Boogie Man (30 page)

‘We made some long trips, man. We’d make some trips down to Georgia, and nine out of ten, we had so many miles on it when we come back Johnny had to get a new car. That doggone
eight-eight Olds you had . . . boy, that was a runnin’ thing.

‘Well, I did all the drivin’,’ says Kirkland. ‘A lotta nights I drove all night long in order to get a place. We’d leave Detroit and wouldn’t stop ’til
we get to Macon, Georgia. No sleep. The only times we’d stop would be to get a cup of coffee, stop in Nashville sometimes. We spent a lotta time in Nashville, too. We’d stop for a few
hours because we made a lotta good friends in Nashville, but it wouldn’t be no sleep involved. Most of the time Hooker would stay up all night with me and talk, sometimes he’d get tired
and go to sleep. He’d always sit in the front seat, never lay down in the back. At that time we’d see ghostses on the highway . . .’

He’s not kidding. And he says it wasn’t simply the effects of lack of sleep, either.

‘No, that’s the way it were. That was for real. He’ll tell you hisself. We saw a lotta ghostses on the highway, in different places in the South that we travelled to, and that
was back in the ’50s. Nowadays, you don’t have too many people sayin’ that they seen ghostses. Me ’n
him both seen ’em. We seen ’em, man,
cross the highways, man, jam the brakes an’ shit, get out and there be nobody there. We was down South, livin’ in this house in Macon, Georgia, called Brown House. We come in one night
and an old lady come to the door: “Let me in! Let me in!” We turn round, walk to the door, turn around, walk back, lady disappear. He tell you that.’

And he does, too.

Then there were the traditional perks of the travelling musician. Like women. ‘We used to cut ’em, boy,’ says Kirkland. ‘I used to get into town . . . we been
drivin’ all night long, he’d go to bed . . .’

‘I never did no drivin’,’ grunts Hooker.

‘. . . but he would very seldom fall asleep. Sometimes he would take a nap, and then wake up. He had to keep his eyes on me, said I drive too fast.’

‘He could leave here and drive to Detroit quicker’n anybody I know, because he don’t make that many stops. He might just stop and take a nap . . .’

‘I’d drive all day to get to Atlanta or Macon, and he’d go to bed. When he didn’t know anything, I’m shakin’ it, got two girls in the room.’

‘He’d get the women.’

‘I’d go out and get the women. All I had to do: say I play with John Lee Hooker. They follow me. “C’mon, let’s go to the hotel together.” “Let’s
go.”’

‘I wouldn’t go out in the streets,’ Hooker explains later. ‘I never did like going out much. I’d go to the hotel, he’d bring these women . . . “Why you
bring these women?” “They say they want to see you.” Boy, he could drive all ’cross the country, man.’

And he still does.

‘
Don’t
he, man. How can he do that, 67 years old? A lotta
young
people can’t do that.
Young
folks can’t do that, man. He’s a man of
steel
. He leave here bound for Detroit, Kentucky . . . I drive to LA, I’m
burned out. That’s
true
! He drive all ’cross the country: night, bad
weather, rain, snow . . . he got a young wife, got a child ’bout five years old. Oh boy, he’s tough. He’s a man of many surprises. I been knowin’ him about thirty-some
years, and he slowed up a bit, but I slowed down a
lot
,’ Hooker sums up. ‘Yeah, we went through some things together, me and this man. We was young and we never had enough of
nothin’
.’

The road may have been fun but, nevertheless, the road was hard. ‘A lot of places in the South,’ says Kirkland, ‘they were kind of rough on blacks, especially two black mans
travelling through there at night. It was real funny to me the way Hooker would act. He would look at me and he’d say, “Kirk, you better d-d-d-d-d-d you better hurry and get out this
little town. They d-d-d-d-d-don’t want us,” and he’d be looking all around . . . like when we messed around and went the wrong way and got caught up on a mountain in Kentucky and
. . . I was young back then and every chance that I get I would pick my guitar, so while he was gettin’ gas and the man checkin’ our water and all that, I was playin’ my guitar .
. .’

Hooker chuckles at the memory. ‘“Come heah, boah! Heh heh! Play that thang!”’

‘. . . and now we
got
to play. We was
yodellin’
! “Oh, that sound good!”’

‘“Keep goin! Keep goin’, boah!”’

