A Classic in the Debauchery Canon

In one seven-word incantation, the sawed-off, lion-hearted prophet Ian Dury passed along a magic recipe for the rock-star memoir: "sex and drugs and rock and roll." But chart-making artist, producer, sideman and Blood Sweat & Tears founder Al Kooper—who assured his immortality by brass-balling his untutored organ stylings onto Bob Dylan's "Like a Rolling Stone"—was the first to get the proportions right. First published in 1977, Kooper's Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards (Backbeat, 352 pp., $19.95) remains a riotous yet instructive chronicle of eyewitness rock history laced with fondly recalled debauchery—essential reading for kids who want to see a million faces and rock them all.

By the Caligulan standards of the Mötley Crüe screw-all The Dirt or the Led Zep bio Hammer of the Gods, Kooper's book seems almost tranquil. A nice Jewish kid from Brooklyn whose inner Keith Moon was somewhat tethered by a tetchy ulcer and a streak of self-preservation, the frizzy-haired, dark-shaded Kooper never dueled Ozzy in a red-ant snort-off nor engaged in piscine gynecology with groupies. Apart from a brief immersion in the late-'70s Hollywood swingers' scene, the carnal indulgences recounted here are wryly circumspect: "We ended up consummating our mutual feelings for each other on the indoor handball court."

But that is the stuff most bands put forward when they've done little else worth remembering. What Kooper has to offer is a shotgun seat (and sometimes a peek behind the wheel) on some of postwar pop's dizziest rides. Starting with the girl-group-era New York hit mill that became known as "the Brill Building sound" (though he insists the nearby 1650 Broadway building was the true epicenter), Kooper winds through the 1960s folk and blues-rock explosion, with his Blues Project going to bumpy road college with Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry and other greats. From there he plays at a moment's notice on the Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (one of countless "he did that?" moments) before lending his production services to a scruffy but tight band of hellraisers on the Atlanta club scene—Lynyrd Skynyrd to you.

Kooper renders these in crackling anecdotes that make both the teller and the subject vivid. See the author finagle Joni Mitchell's landmark emergence at Newport out of sheer lust, essentially enlisting Judy Collins as his wingman. Watch as Skynyrd's Ronnie Van Zant coolly demolishes a bandmate's racist putdown of Jimi Hendrix. Nowhere is Kooper's eye sharper than in the sections on Dylan, who radiates malicious mischief and mercurial talent—yet cannot bring himself, during the legendary Blonde on Blonde sessions, to address blind Nashville session great Hargus Robbins by his nickname, Pig.

Revised and reissued to commemorate Kooper's 50th year in music, Backstage Passes & Backstabbing Bastards lives up to its name, settling old scores with shifty managers, conniving ex-bandmates and icky mogul Clive Davis—and offering, in the process, a virtual music-biz class in surviving the suits. He also challenges rock-crit orthodoxy whenever the chance arises, most dramatically with a far different reading of the boos that greeted Dylan's electric Newport appearance. If Kooper sometimes shortchanges his own depth of experience (hello? you played on Electric Ladyland but can't cough up one measly detail about the session itself?), he never misses a chance for a self-deprecating one-liner or a wisecrack. Faced with finding a manager, he writes, "I'd rather comparison shop for diarrhea."

That caustic wit extends to Kooper's move to Nashville in 1990 and subsequent flight seven years later. "[In] the early nineties, some geniuses thought it would be a great idea to gentrify the downtown," he laments. "The streets crawled with people who craved buying commemorative tee shirts in shitty souvenir shops disguised as restaurants.... The people I had moved away from L.A. to avoid began to move to Nashville in droves." Al Kooper may have fled Music City for Boston—were things really that bad?!?—but for the length of this classic rock memoir, he's present in blood, sweat and tears.