Boogie Man (21 page)

Initially, Maude Hooker claims, she didn’t make too much of a fuss about her husband’s new project. ‘Not at the beginning, because I knew that he would have to be workin’
here and there and be out half the night. I understood that and I went along with that, you know. As my kids were born, I stayed home and tried to raise them to the best of my knowledge, that I
could. Afterwards it got kinda hard, after the rest of the kids was born.’ Her brother Paul recalls that she wasn’t always quite that sanguine. ‘I recollect a little party, just
before he started making records, at this lady’s house – the one that I was friendly with, Lucinda – John was playin’ and we was havin’ a good time. Oh, we was really
havin’ a good time. And Maude came in and said, “C’mon John, let’s go.” Well, John was havin’ a good time, and John wasn’t ready to go, so Maude promptly
yanked the guitar out of his hands and hit it ’cross the amplifier and broke it into smithereens. She tore it into splinters. I don’t think it was so much that she disapproved of his
playing
. The disapproval was that there was
women
there. There was women there, you know what I mean, and they
shakin
’ it, you know what I mean, and he’s
playin’, and that was the disapproval.’

By 1948, John Lee was beginning to make some real headway. This was just as well, since his and Maude’s second child, Vera, was born on 1 April of that year. He’d also graduated to
playing an occasional show at Lee’s Sensation, a slightly more upmarket club than his usual Black Bottom venues. ‘It was a kind of a swinging, classy joint, not
really a blues bar’, according to Eddie Burns. ‘Lee’ was the name of the owner and ‘Sensation’ was the name of the club – as Burns remembers it,
anyway – but over the years the names of bar and boss have fused to the point where most people, including Hooker, remember both simply as ‘Lee Sensation’. ‘“The Lee
Sensation Bar.” That was a nightclub.
Nice
nightclub, oh yeah. I used to play there for Lee Sensation. That was a high-class club. I played there, I thought I was in heaven. I thought
I’d
never
get to play there. That was on Oakland, on the north end of Detroit. Lee Sensation, he named his club after his name. That was before I recorded . . . that was a long time
ago. I wasn’t too famous then. I’d been wanting to play in that bar for a long time, but nothin’ but big people played there, big names and stuff like that. T-Bone Walker and
Ivory Joe Hunter, Jackie Wilson, people like that . . . big people. I was so famous around town that he booked me in there.

‘It was just a matter of findin’ the break. I got discovered out of a little bar by my manager Elmer Barbee. He was a very good person, very smart. He was mixed Indian and black;
very nice, very honest person. He knew how to get ’em. He the one discovered me, playin’ around night clubs, little honkytonk bars, house parties. I had a little trio, I was playing
electric guitar.’ Before Maude broke it, one assumes. The trio was filled out by pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster, two musicians who could adapt to Hooker’s rough-hewn,
rural approach. ‘I was playing a little bar called the Apex Bar on Monroe Street, and I was the talk of the town. Little John Lee Hooker, they would be callin’ me. And he come in there.
He made a special trip to come in that bar and see me. He had never seen me, but he had heard of me. He had a little record store on San Antoine and Lafayette, 609 Lafayette, which is long gone.
The building was tore down years gone. He was livin’ in the back with his wife and son, and he come down to that place and saw me and he said, “Kid, come down to my record shop.
I’m a manager, and you are the best I ever heard.” I said, “Yeah?”
and I did, I went down there, and I went on about six months to a year, just
recordin’ in the back of his place.’

‘There was this record store called Barbee’s,’ says Paul Mathis, ‘with a little studio in the back, and he would go down and try to play, and then nothin’ never
would happen, and he’d go back and try to make another record and nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and make another record and nothin’ never would
happen.’

‘Nobody knew John Lee Hooker ’cept playin’ at little clubs, no record, nothin’,’ says Hooker. ‘The clubs were packed every night with people wantin’ to
see me, but I wasn’t known in the States. I come down to [Barbee’s] place one Wednesday, and we started recordin’ and talkin’ all night, drinkin’ wine and goin’
over these different tunes, ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘Hobo Blues’. Finally, he taken me downtown on Woodward Avenue with all this material to a big place like Tower Records, and
the guy had a little label called Sensation . . . Bernie Besman and Johnny Kaplan. They was partners, both of them was big wheels, and they heard the stuff and they went wild and they recorded
me.’

