When I began writing this article my intention was to review an album that had impressed me many years ago as a teenager. It became a turning point for me as a budding guitarist. But after a few days of research I concluded that there was a much larger story that demanded my attention. The album is historic for numerous reasons, nevertheless it has not found its rightful place in the annals of music history yet.
At the time of this album’s release, AM radio was king of the airwaves. And as a listener, I quickly tired from hearing the same dozen popular songs repeated over and over, hour after hour. A fellow band mate turned me on to “Super Session” because the cover song Season of the Witch
was a popular folk song at the time. However this newer version was played with a distinct aural twist. There was an odd sounding guitar lead that was not evident on the original Donovan recording. The lead woven throughout the song sounded like it was crying, or speaking the lyrics at times. Al Kooper’s jazzy Hammond B3 wailed an eerie tone that spoke to me. And the whole track sounded more like a jam session our band might have noodled during practice than the tunes we used to hear on our transistor radios. The remaining tracks screamed blues-leads that compelled me to hone my guitar skills.
I recently revisited that album and found some of the recordings to be quite avant-garde considering it had been performed forty years ago. I realized that some burgeoning guitarists may have never heard about Mike Bloomfield or Al Kooper. Yet Steven Stills, who recorded half of the album, had established a renowned reputation for himself. There were other intriguing facts uncovered that I never knew about Bloomfield and Kooper and the making of “Super Session,” considering how the album fits into the timeline of music that was produced at the time. I became more curious why these two talented musicians are still relatively unknown, yet their jazz-blues mix remained timeless and refined. I asked myself, “What is their history? Why don’t I hear their songs on alternative FM radio today? Why is there little evidence of their talent on YouTube?”
I discovered that these two guys were serious risk-takers. They wrestled with the system, choosing to play and record music that pleased them. They disliked being typecast into the pop trend of the time. They abhorred having engineers or managers determine the quality of their sound and the cleansing of the gritty, raw tones they found to be so emotionally rewarding. Although I have little doubt that they wanted to profit from their recordings, it seems they passed on the big money in order to keep their identities. They weren’t after fame and its pitfalls that the Beatles or Stones had succumbed. Mega-groups were heavily promoted and controlled. They could be heard all over the radio dial. Bloomfield and Kooper weren’t into that sort of thing. They just wanted to play their stylized jazz-blues fusion at any expense. They were rebels. And innovators. They simply loved their craft and loved jamming on the fly with other musicians. They are two artists who undeniably influenced a Winds of Change in music and culture that Eric Burdon had predicted, creating a sound that can be heard throughout much of popular music today.
Then came the Beatles, Rolling Stones
Whole new thing going on
And the winds of change go on blowing, blowing…
There are winds of change blowing.
Eric Burdon and the Animals
“Winds of Change” 1967
“Winds of Change”
The date was August 1968. The Beatles were forever topping the charts. Hendrix had begun to emerge as a driving force for a new direction in musical sound. Led Zeppelin began their pivotal hard rock trek into rock stardom. The Stones were the established bad boys of Rock ‘n Roll. Popular music seemed to be riding a razor’s edge toward uncharted territory.
How was it possible that a blues guitarist would find his way into that emerging market with a vinyl release that consisted of 50 minutes of him noodling with a couple of friends? Who could have imagined that a jam session, which would never be played on AM radio, would become a huge seller upon its release? And who would have thought that the established music press would consider it one of the top 100 albums for forty years?
That was the concept for “Super Session.” It was the ‘60’s. The ultimate time for experimentation, exploration, and self expression.
Enter: Mike Bloomfield, Al Kooper and Steven Stills. Three relatively obscure musicians who at the time ventured together to produce an album based on a studio jam session. An album that had “no commercial potential,” as Frank Zappa would have categorized it. An album that should be in every guitarist’s CD collection, that is, if one enjoys listening to searing guitar riffs, R&B cuts that can make your neck hairs stand on edge, or extraordinary electronic techniques that were absolutely innovative for the 1960’s.
While Lennon-McCartney were releasing their rebellious yet technically proficient “White Album” targeted for a lesser “pop” market, Hendrix was experimenting with avant-garde audio effects for “Electric Ladyland,” despite major objections by his manager, and Led Zeppelin was perfecting their blend of amplified blues-folk and eastern influenced sound for their first vinyl album that would ignite their lengthy career and contribute to a new genre of music that would become known as “heavy metal”.
Bloomfield and Kooper, on the other hand, were following their inner voices. Their voices sang choruses of jazz and blues. There was nothing trendy about either of those genres of music at the time. Both already had legendary histories. So both artists consciously decided to create their version of what was the status quo.
Michael’s idea was [that] you always go back to the source – as far as you can, to the plantation sound, the work song, the prison song. He was not interested in music that was created by imitating what someone else did last week.
