Boogie Man (2 page)

MC5: ‘Motor City Is Burning’ (1968)

Don’t forget the Motor City! The year after the Detroit riots and JLH’s own release of this mordant commentary, the song received this incendiary, incandescent
in-concert hot-rodding from the composer’s fellow Detroiters, the insurrectionary activist band whose brief career helped lay a powder trail for what erupted only a few years later as punk.
Almost a decade further on, the title was obliquely referenced by The Clash in one of their most powerful early songs, ‘London’s Burning’.

POP STAPLES with STEVE CROPPER and ALBERT KING:
‘Tupelo’ (1969)

Where Hooker’s baritone is dark and heavy, the unassuming, understated tenor of Roebuck ‘Pop’ Staples, the founding patriarch of The Staple Singers, is
light in both senses of the term. A fellow Mississippian and contemporary of Hooker’s, he explores this incantatory account of the apocalyptic flood of 1927 (which also inspired classic songs
by Charley Patton and Bessie Smith, not to mention – many years later – by Randy Newman) from the inside: the trademark vibrato pulse and throb of his ominous guitar subtly coloured and
decorated with truly exquisite restraint by Cropper and King. Bob Dylan reworked and deconstructed ‘Tupelo’ as ‘The Big Flood’ in one of the
still-unofficial stretches of
The Basement Tapes
, along with ‘I’m In The Mood’.

THE DOORS: ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ (1971)

Since everybody who enters the universe of a Hooker song finds there what they’ve brought with them, it should come as little or no surprise that The Doors’
Jim Morrison finds an ominous, brooding sexual brag’n’swagger. Morrison fancied himself as a blues singer (among other things), and this performance, from their
LA Woman
album,
stands alongside their eponymous debut album’s stab at Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Back Door Man’ (composed by Willie Dixon) as a cornerstone of his claim to those particular keys
to that particular highway. Mean, moody, measured and menacing, with a mid-tempo funk stomp from the rhythm section and guitar and piano solos respectively idiosyncratic (Robbie Krieger) and chilly
(Ray Mabnzarek), Morrison evokes Hooker without mimicking him – a harder trick to pull off than you might think.

GEORGE THOROGOOD & THE DESTROYERS:
‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ (1977)

Raw, extrovert and thoroughly rockin’, this exuberant ride through one of Hooker’s greatest party-time barroom boogies mashes up the titular song and the
picaresque shaggy-dog narrative of ‘House Rent Boogie’ with relentless energy and extravagant panache. Riotous and rambunctious, this reaches out to the FUN side of John Lee Hooker: the
groovaliciously dynamic entertainer who used to wreck/rock the house at all those legendary long-gone Detroit taverns, making sure the dancers just couldn’t hide, receives all due honour
here.

DR FEELGOOD: ‘Mad Man Blues’ (1986)

The Thin White Wolf – Dr Feelgood’s late lead vocalist Lee Brilleaux – fronts a latter-day version of the legendary Canvey Island R&B gangstaz for a
visceral take on one of Hooker’s toughest, nastiest, scariest songs. Delivering a grimily distorted vocal through a harp mic plugged into an amp and backed only by guitar and footstomp,
Brilleaux squared up to the maestro on his own musical turf and gave a very good account of himself indeed. Rough, raw and as far in-yer-face as it’s possible to get. I reckon John Lee
would’ve heartily approved.

This foreword is long overdue – as I type, I fancy I can hear my publisher’s fingertips drumming impatiently on his desk – but I’m strangely reluctant
to declare it done, sign it off and send it off . . . partly because there’s always more to say, and partly because it means saying goodbye again . . . both to
Boogie Man
, and to John
Lee himself.

This book took me eight years to write. It cost me more money than I’ve ever earned from it, my sanity (a fragile thing at the best of times) and a marriage (of which the same could be
said, though I was too deeply immersed in my task to realise it at the time) . . . but I’m still proud of it, still glad to have written it and thoroughly delighted that it’s now
available once more. A massive ‘thank you, fellas’ is thereby due to John Seaton at Canongate for bringing it back to the world after a first attempt at another publishing house
stalled, and to my agent Julian Alexander at the LAW agency, for unflappably sorting out all that stuff that always needs sorting out.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading it, and that it moves you to explore some of the music discussed herein and the times, places and culture that stimulated its making; if such is the case, may
the music do for you what it’s supposed to do, just as God and John Lee Hooker intended.

