Boogie Man (17 page)

‘Oh
God
,’ breathes Hooker. ‘
Jeff
.’

We’re calling this particular guy Jeff because it’s not his real name. He’s one of those people Hooker just
meets
, and he seems to have become semi-permanent. It could
have been at the vet’s surgery while getting some essential maintenance work done on Fluffy, because Jeff’s dog had been run over by a careless driver and needed considerable veterinary
work, and Hooker – who likes to think of himself as being tough and hard-headed about money but in fact seems to end up putting his hand in his newly capacious pocket for the benefit of at
least half the people he knows – wound up footing the pooch’s bills. Bearded, plaid-clad, long-haired, baseball-capped Jeff is hugely amiable
and essentially
harmless, but undeniably a touch on the weird side. For example, he has this story that he regularly insists on telling: apparently before they got famous the Beatles flew John Lee to London
for
a whole year
so that he could teach them guitar, and it was only after John Lee thought they were ready that they made their first records. So why hasn’t this story ever been told before?
Easy; it was
hushed up
. And they paid John a lot of money not to tell anybody.

So here’s Jeff tramping up the front garden path and before you know it, there’s a whole family of complete strangers standing over John in his sofa, and a thickset blind guy is
shaking hands with John, telling him that he’s been a big, big fan since forever and it’s a
real thrill
. Seems Jeff met these people somewhere, mentioned that he knew John, asked
if they felt like meeting him, and here they are. So they all shake hands, and then John tells Jeff that he’s busy – which he’s not, particularly – and that they’ll
all get together soon. And so Jeff leads them all out again.

‘This kid Jeff, he’s a nice kid but he’s a
pest
,’ sighs Hooker once the coast is clear, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. ‘You know me, I’m a very
easy-going, quiet person. I’m just a softie. I don’t tell ’em to go to hell or get out or nothin’; I don’t do that. A lotta stars, they couldn’t even get in the
house, but I’m not like that. That blind guy, he really nice. A lot of ’em nice. This Jeff kid nice. They
all
be nice. But . . .’

Exactly.
But
. John Lee – as he never tires of repeating – loves people. All people. All kinds of people. People in general, and people in particular.
But
. . . that
doesn’t necessarily mean that he wants all of them in his house, all the time. However, sometimes that’s what he gets. So, while we’re briefly looking ahead to spring, imagine a
quiet Saturday night in Redwood City. Tell you the truth, it’s moderately difficult to imagine any
other
kind of Saturday night in Redwood City, but on this particular Saturday
evening, the only real option seems to be to call up a mutual friend to hustle a lift over to John Lee’s
house. It’ll be
mellow
. It’ll be so nice and
laid back
. Just sit around, watch a movie or a game, pop a couple of lite beers, chit-chat a little and
kick back
.

To start with, that’s just exactly how it goes down. There’s something fairly inconsequential like a
Karate Kid
movie on TV, and John is recounting Albert King’s riposte
to a female fan who asked if she could take his picture – ‘
Buy my album, there’s a picture of me on the cover!
’ – when there’s a crunch of miscellaneous
footsteps outside, and craziness walks in. First of all, there’s a hardbodied bleach-blonde woman in an elaborate black leather and PVC ensemble, waving a bottle of tequila and screaming in
an ersatz Southern accent. By comparison, Madonna comes across like a morbidly prim Victorian schoolgirl. Because it’s not her name, let’s call her Cathy. It later turns out that during
the week, Cathy is a seriously high-powered business whiz in San Francisco, holding down an extremely responsible and gruelling job involving eleven-hour days, seven-figure budgets and entire
floorsful of people reporting to her. During the week, she works out conscientiously, she touches not one drop of alcohol, she is the precise, rigorous, disciplined, supremely organized Ms Jekyll.
Guess who emerges at the weekend. Following in her wake is a bemused-looking, guffawing, denim-clad high-school kid with a blond shag-cut and a wispy moustache; two quiet and extremely obese women
in stretch slacks, cardigans and training shoes; and assorted others whose best bet for weekend fun is to hang out at the home of the world’s most accessible superstar. Instant party. In
fact, Cathy is a party all by herself: laughing and screaming like a jam session between a hyena and an air-raid siren, strutting and stomping in her stilettos, teasing everybody in the room in
enthusiastic parodies of their own accents, she steals the show from
The Karate Kid
. Soon the TV is silenced, replaced by a rocking Albert Collins tape. She even starts flirting with
Hooker’s Brit acquaintance, despite the fact that he is the kind of pallid-skinned muscle-free zone not generally considered attractive in California.

