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EDITOR’SNOTE
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Hopper, Kooper And The
Super Duper
Blooper
Al was not your average, ordinary 20 year
old. He was accomplished enough as a
musician to be invited to an important
recording session with a major artist. Still, he
was a bit intimidated when he arrived at the
session, guitar in hand, and found Michael
Bloomfield, bluesman extraordinaire, already
unpacking his guitar. He knew he was out of
his league. He didn’t unpack his own guitar,
but he didn’t give up either.
Instead, he quietly slipped into
the control room and sat next to
the producer, looking for an opportunity.
Maybe the drummer would
spontaneously combust, or the
bass player wouldn’t show up. Then
it happened.
No, the drummer didn’t go up in a cloud
of smoke, but the organ player did get up and
move over to the piano. Al’s eyes lit up. Turning
to the producer, he asked if he could go
and sit in on the organ.
“Oh, Al, you’re not an organ player,” the
producer responded.
“But I have the perfect part for this song,”
Al insisted. He was bluffing. He really had little
more than the burning desire to play on
the record. But the producer saw right
through him.
After some back and forth, the producer
got a phone call and left the room. Al quietly
slipped behind the plastic keys of the organ.
When the producer came back and saw him
“I have the perfect part
for this song,” Al insisted.
He was bluffing.
at the keyboards, he gave Kooper a hard time.
“What are you doing?” the producer said. But
he let Kooper stay on the keys.
I once saw a locally produced broadcast—
and I use the word “produced” very loosely—
of a presentation given by a very short, whitehaired
lady in a Navy uniform. I was instantly
captivated by the little lady’s huge stature as
RichardCadena
she described her rise through the ranks of
the Navy. She started as a computer programmer,
one of the first in the world. She
programmed the Mark I computer
in 1943 and in 1973 she became the
first U.S. citizen and the first woman
to become a Distinguished Fellow of
the British Computer Society. She said
she kept a clock that ran backwards
on the wall behind her desk in her office to
illustrate that just because “it’s always been
done that way,” there’s no reason not to do
things differently. She handed out “nanoseconds”
in the form of lengths of wire about a
foot long the distance that electrons travel in
one nanosecond to illustrate that, in order to
be fast, computers had to be small. Then she
would hold up a “millisecond,” a coil of wire
about a thousand feet long. But the most vivid
message she delivered was one I’ll never forget.
“It’s much easier,” she said, “to apologize
than it is to get permission.” The speaker was
the late, great Rear Admiral Grace Hooper.
If you listen to the recording of Bob
Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone” you’ll notice that
the organ always comes in an eighth note behind
the rest of the band. You see, Al Kooper
was not a keyboard player. He was the guitar
player who showed up to the recording session
to find Michael Bloomfield there, a guitar
player who, by Kooper’s own admission, was
far and away a much better player than he. So
when Kooper slipped behind the keyboard to
play that song, he was waiting until he heard
the rest of the band to confirm that he was
playing the right chords. Apparently he was.
Later on, when everyone was in the control
room listening to the playback, Dylan
asked the producer to turn up the organ.
The producer protested, saying that Kooper
wasn’t a real organ player. Dylan didn’t care;
he liked what he heard.
That song turned out to be one of Dylan’s
earliest and biggest hits, and the organ part
is its signature sound. But had Kooper waited
for permission to play the organ it never
would have happened. Kooper took a chance,
even though he wasn’t trained for the task he
took on.
I’m not sure Kooper knew who Rear Admiral
Hooper was, but he was following her
advice anyways. You should too.
I see a lot of young aspiring production
professionals waiting for permission to start
their career, to learn AutoCAD, to take on a
lighting design, basically to do anything for
which they don’t feel comfortable doing.
Waiting for permission is not the conventional
way to greatness. Greatness takes risk,
it takes guts and it sometimes takes making
a lot of mistakes even very big mistakes. I’m
talking colossal blunders, super-duper bloopers.
But it doesn’t take permission.
The judicious application of Hopper’s axiom
just do it is the first step towards greatness.
Don’t wait for permission to take a bold step in
your life. Take a big chance today.
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Projection, Lights & Staging News (ISSN:
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