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ON THIS DATE (56 YEARS AGO)
July 22, 1968 – Mike Bloomfield/Al Kooper/Stephen Stills: Super Session is released.
# ALL THINGS MUSIC PLUS+ 5/5
# Allmusic 4.5/5 stars

Super Session is an album envisioned by Al Kooper and featuring the work of guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Stephen Stills, released on July 22, 1968. It reached #12 on the Billboard 200 Top LP's chart.

"Super Session," is a collaborative effort between musicians Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, along with other notable session musicians.

Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper had previously worked together on Bob Dylan's album "Highway 61 Revisited" and had a history of collaboration. Kooper, who was working as an A&R man for Columbia at the time, wanted to record with Bloomfield again. He organized two days of studio time and invited Bloomfield, along with other musicians like keyboardist Barry Goldberg and bassist Harvey Brooks, to join the sessions.

On the first day of recording, the group laid down mostly blues-based instrumental tracks, showcasing their musical talents and chemistry. However, on the second day, Bloomfield didn't show up, leaving Kooper and the other musicians without their lead guitarist.

Needing to salvage the second day of sessions, Kooper called upon Stephen Stills, who was in the process of leaving his band Buffalo Springfield. Stills stepped in to fill the gap left by Bloomfield, and the group focused on recording vocal tracks. Some of the songs they recorded included a cover of Bob Dylan's "It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes a Train to Cry" and a lengthy and atmospheric version of Donovan's "Season of the Witch."

The album "Super Session" was a success, receiving critical acclaim and achieving gold record status, despite being recorded on a relatively modest budget of $13,000. It became a landmark release, influencing the concept of "supergroups" in the late 1960s and 1970s, where musicians from different bands would come together to create new projects.

Following the album's release, Kooper and Bloomfield performed together on several occasions, and some of their live performances were later released as the album "The Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper."

"Super Session" remains a significant and influential record in the history of rock music, showcasing the talents of these accomplished musicians and the power of collaboration.
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ORIGINAL 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 there1s no one else around; certainly the best music in America is made after twelve, deep in the rock and roll dungeons, little clubs in New York and California, 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, always they discover something they'd perhaps had in mind but couldn't quite bring home before, they dare and thrill each other, and, because there1s nothing to lose that's not best done without, and there's no one to please but themselves, these loose, peppery, brief encounters between an itinerant few are where musical suspicions are tamed or run amuck, it can be a rare synthesis, or it can be gang-rape, but whatever happens, it's where elemental rock and roll, and especially the blues, begins and ends. When everybody's gone home, all but the friends and lovers, that's when the best things happen.

You may never hear it. It's hard to locate, it's hard to get the right people in the right place at the right time, the very spontaneity and rashness of a jam depend on the good luck of one night in the month of May, any night, but no night in particular, a jam is, must be, a fugitive occasion, but as rock and roll and blues become more permissive, as they approach the jazz assumption of free-wheeling improvisation, there is the opportunity for records such as this one. Not that there are likely to be too many records such as this one, it1s 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 New Year's Eve.

Kooper, Bloomfield and Stills, all refugees from different bands that one way or another lost their way, very good bands, Kooper's swaggering brass adventure "Blood, Sweat and Tears," Bloomfield's easy-grooving "Electric Flag," Stills' good-time "Buffalo Springfield," the three of them battle-scarred but furiously creative, Kooper, stringy, haggard, in orange velvet and cherry satins, low-down Mike Bloomfield, like an exuberant gangster with a rose tattoo, Stills, like a funky young cowboy neighbor all dressed up for a poker game, all obsessed musicians, all, on these sessions, playing better than they ever have, dancing like butterflies, stinging like bees, the way they play when they're the only ones listening.

Bloomfield has never played so sweet and salty as he does on the blues jams, Kooper wrenches giddy acts of God out of the organ, and you have to dig his weird, rheumy singing, like a soulful asthmatic, and Stills brings a breath of that sweet country air to the Dylan tune, and then makes you aware, for the first time, that the wah-wah pedal's not just a war toy, on Donovan's song, that's Donovan the minstrel. And the record ends with the first known tune by Harvey Brooks, the gentle grizzly bear of rock and roll. So what happened was, I was at Kooper's house, and there's all these pictures of him all over the walls and a picture of Bob Dylan shaving on the piano, and a color pinup of Frank Sinatra before the war, framed in gold tin, and Kooper's 1965 Citation of Achievement Award for writing "This Diamond Ring," and this little dog who looks like Mary's little lamb running around everywhere knocking over piles of records eight miles high, and Joan's brushing her long brown hair, right to her ass, and he says, "Why don't you do notes?", and, remember, it's 100 degrees in New York and Bobby Kennedy just got shot and I've lost the key to my bicycle and I've got to walk home but he plays the tapes again, and I don't know why he needs notes, who has notes, it's an honest album, you can't whistle it while you walk home and it's 100 degrees, but I'd be ashamed not to say I love it.

