Boogie Man (29 page)

He races through into the studio.

‘When he starts singing, you should be on the one. When he does that last line, Eddie, go to the five.’ There are still a few collisions.

‘That were a little fast too, wasn’t it?’ asks Hooker.

‘He’s into it,’ replies Rogers. ‘Let him do it again.’

‘Take four,’ Hooker announces. Is this a record, heh heh. Yes, it is: everyone declares themselves satisfied. Rogers retunes Hooker’s guitar to open A for the next tune: one of
Eddie’s songs entitled ‘There’s Gonna Be Some Blues’. He wanders back into the studio and whispers in Hooker’s ear before returning behind the desk. He turns round to
smile conspiratorially at the assembled company. ‘I just told John his guitar is sounding exceptionally funky today,’ he says. This particular number is seriously rockin’, with
Hooker supplying the backing vocals and Eddie tailing into falsetto on the title line.

‘I don’t think you can do no better,’ Hooker announces proudly at the end of the first take. Nevertheless, they run through it again. Rogers lopes back into the studio to
retune Hooker’s guitar, switching it back from open-tuned A to regular-tuned E. The song seems to have turned into something called ‘Big City Behind The Sun’.

By now, Hooker seems to be getting a little restive. ‘Let’s go,’ he says, ‘I wanna look at pretty girls. They get the girls in here yet?’ He cackles. Sheila
McFarland, the red-haired female engineer, doesn’t. They cut it. ‘That’s it!’ Jim Guyett and Sam Lehmer, the other engineer, debate a few changes which indicate a certain
degree of difference of musical opinion between Jim and Eddie as to whether overdubs are
required. Apparently they are not. Eddie packs up his gear. Archie packs up
John’s. The session has lasted exactly one hour and fifty minutes. John rides back to Redwood City in the Lincoln to watch TV, chow down on some of Archie’s virtuoso downhome cuisine,
and chat to his friends on the phone. Kirkland climbs back into the Dodge, but tonight Hooker is treating his guest to the luxury of a night’s rest in a nearby motel. Tonight Eddie Kirkland
doesn’t have to sleep in the back of the van.

The following morning, getting ready to drive up to Hooker’s house to hang out and chit-chat for a while before climbing back behind the wheel of the Dodge to catch up
with his next job, Kirkland is still euphoric, still flying, after the experience of playing with his old buddy again after all those years. ‘One thing I always learned comin’ up in the
music,’ he insists, ‘was you listen to a man, what’s comin’ from his heart. You don’t change that, you just figure out a way to do it. I would always listen to him,
whatever he was doin’, and think in my mind what to do to put on top of that to make what he done better. That’s what I did the way I played behind him in those days, the same way I did
yesterday.’

He had a few problems, though, playing with the Coast To Coast rhythm section. ‘Even the musicians, the bass player, that I heard yesterday behind him was not playin’ . . . good bass
player, but he was not playin’ on top of Hooker. On “Dimples” the bass player was playin’ another beat . . . that’s why I talked him into playin’ a cajun beat,
because that fitted. I’m not downin’ the musicians, but they did not have the idea
what
to put behind him. They was puttin’ behind him what they feels, but it’s not
right. Whatever he do with his hands, you got to fit it. You don’t play somethin’ else. That’s why I was more sensitive playin’ with him than anybody else.’

Both ‘There’s Gonna Be Some Blues’ and ‘Big City Behind The Sun’,
the two tracks on which Hooker backed Kirkland, end up on Kirkland’s
next album,
All Around The World
, heralded by a prominent cover sticker on which Hooker’s name looms large.

However, several months later, when Hooker, Roy Rogers and Mike Kappus – the three partners in Blue Rose Productions, the production company which makes and licenses Hooker’s current
records – review the session tapes, it is decided that there are simply too many bloopers on the Hooker/Kirkland tunes, ‘Ain’t No Big Thing’ and ‘Dimples’, to
justify their inclusion on any future Hooker release. Indeed, that session was the first one undertaken by Blue Rose since the inauguration of
The Healer
which produced no useable material
whatsover. But by the time the decision is taken, Kirkland is long gone. Back to the Midwest, driving 1,500 miles nonstop through a blizzard, to play a 45-minute set with a borrowed band.