Hooker delivers polite, cordial greetings and encourages everybody to make themselves at home, but within moments he’s disappeared, barricading himself in his bedroom
at the back of the house with his TV and his telephone. An hour or so passes, the noise level mounts and suddenly –
brrriiinnnnggg! –
there’s an insistent ring on
Archie’s private telephone line. It’s John Lee, calling from the back room, demanding that the noise be held down. Fortunately, a natural break in the proceedings soon occurs as the
booze runs out. Cathy threatens to drive out and pick up fresh supplies of beer and tequila and come right back to continue the festivities, but she’s eventually persuaded to gather up her
entourage and seek her next round of wild delights elsewhere, preferably somewhere a long way out of John Lee’s earshot. The following morning, Archie and Martin ruefully assess the damage to
the still-soft varnish of the hardwood floor. The varnished surface they’d so painstakingly applied, coat by coat, only two or three days before is now scarred with hundreds of tiny, shallow
bullet-pocks, each one the approximate size of a stiletto heel. ‘No more fat broads,’ they announce, but it’s another couple of days before anyone remembers that the ‘fat
broads’ had been not only trainer-clad but as quiet as a pair of admittedly generously-sized mice. The ‘fat broads’ probably won’t be back. But Cathy will. After all,
she’s a friend.

The regular cast of characters
chez
John is a fascinating one, and we may well meet more of them later on. However, right now we’ve got a show to go to, and we don’t want to
be late

Christmas is coming, and John Lee is playing his major hometown showcase of the season. As its name might suggest, the 600-capacity Great American Music Hall is tricked out in
velvet-plush Victorian kitsch. Archie rolls the Lincoln in with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a walkie-talkie into which he’s talking quietly and urgently, making sure that the
pavement is clear, the parking space is
free, and the side door is open so that John Lee can disembark as smoothly and easily as possible. Inside, the band is assembled at
rather more than full strength. The elusive Deacon Jones is back, there being no other activities with a prior claim on his attention, and so is his wife’s T-shirt stall. Deacon Jones is a
screwdriver-jiver and a half: slick, loud, impossible to ignore on or off stage. In contrast to the laid-back hippie demeanour of his colleagues, Jones is dressed up to the nines and beyond; a
vision of elegance in his crisp pin-stripes, snowy French cuffs with gold cufflinks, tie pierced with a diamond stickpin, and an immaculate black Homburg hat easily the match of Hooker’s
perched on his head. He seems to have some friends with him: the basement dressing-room designated for the band is full of mustachioed guys in major hats, commandeering the table, pulling tricksy
one-hand river-boat-gambler shuffles with their decks of cards, and saying things like ‘My name is Jake and your money I’ll take.’ Even with Jones back in the band, his
replacement Lizz Fischer is still around, celebrating the season by topping off her Little Black Dress with a jauntily drooping red Father Christmas cap. As it turned out, her fears concerning the
precise nature of her role as Hooker’s companion during that summer’s New York sojourn had been entirely unfounded. She’d occupied the hotel room next to John Lee, all that had
been required of her was her company, and she’d had a hugely enjoyable time.

Yep, ’tis the season of good will; yep, John Lee is headlining a major San Francisco venue of the kind that he works during his increasingly infrequent road trips, as opposed to the
unadvertised small-club gigs he normally plays in the Bay Area, both to stay in shape and help out the friends who run his favourite bars. But there’s something else that’s very special
about the show tonight: if you caught sight of the Music Hall’s marquee on the way in you’ll have noticed the other name on the bill. It’s a family affair: tonight’s opening
act is Zakiya Hooker.

