Boogie Man (33 page)

Hooker was thus the sole exception to the prevailing Detroit rule. Though Tom White head and the Boogie Ramblers could – and did – perform in a variety of styles during the
curtain-raisers they played before Hooker took the stage, he was the only one of the city’s bluesmen getting by with nothing but straight, deep blues. His new records for Modern, some of
which featured him alone or with Eddie Kirkland but an increasing proportion of which showcased him with piano, drums and saxophone accompaniment, were selling well, even if not as spectacularly as
had ‘Boogie Chillen’ or ‘I’m In The Mood’. Nevertheless, he was still broke. ‘Every time I see him he was out of gas,
heh heh
,’ laughs Coachman.
‘He had a big engine in the car with a little bitty gas tank, and the small gas tank mean that the car were drinkin’ more gas than he could keep in the car. And every time he needed
some money he would come by the store: ‘H-h-h-h-h-e-e-e-e-e-y-y-y Famous Coachman, I’m outta gas.’ He had a TV, and every time it’d break I had to go fix it, and he never
had no money to pay me. He had one of them big old pot-bellied stoves right there in the middle of the floor, and they put coal in it to keep them warm. He had a big old TV, had a cabinet that was
big, and a seven-inch screen. That’s all there was out there then. I used to have to go out there every two, three weeks and put a brand-new transformer. That was the record: about two, three
weeks. Runnin’ the whole set with that. When that go out, the sound go out, picture go out. Everything, boy.’

By now, the Hookers had moved again: to the house on Jameson and McClellan which would remain as the family home until Hooker
finally packed up and quit Detroit for good.
There were still bills to pay – a second son, Robert, had been born on 25 July, 1953 – and there was never quite enough money coming in to take care of everything. Despite
Hooker’s perennial suspicions that Bernard Besman had been underpaying him, at least Besman had managed to extract
some
money from Modern Records. Hooker himself had rather less luck
until, one day, he decided to take matters into his own hands once and for all.

‘I never see a true royalty statement. You go over, they be hidin’. Go down to LA, they say, “He ain’t in.” You call, they say, “Is that Mr Hooker there? Just
a minute. Oh, he stepped out.” And he sittin’ right there, all that kinda crap. I go down there, lay down the law . . . I caught him one day, I went about three times, four times. He
didn’t know I was comin’. I walked right in, and Jules and Joe were sittin’ right there. They eye nearly popped out. I had this guy with me, knew all about publishing, stuff like
that. I didn’t know about publishing and different stuff, this and that, but he know, and he walked in with me, and they knew him. He said, “We got to have eight or ten thousand
dollars.” And I say
,
“
What!?
’ I ain’t never
heard
of that kind of money.” I know he was up there, I know I had made way, way, way,
way
more
than that. He took them back in the office, and I sat there for about an hour and a half, and he came out of there with a cheque for about ten thousand dollars. I don’t know what he did to
them to get that, but he had all the papers in the world, and he knowed all about the business, and he must’ve threatened ’em, he must’ve scared them. His percentage was 10 per
cent, and I had never
saw
that much money before. Not at once. Barbee would give me money like six, seven, eight hundred, twelve or fifteen hundred when I do those recordings, which was big,
big, big money.
I
thought it was. This guy Paul Oscar was the lawyer from LA, I had been talking to him on the phone, somebody recommended him.

‘He had all this stuff set up so I could come down from Detroit
to his office. He had made a few phone calls to them, but that day they didn’t know he was
comin’. He was a big man then. I sat there about an hour and a half, two hours. I sat there by the receptionist, and she said, “Son, I know you hungry, do you wanna eat
something?” I said no. She went next door, got some sandwiches. We done talked and talked. She said, “Oohh Mr Hooker, I
love
your music, you is so popular.” They got
’em trained, but she really liked me. After a while, he came out of the office and said, “I know you hungry, but I got something gonna give you a good appetite, make you eat
more.” So we sat in the car, him and his driver. I don’t know where his driver had went, because he wasn’t in the office. Probably watching the back door, make sure they
didn’t run out! He said, “I’m gonna put the biggest cheque in your hand you ever seen in your life.” I was breathless. I was scared to ask how much. “Uh-huh.”
“Ain’t you gonna ask?” “Uh-huh.” “Stop that
uh-huh
! How much you think it is?” “I dunno, about a thousand?” “Oh
Lord
.
It’s ten thousand dollars.” I like to fell out the car. I don’t know what he did to get it, but it was the first and last money I got from them.’

