Boogie Man (26 page)

Sometime in 1949, during the early days of Atlantic Records, the company’s founder Ahmet Ertegun had a highly significant encounter with a seasoned executive from one of
the major record companies. The fledgling record man was quizzing his more experienced colleague on various aspects of music-biz lore and practice, and Ertegun asked the veteran about
artists’ royalties. ‘You mean you’re giving these artists
royalties?
’ the man from the major replied, aghast. ‘You’re going to ruin the business for all
of us!’

Based on a set of standard practices applied to black and poor-white music ever since the earliest days of the record industry, rhythm and blues recording was little more than a sweatshop. The
artists didn’t even qualify as sharecroppers: they were strictly day labour, paid cash-in-hand on a flat rate of so many (or, rather more appropriately, so few) dollars per side. Artists were
encouraged to record original material, because that way no money needed to be diverted to outside publishers. Furthermore, since the artists’ original songs were handled by the record
company’s in-house publishing companies, the royalties on all but the biggest and most successful tunes could – through the magic of creative accountancy – simply disappear into
the black hole of a company’s notional losses. Even a substantial hit could net the
artist virtually nothing. In 1930, when Columbia Records’
race-music-and-hillbilly subsidiary OKeh opened its doors for business, its standard deal was to pay the artist a flat fee of $25 per side and an utterly derisory publishing royalty of no more than
.0005 of a cent per copy sold. The artist, therefore, literally didn’t make
one single cent
until he or she had sold at least 2000 copies, and couldn’t make a dollar until
200,000 units moved out of the door. When you consider that recording costs were then ‘billed back’ to the artist, it was virtually impossible for these performers to make any money
whatsoever from record sales.

By 1949, the rates had improved, but not by much. It was therefore necessary for performers to make their entire living out on the road. In that market, at that time, a hit record didn’t
guarantee a recording artist any noticeable amount of bankable cash. What it did guarantee was a reputation, a ‘name’ and a regional or national fan base which might drive their
in-person concert fee up to the point where it was possible for them to make some sort of a living from playing live. The price of earning that living was to spend years of their lives living out
of a suitcase away from home, family and friends; burning up the highways to get to the next club, the next bar, the next dollar. ‘I didn’t get money,’ says Hooker, ‘but I
did get a big, big name.’

The manner in which Modern did business was the rule rather than the exception. Hooker makes little distinction between the way they and the other prominent R&B independents of the time
operated, but he has a special bitterness towards Modern. ‘The worst? Modern was the worst. They was
the worst.
Then here come Chess. They was bad. Here come Vee Jay: they took the
clothes off your back. They was
terrible
. And Modern was just
ridiculous
. Nobody got nothin’ from Modern Records. You go to the office and they hide, they said they
wouldn’t be there. You call, and when they find out who’s callin’, they say, “He ain’t here.”’ Still, for a hungry young blues artist out to make a name
and get off the farm or out of the factory,
companies like these were the only game in town. ‘I would’ve
paid
someone – not wanna
get
paid, but
would’ve
paid
someone – to record,’ says BB King, another Modern Records alumnus, who joined the Biharis’ roster in the summer of 1949 via a deal with their
subsidiary label RPM.

He elaborates: ‘When you don’t know something, like I didn’t – I didn’t know how to make a deal, and I still don’t. This happens to people all the time. By
having a manager that looks through all of this, that makes a difference. In so many words, I’m not puttin’ a halo around their [the Biharis’] heads, but I’m sayin’
that they was sorta like bidness as usual. It’s like today: people make deals. If you don’t know and I can get you, I’ll get you. That’s generally the American way: not to
the point of where you
bleed
a guy, but you say, “Man, that was a
deal! God
, I
really
pulled off a
deal!
” Possibly they felt the same way. Me, I would have
paid them to record me. Then later on when I got a manager, he started to tell me the many things that they didn’t do that they should’ve done; things that they did that hurt me that
they
shouldn’t
have done. Then I was able to see it. Maybe John knew about it long before I did. But even out of all the bad things that have happened, I still like ’em to day.
There was some good things that came out of it. Okay, maybe I was owed maybe $100. They may have given me $25 or $50. But next week if my son was hurt or somebody broke in my car or something and I
needed another $25, I could go to them direct.’