Zakiya is John Lee’s Number Two daughter. Originally christened ‘Vera’, she subsquently changed her name to something she felt suited
her better.
She’s a tiny little woman with a slick cap of hair that looks as if it had been painted across her head with a single stroke, and if you saw her only from a distance you might be tempted to
describe her as ‘doll-like’. Close-up, though, the warmth and mobility of her mouth and the humour and pain in her eyes would wither the word on your lips. She is in her early forties,
though most people would find it hard to reconcile her hip, youthful appearance with her chronological age unless they were shown a birth certificate first. Tonight she’s making her
major-league debut, fronting a bandled and directed by her partner Ollan Christopher, formerly a member of the Natural Four, a vocal group who used to record for Curtis Mayfield’s
Chicago-based soul set-up, Curtom Records. However, this is more than a simple coming-out party for a late-blooming ‘new artist’, even one who happens to be related to the headliner.
Just a few weeks previously, Zakiya had lost her youngest son, John Sylvester, in a road accident. By all accounts, he’d been a lovable, sparky teenage kid; for his entire life a favourite of
all who knew him. His doting granddad’s friends adored him, too.

‘His grandson must’ve been about five years old, and John used to bring him over to see me,’ recalled B.B. King. ‘For some reason, his little grandson, named John, like
his grandfather,
liked
me. I don’t know why, but he took up with me, seemed to like me, and John knew it. So every time he would come or I’m near him, he’d always bring
little John. And when little John got old enough and big enough, he would ask [John Lee] to take him to see me. And then, about a year or so ago, I had a call from John telling me that his grandson
had been killed in an automobile accident.’ The Coast To Coast Blues Band have their own memories of that awful night. John Lee was playing a low-key show at his favourite club, The
Sweetwater in Marin County, and he was given the terrible news of young John’s death only seconds before showtime. His face just closed up like a fist be fore, as Rich Kirch remembers,
‘he hit that stage . . . rockin’’.

By all accounts, it was the one of the most powerful shows anyone could recall him playing. When Hooker found himself tumbling into a moment of deep, intense personal sorrow
and agony, his music was there to catch him, to bind the wound, to enable the Healer to begin the painful, wrenching process of healing himself. And tonight it is Zakiya’s turn to face the
world from her father’s stage, to assert her position as her father’s daughter and her son’s mother, and to dedicate herself, slowly and haltingly, to the new future towards which
those relationships steer her as she begins her life afresh. Her show is more significant this particular night for what it represents than for what it is; a few harsh words are exchanged after the
band comes offstage, and the line-up is radically reshaped shortly afterwards. Reminded of this occasion some two years later, after Zakiya has her first solo album under her belt and her second
one halfway to completion, Ollan Christopher is happy to dismiss it. ‘Different artist,’ he says, with crunching finality, but the artist Zakiya is now could not exist without standing
on the shoulders of the artist she was then.

To someone who had never seen him before, John Lee’s show would be a revelation. To someone more familiar with his set, it’s a better-than-okay night which definitely has its
moments. Vala Cupp flutters around him like a thirsty butterfly hovering over a succulent plant when they duet a feverish ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’; a puffy-eyed Gregg Allman sits in
– on guitar, as it happens – to perform what he evidently expects to be a marathon version of T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday Blues’, only to find John Lee bringing the
song to a close, some what irritably, after a single verse and a couple of solos. A stalwart young woman with a baritone sax flanks Kenny Baker on tenor, providing the band with the rich thickness
of an actual brass section. The textures created by the blend of Lizz Fischer’s deep-rolling piano and Deacon Jones’s exuberant Hammond organ are almost obscenely luxurious, and the
climactic boogie – Jones launching great washes of Hammond that threaten to drown the audience in funk – induces a joyful,
sweat-slick meltdown that blows the last
remaining particles of dust off the mock-Victorian velvet seats in the balcony.

A good job well done, in other words. Backstage again, Hooker greets his final flock of visitors as regally as ever before settling back into the Lincoln for his forty-minute ride home. Before
the car clears the city limits, his eyelids begin to droop. He is fast asleep well before the headlights lick on the street-sign reading ‘Hastings Avenue’.

5

WHEN I FIRST COME TO TOWN, PEOPLE