Rekooperated

Al Kooper settles in Boston and gets ready to rock

by Ted Drozdowski

Al Kooper is a music-biz dropout. Not that he's resting on the considerable laurels he's gathered during his 40 years in blues rock. He's completing his second autobiography, teaching at Berklee, and writing lots of new songs. But one of America's great record producers -- whose credits run from Mike Bloomfield to Lynyrd Skynyrd to Green on Red -- has stopped shooting dice with the industry weasels, or rolling for lucky sevens into the Top 40.

"The only reason I stopped producing records was the record companies," Kooper says. "Dealing with them became tedious and distasteful. The actual producing of records? I'm probably better at that than ever. But if I can't enjoy it, I might as well not do it."

What he is enjoying are the new roots he's planted in Somerville, in a comfortable house on one of the city's hills. There he's surrounded by a lifetime's worth of albums, instruments, and awards; a cool 24-track demo studio; and memorabilia gathered over the years -- including the "Tingler," the spine-sucking "star" of William Castle's '50s horror flick of that name.

He's also enjoying his band, the Rekooperators, who make their "hometown" debut at Harpers Ferry in Allston this Saturday. "I'm really looking forward to this," the 54-year-old keyboardist/guitarist/singer testifies. "It's been in the making since I moved here on August 1.

"We're kind of a cross between Booker T. and the MG's and the Neville Brothers. I sing a third of the songs; Jimmy Vivino sings a third; and the rest are instrumentals. I don't know of anyone else who has two singers and plays instrumentals except the Nevilles . . . but we're three-quarters white."

Nonetheless, Kooper's been a soul man since the '50s, even if his earliest hits -- "Short Shorts" in '58 as a member of the Royal Teens and the '65 smash "This Diamond Ring" which he co-wrote for Gary Lewis and the Playboys -- don't rock that way.

"As a kid, I'd come home from school and play guitar along to Chuck Berry records," he explains. The first bands he co-led after a Brill Building-style stint as a songwriter were the Blues Project and the R&B-driven Blood, Sweat and Tears (whose classic first album he also produced). And he calls Ray Charles "someone I worship. I've modeled my whole life after his artistry." But in temperament, Kooper seems closer to his pal B.B. King than to Brother Ray. He's a nice guy who lives to make music.

Despite his decades of on-and-off touring with Dylan (including last year's Prince's Trust charity concert in London's Hyde Park with co-headliners the Who, Eric Clapton, and Alanis Morissette) and a performing résumé that includes stints at Bill Graham's famed Fillmores and jamming with Jimi Hendrix, Kooper's mostly been a studio artist and songwriter. "I never played so many gigs I got tired of it. I'd have to go on a Stones tour or something to get tired of playing live," he jokes. "It's one of the great joys -- like sex, but less scandalous. Which is why I love playing with these guys so much."

"These guys" are his fellow Rekooperators: guitarist Jimmy Vivino, drummer Anton Fig, and bassist Mike Merritt. The band's history goes back to Kooper's early-'80s return to his native New York City, after stretches living in Atlanta, Los Angeles, and other places where the music beckoned. "I was playing with a bunch of Jersey guys as 'Al Kooper.' One night 15 years ago, the guitar player couldn't make it, so he sent Jimmy as a sub. I never let the other guy come back. We started calling it 'Al Kooper and the Rekooperators.' In '92, we got Anton Fig and Harvey Brooks on bass. At that point the recognizability of the musicianship got so high I dropped 'Al Kooper' and it became the Rekooperators."

When Brooks left last year, Merritt -- one of Vivino's running partners in Conan O'Brien's house band, the Max Weinberg Seven -- joined. Together the Rekooperators play a sprawling songbook: Kooper-penned hits and favorites from albums like 1969's Super Session (Columbia/CBS), classics like "Albert's Shuffle" and "Glamour Girl." Mostly Kooper hugs the Hammond B-3; he also plays guitar and some mandolin in an acoustic segment that can embrace Blind Willie Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Skynyrd's "Mississippi Kid," at the Rekooperators' whim.

"Because the other guys in the band work every night, we can't really tour. So we play for fun. And we like to make other people happy too.

"One thing I'm really looking forward to about this gig is that people in Boston are going to get a chance to see Jimmy play. I've been hitting the clubs ever since I came to town, and I don't think anyone around here has heard a guitar player of Jimmy's caliber."