‘. . . “You gotta play before you leave here.” When I was going to school in Indiana,’ Kirkland explains, ‘I started playing with a country band, so I knew some
country music. I know how to yodel too, so it weren’t no sweat. We come on back and went inside and played country and western and Hooker, he started flammin’ in right along with me. So
anyway, we did well: he gave us a bag of cookies and sardines and stuff and left. “Okay, boah, y’all can go”, and they was all happy. After that when we got down the road John
said, “D-d-d-d-d we d-d-d-d-did all right, didn’t we?”’

Tell us another, Mr Kirkland.

‘What happened, Johnny wanted to stop and get him a little half-pint bottle of somethin’ . . .’

‘I was drinkin’ Beefeater.’

‘And Johnny got to kinda feelin’ good. “Whatsamatter, you can’t step on it?”’

‘Oh yeah! I forgot about about that! “Step on it! Step on the gas!”’

‘Let’s get to Georgia. Went down there, this old cop pulled us over, tooked us over to the judge’s house, woke the judge up . . .’

‘Sure did.’

‘How much that cost us, John, fifteen dollars?’

‘Fifteen, twenty dollars. Back then that was big money.’

‘Big money back then, man. Fifteen dollars in your pocket, you could do a lot with that.’

‘They had little places way out in the fields. Little jails . . .’

‘Little towns with but two, three stores in it . . . they stop you . . .’

Racism on the road was one problem. Missing the folks back home was another. Hooker had a young, growing family – his first son, John Lee Hooker Jr, had been born on 13 January 1952
– and he was caught in an archetypal double bind. The only effective way he could earn the money which he needed in order to feed, clothe and house his family was to travel, which meant
leaving them at home for long periods of time. That hurt.

‘You heard that song “
at the crossroads, don’t know which way to go
”? I made up my mind to keep on up the road, and I reached the goal. But many times I wanted to
turn back. I was all I had. At the same time, goin’ down that hard road to reach my destination, I had to deal with the family. I had kids to raise. I had kids to feed. Had to make money for
bills and houses. I had to be facin’ all of that, and them lookin’ to me for that. I was a hard, game person, wasn’t gonna let my family suffer. They never suffered a day in they
life for food, for money. So I think about that, and I wouldn’t go back. I look back, and say, “I wish I could go back there, I should quit and go back”, but
no, I can’t go back now, I got a family and kids to support, I got to keep pushin’. And I kept doin’ that, bringin’ the bacon home. Out on the road, night and
day. Sometimes out there all night long, travellin’. Workin’ the next night, the same. Thinkin’ about home, but I couldn’t
go
back home, ’cause I had
nothin’ to go back there
with
. I had to bring the
bacon
back. When I go home I had to bring that money back. You follow me? Had to go out there and
git
it.

‘They were there, they was at home, I just know I had a family and that’s about
it
. Come home to ’em, stay awhile and get right back out. Wasn’t because I wanted
to, but because I had to do that. I was young, I could handle it then, you know. I wanted to be home with them; I wished I could’ve, but I couldn’t. Hey, I got to put food on this
table, I got to go. So they grew up knowin’ when I come through, knowin’ that I did the right thing. I’m glad they know that, knowin’ that I did that for them, for the kids.
They didn’t ask to come here. I got ’em here, so I got to take care of ’em. So that’s what I did.’

Back in Detroit, his prolific recording habits were beginning to get him into trouble. That year he released four singles on Modern under his own name (one of which was billed as a joint effort
between himself and ‘Little’ Eddie Kirkland) as well as appearing ‘as himself’ for two on Chess. As ‘John Lee Booker’ and ‘John L. Booker’, he cut
three more for Chance, but what finally got Bernard Besman’s goat was Joe Von Battle finally playing things too fast and loose for comfort. In April 1951, Battle had recorded an extended
Hooker session for Chess (one of the artistic peaks of Hooker’s early recording career, as it happened) but Besman hit the roof when Battle sold two of the sides from that session,
‘Louise’ and ‘Ground Hog Blues’, to Modern – to whom Besman was supplying his ‘official’ releases – who released them in 1952 under the incredibly
subtle credit of ‘John L’Hooker’. ‘He recorded for Modern, to whom I was leasing records,’ fumes Besman, ‘and while I was making the records which I would lease
to them for the rest of the country, he was making records for them. At
least he wasn’t making the same tunes! But when I found out Modern did that, I was really teed
off. I said, “You’re finished.” I broke his contract. I said, “You wanna go with Modern?” They were gonna pay him a hell of a lot more than I did, because I started
him. They promised him the moon, I suppose, I dunno, compared to me and how much bigger the company was. I said, “Okay, I’ll let you out of the contract, but I’m not paying you
any more royalties, with the money that I advanced you on the artist’s royalties. No more. That’s it, because you’ll never pay me back what I’ve invested.”’

