Boogie Man (36 page)

Inevitably, the shifting of Hooker’s recording base to Chicago meant that he became an honorary associate member of the Southside blues scene. ‘I played Chicago a lot, played a lot
of blues clubs. The money was a little better than it was in the South, but things was a little more expensive, so it equal out. I had never met Muddy and the Wolf before. You know how it was. You
was in Chicago and they was real popular and you had to see ’em. They was playin’ all over Chicago in all the bars, and I would go to the bars where they was playin’ and meet
’em. I stayed at Muddy’s house when I go there. Wolf, I met him and Little Walter, and Jimmy Rogers from the same place I’m from in Mississippi.’ So was Walter as wild and
mean as his reputation might suggest? ‘Wild? Oh yeah. He carry a gun everywhere. Mean? He didn’t take no stuff off of nobody.’ Then there was another Vance expat, though Andrew
Luandrew – pounding his electric piano under his South Side soubriquet of Sunnyland Slim – was an older man who’d left Vance before the Hooker family even moved there. It was on a
Sunnyland Slim session that Muddy Waters received his first recording break. ‘I didn’t know him down there, that’s for sure, but I knowed him from Chicago. Old Sunnyland Slim; I
admired him so. He was the talk of the town.’

Hooker’s Chicago sojourn also meant a reunion with a long-lost relative, thirteen years his junior, whom he hadn’t seen since Clarksdale days: the slide-guitar virtuoso Earl Hooker.
‘Earl Hooker, he was in Chicago. He was my dad’s brother’s son, my first cousin. There was a big gap between me and him: I met him later in Chicago. I knew of him, like I knew of
Archie, my nephew. A music-inclined family, but none of ’em keep a career goin’ way deep but me or Earl. He never got
real
famous, but he got famous. He was
a really good musician, too.’ Earl Hooker was one of the great lost princes of Chicago blues, an innovator, a musicians’ musician
par excellence.
Unlike the older, more
traditional Delta-trained slidemen, he played in standard, rather than open, tuning, and his crisp, melodic, endlessly inventive playing exhausted the superlatives of all who heard him. If his
singing had been anywhere near the equal of his guitar work, he would have been a star: he was using a slide and wah-wah pedal in combination even before Jeff Beck. Muddy Waters’ ‘You
Need Love’ – the blueprint for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ – was simply a Waters vocal overdubbed onto an Earl Hooker instrumental, ‘Blue
Guitar’, after Chess acquired the tape and decided to use it as a backing track. ‘Earl Hooker is the only man I ever saw break a string, hold a note on his guitar while he change the
string, keep on playin’, never miss a note,’ recalled Junior Wells to Andrew M. Robble in
Guitar Player
magazine. ‘I’ll put it this way: Earl Hooker could do more
with a guitar than a monkey could do with a coconut.’ In conversation with Jas Obrecht in the same magazine, Buddy Guy remembered Earl slightly differently, but equally fondly.

‘As a blues guitarist,’ Buddy told Obrecht, ‘I’ve never seen anybody could play the way he played it, and especially the slide guitar . . . Earl wouldn’t hardly
never sing that much, but everything would come out with the slide. He would play the melody and it would sound like someone singing.’

‘He used,’ says John Lee, ‘to be kinda wild.’ That’s something of an understatement. According to Buddy, Earl ‘stole the long cord that I learned from Guitar
Slim out of New Orleans. Earl Hooker would steal his tubes [valves] right out of my amplifier. If we’d leave our amplifiers in the clubs ’cause we be back here tomorrow night to jam
again, he would go down there again in the mid-day and you’d think he’s over there messin’ with his guitar, but he would change the speakers out of your amp if you sounded good to
him. Then somebody that’d seen him there would say, “Well, Hooker been over there.” And I would just
go by his mother’s house and say, “Open the
door, man. Give me my speakers and my cord back.” And he would give ’em back. He stammered a lot, kind of like John Lee: “You-you-you-you sounded so good, I wanted to see what you
had that I didn’t have” . . . from the first time I met him, I never did see him drink or do nothin’. He had no bad habits other than stealing your stuff.’

‘I don’t know,’ sighs John Lee when Earl’s name comes up in conversation. ‘He was such a gifted musician, but he just wouldn’t take it in the right direction.
He thought things would improve. I would talk to him, but . . .’

However, one crucial early acquaintance remained elusive. ‘Tony Hollins went to Chicago; that’s where he passed, I guess. He had a barber shop there, but I never did see it. I wanted
to go, but I never did get around to it. I never know where he was, but he was there. I know he would’a loved to see me.’