‘Do you want me to tell you how Hooker got into the picture?’ asks Bernard Besman expansively. ‘I didn’t look for him; he just happened to come in. One
of the dealers that we had brought him in. His name was Barbee.’

To John Lee Hooker, still a country boy at heart despite his years in the big city, Elmer Barbee – or ‘E’ Barbee, as he was also known – was a person of some consequence.
To the considerably more worldly Besman, whose business had a million-dollar annual turnover, Barbee was simply ‘a very small record dealer who had a store. These people would come in every
day bringing in artists. Barbee said, “Here, I have a terrific blues singer for you and I’d like you to hear him.” He brought John by in person, and he brought a record that John
had made in
one of those auto . . . those music-machine booths . . . a record made in this quarter machine. I think I got it some where, but I don’t know where it is. I
haven’t lost it, because we keep everything. I listened to the record, and it was already practically worn out, and you could hardly hear anything on it. Anyway, he sang “Sally
Mae” on that thing, a blues number, and I’d never recorded a blues artist up to that time. Although we were selling the blues and I was familiar with the blues, he didn’t sound
like any of the blues artists we were selling. The blues we were selling at that time were like Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers with Charles Brown, T-Bone Walker . . . twelve bars, you know.
This was something altogether different that I frankly didn’t understand.

‘On top of that, when he sat talking to me, he stuttered. I figured, “Jesus, how can this guy sing for stuttering?” I didn’t believe it was him. I thought, “This
guy must be lying. He’s not singing here. This must be a fake.” So I said to Elmer Barbee, “Okay, next time I have a session, bring him over and I’ll make a dub at the
studio with him.” So that’s what happened. The reason I recorded him was the fact that he could sing and not stutter. Otherwise I wouldn’t have recorded him. He didn’t mean
anything to me.’

Not surprisingly, Hooker remembers these events from a very different perspective. ‘Me, I brought [Besman] a long ways,’ he says. ‘A
long
ways. He had a little old label
named Sensation Records, a
little
label right there in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue. Barbee brought me in the store there. I had never met Bernie, I didn’t know him from Adam. Me and
Barbee played all those tunes [‘Sally Mae’, ‘Boogie Chillen’
et al
] for him and Kaplan right there in the store. Barbee had come in and said, “Man, I got a kid.
Discover this kid.” [Besman] know Barbee real good, they was good friends. “Sally Mae”, yeah. Me and Barbee did that in a studio on Lafayette and St Antoine; he had a record
store. We would sit there
all night . . .
we’d be playin’ guitar all night, me’n him, his wife and so on. Then he told me, “I got a friend, Bernie Besman and Johnny
Kaplan. I’m gonna take you down
to they store; they got a record store and a distributing company there.” Me’n him went down there. They had blanks then: they
didn’t have tape recorders, they had wax disks. We recorded [an acetate] on that, we went down there and we played it for them. “Sally Mae”, “Boogie Chillen” . . . I
was playin’ that in little old night clubs round then, all the stuff that I recorded I was playin’ around. All the stuff I played for Barbee I was playin’ in parties, nightclubs,
the Apex Bar. Barbee would come round nights when I wasn’t playin’, and we would play these tunes: “Boogie Chillen”, “Sally Mae”, “Hobo Blues”,
“When My First Wife Left Me”.’

By the end of World War II, just about every definable section of the American public was ravenously hungry for the new music of which they’d been starved for the previous couple of years.
Two separate bans on recording had just ended. One was caused by a shortage of shellac – the basic material from which the ten-inch 78rpm biscuits current at the time were made – for
which the war machine’s need had taken understandable precedence over that of the record business. The second was the result of a fierce industrial dispute between the major record companies
and the American Federation of Musicians; by the time it was resolved, a thriving crop of independent operators had started up, unimpeded by the battle between the union and the majors, and serving
the markets for hillbilly and ‘race’ music in which the majors were no longer so interested. Or, as Eddie Burns puts it, ‘one of the reasons John got in and a lot of us got in,
was that the musicians’ union had a ban on the studios. What happened was them Jews found a way to record blues musicians and people like that, but your contract wasn’t worth the paper
that it was written on. They had a way of settin’ these dates when they released the stuff, sayin’ it was recorded back then [i.e. before the ban]. So a lotta blues people got in on the
deal, which mean that you automatically was gonna get a screwin’, because it wasn’t legal in the first place.’

