55 Years Later: Revisiting Al Kooper’s Influential ‘Super Session’ With Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills

With fifty-five years of hindsight, it’s easy to see why Super Session (released 7/22/68) has exerted such influence on contemporary rock in the interim since its release. Besides its emphasis on the blues, the approach inherent to the album’s conception and execution not only stands right on the cusp of the supergroup phenomenon of its late Sixties era but also the increasingly prominent improvisational tendencies evinced by many bands of that same period (Cream, Grateful Dead, Allman Brothers to name just a few).

Comprising nine tracks, timing out at just over fifty minutes, the album was completed in a timely manner despite some adversity that arose during the two days of sessions Kooper had booked in the wake of his ouster from Blood Sweat & Tears. While day one went well in terms of recording mostly blues-based instrumental numbers like the nonchalant opening, “Albert’s Shuffle,” Bloomfield was a no-show for the next day (he suffered from severe insomnia, the debilitating symptoms of which also wreaked some havoc with the concert dates collected for The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper). 

In the process of departing Buffalo Springfield, Stephen Stills was languishing in a transitional period much like his guitar counterpart–who was about to disband his labor of love ensemble The Electric Flag–so he was able to step in and add a much different tone to the proceedings. On this comic romp through Bob Dylan’s “It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry,” for instance, his country-tinged guitar is a marked departure from Bloomfield’s sweet but raw sound, while the judicious use of wah-wah on the extended take of Donovan’s “Season of the Witch” sounds appropriately menacing. 

Not that the instrumental rendition of Jerry Ragavoy’s “Stop” wasn’t at least somewhat foreboding too. But it was a marked exception to a rule of otherwise upbeat performances including a pointedly rhythmic arrangement of Willie Cobb’s “You Don’t Love Me:” heavy on a phasing effect applied to Kooper’s lead vocal, it is otherwise a precursor to the streamlined take by the Allman Brothers as it appeared on At Fillmore East. 

Further distinguishing the forward-thinking sound of Super Session was the odd texture of a novel keyboard called the Ondioline on “His Holy Modal Majesty.” Yet the use of what was actually an analog synthesizer was less memorable than the fluid and authentic horn arrangements producer Kooper had overdubbed. 

The most outstanding of these is the slightly over two-minute performance of a piece composed by Harvey Brooks, the bassist at these sessions (and, hardly coincidentally, a former member of the Flag). Highlighted by soft sax and crisp electric piano, “Harvey’s Tune” is a suitably noir piece of music evoking last-call hours in the club that had teemed with people earlier the same evening.

 It’s the ideal denouement to a deceptively ambitious, well-paced album that proved popular (and commercially successful) way out of proportion to the $13k cost of its recording. The 2003 expanded reissue illustrates the essential verities of Super Session but does so through the process of addition by subtraction. That is, hearing the tracks without the overdubbed horns, like the aforementioned opener “Albert’s Shuffle,” reaffirms the wisdom of the decision to integrate them into the performance.

Those charts also highlight the fluidity of the instrumental unit assembled by Al Kooper. Partly based on his position of A&R at Columbia, as well as his past experience working with Mike Bloomfield on Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, the Brooklyn-born songwriter/musician/producer enlisted a roster of players including another Flag expatriate, keyboardist Barry Goldberg, and drummer ‘Fast’ Eddie Hoh (who as a teenager knew the latter and ‘Bloomers’); the resulting sophistication suggests what might have been in the aforementioned live setting had that process not become disrupted in much the same way as the studio project. 

Yet such tumult in itself foreshadows the often rocky relationships that plagued high-profile and much-ballyhooed alliances like CSNY, not to mention the personality clashes and self-indulgences of projects like Electric Mud, the intended ‘modern’ homage to McKinley Morganfield, and Triumvirate, Bloomer’s own 1973 collaboration with Dr. John and John Hammond Jr.

On this now half-century-plus-old Super Session, Bloomfield, Kooper, Stills, and company showed us exactly how it’s done, even if, at the time, they were scrambling to make it happen. It’s all the more remarkable that, in retrospect, it all sounds so effortless.