In 1952, in the wake of ‘I’m In The Mood”s success, Eddie Kirkland accompanied Hooker on his first major road trip – in every sense of the word. Kirkland
was the band, the musical arranger, the road manager, the business manager, the driver, the mechanic, the bodyguard and anything else Hooker needed. His original partner in crime, Elmer Barbee, was
out of the picture by now. According to Eddie Burns, Barbee ‘just disappeared. [He] used to run a record shop and he also was a good TV repairman. Barbee divorced his first wife and got
married to another young lady and started a family all over, and he weren’t that young a man. Kids, kids, kids . . .’

‘After “In The Mood” I didn’t have a manager, he dropped out,’ says Hooker. ‘I was on my own and didn’t use a manager at all. I just
had only the booking agency; I pick up the money and the booking agency pick up the deposit. I run my own business, pick up the money, look after the business on the road. I
didn’t need roadies and stuff, I didn’t use ’em. We set up our own ’quipment. I did good with “Boogie Chillen”, but “In The Mood” made more
money.’

After ‘I’m In The Mood’, Hooker says, his career ‘changed tremendous. ‘“Boogie Chillen” was much, much bigger, but when “I’m In The
Mood” come out I made more money than with “Boogie Chillen”, because at that time I got more popular. I was popular with “Boogie Chillen”, but I felt that I
couldn’t afford a band. It was a big, big success. I’d go out with just me and Eddie Kirkland, use pick-up bands, you know? Whatever we needed, drums, bass, piano or whatever. Different
towns had different people. We didn’t carry the band, we’d use a drummer in that town and move on to the next town. They’d know we was comin’ and they have a band there for
us rehearsed in each town, good blues bands.’

One such band, in Montgomery, Alabama, included a young blind guitarist named Clarence Carter, who surfaced on Atlantic Records fifteen or so years later, as a deep-fried Southern soul star in
his own right. ‘I learned how to play guitar from those old blues records,’ Carter explained to Gerri Hershey.
²³
‘John Lee Hooker,
Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, I used to imitate them. John Lee used to come down to Montgomery, where I come up, and every time the club owner that was booking him would get the same thing.
John would say, “What the hell you got to back me up? If you ain’t got those blind boys, I ain’t comin’.”’

‘I couldn’t afford to take a band all round the country, Detroit and everywhere.’ Hooker explains. ‘They’d have to have transportation, need a van. I hadn’t
reached the stage when I could do that. For years I would travel with just a guitar, amplifier and a big old Pontiac. The
car wasn’t too good. We would just carry our
guitars and amplifiers, pile it in an old four-door car, blow out our tyres, fix ’em up with old pieces of tyre ’cause we couldn’t afford no new tyres. We would get used tyres,
put two or three of ’em in the car if one blow out.

‘Eddie Kirkland worked on the car, he could fix anything. I met him in Detroit. He was playing around when I was. He was scufflin’ too. I got a break before he got a break, so he
came with me, and we started travellin’ all over the country. I had this big hit out there, and everybody know John Lee Hooker. We travelled the South the most, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama. I
made Macon, Georgia, my headquarters. Set up there, get a hotel or a rooming house, and stay there, go into other states. Our bookin’ agent was old Clint Brantley. He was a big man, and he
booked us all over Georgia, Alabama, some parts of Mississippi once in a while, every where he could book us.’

Macon, Georgia, used to bill itself as having the highest proportion of churches per head of the population of any town in the US. Its most celebrated musical alumni include Little Richard,
James Brown, Otis Redding – all Brantley clients in the early days of their careers – and the Allman Brothers. Some of those early tours could get chaotic: one time John was sharing a
bill with the Muddy Waters Band just as ‘Juke’, an instrumental single with Muddy’s virtuoso harpist Little Walter as the featured artist, was starting to break big. When the tour
reached Shreveport, Louisiana, Walter cut and run: he headed back to Chicago to put his own band together, and – according to Mike Rowe in
Chicago Breakdown
²⁴
–
when Muddy & Co. returned to Chicago after struggling through the rest of the dates without their popular harp man, Walter was on the leader’s doorstep
asking for his money from the tour. With truly epic restraint, Muddy replied, ‘I thought you brought it wit’cha.’