In April 1954, Hooker signed a standard one-year contract with Specialty Records, another established LA-based R&B independent. Characteristically, though, he cut several sessions for
Modern
³⁵
before the Bihari connection was finally severed. Specialty’s founder Art Rupe had opened for business in 1945, right at the onset of the
postwar jump boom, and sophisticated artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and the brothers Joe and Jimmy Liggins were both to his taste and highly profitable. Furthermore, their well drilled,
highly professional, thoroughly rehearsed approach to recording made for the kind of smooth, organized sessions he preferred to run. Nevertheless, Rupe covered his bets by dabbling in sessions
featuring more downhome bluesmen like Frankie Lee Sims or New Orleans’ Eddie ‘Guitar Slim’
Jones, whose epochal 1953 hit ‘Things I Used To Do’
gave a blind Georgian pianist named Ray Charles his first break as an arranger and musical director, and a proven hitmaker like Hooker must have seemed like an attractive addition to his roster. So
the following month Rupe dispatched Johnny Vincent, one of his staff producers, to Detroit to helm Hooker’s inaugural Specialty session. Hooker brought in Tom Whitehead, Boogie Woogie Red and
saxophonist Otis Finch, and over two studio days they cut nine sides – some with the full band, some with just Whitehead – under Vincent’s supervision, using Esquire Studios
rather than Hooker’s traditional home-from-home at United Sound. However, once the results were shipped back to LA, Rupe was unimpressed, and only one Specialty single – the menacing
monologue ‘I’m Mad’, backed with ‘Everybody’s Blue’, a free-form, one-chord slow blues propelled by Whitehead’s bump-and-grind drumming – was issued
before the contract was allowed to lapse the following year. Indeed, in 1954 Hooker did more studio work for Modern, to whom he was no longer contracted and whom he heartily distrusted, than he did
for Specialty, nominally his current label. Modern released four Hooker singles that year – though some of the tracks had been cut as far back as 1952 – to Specialty’s one, while
‘John Lee Booker’ had two singles out on Deluxe, and Chess finally got around to releasing ‘It’s My Own Fault’, which Hooker had recorded two years earlier for
Fortune.

Meanwhile, the landscape was shifting under Hooker’s feet, in more ways than one. In ’54 and ’55, what Dave Marsh has called ‘the age of rock and soul’ was just
beginning. The kind of electric downhome blues championed and epitomized by Hooker in Detroit and Muddy Waters in Chicago was challenged in its listeners’ affections by two spectacular new
offshoots. Ray Charles, the pianist who’d masterminded Guitar Slim’s hit, was cutting for the New York-based Atlantic label, grafting elements of jazz and gospel onto the blues with a
series of shattering singles commencing with ‘I Got A Woman’ to lay the
foundations of what would soon become soul music; he would soon be joined by a pugnacious
Macon-based vocalist named James Brown, whose galvanic ‘Please Please Please’, released by Syd Nathan’s King Records out of Cincinnati, even outdid Charles for sheer intensity.
Simultaneously, a bunch of greasy-haired white boys, led by Elvis Presley, who’d been hanging around Sam Phillips’s Sun studios in Memphis, were sour-mashing up hillbilly music and the
blues they’d picked up from the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Junior Parker and B.B. King into an intoxicating new brew which would eventually become known as rock and roll. Before
too long, along came Chuck Berry, a sharp-dressing, duck-walking, motor-mouthed singer/guitarist/songwriter from St Louis who’d arrived in a very similar place by starting out from the
opposite direction, fusing hillbilly rhythms and teen-oriented topics with the blues and jump he and his piano-pumping partner Johnnie Johnson had been playing for years in their hometown clubs.
And an ex-boxer and aspiring songwriter named Berry Gordy Jr was about to see his ghetto record store go out of business because he persisted in stocking bebop records rather than the Muddy Waters
and John Lee Hooker records his customers actually wanted.