Norman Dayton, Producer
When Planets Align
Mike Bloomfield’s history is drenched in deep hues of ethereal blues. He played lead guitar with Bob Dylan, Elvin Bishop, Buddy Miles, Muddy Waters, and for The Paul Butterfield Blues Band during the mid-1960’s. He was lead guitarist for The Electric Flag in 1967, but his expertise in improvisational blues lead riffs was stifled and subdued by his management and band members. The internal strife and accelerating heroin consumption by the band became uncontrollable. He needed to break out of the proverbial box, and shred some heart-felt, gut-wrenching leads without a manager or recording engineer manipulating the outcome.
Bloomfield battled with the “…professional white-collar guys, with white shirts and ties… all they wanted to do was get a nice clean sound on everything, and he didn’t want a nice clean sound on everything.
Norman Dayton, Producer
Al Kooper’s past is quite diverse comparatively speaking. He began as a guitarist-songwriter-producer but later found his niche by pure luck sitting behind the keys of a Hammond B3 playing backup for Dylan. During his career he played the keyboard on albums for outstanding groups such as the Rolling Stones, Hendrix, The Who, BB King, and Cream. However, his musical talents soon became overshadowed by his founding and leadership of the jazz-rock group Blood, Sweat and Tears and by his discovery and production of numerous albums for Lynyrd Skynyrd, including the hit single “Sweet Home Alabama” and the iconic Rock and Roll anthem “Free Bird.”
Bloomfield and Kooper met in 1965 while working as session musicians for Dylan on the “Highway 61 Revisited” album, which was a turning point in Dylan’s style of folk music. Some music critics attribute Dylan’s departure from an acoustic to an electric sound because of the refined rock-blues techniques Bloomfield applied to his songs. Yet Dylan and his transitional folk-rock style was not a fit for either musician. Bloomfield, the consummate iconoclast, refused an offer to stay on permanently with Dylan after “Highway 61” was released. It wasn’t until 1968 when Kooper finally jammed with Bloomfield during the Grape Jam with Moby Grape, that he experienced Mike’s inner blues-soul and his penchant for playing extemporaneous blues. That jam session became the impetus for making the “Super Session” album.
It’s all in the hands – bare meat on steel strings.
Norman Dayon
Nine Hour Jam
Kooper explained to a reporter the rationale used for creating “Super Session”: “Why not do an entire jam album together? At the time, most jazz albums were made using this modus operandi… record an entire album on the fly in one or two days. Why not try and legitimize rock by adhering to these standards? …as a fan, I was dissatisfied with Bloomfield’s recorded studio output up until then. It seemed that his studio work was inhibited and reigned in, compared to his incendiary live performances. Could I put him in a studio setting where he could feel free to just burn like he did in live performances?”
Bloomfield burned all right. After recording the hard-edged-scorching blues tune “Albert’s Shuffle” and the smoothly phrased riffs on “Really” and “Stop,” he burned out completely, due to what is euphemistically referred to by critics as “cronic insomnia.” But during that single session, he generated all of the tracks for one side of the album in a matter of nine hours. He left the studio, checked out of his hotel room, leaving Kooper an apologetic note, and consequently is featured for only thirty minutes on one side of the album. Steven Stills was summoned for an eleventh-hour rally to complete the remainder of the session. Regardless, the album became the biggest selling recording of Bloomfield’s career.
In the course of a single solo, Mike would make you feel relaxed and almost sleepy with his low volume playing, and then he would hit you with the goods – [really] hard.
Allen Bloomfield, Michael’s younger brother
The Flip Side
What is even as anomalous as Bloomfield’s part in the success of the album is Steven Stills’ ability to complete the rest of the recording session without ever singing a note. Arriving fresh from the group Buffalo Springfield, his vocals were notoriously superior to that of Kooper’s. On the lengthy eleven-minute track “Season of the Witch,” a rather mundane Donovan Leitch original composition, Stills embeds his personal signature by cranking out some state-of-the-art wah-wah riffage hearkening a sound that was to become commonplace for many years. Only a year prior to the release of “Super Session,” Jimi Hendrix learned from Frank Zappa about the auditory wonders of the effect pedal. Hendrix then began tinkering with the experimental wah-wah and mastered it for “Electric Ladyland,” released in October 1968. The electronically generated sound became a Hendrix trademark. Additionally, the swirling tones of Stills’ guitar on “You Don’t Love Me” are precursors to similar phaser effects that were used extensively on recordings released by Hendrix’ after “Super Session” was pressed.
