Boogie Man (23 page)

Despite Hooker’s popularity as an in-person attraction playing trio with pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster in Black Bottom bars, Besman opted to record him
solo, placing the aural focus even more squarely on the featured singer/guitarist than the successful Hopkins and
Waters records had done. The object of the exercise was to lay
down four releasable tracks, enough for the A- and B-sides of two 78rpm singles, during the three-hour session which was then the basic, union-recognized unit of studio time. Evidently, Besman and
Hooker had agreed that the featured release was to be a slow blues, because Hooker arrived ready to perform three different numbers in that style. Well, sort of ready. ‘When Hooker came into
the studio,’ claims Besman, ‘all he had was this one guitar, a box [acoustic] guitar he’d just got out of the pawnshop. He had no guitar; when I gave him an advance before the
recording he went and got the guitar and he said that after the session, which I also paid him, that he would buy it. Anyway, the first session that John Lee Hooker did, and the fact that he
stutters, and the fact that he didn’t have any experience, and the fact that he drove me crazy because he repeated the same song . . . I only did three numbers in the three-hour session that
I was allotted. And I wanted four.’

According to Besman’s session notes, those first three tunes that Hooker played for him were ‘Sally Mae’, ‘Highway 51’ and ‘Wednesday Evening’. However,
if we consult Les Fancourt’s definitive Hooker discography,
⁷
we find a slightly more complex story. According to Fancourt, the session did indeed begin
with two takes of ‘Sally Mae’; the other songs, also deep slow blues, remained unreleased until the early ’70s, when Besman demonstrated that he’d learned at least one
specific lesson from Hooker by leasing the two takes he’d cut of each piece under two different titles to two different record companies for two different retrospective anthologies. Neither
song had fully matured: Hooker returned again and again over the years to ‘Wednesday Evening’, a song which mourned his failed marriage to Alma Hopes; later versions of this free-form
slow blues attained depths of cathartic emotion which ‘She Was In Chicago’ and ‘Crazy ’Bout That Woman’ (the titles which Besman later assigned to the discarded takes
from this particular
session) failed to plumb. ‘War Is Over (Goodbye California)’ shared the same eerie modalities as ‘Sally Mae’, but had only a
passing lyrical reference in common with ‘Highway 51’, a traditional Delta theme approached rather more conventionally at a subsequent session.

Hooker’s approach to what must have originally seemed like fairly standard material turned out to be so idiosyncratic that Besman, to whom the very notion of a free-form slow blues was
utterly oxymoronic, must have wondered just what the hell he’d let himself in for. In fact, the session represented a flying leap into the unknown for both artist and producer. Thanks to
several years of hard experience, Hooker was fully confident of his ability to rock the house solo or with a band, acoustically or amplified, at house party or a club, but though his demo sessions
with Barbee had taught him to compress his lengthy free-form improvisations to accommodate the limited recording-time available on the wax discs, he was still first and foremost a live performer,
geared to instant communication with the hearts and feet of an audience he could see in front of him. Besman, by contrast, was a hard-bitten record man who knew both that a single had to grab its
listeners within the first few seconds, and also that what worked brilliantly in a club or at a dance might not necessarily have the same effect when stripped of its original context and laid bare
in the cold light of the recording studio.

Microphone fright was one problem which Hooker certainly didn’t have. Shy or not, from the first take of ‘Sally Mae’, he chorded his open-tuned guitar with rock-solid
confidence and absolute rhythmic authority, and the rich, brooding baritone in which he sang bore nary a trace of the hushed, stuttering murmur in which he spoke. It was what he played and sang
– rather than how – which baffled the producer. For a start, Hooker’s approach to the blues was utterly unlike anything which Besman – to whom form was infinitely more
important than content – had heard before. To Besman, accustomed to categorising musical styles according to their underlying harmonic and rhythmic
structures rather than
their social context or emotional content, a song was a set piece with a basic shape and form which it retained no matter how often it was performed. By the same token, a ‘blues’ was
one such specific form; one which rarely departed from its basic formal structure of a three-line twelve-bar pattern with an A-A-B rhyme-scheme, and then only into one of a few familiar basic
variations. Clearly, Besman was sublimely unaware of the older, looser, less formularised rural blues traditions within which Hooker had received his earliest schooling. ‘The blues that you
know of and that I know of up to this time: they’re all twelve bars or twenty-four bars, the standard blues,’ Besman still insists. ‘The blues are blues. It’s just twelve
bars. It’s not a chord sequence, it’s just a pattern. It’s a pattern because the words and the stops that they have where they sing certain things, the breaks – whatever you
call ’em – are there. I don’t care how you cook it or how you slice it, when they get through, there’s a pattern. Whether they’re playing twelve bars, or eighteen
bars, or twenty-four bars . . . not in the blues. It’s got to be regular. Whether it’s twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four, that’s
it
.’