The bluesmen were faced with some uncomfortable choices. They could attempt to adapt and risk alienating their core audience without gaining a new one, or else they could stand their ground and
risk atrophying. Hooker chose an each-way bet: in 1955, he shifted his artistic base to Chicago. He signed yet another recording contract, not with the mighty Chess – who already had the
cream of the city’s downhome bluesmen under contract, as well as Chuck Berry and his foil Bo Diddley – but with Vee Jay Records, a small but ambitious 1953 start-up already challenging
Chess’s dominance by scoring hit after hit with Jimmy Reed, a sly, laconic, laid-back Mississippi transplant who was to enjoy more chart success in the ’50s than either Muddy Waters or
Hooker himself.

The decision wasn’t taken a moment too soon. In 1955, in order to commence work on what was to become the Chrysler Freeway, the city’s bulldozers moved in and
began tearing down Hastings Street. The symbolism was inescapable: change was utterly inevitable, and he who was incapable of moving with the times would be lost.

John Lee Hooker’s Detroit is gone. The Lee Sensation Bar on Oak in the north end of Detroit, not to mention postwar Black Bottom landmarks like the Rainbow Bar and
Henry’s Swing Club, are ancient history. Only one block of what was once Hastings Street remains, and the Horseshoe Lounge on St Antoine is the last of the old-style black bars, though the
Apex Bar still exists, on Oakland Avenue and Clay, as does the New Olympia Bar on Grand River and Grand Boulevard. The site of Elmer Barbee’s store at 609 Lafayette, on the intersection of
San Antoine and Lafayette, where Hooker rehearsed for his first recordings, is now a parking lot outside a large, ornate church. The old Black Bottom has been thoroughly yupped out: it’s now
one of the few enclaves of downtown Detroit where white-flight suburbanites feel safe. Much of the rest of the inner city is now straight-up ghetto: Detroit is an 85 per cent black (and his panic)
city. As the businesses on which Detroit’s boom years were founded fail, the inner city has been ‘surrendered’ to blacks: in 1992, Detroit had
a black mayor
(Coleman Young), a black police chief and a black administration thirty years after such changes could have done the city and its people some good. Downtown is one of America’s Gotham Cities:
a rusted-out hulk of a city where ostentatiously modern buildings and futurist set-pieces like the People Mover elevated train rub shoulders with grandiose, decaying ’40s structures that
would’ve made Tim Burton drool. In fact, there was absolutely no need for Warner Bros to construct new Gotham City sets for
Batman Returns
, which was opening the same Independence Day
weekend on which Hooker was due to return to the city for a homecoming concert: they could just have taken over downtown Detroit for a few weeks, taken full advantage of the crumbling splendour of
its existing architecture and pumped some much-needed dough into the local economy. Detroit shares an eerie indicator of decay with Mississippi: everything from a hotel room to a packet of
cigarettes is seriously cheap; a half or even a third of the prices charged in more prosperous burgs. Unemployment is several points higher than the national average.

Too many of John Lee Hooker’s people are gone, too. In July 1992, just two days before he returned to his old stomping grounds for a weekend showcase, his old friend and former pianist
Vernon ‘Boogie Woogie Red’ Harrison died of kidney failure, at the age of 66. Red had played with Hooker for eleven years, and had been expected to show up at the concert to meet and
greet his old Hastings Street buddy, though the chronic arthritis which had plagued him for the last few years would almost undoubtedly have prevented him from participating in the grand all-star
reunion jam planned for the climax of Hooker’s set. But Eddie Burns is still around, and on sunny afternoons you can sometimes find him sitting comfortably on the front porch of his roomy,
wood-panelled house on Chalmers, off East Jefferson, sipping a beer and contemplating the scenery. Famous Coachman is still here, too, tirelessly promoting the Detroit blues scene –
‘Hey! Hey! The Blues Is All Right’ bumper stickers and all
– from his cramped record store on Gratiot, stuffed with gospel and Southern-soul records for the
older folk (not to mention a small, disconsolate rack of downhome blues) plus a small selection of rap and swingbeat to cater for the local youth, and complete with a chaotic electrical-repair
workshop in back. Tom Whitehead, now converted to Judaism and retired from his job driving a truck for the city, still pays his respects to his first love by playing jazz and blues in clubs and
bars, in cabarets and at weddings.