Arts & Entertainment Rockin' On For more than four decades, Al Kooper has enjoyed a career as a musical Jack-of-all-trades. Al Kooper: "From one Jew to another," says Paul Stanley of KISS, 'Al is the definition of chutzpah." DON COHEN Special to the Jewish News I f there were justice in this world, more people would know of Al Kooper than Alice Cooper. Those familiar with his work know his rightful place in the pantheon of esteemed classic rock and blues artists. Others probably don't realize he's responsible for some of the most famous passages in several all-time favorite classic rock songs. They include his famous organ riff on Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" from Highway 61 Revisited, and the classic piano, organ and French horn play- ing on the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," from Let it Bleed. This eclectic musician appears with his group the Funky Faculty Saturday, Sept. 15, as part of the Detroit Festival of the Arts. The three-day visual and perform- ing arts event takes place throughout a 20-block area in the University Cultural Center Sept. 14-16. Kooper's influence extends way beyond his own music. An artist who's worked with Simon and Garfunkel, The Who, Tom Petty and Jimi Hendrix, to name just a few, the musician/composer/producer dis- covered Lynyrd Skynyrd at one of his hangouts in Atlanta. He formed a record label to release the group's music and produced its first three albums, including the hits "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Free Bird." Along with Steve Katz, Kooper put together the Blues Project, then Blood, Sweat and Tears. His col- laborations with his close friend the late blues gui- 9/14 2001 R60 tarist Mike Bloomfield achieved critical and com- mercial success with the million-selling Super Session, which also featured Stephen Stills. Kooper also composed songs — like "This Diamond Ring," for Gary Lewis and the Playboys — and has done solo work, in addition to becoming a respected producer. In 1998, he wrote a memoir, Backstage Groupies and Backstabbing Bastards, about the music industry. Born in Brooklyn in 1944, Kooper was making music by the time of his bar mitzvah, but neither he nor one of his teenaged guests, the soon-to-be "Godfather of Soul" James Brown, performed at the party. "My bar mitzvah was so long ago," Kooper jokes, "they played 'Kum Ba Ya' there. The band that played was some society outfit from Long Island called the Jerry Jerome Orchestra — oy!" Though he hasn't lived in New York for quite some time, the city shaped Kooper's Jewish identity, which leans toward the secular, cultural and gastro- nomic variety. "I am a New York Jew. Hardcore," he says. "Today I meet other Jews my age that I call 'fake Jews.' They've never eaten kasha varnishkes (Jewish soul food). They blanch at the thought of a tongue sand- wich. "Get away with these fake Jews! If you can't enjoy tongue on rye, with Russian dressing, a couple of pieces of roast turkey and coleslaw on the sandwich, don't even talk to me. And if you've never had kasha varnishkes with a buttah-soft brisket, don't tell me you're Jewish like me." When asked if he has ever played in Israel, he says, "Israel? Are you crazy? Yeah, I could see a two-CD set — Kooper at the Golan Heights Amphitheater. "One CD would be music and the other gunfire and ambulances. I think I'll wait for my next life when there's peace in the Middle East." No solidarity missions for this guy. Probably the most famous Kooper story is about how he was invited to watch a Bob Dylan recording session and ended up playing on "Like A Rolling Stone," though he'd never played the organ before. Less well known is that he met Mike Bloomfield at the Dylan session. Their work together, and Norman Rockwell's painting of them on the highly regarded 1969 live double-album Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield & Al Kooper, are both classics. Kooper says Bloomfield had a theory about how Jews, blacks and the blues intersect. "Mike used to say that the tie-in was that black people suffered externally and that Jewish people suffered internally, and that the suffering was [what] triggered the real blues." Whatever the reason, it's true Jews took to the blues. In fact, Kooper's first blues band, the Blues Project, which helped fashion the 1960s urban blues sound, was made up of five young Jewish guys. In the fall of 1997, Kooper moved to Boston to teach at the Berklee School of Music. He found teaching to be "great and frightening — frightening because these kids had never heard of Laura Nyro or the Isley Brothers, and great because now they know all about them." His teaching career was cut short last year, when a debilitating condition robbed him of two-thirds of his eyesight. But it doesn't hamper his performances. Kooper explains that the Funky Faculty — the group he'll perform with Al Kooper got his start in Detroit — is "made up with the boy band the of rockin' professors from Royal Teens, which in Berklee who need to blow 1958 made a fashion off steam after teachinc, all statement with the pop- these kids how to do charting "Short Shorts." music. We got a real rockin' band and we cut Kooper, who went school a lot to play all on to co-found the over the world." rock/jazz/blues group Kooper's new Web site Tears, Blood, Sweat — www.alkooper.com — once dubbed his mid-'60s is different from most New York-based band others in that, in addition the Blues Project "the to promoting his activi- & Jewish Beatles."