Al Kooper: The session musician who went to war with the “backstabbing bastards” of counterculture
Root through your prised records from the counterculture years, pluck one at random, and there is a chance that the name Al Kooper will feature on the credits list. Over the years, he played with Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, George Harrison, B.B. King, Bo Diddley, Roy Orbison and the rest of anyone who was anyone. Did he enjoy it? Hardly.
To say he was a central figure in the counterculture scene from the get-go is, to put it mildly. However, he was almost an inadvertent presence at its heart. After all, he fell into his first professional role in 1958 when he was only 14 years old. Ushered into the movement thereafter, he began to see his life in the music industry as a self-deprecating lark rather than a bourgeoisie toppling duty like many of his pious peers.
This gave him a grounded approach to his time in the studio alongside the counterculture greats of the day. While the blurb to his memoir might read: “Kooper’s quirky keyboard style was a seminal force in popularizing the Hammond B3 organ as a major voice in rock music,” the pages argue otherwise. And Kooper himself sees this duality as a signifier of the Achilles heel of the counterculture movement.
The song that helped to launch his so-called “quirky” style is the perfect paradigm of this. Bob Dylan’s masterpiece ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ magnificently pointed the finger at the fickle ways of the scene, but this also seemingly played out in the studio with perfect meta irony. Off the back of the track, other bands were hankering to have Kooper’s clunky Hammond style on their own songs. However, he decrees that it sounded like that in the first place because he hadn’t played it in a while and was ham-fisting his way back into shape.
In the anthem, there is a very slight delay between the change of chords and he joins the melody on the upbeat. This gives his input a sense of gravitas. It adds to the energy of the song. The chords become considered stabs rather than a mellow flow. In reality, Kooper says that this was born from him simply struggling to find the chords and playing rather clumsily. But it was the accidental merit of this style that shone through. Thusly, his naive melody became an in-demand ‘new sound’ as opposed to ropey organ playing.
As Kooper recalls: “At the end of the playback of the take of ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, or actually during the thing, Bob Dylan said to the producer, ‘turn up the organ’. And Tom Wilson said, ‘Oh man, that guy’s not an organ player’. And Dylan said, ‘I don’t care, turn the organ up,’ and that’s really how I became an organ player.” And not just any organ player, but instantly the most in-demand organ player ever.
Rather than think of himself as the benefactor of a strange windfall, Kooper saw this as a sign of the facile side of the counterculture. After all, he’d seen it all. He literally grew up in it. Free of the gloating that comes with joining the new ‘it crowd’, he was happy to dismiss the Bolshevists en vogue as mere backstage passes and backstabbing bastards. As Louis Theroux says of Kooper: “He thinks most people are full of shit and doesn’t hesitate to call them out on it.”
His view of counterculture, therefore, became scathing despite being at the centre of one of its finest achievements. But Kooper often found himself hoisted by lofty achievements. One of his favourite collaborations was with Mike Bloomfield, and he was so blown away by him that he felt he was cheating the world if he ever played the guitar again. “Bloomfield sat down and started playing, and I went, whoa,” Kooper recalls. “Because I had never heard any white person play like that before. And he was about my age, and he just… that finished off my guitar career, just like that, in one afternoon.”
In fact, he remains pretty blasé about every single one of his own achievements. He called producing Dylan a mere “spectator sport”, he frequently claims that he was often just invited along to sessions because he was a known name. And that’s a name he claims he earned through “sheer amibition” and a burning desire to work with his hero Bob Dylan more so than any discernible talent. The question is, if we’re to take his comically disdainful word for it, then how do we reckon with the fact that he always sounds so good?