The kind of sophisticated ‘urbane’ blues which Besman was used to selling from his Woodward Avenue headquarters did indeed play by those rules. So – most of the time –
did the citified country blues which Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins, their big country feet stuffed into slick city shoes which had to be loosened before they fit, were hauling into the
studios of Chicago and Houston.
⁸
Hooker’s music, by contrast, played by rules so utterly different from the rhythm-and-blues norm that Besman
didn’t recognize them as rules at all. For Hooker, no ‘song’ was ever actually completed, finished, engraved into marble, rendered definitive. Rather, it was different each time
it was
performed. Each piece was a platform for improvisation, a loose framework of lyrical and instrumental motifs into which he poured the emotions of the moment. Ask him to
perform the same song a year later, a month later, a week later, a night later, an hour later, or even five minutes later, and the piece would have changed, sometimes beyond recognition. The basic
pool of riffs and verses upon which the song drew remained more or less constant, but it would be reconstructed anew; cooked from the same cupboard of ingredients, but served up fresh each time,
remade not according to any detailed recipe but based entirely on the spontaneous emotional reactions of the chef. Thus the slow-to-medium-paced blues ‘Sally Mae’, for example, was
performed in two quite distinct incarnations,
⁹
with different lyrics. In both takes Hooker maintains the structural integrity of the 12-bar pattern with
rather more fidelity than was customary in his solo performances, but he alludes rather than adheres to the conventional rhyme scheme of the A-A-B structure: it is acknowledged more in the breach
than in the execution.

As if that wasn’t enough, Besman had never before been required to deal with the specific problem of how to record one man with an acoustic guitar. It may have seemed as if Hooker had
strayed onto Besman’s turf and that it was the bluesman, rather than the producer, who was on unfamiliar territory, but the mesmeric unorthodoxy of Hooker’s music placed Besman as much
on the defensive as his studio-neophyte artist. It was thus Besman’s turn to take a shot in the dark; to throw away his preconceived ideas about recording and start thinking on his feet.
‘When I started recording [Hooker] I thought,
“Jesus, this is so empty, how the hell’m I gonna make this one guy sound like something?” I’d never
recorded one man before: Todd Rhodes had a seven- or eight-piece band. I saw a pallet full of cardboard boxes at the other side of the room, so I said to bring that over and put it under his foot.
I hadn’t noticed that he stomped: I just wanted some rhythm in there. We put a mike down there also and started doing that, and on most of his records – of mine, anyway – you can
hear that. But I wanted to amplify his sound and we had no echo chambers at that time, so we set up [another] microphone in a toilet bowl. We took the speaker from the studio and put it in a toilet
bowl, which was about sixty or seventy feet from the studio. Then we put a microphone in front of that speaker and brought the speaker from
that
microphone back into the studio. I
didn’t know what would happen, but I realized that we would have an echo chamber. I had the speaker right on his guitar. And that’s why he sounds so big. This one guy sounds like a
whole band when he plays on those recordings. I shocked myself because I’d never tried it before, the tapping of the feet on the pallet thing. It was a very good rhythm, a one-man band. I
couldn’t get over it, myself.’ (For the record, Hooker vehemently denies the toilet bowl story, probably because, as the anecdote passed down the line, Chinese-whispers style, it has
somehow mutated into the mythic notion that Besman recorded Hooker by placing the singer himself in a bathroom. So it goes.) ‘I experimented a lot with him,’ Besman remembers proudly.
‘So I recorded him most often with that set-up, and he sounds big. People were amazed at how we got that sound. That sound was really surprising to me. It was unique for just the one man
playing the guitar. It sounded almost like a band.’