Kooper, on the other hand, had been experimenting with the Ondioline, a freakish sounding keyboard instrument with a haunting presence since his Blood, Sweat and Tears days. Some historians speculate he was attempting to mimic the voicing of John Coltrane’s soprano saxophone. As Barb Flaska of Pop Matters describes the sound, “…[it’s] a very strange-sounding ancestor to today's compact synthesizer. Kooper laid his hands on this French invention by Jean Jacques Perry and came up with “His Holy Modal Majesty”, a wild instrumental experimentation which summons up sonic memories of bagpipes transforming into Bulgarian harmonies.” The sound of the Ondioline on the “…Majesty” cut was so unlike the sound of the #1 Billboard Hot 100 pop tune “This Diamond Ring” that he wrote for Gary Lewis and the Playboys only four years earlier.
The Kooper-Stills collaboration reveals how experimental and adventurous they were concerning their recording session together. This could be partly attributed to all the cultural upheaval that was occurring at the time. But their willingness to take risks with their music and not succumb to the pressures of managers, engineers and popular trends could be based on their deep commitment to following their inner spirit. This is something I believe that separates the mercenaries from the musicians.
“Super Session” is an important album to include in your music archive. It is a quintessential blues-mix by an under-rated guitarist (Bloomfield) who died too soon to rise to the top of the heap. The album also gives you a taste of the diverse skills Stills has as an innovative session guitarist under pressure. And Al Kooper -- well, he’s a whole story in himself, a person who many people have failed to recognize adequately at this point in music history. It may be decades before anyone can totally assess the lengths Kooper’s musical reach has touched.
The 2003 remastered CD release of “Super Session” has bonus tracks that have never been released but should have been included on the original vinyl album. Some of the over-dubbed horns have been stripped out of a few of the songs, giving it a more “raw” appeal, one that Kooper prefers. I would recommend lending an ear to this 40 year-old jam session that was obviously way ahead of the curve and has righteously withstood the rigors of time. I equate this brief artistic slice of the ‘60’s to listening to music of the future, while standing with one foot in the past. It is undoubtedly another reason why the blues is a timeless entity.
Hey Michael—I miss ya big time—it's really gettin' crazy down here now, like you wouldn't believe. I'll see ya in awhile. Take care....
Alan[Kooper]
♦ ♦ ♦
2003 Super Session CD info:
• Audio CD re-released: April 08, 2003 digital remaster w/bonus tracks
• Original Release Date: August 1968 Columbia
• Label: Sony
• ASIN: B00008QSA5
• US CHART POSITION #12 . . . GOLD RECORD (12/04/70)
[Excerpt] ORIGINAL LP LINER NOTES (CS 9701) Always, the best things happen after hours, by accident, while the cat's away, when the moon goes behind a cloud and there’s no one else around; certainly the best music in America is made after twelve, deep in the rock and roll dungeons,… when whoever's in town and feeling restless, a bass player from one band and a drummer from another, a couple of others, rock and roll strays, they get together and jam, sometimes they collide, more often than not they tempt each other to take more and more risks,…. Not that there are likely to be too many records such as this one, it's not very often such a gifted bunch get together and shed blood, forget their own myths, and trust whatever it is comes naturally, and go wherever they fancy. It's like rock and roll NewYear's Eve.
--Michael Thomas, 1968
Resources 
The date was August 1968. The Beatles were forever topping the charts. Hendrix had begun to emerge as a driving force for a new direction in musical sound. Led Zeppelin began their pivotal hard rock trek into rock stardom. The Stones were the established bad boys of Rock ‘n Roll. Popular music seemed to be riding a razor’s edge toward uncharted territory. 
What is even as anomalous as Bloomfield’s part in the success of the album is Steven Stills’ ability to complete the rest of the recording session without ever singing a note. Arriving fresh from the group Buffalo Springfield, his vocals were notoriously superior to that of Kooper’s. On the lengthy eleven-minute track “Season of the Witch,” a rather mundane Donovan Leitch original composition, Stills embeds his personal signature by cranking out some state-of-the-art wah-wah riffage hearkening a sound that was to become commonplace for many years. Only a year prior to the release of “Super Session,” Jimi Hendrix learned from Frank Zappa about the auditory wonders of the effect pedal. Hendrix then began tinkering with the experimental wah-wah and mastered it for “Electric Ladyland,” released in October 1968. The electronically generated sound became a Hendrix trademark. Additionally, the swirling tones of Stills’ guitar on “You Don’t Love Me” are precursors to similar phaser effects that were used extensively on recordings released by Hendrix’ after “Super Session” was pressed. 
“Super Session” is an important album to include in your music archive. It is a quintessential blues-mix by an under-rated guitarist (Bloomfield) who died too soon to rise to the top of the heap. The album also gives you a taste of the diverse skills Stills has as an innovative session guitarist under pressure. And Al Kooper -- well, he’s a whole story in himself, a person who many people have failed to recognize adequately at this point in music history. It may be decades before anyone can totally assess the lengths Kooper’s musical reach has touched. 