Those records subsequently sold more than a few, though.

‘Well, subsequently,’ Besman concedes reluctantly, ‘but at that time I was way in the hole on Hooker. And one of the reasons that I sold my business to my partner and went to
LA was because I spent so much money recording not only him but other . . . I was so much in the hole with him that my partner didn’t get along with me too well. Four or five years later he
sold the company to Handelman Brothers, the biggest record distributors probably in the world. They were on the Stock Exchange at that time, so he became president of that company. The company that
I started with six thousand dollars is now one of the biggest companies in the world. The point is that I had advanced all this money and he always needed the money . . . oh what the hell,
I’ll record him. But he got so far behind that my partner didn’t like that too well, so that’s what happened. So when Modern did this I was really teed off, because I didn’t
know about that. I didn’t know about the others until much later. [Modern] were going to pay him much more, they got bigger distribution, so the deal was I signed the release of his contract.
So the contract had to go through the union also, and I cancelled that, and I filed why it was cancelled. Then when he got signed up with Modern, they were in California, so I don’t know what
they did. At that time you had to be licensed by the union to be a record producer.’

The terms of ‘the release of his contract’ meant that Hooker ceded
Besman all artists’ rights in the existing master recordings. Besman emphasises that
Hooker only waived his rights ‘as an artist, not on the music, not on the songwriting, the publishing’, but what it effectively meant was that all Hooker received – or would ever
receive – from the proceeds of the 250 or so sides that he and Besman cut together between 1948 and 1952 would be one-half of the composition credit. That’s ‘one-half’
because Besman had decided, as a parting gesture, that he would register himself as the co-writer of everything that he and Hooker ever recorded together, even though the initial singles had come
out with the compositions label-credited to Hooker alone.

One key exception to the latter generalisation was ‘I’m In The Mood’: the original Modern issue listed the composers as ‘(Hooker/Taub)’. ‘Taub’ was one
of the ‘house names’ – two others being ‘Ling’ and ‘Josea’ – which were habitually appended to the composer credits of Modern artists, like B.B.
King, in order to divert half the publishing royalties from potential hits back to the company. In the history of the recorded African-American music of the twentieth century, this kind of scammery
was the rule, rather than the exception. In fact, it was business as usual. To cite one famous example: when Chess released Chuck Berry’s first single, ‘Maybellene’ in 1954, two
powerful disc-jockeys of the time, Russ Fratto and Alan Freed, were each awarded a third of the composer’s royalties as an incentive to give the record heavy airplay. They certainly followed
through on their end of the bargain: the record was indeed a hit and formed the foundation-stone of the Chuck Berry legend which persists to this day, but that still doesn’t make it right.
Similarly, many of the great Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland’s early hits, credited to ‘Deadric Malone’, were in fact written by members of Bland’s justifiably fabled band,
notably trumpeter/arranger Joe Scott and guitarist Wayne Bennett. ‘Malone’ was a pseudonym for Don Robey, boss of the Houston-based Duke and Peacock labels, for whom Bland recorded:
Robey was a notorious ‘heavy’ who once, reputedly, punched Little Richard hard enough to give him a
hernia when the flamboyant young pianist had the temerity to use
the word ‘royalties’. Apparently Robey had little difficulty inducing Bland’s men to sign away their copyrights in exchange for a few bucks in front. ‘
Ohhhh
boy, Don
Robey . . . he robbed
everybody
,’ Hooker chortles.

In fact, Duke Ellington, despite coming from the opposite extreme of the African-American social spectrum from Hooker – he was the urbane, educated, musically-literate scion of a White
House chef, as opposed to an unlettered manual worker from the Delta – had very similar experiences in the New York City of the 1920s, during the dawn of his fame. Ellington worked with
publisher Irving Mills, later the Ellington band’s booker, manager and publicist, who was in the habit of buying blues tunes outright from indigent songwriters for fifteen or twenty dollars
apiece. (In his autobiography,
Music Is My Mistress
,
²⁵
Ellington recalls how Mills ‘hit the ceiling’ when trumpeter Cootie Williams went
down to Mills’ office to sell him a blues. ‘Oh, no,’ Mills yelled at the unsuspecting hornman, ‘I own
all
the blues!’)