Even if it was only what the artist was owed in the first place? ‘Well, you know that. They knew that. But I didn’t. And, God, unless you’re a person who just started to play
in the ’90s or the late ’80s, most of ’em didn’t know. Kids today, they’ve got their publishing . . .’ As Sid Seidenberg, BB’s manager, adds,
‘You’ve got to remember one thing. When Mr Edison invented the telephone and made his deal, he got so much . . . he couldn’t visualise the amount of money he could’ve gotten
at that point. But when he got older, he didn’t say,’
– Seidenberg slips into a stylised whiny voice – ‘“Well, you know, I got screwed and I
hate them.” At that point, they were the only company that gave him the money to do what he had to do to develop whatever he had to develop. They may have shorted him, but as a business
person you have to look at it two different ways. You can’t be inhuman, of course. I mean, I’m on the side of the writer and the performer, generally, morally speaking. But you got to
look at it both sides.’

‘Paternalism’ was the name of the game. In 1964, the Rolling Stones, flushed with their first American success, made their pilgrimage to Chicago to record at the Chess studios which
had produced so much of the music that inspired them. They were horrified to discover that the burly decorator in overalls, painting the outside of the studio, was Muddy Waters, who had written the
song from which they had derived their name, and whom they worshipped as a god.
¹⁹
Musicians who complained – or who needed sweetening or a reward
– would have their dental bills paid, or be bought Cadillacs and other ‘presents’, rather than receiving straight-up accounting or the royalties which would enable them to buy
their own Cadillacs and pay for their own dentistry. The artists were by no means stupid men, but they weren’t the best-educated guys around and, more to the point, nobody had ever bothered
to tell them the rules of the game they were playing. ‘Back in them days,’ says Hooker, ‘the record companies was cut-throats. I hate sayin’ it, but it’s the truth,
and you supposed to tell the truth. They was cutthroats because most blues artists, they didn’t know about the publishers, the writers; and they didn’t tell you about the publishers. We
didn’t know what a publisher was. They made good money, the
publisher, but we didn’t get none because we didn’t know. We thought we got a royalty and that was
all. I got contracts, but record-deal contracts, like for two years, three years; one cent, cent-and-a-half, two cents. But it didn’t say anything about publishing, they didn’t put any
of that in there. They were just a rip-off. I never got a royalty statement from any of those companies. I was on Modern, and I made them tons of money.’

‘To be honest with you,’ remembers Paul Mathis, ‘[the success of “Boogie Chillen”] didn’t really change [Hooker’s] circumstances. It was just
“Hey, I got a little more money now. I got a number one now and I’m gonna go all out, non-stop.” And that’s what he done. Let’s face it: everything the guy’s
got, it wasn’t handed to him. He didn’t find it lyin’ by the wayside. He went out there and built it, stone by stone.’ Maude Hooker remembers only that ‘those was good
days, very good days’, but they were also very hard days. Not hard in quite the same way as the years of grinding poverty, non-stop manual work and little acknowledgement which preceded them,
but hard nonetheless.

Fortunately, Hooker had some new allies. Around the time that ‘Boogie Chillen’ was released, he ran into a stocky, Jamaican-born guitarist some years his junior. ‘Little
Eddie’ Kirkland was a former amateur boxer who’d grown up in Alabama, and travelled the South in a minstrel show, as well as performing both gospel and blues, before settling in Detroit
in 1943. ‘I was working for the Ford Motor Company in the foundry at the Dearborn plant,’ says Kirkland. ‘Me and Eddie Burns used to play house parties together, and then I went
out one night in 1948 after I got off work, at around eleven or eleven-thirty, and I went to a house party on the north end of Detroit and guess who was playing there? Hooker. He had one record
out, “Boogie Chillen” and on the other side was “Sally Mae”. He was playing by hisself, no band, not at a house party. At that time Hooker was playing by hisself in the
bars. People knew me, so they asked
John Lee, “Why don’t you let him play somethin’ witcha?” Hooker said, “Okay, c’mon.” I went back
out to the car, got my guitar, came back. We sat down, started playin’, I’m backin’ him up, and the people loved what I was doin’ behind him. They said, “You and him
ought to play together, y’all ought to make some records together.” So that put the idea in John’s head, too. John accepted me as an accompanist playin’ behind him. The
background I was puttin’ behind him, even his record manager loved it. That was Bernie [Besman] at Pan American.’

