Mike Cooper does not want to talk about how famous he might have beenhow he declined an offer to join the Rolling Stones, how he refused to conform to commercial folk-rock standards a decade later, or how that decision not only cost him a record deal but also sent him into exploratory musical exile for the next quarter-century.
Instead, the 71-year-old British guitarist living in Rome wants to talk about how he has imagined the city of Durham for the last 50 years. After Cooper’s first band broke up in the early ’60s, he spent a year obsessing over and imitating Blind Boy Fuller, the peripatetic Piedmont bluesman who toured hard and perhaps lived harder in and around Durham. He died in 1941 and is buried just south of N.C. Central University. More than 20 years after Fuller’s death, Cooper learned every one of his songs that he could find, even traveling to South London to visit a rare record collector who transferred several obscure singles to heavy acetate discs. Cooper still treasures them.
“I kind of became Blind Boy Fuller. And because of him, I’ve always had this image in my head of Durham,” he says, laughing. “Yesterday, I went and Googled it, and my image is totally ridiculous. I had this black-and-white photo in my head, how it would have been when he was around. But it’s a metropolis now, isn’t it?”
That kind of curiosity has defined the singular but assorted career of Cooper, an ever-restless musician who has moved between free jazz and blues guitar, electronic improvisation and operatic composition during the last half-century. For a brief but particularly fertile period in the early ’70s, after he’d declined the offer to take the Rolling Stones spot that Brian Jones would claim, Cooper funneled many of those interests into a triptych of LPs that stretched the boundaries of folk-rock by pretending they didn’t exist. Taken together, Trout Steel, Places I Know and The Machine Gun Co. with Mike Cooperreleased in succession from 1970 to 1972provide a suggestive map of the post-modern eclecticism that’s blossomed in an age where the extremes of the world’s collected music can be accessed with the few taps of a button. Saxophones shriek beneath simple chords. Would-be ballads veer suddenly through psychedelic spirals. The sense of possibility hangs, pregnant and loaded.
This week, the Chapel Hill-based label Paradise of Bachelors has reissued those three albums, bundling the last two into a double-disc package that, 40 years ago, was deemed too outlandish and audacious to work by another record company. In retrospect, Cooper’s decisions feel instead suspiciously prophetic, like a long-range weathervane more interested in the future than present atmospheric conditions.
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