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Reviews Al Kooper & Shuggie Otis - Kooper Session Sunday, July 13, 2008 A seminal figure in rock music at the time meets virtually unknown 15-year-old guitar prodigy. By Billy Pinnell.
Al Kooper, Shuggie Otis
Kooper Session – Al Kooper Introduces Shuggie Otis
Acadia
This fascinating album brought together an unlikely pairing of musicians in Al Kooper and Shuggie Otis, one a seminal figure in rock music at the time, the other a virtually unknown 15-year-old guitar prodigy.
Born in Brooklyn New York City in 1944, Kooper, at the age of 13, became a member of The Royal Teens a group from New Jersey that scored a top 10 hit with ‘Short Shorts’ in 1958. At 19 he began working as a session guitarist and songwriter contributing to ‘This Diamond Ring,’ a hit for Gary Lewis & The Playboys in 1965.
That same year producer Tom Wilson gave Kooper a job playing organ on Bob Dylan’s single ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and later on the ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ album. At the 1965 Newport Folk Festival he famously backed Dylan on his electric set and later appeared on ‘Blonde On Blonde’.
In ’65 Kooper and guitarist Steve Katz formed The Blues Project and in 1967 founded Blood, Sweat & Tears, Kooper selecting the band members and producing their 1968 debut ‘Child Is Father To The Man’.
That same year he left to join Columbia Records as a performer / producer / talent scout, scoring a major hit with his first effort ‘Super Session’, a collaboration with guitarists Michael Bloomfield and Stephen Stills that became one of 1969’s biggest sellers. He followed that with The Live Adventures Of Al Kooper And Michael Bloomfield (1969) another million seller, somehow finding time to guest on Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland (1968) and The Rolling Stones’ Let It Bleed (1969).
His own reputation firmly established, Kooper was anxious to connect with young musicians he believed in, hopefully giving them an opportunity to record and so reach a wider audience.
His mentor at Columbia was legendary producer / talent scout John Hammond Snr. who told Kooper about a 15-year-old guitarist / multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles who was at the time playing in a band fronted by his father, R&B legend Johnny Otis. Otis Snr. had already attained notoriety as the leader of The Johnny Otis Show, a band that at different times included Hank Ballard, Big Mama Thornton, Little Willie John, Esther Phillips, Etta James and Jackie Wilson and in 1958 had a top 10 hit with ‘Willie And The Hand Jive’.
Shuggie Otis, born Johnny Alexander Veliotes in Los Angeles on November 30 1953 began playing professionally at age 12, contributing a guitar solo to his father’s 1969 hit ‘Country Girl’. As a teenager he would wear dark glasses and a fake moustache so he would look older, enabling him to perform in nightclubs.
Kooper was made aware of a hard-edged traditional blues album Cold Shot featuring the Johnny Otis Show with Shuggie Otis on lead guitar. Suitably impressed, Kooper invited the young musician to New York where he would showcase his talents allowing him to explore a diverse repertoire, not just the blues.
Hiring a house band of seasoned musicians – bass guitarist Stu Woods, drummer Wells Kelly and Mark Klingman (who’d played with Ian and Sylvia and Eric Clapton) to provide piano on half the album – Kooper suggested a bunch of songs that would allow his young collaborator a chance to play in many different styles.
Both men loved the gospel group The Swan Silvertones so they decided on ‘Bury My Body,’ Kooper’s re-arrangement of the traditional ‘In My Time Of Dying’. Kooper asked gospel singers Hilda Harris and Albertine Robinson to round up some of their friends and come down to the studio. They are heard to great effect on the aforementioned song and Little Buster’s ‘Lookin’ For A Home’. Both songs highlight the rapport shared by Kooper and Otis, the older musician delivering some of his most convincing vocal performances and his organ and piano leaving room for the younger man’s guitar to support or take the lead.
‘Double Or Nothing’ is a faithful cover of the Booker T & The MG’s recording, with Otis sounding like a clone of Steve Cropper. ‘One Room Country Shack,’ an old Mercy Dee Walton tune popularised by Mose Allison, is given a pop treatment with organ and guitar complementing each other throughout. The original vinyl release was subdivided into ‘The Songs’ on side one and ‘The Blues’ (three spontaneous jams) on side two.
These performances are documented the way they were at the time: one take, no post-production, just a bunch of great instrumentalists bouncing ideas off each other.
‘Shuggie’s Old Time Slide Boogie’ pays tribute to the bottleneck-piano duets available on old ‘78s. In re-creating the ambience of the original recordings, Kooper electronically reprocessed the track adding surface noise so that it sounds like a scratchy record of the era.
‘The Slow Goonbash Blues,’ clocking in at 9:29, allows Kooper, Otis and the supporting musicians plenty of room to make it up as they go. The final track ‘Shuggie’s Shuffle’ is another showcase for Otis’ virtuosity, his tone similar to Eric Clapton’s circa The Bluesbreakers.
While the album didn’t set the charts on fire, it did expose Otis to a mainstream audience and was probably a factor in his name being mentioned as a possible replacement for Mick Taylor in The Rolling Stones.
Otis also plays piano, organ, drums and bass, is a successful composer (his ‘Strawberry Letter 23’, covered by The Brothers Johnson, sold a million copies in 1977) and has appeared as a session player recording with Cal Tjader, Etta James, Eddie Vinson and Frank Zappa (electric bass on ‘Peaches En Regalia’ from ‘Hot Rats’). Since his collaboration with Kooper, he has released only three more albums ‘Here Comes Shuggie Otis’ (1970), ‘Freedom Flight’ (1971) and ‘Inspiration Information’ (1974) recently re-released on David Byrne’s Luaka Bop label.
He continues to play with his father and in his own band mainly around Northern California where he lives. Kooper went on to discover Lynyrd Skynyrd, producing their first three albums, and continues to record his own music.
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