Eddie Burns, twenty years old at the time and working as a double act with his travelling companion, guitarist John T. Smith, was a recent arrival from Waterloo, Iowa. However, he’d been
born in Belzoni, Mississippi, and raised in the same area – around Clarksdale, Dublin, Tutwiler – as Hooker himself. Not surprisingly when you consider that he’d played with and
learned from Alex ‘Rice’ Miller (best known as Sonny Boy Williamson II) and pianist Joe Willie ‘Pinetop’ Perkins in Clarksdale, he blew a mean mouth-harp as well as playing
serviceable guitar. He and Smith had come to Detroit looking for a start in the music business. ‘House parties was real great back in those days. We was playin’ in this house party,
John T. and me, and it was like Saturday night, and about three or four o’clock, John was on his way home. He lived in the back of this place – we didn’t know him then – so
he heard us playin’ and he knocked on the door. He didn’t know the people, but they let him in, so he met us and he told us he was John Lee Hooker. He had cut “Boogie
Chillen” but it wasn’t out then. He liked’ed me on the harmonica, and I think that was what attracted him to comin’ up there. So when he got there, he sat down and he played
some after he had introduced himself and everything and he liked’ed the way I was blowin’ the harmonica, so he thought he wanted to sit in if it was okay. And naturally it was, and I
blew the harmonica and John T. Smith played the guitar, and John did. I think he had a guitar, or we had two guitars.

‘So he liked the way I was blowing the harmonica and he had a session coming up on Tuesday the next week, and he asked me would I like to do the session with him. I
told him yes, and when Tuesday came we went and did the session. That was stuff like “Burnin’ Hell”, “Miss Eloise”, “Black Cat” . . . stuff like
that.’ The session which produced these particular songs, though, is listed by Les Fancourt as having taken place sometime in ’49, with Andrew Dunham rather than John T. Smith as the
second guitarist. However, according to Fancourt, the first post-‘Boogie Chillen’ session cut under Bernard Besman’s supervision took place at United Sound on 19 February, 1949,
and was designed to produce the official follow-up to ‘Boogie Chillen’. It was certainly a productive evening: its fruits included two more R&B Top Ten hits for Modern,
‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ (based on a theme he’d learned in his youth from Tony Hollins) and ‘Hobo Blues’. Unknown to Besman, though, Hooker had already recorded
again – not once, but several times – at the behest of his closest co-conspirator, Elmer Barbee. ‘The record companies was so crooked back then,’ according to Eddie
Kirkland, ‘that’s why the artists like Johnny were just sayin’, “The hell wit’ it.” Whoever put up some money, that’s who he make the record for.

‘I was supposed to be under contract with Modern,’ says Hooker, ‘but I wasn’t getting any money from them anyway, so I’d say, “Yeah, I don’t
care.” I got so popular, and this record company Modern weren’t payin’ no money on a Number One hit. I never got any money out of that tune. Modern supposed to pay me. I never get
none but Bernie, they probably paid him. I never get nothin’ out of Modern; they supposed to send me a contract and pay me the royalty which I never did get, but I’m sure they paid
Bernie. Other record companies wanted me so bad, small record companies would give good money just to get me to do something on their label. And Barbee would go out and come and get me at night and
go record and pay me nice, nice money under three, four different names, all on different labels.
And Barbee would say, “Kid, I’m gonna give you this name, use
so-and-so.” He give me those names. I was survivin’. I didn’t want to do it. He said, “Look, kid, they ain’t payin’ no money, Modern. You got a big hit on your
hands and you ain’t gettin’ nothin’. You gettin’ peanuts outta them.” I believe what he say. We’d do this at night. He’d come and get me. I be in the bed.
He’d say, “John, I got a deal for you. Get up, put your clothes on . . .” I say, “Okay.” I get up outta bed and put on my clothes, go in some studio, spend a couple
hours recording. He say, “I have a name for you tomorrow, I can’t think of no name right now.” I say, “Okay.” He got the money right on the spot. He was a smart guy.
Right on the spot.
Big
rolls of cash. Down through the years, people they thought it was me givin’ those names. I try to explain that that’s the way it was, which was good. The
guy have the cash, I’d go home and go to bed. I’d jump to all those little labels, like King Records. I was kinda hot then,
the
hot blues singer then. For a thousand dollars
I’d jump over the moon. But you just had to do it. No time to polish, or go by the book: the book is in my heart and in my head. They wanted something by John Lee Hooker: they didn’t
care if it was a dog-bark, long as it had the John Lee Hooker sound. The record companies was goin’ wild about that when I came out with that “Boogie Chillen” thing. Barbee came
running: “C’mon! Get your clothes on! C’mon! Let’s
go!
Let’s go, kid! We got four, five thousand dollars out here!”’