That sound
was an inspired improvisation. The experiment paid off
big
time: Hooker sounded huge. What might have started as a back-porch meditation, a sound which customarily
dissipated and escaped into the vastness of the night sky, was now so big that it threatened to crack the studio walls. Hooker’s blues may have travelled
from the low,
low lands and reached its destination
virgo intacta;
but now it had unquestionably arrived in the city. The music reverbed off concrete and tile; it positively crackled with electricity.
Maude may have smashed Hooker’s electric guitar, but the way that Besman and Joe Siracuse had close-miked the pawnshop acoustic created a sound pressure level high enough to overload the
valve-powered recording machine, driving the meters into the red zone. The result was so distorted and ‘hot’ that just about everybody who ever heard the results of that session swears
blind that the guitar they’re hearing was heavily amplified. In fact, it wasn’t the guitar that was electric – it was the guitarist.

So right there Besman had two takes each of Hooker’s first three titles, but he wanted more. ‘I needed four numbers. I was teed off already that I wasn’t going to get four
records. So I said, “Do you know how to play a boogie?” because boogie was big, twelve-bar boogie. I figured if we could make a boogie then we maybe have a chance. And he says
“No, I don’t know how to play a boogie.”’

‘And finally,’ says Paul Mathis, ‘he made “Boogie Chillen” . . . and that’s history.’

6

‘BOOGIE CHILLEN’ CAME OUT BURNIN’

We hold this truth to be self-evident: that one man’s boogie is another man’s woogie. Let me explain.

‘A long time ago,’ Hooker says, ‘they used to call it boogie-woogie, on an old piano. But as the years went by, as the time went by into the modern day, they called it the
boogie. It ain’t the boogie-woogie any more, it was the boogie. And I think I started all of that. I originated that. There was nobody else doing it like that and calling it the blues, and I
just called it “Boogie Chillen”.’

By way of contrast, the incorrigibly literal-minded Bernard Besman’s
notion of exactly what constitutes ‘boogie-woogie’ is more or less the same as that of
the compilers of the
Oxford Dictionary
: an uptempo, eminently danceable eight-to-the-bar piano blues with a regular ‘walking’ left-hand bass line. In fact, both the style and the
term had been around for decades before pianist Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith brought them together on his 1928 hit ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’.
¹⁰
Variously known as ‘barrelhouse’, ‘honky-tonk’ or, intriguingly, ‘Dudlow Joe’, this rumbustious idiom emerged out of Southwestern saloons
and lumber camps sometime in the late nineteenth century. The expression ‘boogie’ (or ‘boogie-woogie’ or ‘booga-rooga’) dates from roughly the same time: it
simply means to dance, to party, to rock, to have any kind of physical good time you care to name, specifically including the obvious one for which ‘jazz’ and
‘rock’n’roll’ have, over the years, also served as euphemisms. Hey –
you
know what I’m talking about.

The etymological origins of the word ‘boogie’ remain obscure. It would be nicely symmetrical if we were somehow able to prove that it was an African term, that it shared the
Wolof-via-Gullah derivation of ‘juke’ (or ‘jook’); unfortunately, we can’t. First amongst its closest linguistic cousins would appear to be ‘bogy’, a
nineteenth-century term for an evil spirit or goblin, or even for the Devil himself. This is itself descended from ‘bogle’, a sixteenth-century Scottish word for a goblin, phantom or
scarecrow, which – significantly enough – was also used in the mid-’90s to describe the state-of-the-art obeah-derived dirty dancing which accompanied ragga and jungle music. (No
wonder religious folk disapproved of the boogie: its very name must have seemed like Satan’s calling card.) Because of the number of ‘train’-oriented titles and rhythms
prominent during the recorded idiom’s early days in the wake of Meade Lux Lewis’s epochal ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ (he recorded the first of many versions in
1927), we could also throw in the portion of a train’s undercarriage known as the ‘bogie’. Also – though we’re on rather less solid ground here – we could cite
the numerous musical and titular allusions to ‘bugle’ calls in piano recordings of the ’20s.