got the bad parts out and the good bits in.
So at every edit point the tempo changes. Either you hear those
edits or you think we were musicians so attuned to each other
that was sped up and slowed down to perfectly together. Not!
When I’d played on Highway 61 Revisited, we’d cut some songs two
or three times with different arrangements each time. One such
song was Dylan’s “It Takes a Lot to Laugh It Takes a Train to
Cry.” We originally recorded it as a fast tune, but Dylan opted
for the slower version cut a few days later as the keeper for
his album. I pulled out the fast arrangement and taught it to
everyone and we had song number two.
A staple number in Buddy Guy’s and Junior Wells repertoire was
Willie Cobb’s “You Don’t Love Me.” It was usually done as a shuffle,
but I found it lent itself well to a heavy-metal eighth-note feel.
Later, when I mixed the album, I put the two-track mix through
a process called “phasing” that gave it an eerie jet-plane effect.
It was 3am and we had three tunes under our belt, leaving us one
or two tunes short of an album side. We racked our brains, but
to no avail. Then Harvey said he had just written a tune that
we might like, and played it for us on the guitar. We did like
it and that became the final tune on the album. It was called
“Harvey’s Tune” at that time, but it was later included with a
lyric on an Electric Flag album as “My Woman Who Hangs around
the House.” Nice title Harvey.
I left for New York, a day later with the tapes and continued
working on the album there. I put on all my vocals, added some
horns for variety, and mixed it slowly and deliberately. After
all, this was my debut as a producer, and I wanted it to be as
competent as possible. I played it for the big boys at CBS and
they thought it was okay enough to release. Bruce Lundvall, a
kindly VP (later to become president of Blue Note records) named
the collection Super Session. Six weeks later it was in the stores.
Fully aware that this was just a furthering of the Grape Jam concept,
and considering the relative infamy of Bloomfield, Stills and
myself. I didn’t delude myself that the album was going straight
up to number one or anything. It was merely something for me to
do while I learned my new craft. I was back in LA the day it was
released, and ambled into Tower Records to see the initial reaction.
I swear they were sailin’ ‘em over the counter like Beatles records!
In a matter of weeks, it was in the Top Twenty and finally peaked
at number 11. But that was plenty. This was a first for me. It
only cost $13,000. to make, and soon it was a gold album (for
sales exceeding 450,000). I found this particularly ironic. All
my life I’d busted my ass to make hit records. Now me and these
two other goons went into the studio for two nights,screwed around
for a few hours, and boom, a best-seller.
In retrospect, I think that’s what sold the record. The fact that,
for the first time in any of our careers, we had nothing at stake
artistically. Also, we had brought another ounce of respectability
to rock and roll by selling a jam session as “serious” music,
something that had only been done in jazz circles up ‘til then.
All of a sudden, I had the respect of the CBS shorthairs. Shortly
thereafter, because of the tremendous success of Blood, Sweat
& Tears’ second album, my BS&T album turned gold, and then there
were two (gold albums, that is). In retrospect, I might add that
as of this writing, I still have not received one cent in royalties
for these albums that sold millions of copys.
With Super Session’s success, things became a lot more comfortable
around the corporate HQ. Instead of just being the company freak,
I was the company-freak-with-the-number-eleven-LP-on-the-charts,
an important distinction. I had already been through three frightened
“straight” secretaries (who quit, or asked to be transferred),
and I still don’t understand the ramifications of the “paperwork
system.”
As Super Session began making it’s way down the charts, I needed
some product on the street. I got a bad case of commercial fever
and decided to cut a follow-up to our quasi-hit. One of the only
criticisms of SS was that it was a studio album and, therefore,
“uninspired.” Always one to want to shove it up critics’ asses,
I decided to cut a live jam album, possibly at the Fillmore in
San Francisco. I called Bloomfield and he said sure, I owe you
one for (for when he snuck out of the first album).
This time he chose his friend and neighbor, John Kahn, on bass,
and I selected Skip Prokop on drums. Prokop had just quit The
Paupers , a Canadian group I was friendly with. I couldn’t get
Steve Stills because of prior commitments on his part - but mostly
on instruction from higher-ups, who evidently were still embroiled
in the legal aspects of our last venture.” . . .