Kooper's last production was Vivino's '97 CD Do What Now? (MusicMasters). It's essentially a Rekooperators album, with Vivino taking lead. Before that, it was his own Soul of a Man (MusicMasters), also with the Rekooperators. "Otherwise, I dropped out of producing in 1990," Kooper explains.

That was the end -- at least for a while -- of a studio career that began like a Roman candle in 1965. Early that summer, producer Tom Wilson invited Kooper to a Dylan session. Kooper brought his guitar, figuring he'd sit in; but he found that the great blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield was already booked. So Kooper played B-3, an instrument he then was only passingly familiar with. Yet via the crude organ lines he put on "Like a Rolling Stone" and other tunes on Highway 61 Revisited (Columbia), the Hammond became his signature.

Later that summer Kooper joined Dylan at the Newport Folk Festival, where Dylan's first electric set in public caused an uproar among purists but launched him toward rock stardom. Kooper also contributed heavily to Dylan's next album, Blonde on Blonde (Columbia).

Kooper joined the Blues Project, but after three albums he left New York for LA. He wrote prodigiously and found a home for some of his new songs with Blood, Sweat and Tears, which he started as lead vocalist. He produced the band's debut album, '69's Child Is Father to the Man (Columbia), then split as they headed from R&B toward pop.

Believing his friend Mike Bloomfield had never been captured correctly on record, Kooper produced Super Session and Live Adventures of Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield (Columbia) in 1969. Both contributed mightily to the troubled guitar genius's legacy. Kooper played on Hendrix's Electric Ladyland (Reprise) and the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed (London/Decca). He produced and played sessions at a heady pace in the '70s and '80s, making his own LPs and working with B.B. King, Taj Mahal, Don Ellis, the Tubes, Nils Lofgren, and others. But his most important discovery was Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Kooper found the shaggy outfit from Jacksonville playing bars and swept them to superstardom. He got Skynyrd a deal with MCA and produced their first three albums. "They were incredibly well rehearsed. Most young bands are not good arrangers. They may be great writers, singers, and musicians, but they're not arrangers. That's the thing I usually contribute more than anything else. Lynyrd Skynyrd were terrific arrangers. They would even compose their guitar solos. My job was to get certain sounds and make their live thing more studio-y so it would translate to hit records." Kooper succeeded, helping "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama" to the charts at #19 and #8, respectively.

In the '80s, the breezes of the music industry started carrying something that smelled like bad fish to Kooper. "It was an attitude. I would have guys younger than my son coming in and telling me, `I don't think you should do that song.' In the old days you didn't mind listening to that because the people who ran record companies were record men -- with vinyl running through their veins. We couldn't be further from that now.

"Increasingly they would do things like take the mixing from me and not allow me to attend the mixing session." That resulted in a song he produced for his friend B.B. King being mixed without snare drum in the chorus and with Kooper's own guide guitar track still included on the album.

"It all culminated in a run-in with Virgin Records, after I moved to Nashville. They said they had an act they wanted me to produce. So they do this thing where you hang out with the act for a week to see how the chemistry works. The guy came to Nashville. We wrote a song together and went into the studio to cut something -- just the two of us. After he left, the A&R guy called me up and said, 'We're gonna use a few producers, so we'd like you to do four tracks.' And he offered me an amount of money lower than anything I'd ever gotten in my life. Even for the first record I produced. So I told him as much, and he said, 'Well, what have you done lately?' I said, 'Turned you down,' and hung up. I regretted that I'd hung in long enough to hear that fuckin' cliché.

"So I took seven years off and did fuck-all. Some gigs came in and I did them, but I hardly did anything. Didn't even golf -- which I don't think is a very blues-mentality thing."

Lured by the promise of students who'd "get it," Kooper left Nashville last year. This semester he's teaching History of Songwriting and History of Record Production at Berklee. "My fantasy was that I could teach about things I knew and not be forced into a tight curriculum, and so far my fantasy's come true.

"Teaching could suck if you were uninspired or doing it to pay the rent. But for me, it fits into an interesting period of my life. I'm doing all the things I never had time to do: teaching; I'm looking to get a radio show; I'm finishing a book. It's a fun time."

The Rekooperators play Harpers Ferry at 158 Brighton Avenue, Allston, this Saturday, February 7, with openers Kid Bangham & Amyl Justin. Call 254-9743.