Profile of Al Kooper on Famous Like Me

Al Kooper (born February 5, 1944, Brooklyn, New York) is an American songwriter and musician, probably best known for organizing the group Blood, Sweat & Tears.

His first musical success was as a 14-year-old guitarist in the Royal Teens, best known for their novelty blues riff, "Short Shorts". In 1960, he joined the song-writing team of Bob Brass and Irwin Levine, who wrote the hit, "This Diamond Ring", for Gary Lewis and the Playboys. When he was 21, he moved to Greenwich Village.

He performed with Bob Dylan in concert in 1965 and in the studio in 1965 and 1966. He worked extensively with Mike Bloomfield for a number of years after the two met as studio musicians on Dylan's legendary Highway 61 Revisited album.

In 1965, he co-formed The Blues Project and played their most famous gig at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. He formed Blood, Sweat & Tears in the same year, leaving after the group's first album, Child is Father to the Man, in 1968.

Kooper played on hundreds of records, including The Rolling Stones, B.B. King, The Who and Cream. On occasion, he has even overdubbed on his own efforts, as on The Live Adventures Of Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper album, as Roosevelt Gook. He produced the first three albums for Lynyrd Skynyrd, whom he discovered. Kooper also wrote the score for the TV series, Crime Story, and has also written music for several made-for-television movies.

Al Kooper has published a memoir, Backstage Passes: Rock 'n' Roll Life In The Sixties (1977), now available in revised form as Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards: Memoirs of a Rock 'N' Roll Survivor (1998).

He was a guest on the Howie Carr radio show on August 31, 2005 promoting his new album.

Like a Rolling Stone Session

Kooper's most notable playing with Dylan likely are the striking organ parts on "Like a Rolling Stone". Kooper had been invited to the session as an observer, and hoped to be allowed to sit in on guitar, his primary instrument. After hearing a guitar player who turned out to be Mike Bloomfield warming up, and recognizing that Bloomfield was a much better player, Kooper put his guitar aside and went to the control room. During the recording of Like a Rolling Stone, Paul Griffin moved from organ to piano. Kooper told producer Tom Wilson that he had a good organ part for the song, and before Wilson could answer, he (Wilson) got a phone call. So since he didn't get a "no" answer, Kooper went and sat down at the organ, though he had rarely played organ before the session. Wilson allowed Kooper to stay at the organ during the recording. You can hear the organ coming in just behind the other members of the band at many places in the song, to make sure he was getting the chords right. During playback, Dylan famously said, "Turn the organ up," and a classic rock organ part was born.

Discography

• I Stand Alone (March 1969)
• You Never Know Who Your Friends Are (1969)
• Super Session (With Stephen Stills and Mike Bloomfield) (1968)
• Easy Does It (1970)
• New York City (July 1971)
• A Possible Projection of the Future / Childhood's End (July 1972)
• Naked Songs (1973)
• Act Like Nothing's Wrong (January 1977)
• Championship Wrestling (1982)
• Rekooperation (June 1994)
• Black Coffee (August 2005)

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Al Kooper