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Meet Mike Cooper, the mysterious folk blues legend who turned down The Rolling Stones
06.06.2014
11:01 am
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I won’t pretend to have ever heard of Mike Cooper prior to yesterday, but I am very glad I have. Cooper is an obscure folk-blues artist who, legend has it, was offered the job in The Rolling Stones that Brian Jones eventually filled. (Cooper was running a blues club in Reading where a young Mick and Keith hung out I guess is the short version of that story.) The guitarist and songwriter released three experimental folk LPs on Dawn/Pye Records in the early 1970s but then essentially dropped out of the music business making an itinerant hippie living in Spain and Germany painting and busking before eventually returning to musical work in the 80s and settling in Rome.

It is this trio of fabled 70s albums—Trout Steel (1970), Places I Know (1971), and The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooper (1972) that the heroic North Carolina-based Paradise of Bachelors label are rebirthing into the world after two years of working on prying the tapes from the vaults. Based on the evidence of what I’ve heard so far, it seems to have been worth the effort.

When I clicked the link over to their Soundcloud page, I noticed that the tags they’d added for Cooper read #beefheart, #albertayler, #gratefuldead, #beefheart, timbuckly# and #pharoahsanders. Not like there would be many people searching for him there by name at this point, of course, but I wouldn’t quibble with any of those tags, either. Add in the facts that the title for Trout Steel was inspired by Richard Brautigan and “The Machine Gun Co.” bandname is a nod to German free jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann and I think you’ll get the idea… sort of. I’ve only heard these three tracks so far and the range on the three albums is supposed to be quite wide. His sound is unique: Blues, folk and free jazz improvisation… all at once.
 

 
“I’ve Got Mine,” is a stunning 11-minute-long improvised acoustic epic that Cooper described to American Songwriter:

“I’m actually in Spain at the moment up the coast some way from where that song was written in the early 70s. I was very much into the works of the mystic sufi poets such as Rumi at that time and the lyric uses a lot of the same symbolism that they used. It was also the first song that we decided to let the musicians have a totally free field to improvise over the pulse – plus we experimented with some delay echo effects influenced by the (at the time) very early dub music.”

 

 
“The Singing Tree” was premiered recently on the WSJ’s website. The way the number is described there just makes you want to hit play, doesn’t it?

The song starts as a fairly standard early-’70s folk-rock tune that burbles along on a blend of organ and acoustic guitar as Cooper sings pastoral lyrics in a soulful tenor. Midway through the song, little squiggles of sound appear in the background, softly at first, like an auditory hallucination, and become more prominent squawks and honks as the song rolls on. Cooper says he wrote the tune while on vacation in Almuñécar on the southern coast of Spain, inspired by the scenery outside his lodging and “The Conference of Birds” by the Persian poet Farid ud-Din Attar.

“Outside our window was a solitary Norfolk pine,” Cooper told Speakeasy. “Every evening at sunset, thousands of birds would gather in this solitary tree and make an incredible racket.”

Gorgeous tune. Whimsical and lovely. Reminds me a bit of Licorice Root Orchestra. It’s a pity it took so long for Mike Cooper’s music to be heard.

Here’s one more, “Country Water.” It kinda sounds like one of his old buddy Keef’s numbers, but Cooper can sing a whole lot better…
 

 

 
Thank you Jessica Linker!

Posted by Richard Metzger
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06.06.2014
11:01 am
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