‘Then it was big, big money,’ says Hooker. ‘We got two, three
hundred dollars, that was a lot of money. We could survive, had money in the pocket, send
money back to the family, whatever. Some places we got $500, some places less. Some places we do two shows in the same city one night; do one here and then jump over to the next club and do one.
Oh, it was fun back in those days. Sometime I wish that I could relive it. The prices of food and clothes was now like it was then. Honest truth, the money was equally the same thing now as it was
then. I’ll explain this to you: we make a lot of money,
lots
of money. But you pay a lot of rent,
food
way up there,
everything
way up there. And if you look at it, it
about equal out the same way it was then. Wages was very cheap and food was very cheap. Rent was very cheap, almost dirt cheap. The money you made then balanced out. Now you make big money and you
got to pay big rent, big everything. It balance out, you know what I’m sayin’?’

‘At that time,’ says Kirkland, ‘I was interested in helpin’ Hooker. I had a pretty good job, I was doin’ all right, and the money didn’t matter. I felt like I
wanted to give him a helpin’ hand, you know. I supported him every way I could. I drove. Time when I had to take care of a little business, I took care [of it]. Time when I had to keep
peoples off us, bad people, I was there. Ready. We went quite a bit of ways, man, we travelled all over the South, me and him. Played, done well, in clubs, in houses. Band be behind us, and me and
Hooker be sittin’ out front. If the band mess up we just keep on wailin’, man, and end up with the show. We had a really great time. I learned a lot, me and Hooker both. At that time,
Hooker didn’t know anything about no road. We didn’t actually know too much about travelling the highways. We just had somewhere to go; we just got out there and
went
. Mostly in
Detroit we did by ourself, just two guitars. When we went South we’d tour with a band. We toured with Clint Brantley out of Macon, Georgia, and they’d put a band with us, a whole show
with us. Lotta times the musicians didn’t know how to play what we were doin’ or didn’t want to play what we were doin’. It didn’t stop us: we
still went on and did what we did together. We took the house, because a lot of bands out there with us didn’t like us because John had that fame. He was Hooker, he was John Lee
Hooker, and he was popular, and you know how jealous some musicians is. On some occasions they’d try to mess us up, but see: what I did, I’d stay right behind him, push it, and
everything worked out lovely. It wasn’t a hard job: it was very easy. I would keep that rhythm goin’ right behind him and we would tear the house up . . . I was with him from ’48
to ’55, ’56. ’53, ’54, I was off and on with him. In ’53 he got his first band in Detroit behind him. A lotta times he had enough people that he couldn’t afford
to use me. I understood, but most times, when he got ready to go South he always want me to go with him. In 1953, I spent time in Georgia by myself, then went again in ’54. And I toured with
him in Georgia in 1955. He had to come home because his wife was sick; I stayed.’

Listen to ’em. They’re reminiscing now, the morning after the session, anecdotes from half a decade of touring flowing freely. Not surprisingly, after all that time on the road, the
years tend to meld together. ‘
Keep that rhythm
,’ says Hooker. ‘We would go all across the country, just me and him. Cars be blowin’ up, Eddie would get out and fix
’em . . .’

‘That damn Chevrolet we had, that was a hard ol’ car. That Chevrolet was somethin’ else. You know what we did? We started out in Cincinnati, we went to Columbus, Dayton,
Nashville, Knoxville, Atlanta, Montgomery, Birmingham, on down to Jackson, Mississippi. Left out of Jackson, Mississippi, had to go all the way down to Cleveland. We drove all the way. It was
packed in the car: me, Johnny, Cookie Brown . . . we had another lady with us, one blowed the trombone with the Sweethearts of Rhythm.’

‘The woman was goin’ with all of us, the horn player. With the other woman, too. She was gay.’

‘We drove from Jackson to Cleveland in one day,’ laughs Kirkland.
‘I drove all night long, man, made that job. Johnny said, “Kirk, we ain’t
gonna make this one.” I said, “Bet we do.” Drivin’ a ’48 Chevrolet Coupe De Ville. That was a good runnin’ car, man. One thing I can say about a Chevrolet, that
car
run
. Took us all those trips . . . I mean, we was doin’ some one night stands, man, I mean some hell of a drivin’. Remember that time we was comin’ out of Knoxville and
it was fog and we stopped by the side of the highway to sleep, woke up the next morning and it was right at the cliff?’

‘Oooh-weee! I had forgot about that! Hangin’ over the cliff and it was
waaayyyy
down! Another time we was drivin’ and the hood flew off . . .’

‘That was on that Oldsmobile.’