--Michael Thomas, 1968
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ROLLING STONE HALL OF FAME Review
Rolling Stone
Issue 869 May 24, 2001

Super Session
Mike Bloomfield/Al Kooper/Steve Stills
Columbia, 1968

THE IDEA WAS SIMPLE:
Two out-of-work rock-star pals pull into a studio, jam on some blues changes and put out a record. Guitarist Mike Bloomfield, late of the Butterfield Blues Band, had just quit his psychedelic-R&B project, the Electric Flag; singer-organist Al Kooper was fresh out of Blood, Sweat and Tears. And the two had already played together on Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. The empathy was up and running immediately. In one nine-hour session, Bloomfield and Kooper, with pianist Barry Goldberg, bassist Harvey Brooks and drummer Eddie Hoh, cut enough music for one whole side of an LP: two long, sweet blues, a raga-jazz trip and covers of Curtis Mayfield's "Man's Temptation" and the 1968 Howard Tate single "Stop."

Bloomfield didn't play another note on the record. A chronic insomniac sinking into long-term he**in addiction, he abruptly split for home the next day, leaving Kooper to finish Super Session with a hastily recruited Steve Stills. But what Bloomfield left behind is still the best half an album in late-Sixties rock: five performances comprising the single finest document of Bloomfield's rare gifts as a guitarist, the visceral swing and clarity of attack that were heard less and less on record in the decade leading to his death from a drug overdose in 1981.

The most amazing thing about Bloomfield's playing on Super Session is its absolute joy. With Butterfield, he often sounded like an impatient purist, pressing against blues convention with a fitful mix of apostolic propriety and caged-animal violence. But in "Really" and "Stop," there is a wide-open cheer and confidence in Bloomfield's tone -- a clean, sharp peal descended from the treble-y stab of three Kings (B.B., Albert and Freddie) -- and his meaty glide from note to note. Bloomfield's opening and closing solos in "Albert's Shuffle" are stunning displays of grip and virtuosity, of his ability to fire dense knots of melody with dead aim. And in "His Holy Modal Majesty," Bloomfield's Indo-Coltrane maneuvers combine free-jazz aggression with the concentrated solemnity of prayer.

The Stills numbers are pretty fine, too: The mod-cowboy jangle he drapes over Dylan's "It Takes Alot To Laugh, It Takes A Train To Cry," the sexy dread of his wah-wah yelps in "Season Of The Witch." And Kooper is a classy ringmaster, gluing the record together with strong, straight singing and classy, unobtrusive horn overdubs. But Bloomfield -- then at the height of his powers -- is the reason Super Session deserves its name.

After it hit the Top Twenty in late '68, packs of lazy rock stars in search of easy coin tried peddling hours of dire studio noodling as "super sessions." But there was only one true Super Session. This is it.

--David Fricke
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RECORD WORLD, August 24, 1968 - Pick Hits

SUPER SESSION MIKE BLOOMFIELD, AL KOOPER, STEVE STILLS-Columbia CS 9701. Al Kooper and Mike Bloomfield team up for the first side. Bloomfield and Steve Stills make the side two scene. An album idea that is bound to encourage others. The best rock musicians take the jam session opportunity to work out together for mutual fun and fan benefit. "Albert's Shuffle," "Season of the Witch."
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TRACKS:
Side one
1 Albert's Shuffle (Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield) - 6:54
2 Stop (Jerry Ragovoy, Mort Shuman) - 4:23
3 Man's Temptation (Curtis Mayfield) - 3:24
4 His Holy Modal Majesty (Kooper, Mike Bloomfield) - 9:16
5 Really (Al Kooper, Mike Bloomfield) - 5:30

Side two
1 It Takes A Lot to Laugh, It Takes A Train to Cry (Dylan) - 3:30
2 Season of the Witch (Donovan Leitch) - 11:07
3 You Don't Love Me (Willie Cobbs) - 4:11
4 Harvey's Tune (Harvey Brooks) - 2:07

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Lead Belly

“The blues is like this. You lay down some night and you turn from one side of the bed to the other: all night long. It’s not too cold in that bed, and it ain’t too hot. But what’s the matter? The blues has got you.” - Lead Belly

Huddie William Ledbetter

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