The most original band Al Kooper ever encountered: “Everything was different”
Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock ‘N’ Roll Survivor – That’s the title of Al Kooper‘s autobiography. Needless to say, we’re not dealing with a person who was easily seduced by stardom and the sordid worship of the chosen few.
Al Kooper saw right through the industry. In fact, he put his own defining moment down to a fortuitous fluke. “The very funny thing about ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ is it was a six minute song, there was no music to read from,” he said.
“And there I was playing this unfamiliar instrument,” Kooper continued. “So I would come in on the upbeat of one. I would wait until the band played the chord, and then as quickly as I could come in play the chord”.
But Bob Dylan demanded, “Turn the organ up”. So, the clunking playing became a prominent part of the mix. And before long, bands were hankering to hire Kooper for that trademark “on the upbeat” sound without knowing it was purely the product of naive technicality. Rather than feeling like he was the benefactor of a major windfall, this served as further proof to Kooper that the industry was phoney.
He played with just about everyone and true enough himself to realise that certain revered heroes were not worthy of the worship that they received. He saw first-hand the copycat tactics and soft plagiarism that he thought plagued the industry, and it left him sorely uninspired. But then came a band who defied the folly of chasing a slither of the zeitgeist – a band original enough to remain timeless for no doubt generations to come: The Band.
Even the group’s own Robbie Robertson was happy to admit that the North American journeymen were approaching music from a different point of view, and finally reaping the benefits of that singularity. “Because of all this stuff the Hawks had been through, [we had] a maturity in our musical taste, in our approach. We didn’t feel a part of what was happening at that time out in the world. We weren’t very good at being trendy,” he told Mojo.
Kooper relished that trend-defying magic and hailed the band as the American masters. “The main thing was The Band not only didn’t sound like anybody else – their whole thing was original. Everything was different,” he said. Given that he had played with everyone from The Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix to Aretha Franklin and George Harrison, that’s pretty high praise.
Kooper continued, “The songwriting was different, the singing was different — they weren’t scared of doing anything. And they actually started a style, so you could say ‘that sounds like The Band.’ There were people that imitated it – I was one of ‘em.”
The Band had assimilated everything that they had encountered during years on the road and blended it into a thrilling whirlwind of Americana. This was not a blend of necessity, designed in a bid to create something ‘original’, it was a blend borne from inspiration, and that’s where true originality without the air quotes comes from.
