arts & entertainment
Rock Royalty
Al Kooper will take the stage at Music Hall.
Suzanne Chessler
Contributing Writer
A
1 Kooper — in a long career of
performing, recording, song-
writing and producing — has
worked on many hits and with many
chart-topping stars: "Short Shorts" with
the Royal Teens, "Child Is Father to the
Man" with Blood Sweat & Tears (a group
he organized), "Like a Rolling Stone" with
Bob Dylan and "All Those Years Ago" with
George Harrison, among many others.
Kooper, 68, also has spotlighted many
musical styles, with his most recent
recording, White Chocolate, released in
2008. His work recently has been sampled
by hip-hop artists Jay Z, the Beastie Boys
and the Alchemist.
Metro Detroiters can get samplings of it
all during A Very Special Solo Evening With
the Legendary Al Kooper on Thursday, May
17, in the Music Hall Jazz Cafe, where he
will play piano and guitar.
Kooper previewed the show and revealed
his current interests during a phone conver-
sation with the Detroit Jewish News:
JN: What will you be performing in
Detroit?
AK: I never like to say; I like the ele-
ment of surprise. I get there and see how
the sound is and if everything's working
OK. I come out and look at the audience
and decide what to play.
IN: How does working solo compare to
working with a band?
AK: Playing solo is a lot more respon-
sibility. What I can do alone that I can't
do with a band is explain where the songs
come from and tell stories about them.
People will get to know me better than in
a band show.
IN: What do you recall about earlier
work in Detroit?
AK: Playing the Grande Ballroom with
Blood Sweat & Tears was an exciting gig. I
also played outside for a fabulous festival
with about 3,000 people in the audience.
I have a friend, poet and teacher M.L.
Liebler, who has taken me to stores where
they have hard-to-get CDs. I like to shop
for those.
IN: Have you worked with Motown art-
ists?
AK: I don't think I ever worked with
a Motown artist. I'm a gigantic fan and
even bought a karaoke boxed set so I
could have copies of the actual tracks. A
song that Blood, Sweat & Tears did —
"You've Made Me So Very Happy" — was a
Motown song that I got from an old record
and just changed the arrangement.
IN: What are your current projects?
AK: I'm working on a documentary, a
four-CD boxed set and probably the last
album that I'm going to do. It should take
four years to finish.
IN: Do you have any favorite artists
now?
AK: I like a band called Field Music from
England and Mount Moriah from down
South. Their music reaches me on some level.
JN: How did you come to write a weekly
Web column, "New Music for Old
People for the Morton Report?
AK: They came to me, and I thought the
best thing I could write about would be the
new music that I listen to. I go to iTunes
every Tuesday, pick 10 releases and write
about them. I stream the entire songs in the
columns. I also take things that are very old
— from the '60s-'90s — and put them in if
Wils on We bb, courtesy Sony P ictu res Cla ss ic s
Big-Screen Boomers
A new Kasdan film with Detroit roots.
Curt Schleier
Special to the Jewish News
F
filmmaker Lawrence Kasdan
attended the University of
Michigan. It's where he met his
wife and frequent collaborator, Meg
(nee Goldman), a Detroit native. And it
is where Meg's sister provided a criti-
cal plot point for his latest film, Darling
Companion.
The movie is the third in Kasdan's baby
boomer trilogy. It started with his post-
college, let's-become-adults-film, The Big
Chill. Next came the movie about middle
age, Grand Canyon, followed now by
Darling Companion, about empty nesters.
Beth (Diane Keaton) and Joseph Winter
(Kevin Kline) are married long enough to
figure out what they don't like about each
other. He thinks she's high-strung and
overly emotional; she feels he's pompous
and self-involved.
Matters come to a head when the cou-
ple's rescue dog is lost at their mountain
vacation home, and family and friends
unite in their search for the mutt.
Meg Kasdan, who was music supervisor
on The Big Chill and co-screenwriter on
Grand Canyon and this new film, got the
idea when the Kasdans lost their own res-
cue dog while on a Rocky Mountain trek.
To better enable the film to work, the
couple "borrowed" an incident from Meg's
sister, who found a wounded dog by the
46 May 10 • 2012
side of a Detroit highway and rescued,
adopted and named him — Freeway,
scenes all rather faithfully re-enacted on
the screen.
Taking inspiration from real life is not
unusual. What is different in Darling
Companion is that there's not a single
CGI effect. It is that increasingly rare film
made for the most ignored of all cinema
demographics: intelligent adults.
"I think there's still hope" for these
kinds of films, Lawrence Kasdan said in
a telephone interview."It's harder and
harder to get movies made that you're
interested in. That's why this was made
independently. We didn't think a studio
would make a movie about 60-year-olds,
about real people. So when we finished
the script, we immediately started look-
ing for independent financing."
All tolled, Kasdan has directed 11 films,
most of them critical and financial suc-
cesses. While they vary greatly in genre
— from The Accidental Tourist to French
Kiss — they share an intelligence and
Jewish feel. The director agrees:
"I think they're completely, totally
Jewish," he says. "I am a secular Jew, and
that infuses my sense of humor, it infuses
my world view, it infuses what I consider
my religion, which is humanism, and it
all comes from my Jewish background."
That background not only informs
his worldview, but it has pushed him to
succeed.
Actress Diane Keaton and
Director Lawrence Kasdan on
the set of
"When you grow up feeling like an
outsider, even if you had a good experi-
ence, it helps you as an artist',' he says. "It
makes you more interested in telling your
version of the world:'
Though Kasdan was born in Miami,
he was raised in that hotbed of Judaism:
West Virginia.
"We had a community in Wheeling
and a much smaller one in Morganstown.
There was a casual kind of anti-Semitism
there when I was growing up in the '50s.
It didn't feel malicious. It was just part of
the language. You know the kind of lan-
guage. It was the parlance of teenage kids,
raised in that kind of atmosphere, repeat-
ing words they heard at home. They
didn't realize how much it hurt me."
Kasdan still tries "to be involved" with
U-M. He gave permission to use the title
The Big Chill at the Big House for the
Michigan-Michigan State matchup in
December 2010 and has spoken at corn-
Darling Companion
mencement, among other appearances.
After graduation, at the height of the
Vietnam War, he intended to teach high
school English (teaching provided defer-
ment) and write screenplays on summer
breaks. But it was impossible to get a job.
He went instead into advertising and
in off hours wrote the script for The
Bodyguard, which took years to get from
his pages to the screen.
However, Kasdan was recognized for
his work long before that happened. He
won a Clio Award for one of his ads. As
if to prove that the universe has a sense
of irony, the ad was for — wait for it —
West Virginia Brand Bacon. E
Darling Companion is scheduled
to open in area theaters on Friday,
May 18.