Al Kooper: Always A Bridesmaid?
For Al Kooper, the Sixties began in 1959.
The CREEM Archive presents the magazine as originally created. Digital text has been scanned from its original print format and may contain formatting quirks and inconsistencies.
Backstage Passes: Rock 'n' Roll Life in the Sixties by Al Kooper with Ben Edmonds ; (Stein and Day) _*
by John Morthland
For A1 Kooper, the Sixties began in 1959, with him scrambling around the edges of the Brill Building scene, one of many schoolkids looking for an opening, any opening; they ended in 1969, with him playing out the temporary fame he'd won as a solo artist from his Super Session concepts. In between came a brief flinqas a folkie; sideman work with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones; the Blues Project; Blood Sweat and Tears; numerous production credits; and the transition from stereotypical middle class Queens existence to the life of the well-off bohemian. Always at his best as a sideman and at his worst as a leader or solo artist, Kooper was right in the thick of the Sixties musically, and his journeyman role gives him a perspective missing from previous pop books.
He's even tried his hand at writing before this, most notably in the pages of the early Rolling Stone, and he's always been quite readable, if not profound. For this book, he enlisted the aid of former CREEM editor Ben Edmonds, who claims to have done none of the writing; his role, apparently, was simply to force Kooper (via interviewing) to remember the , details of his story and to parenthetically add an outside perspective where one was deemed appropriate. This technique doesn't get in the way as much as you'd expect.
Still, the book reads like one of those "as told to" show biz biographies. It is light, breezy and entertaining—it has all but one of the qualities of the kind of book you'd pick up at the airport shop before a cross country flight. That one missing quality is a reasonable price, $7.95 being mighty stiff for a 250-page paperback despite the profuse illustrations.
Dylanologists will find a few new anecdotes, and Kooper's description of the infamous Forest Hills electric concert is particularly good. The book is also strong when he describes the innocent, anarchic early days of songwriting and playing (most notably in the Royal Teens) for the Brill Building moguls. Other highlights: recollections of road life for an "underground" group (the Blues Project) in the earliest days of long hair, weird clothes and drug overconsumption; the wonderfully terse instructions Chuck Berry gives the local pickup groups he uses for backing bands instead of taking one of his own on the road; "All you do is watch my foot. When it go up in the-air, get ready. When it hit the ground, if you playin', stop. If you ain't, start!" Now that's rock 'n'roll.
On the minus side, Kooper's insistence on seeing only the bright side of everyone is a common enough approach in any book where most of the characters are still alive, but it does result in some stories being left hanging incomplete, obviously. (Except for a few potshots at Steve Katz, he's a man of his word, too.) Kooper puts as much emphasis on his thoroughly expendable solo albums as he does on some of his most noteworthy achievements. By stopping at the end of the Sixties, he avoids one of his more spectacular failures, the Sounds of the South deal, an episode which could have provided more insight into the music biz itself.
Most of these criticisms are answered in the "Introduckshun, where he explains that the book is not an "altogether serious documentation," that his sole purpose was to allow you to "enlighten yourself with a few facts you might not glean elsewhere and have some fuft while doing it." And he does certainly accomplish that. Were it not for the excessive price for what's essentially an entertaining goof, it would be very easy to recommend Backstage Passes without reservation to anyone who wants to sneak behind the scenes of an amazing decade in popular music.
Kiss Saves Howard The Puck From A Fate Worse Than Thanksgiving!
Those mighty masters of heavy metal vinyl are at it again, this time in the forrp of comic characters. As the Catman, the Demon, the Starchild and the Space-Ape, Kiss make their pen and ink premier in Marvel Comics' Howard The Duck, Volume 1, number 13, (cf. CREEM, Oct. 1976, page 46) as a comatose mental patient's hallucination which serves to warn Howard of this issue's dilemma. Eventhough Ace Frehley is drawn rhore like The Hull than the real life beanpole he is, this book is a definite must. Keep a bloodshot eyeball out for Kiss's solo comic, also from Marvel, coming soon enough!