Blues is
still
the healer, and always will be.

Peace be upon you.

Celebrating the centenary of the birth of Robert Johnson . . . and raising an extra glass to John Lee . . . just in case.

INTRO

I got a history long as from here to London, England, and back, and back again. I got so much to tell, and so much to write about. Everything you read on the album covers is not
true, and every album cover reads different. People using their own ideas; they didn’t come to me, to get it from me. John Lee did this, he did that. I’m gonna tell you, as far as I
know, the truth about my life. I got nothin’ to hold back. Some things I have forgotten. Some things you ask me, I know but I done forgotten. I just about know what I did, but some people may
say . . . tell you some things I didn’t do. Nobody know John Lee Hooker. They know as much about my cat as they know about me. It was a hard road.

Sometimes I don’t enjoy talkin’ about it, but it’s true. Some of it you hate to think about, you just want to throw it out your mind. You don’t even want to think about
what you come through, because sometimes it brings you down thinking about the hard times, the rough times, what happened to you over the years. There’s a lot of misery, hatred,
disappointment . . . all that. I hate to talk about it . . . but it’s there. A lot of them were rough years. You just want to think about the good things, the happy things. There’s so
many things I regret, I can’t put my hand on it. I made my decisions early in life, to be a musician. Before that, I was a hard-working person. I didn’t like handouts. I’d get out
there and work, earn a living and stuff like that, but that wasn’t what I was going to do the rest of my life. I knew that.

That was a hard road, right up to now. It was a
hard
road.

1

THEY DON’T GIVE THIS OLD BOY NUTHIN’

High noon in the lobby of a generic airport hotel on the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey. John Lee Hooker, the blues singer, is leaning on the reception desk methodically
charming the pants off the receptionist. He is an elderly, dark-skinned man of slightly below medium height, lean and wiry except for a neat, globular pot-belly, and dressed like a Japanese banker,
albeit a Japanese banker fond of augmenting his immaculate pinstriped three-piece suit with menacing wraparound sunglasses, a rakish Homburg hat decorated with a guitar-shaped brooch, and socks
emblazoned with big white stars.

He turns from his banter to greet a recent acquaintance. ‘Huh-huh-how you doin’, young man,’ he says in a deep, resonant voice, as grainily resilient as fine leather.
Electronics companies make fortunes by manufacturing reverberation and equalization devices which make voices sound like that. Hooker sounds as if he has $100,000 worth of sophisticated digital
goodies built into his chest and throat. Yet his voice is quiet and muted, its tonal richness off set by a residual stammer and blurred by the deepest alluvial accents of the Mississippi Delta. He
extends a hand as softly leathery as his voice, a hand like a small cushion, but he leaves it bonelessly limp in his acquaintance’s grasp. The top joint of his right thumb joins the root at
an angle of almost ninety degrees, the legacy of more than six decades of plucking blues guitar bass runs. Were the
acquaintance sufficiently injudicious to give Hooker’s
hand an overly enthusiastic squeeze, the response would have been a warning glance from behind the wraparounds, and a mock-agonized wince and flap of the offended paw. No-one crushes John Lee
Hooker’s hand, just as no-one allows cigarette smoke to drift into his breathing space. That hand, and its opposite number, creates a blues guitar sound which nobody, no matter how gifted,
has ever been able to duplicate effectively; that voice is one of the world’s cultural treasures. You endanger either at your own peril.