Together, the bans created an artificial caesura which served only
to magnify and dramatise the already immense cultural and demographic shifts in the patterns of both
production and consumption of popular music, caused directly by the war. The dominant postwar blues styles were indeed still the post-Basie jumpin’ jive exemplified by Louis Jordan and
subsequently customised by Roy Brown, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Amos Milburn and Wynonie Harris alongside – as Besman indicates – the smooth and sophisticated night
club-blues crooning of Johnny Moore And His Three Blazers, featuring the sublime Charles Brown on piano and vocals, plus T-Bone Walker, ruling the roost as both guitar hero and matinee idol alike.
Nevertheless, a new set of realities, a new set of circumstances, a new set of ambitions: these all required a new vocabulary of expression, a fresh language of style. Of joyful necessity, old
idioms were required to reinvent themselves, and new ones began to emerge. One such was a Northern industrial-metropolitan transformation of the music of the Mississippi Delta diaspora: downhome
blues electrically heated into an urgent, stream lined distillation of its rural ancestor, an aural reflection of the new experiences of rural peoples relocated to the rough ends of the big cities.
Furthermore, the first completely black-oriented radio station, WDIA, had just commenced broadcasting from Memphis. Audiences, musicians and record labels alike were ready to roll. And they
did.

The first signpost hit from this particular New Wave was ‘Short-Haired Woman’, a surprise 1947 hit by Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins (from Texas: regional boundaries
aren’t infallible, after all), which racked up the surprising aggregate of 50,000 sales for a tiny Houston in dependent label called Gold Star (and, incidentally, annoyed the hell out of
Aladdin, the larger, Los Angeles-based label to which Hopkins was contracted at the time, by outselling the version he’d cut for them). A year later came Stick McGhee’s light-hearted
‘Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, a cleaned-up version of a much older, much rawer downhome blues – the nonsense syllables replace the Oedipal compound
noun
– which sold somewhere in the region of 400,000 copies and served as the foundation stone for the Atlantic Records empire. Then there was Muddy Waters’ ‘I Can’t Be
Satisfied’, cut for Aristocrat Records in Chicago and featuring the big, booming Delta voice and urgent, amplified slide-guitar of a wartime Mississippi migrant, accompanied only by a
fidgety, funkily slapped acoustic bass. Electric downhome had found a standard-bearer; that record, and its maker, laid the foundation stone upon which Chess Records’ Chicago empire would
soon be founded. In Detroit, Bernard Besman and his partner Johnny Kaplan had taken over Pan American, a derelict record distribution company, and in a mere three years, they had built it up to a
more than respectable size. Besman was well aware that a distributor could sell significant numbers of copies of the right single by a good downhome bluesman, and since downhome music was
ridiculously cheap to record, a small label could break even on as few as 5,000 sales. In his other identity as boss of Sensation Records, an archetypal fledgling independent label with a name
borrowed from a popular local club, he was equally well aware that he didn’t have such a downhome bluesman under contract. But, in Elmer Barbee, he knew a man who did.

John Lee Hooker and Bernard Besman worked actively together for less than four years. Any direct comparison of the two men’s accounts of their collaboration leads to the inescapable
conclusion that they spent much of their time together speaking entirely different, and mutually incomprehensible, musical and cultural languages. Nevertheless, those four years were among the most
intensively productive years of Hooker’s career. His two biggest early hits, ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’, were both Besman productions, and
Besman is undeniably one of the pivotal figures in the entire John Lee Hooker saga. It was Tony Hollins who first set the young John Lee’s feet on the path, and it was Will Moore whose
support, tuition and inspiration gave him the keys to the kingdom.
Nevertheless, it was Besman’s decision to record the stuttering little guy in the long raincoat, a
decision taken – as he claims – on a whim one damp Detroit afternoon, which opened the floodgates for everything which was to follow. The history of the blues is littered with brilliant
talents who failed to receive the fame and acclaim to which their gifts rightfully entitled them because they had the misfortune never to be in the right place at the right time, but John Lee
Hooker would still have made his professional break through – somehow, sometime – even without Besman’s intervention. The only relevant questions are: how big would that
breakthrough have been, and how much longer would Hooker have had to wait?