The Al Kooper Interview Peter Stone Brown Archives Podcast

This interview happened in the last week of March in 1994 at WMMR, once the number one FM rock radio station in Philly. Al Kooper, a Nashville resident was in town to promote a new album ReKooperation , an instrumental album that was a tribute to the organ masters of the '50s and '60s who'd inspired him from Jimmy Smith to Bill Doggett to Booker T.
The album on an indie company, MusicMasters came and went pretty quickly and so did the label. As this interview will show, Kooper didn't expect more than that.
Kooper was great to interview because not only does he answer questions in a totally direct manner, he's also hysterically funny. At times it was hard to ask the next question because he kept me cracked up and also quite at ease from the minute I walked in the door. I was his last interview that day and at the time the music industry seemed dominated by people wearing vinyl baseball warm-up jackets that usually had the name of a company on the latest promotion on them so when I walked in wearing a beat-up leather jacket and cowboy boots, Kooper said, “You're the most refreshing sight I've seen all day,” and he meant it.
Parts of this interview were originally published in a long-gone weekly paper in Philadelphia on April 6, 1994 . Sometime after that, a friend of mine posted parts of it as part of a discussion on the Usenet group, Rec.Music.Dylan. Those parts later found their way much to my astonishment into the English Dylan magazine, Isis .
Keep in mind this was done more than eleven years ago. Kooper no longer lives in Nashville, recently released a new album, and some of the people mentioned here are no longer around and even Warner Brothers Records isn't really Warner Brothers Records anymore.
Why did you move to Nashville ?
So I could semi-retire. I thought there was no danger of me getting involved in country music. I thought I'd be relatively safe there, no danger of them even wanting to be involved with me, even though myself and Bill Szymczyk made the two records that all country music is modeled after in the '90s, and we were doing them at the same time at the same studio. He was in studio A, I was in studio B at the record plant, he was doing (the Eagles') Hotel California, and I was doing (Skynyrd's) Second Helping.
What changes have you seen in Nashville in the almost 30 years since you first went there to do Blonde on Blonde?
Not much. It's a little more cosmopolitan, but it's still a great place to live. I love living there.
I was at SXSW in Austin …
That's not Nashville . I've lived in Austin ,. That's a great place to live also, but you can't make a f*****g penny there. It's just hopeless.
…and they were talking about the music business may be shifting out of L.A.
It has to. I won't go back to L.A. Forget about it. I was in the earthquake. That was the start of my bad winter.
Well, it wasn't a great winter here either.
I went to a bunch of places. Every place I went to, I had a f*****g disaster.
Are you planning to tour behind this new album?
I'm trying to figure out how to do it. It always ends up costing me money which is why I don't do it more often. I gotta figure out a way to do it 'cause I really want to go out and play. The kind of show I wanna put on, I gotta take six other musicians with me, and it's like... you can't make any money. You can't even break even. I'll break even, okay. So if I could figure out how to do that, I'd do that for a living because I love to play. And the business is so fucked up that I can't go out and play. I can't do what it is that I do.
What led you to make an all instrumental album?
It's just something I always wanted to do. I just had to find the right moment for. And this is the right moment. I really had nothing at stake 'cause I hadn't made a record in so long.
The album has a more of a sense of history to than some of your other albums, like when you talk in the notes about going to see the jazz guys at Birdland. I always figured you to be more of a ro