It’s August of 1991 and Hooker, a rhythm and blues veteran whose first million-selling record, ‘Boogie Chillen’, had been released over forty years earlier but whose career had
been in effective hibernation for more than fifteen years, is surfing a renewed wave of popularity without any real precedent in the history of the turbulent relationship between blues, rock and
the mass market. His last major record contract, with the once-mighty ABC label, had been allowed to expire in 1974, by mutual consent, after the last of an increasingly dismal series of
rock-oriented albums, which reflected little credit on either company or artist, had died an ignomnious death in the stores. Subsequent recordings, for small independent outfits, had been few and
far between; often of indifferent quality, and generating only mediocre sales. In the mid-’80s, management of Hooker’s career had devolved onto the shoulders of Mike Kappus, an
ambitious young music-business entrepreneur. A California-based transplant from the Midwest, Kappus had found himself helming an album project to make a real, proper John Lee Hooker record and
facilitate ‘a paying of tribute by friends’. To this end, he had assembled a bevy of Hooker’s famous admirers – including stars like Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt, plus
his own other clients like George Thorogood, the fast-rising young blues star Robert Cray, and the East Los Angeles Chicano roots-rockers Los Lobos – to co-star on a new record which would
restate the fundamental values of Hooker’s music, untainted
by undignified concessions to transitory pop-rock fashion, and reintroduce the frail titan to the pop
mainstream. Shopping the resulting album,
The Healer
, to the major record companies, he had found no serious takers. It saw eventual release in the winter of 1989 via two decidedly minor
independent companies: Chameleon Records in the US and Silvertone in the UK. To the surprise of just about everyone, it was a hit. First in the UK and then in the US, the album climbed the pop
charts. One week, Hooker was even outselling Madonna.

By the New Year, the illiterate septuagenarian from the Mississippi Delta had become the world’s oldest and unlikeliest pop star. During the summer of 1990, Hooker and his band, their fee
now jacked into the stratosphere, hit every major blues, folk and jazz festival in the northern hemisphere. By autumn, the tour had grossed a figure not unadjacent to three million dollars.

In the summer of 1991, a sequel,
Mr Lucky
, stood ready for release. This time, the co-stars included Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, Albert Collins, Johnny Winter and Van
Morrison; and once again, Hooker was on the road, prised from his suburban California hideaway to perform three concerts on the East Coast in locations ranging from grimy New Jersey to genteel New
England. In the baking heat of the hotel parking lot, Hooker’s car is ready: a rented white Buick Park Avenue with Georgia plates. His driver is a young emissary from Mike Kappus’s
Rosebud Agency. Like all the Rosebuddies, he combines brisk efficiency with laid-back San Francisco cool, and an absolute devotion to Hooker’s comfort. The baggage – including
Hooker’s all-important Gibson guitars – is slung into the the trunk, and Hooker creakily installs himself in the back seat with his travelling companion, the diminutive singer Vala
Cupp, who serves as warm-up act with Hooker’s group, The Coast To Coast Blues Band. Chameleon have just released her solo album, nominally produced by Hooker and featuring him on the duet
version of his venerable
‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ which they perform together at every show. Can the acquaintance think of any UK labels which might be interested
in releasing it?

The duet has become one of the major theatrical set-pieces of Hooker’s show. The song itself, learned on the front porch of his childhood home from his earliest blues mentor Tony Hollins,
is among the oldest in Hooker’s repertoire, first recorded by him in 1949 and – re-recorded in tandem with Keith Richards – one of
Mr Lucky
’s show-pieces. Performed
with Cupp, it becomes a sensual epic: she hovers around Hooker’s chair like a butterfly, trading lines with him in a progressively more fevered exchange which culminates in a reassuringly
daughterly peck on the cheek. Not surprisingly, there is a certain amount of speculation concerning the exact nature of Hooker’s relationship with Cupp, generally amongst white male rockers
of what we might call ‘a certain age’, to whom the great man’s predilection for surrounding himself with attractive young women is something of an inspiration; cause for an
optimistic vision of their own rapidly approaching twilight years. Hooker, wrote Dennis Hopper in the notes to the soundtrack (by Hooker and Miles Davis) for his movie
The Hot Spot
,
‘proves you can still make a steady diet of fried chicken well into your seventies and still try to get all of those pretty young things into a hot tub’. The nudge-nudge-wink-wink
response generally received by Hooker’s own denials – ‘they ain’t my girlfriends, we just
friends
’ – obscures the fact that, most of the time, he’s
telling the truth. There are exceptions, though. A friend of the acquaintance is fond of recounting the tale of when attending the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, he and a buddy found
that the hotel room that they were sharing was kitty-corner from Hooker’s. The buddy, an obsessive Hooker fan, insisted on knocking at the great man’s door so that he could press the
flesh and testify to his devotion. So he did. After a long delay, Hooker came to the door in his shirtsleeves. Visible behind him, in the bed, was this fabulous blonde; you know,
really
fabulous. After a brief exchange of pleasantries, Hooker announced, ‘Well-uh-uh-uh, it certainly has been a pleasure meetin’ you, young man, but right now I got me
some business to ’tend to.’ And then he closed the door.