The move to Chicago might have worked wonders for Hooker’s career and his social life, but as far as any noticeable improvement to his bank balance was concerned, it was just more of the
same old same-old. In
Chicago Breakdown
, Mike Rowe quotes a revealing anecdote gleaned from harpist Billy Boy Arnold, who was signed to Vee Jay as a solo artist while recording for Chess as
a member of Bo Diddley’s original group. ‘Billy Boy,’ wrote Rowe, ‘once heard Jimmy Bracken say, with pride, that he wouldn’t pay any artist more than two cents in
royalties, but Eddie Taylor did rather better with his $43 for ‘Big Town Playboy’!’
³⁹
Hooker may well have expected better
treatment from the black-owned Vee Jay than he had received from Besman or the Biharis but, as the saying goes, every brother ain’t a brother. ‘Vee Jay, they took the
clothes off your back,’ snorts Hooker. ‘They was
terrible
. They were just a rip-off. At Vee Jay there was Jimmy Bracken. He was the big boss, and Vivian, his wife. And Al Smith.
He was the president of Vee Jay. A big smart crooked man, worked for Jimmy Bracken. The whole shootin’ match was crooked. Al Smith, he was cheatin’ Jimmy Bracken, and Bracken
didn’t know it and
he
was a crook! You go down there to borrow money, you sit there all day just to get . . . they didn’t want to give us advances or nothin’. They did me
really in, me and Jimmy Reed. And we made ’em tons of money. Vee Jay had his name on nearly ’bout all of my stuff: Jimmy Bracken and Al Smith. They had they name on my stuff and they
ain’t . . . wrote . . . nothin’
. ’

Vee Jay didn’t exactly overwork the studio personnel on Hooker’s behalf, either. In 1956, they’d cut a mere ten sides on Hooker; in 1957 there were only eight titles recorded,
spread over two studio days in March and June. After the first of those sessions, weary of the incessant touring necessitated by Hooker’s ever-precarious finances, Tom Whitehead cashed in his
chips. ‘Well, he started going on the road and I had a day job. I used to take leaves, but he left town for quite some time. Sidemen, well, having kids and things like that you have a lot of
responsibilities, and drummers are ten cents a dozen.’

And so were chauffeurs. Whitehead’s ‘day job’ was as a driver, and he’d doubled up as Hooker’s chauffeur. When he quit the band, the amiable Eddie Burns took over
behind the wheel. ‘With the Vee Jay thing, I still was playing with him here and there, but I didn’t record anything with him for Vee Jay,’ Burns remembers. ‘I was on some
of the sessions far as bein’ there ’cause, you see, Johnny’s not a very good driver. He don’t drive very good, and I always was a very good driver. So when he got ready to
go [to Chicago] to get money or have a session I used to go with him like that.’

There had been no other way out for Whitehead: his family responsibilities kept him in Detroit. By the same token, there was no way out for Hooker, either:
his
responsibilities kept him
out on the road. And as time marched on, the contradictions implicit in Hooker’s situation – being able to keep his family fed and warm only by leaving them behind to work away from
home – grew ever more intense. And each time he hit that road, whether it took him to Chicago or way down South, the home fires flickered ever more ominously.

To tear down Hastings Street required a fleet of Detroit city bulldozers, but to subject John Lee and Maude Hooker’s marriage to what eventually proved to be unendurable
pressure required little more than the stresses and strains of life at the rough end of R&B. The effect of these occupational hazards on their relationship was the initiation of a slow-motion
collapse which took until the end of the 1960s to resolve itself. The genial Paul Mathis had served as a buffer between his sister and his brother-in-law, but in January 1955 he quit Detroit for
New Mexico to commence what turned out to be a 22-year hitch in the United States Air Force. However, the danger signs were there early on, even before Paul left town.

‘He had a terrible time with her. All through the years, him and Maude had difficulties.’ From way back in the early ’50s, according to Eddie Kirkland, ‘they was
scufflin”. She would show up on jobs and make a scene. One time we did a job in Toledo. I booked it. She found
somebody to bring her from Detroit to this club. She walks
in, we was up there playin’, tooks his
git
-tar and busts it over his head. Yeah! That happened several times. He gave me one of the guitars, was busted in the back where she had took
it and hit him ’side the head with it. That was the kind of things was goin’ on.’ Hooker remembers the incident clearly, as well he might. ‘Oh, she was
terrible
,’ he groans. ‘She hit me with the guitar and broke it.’ His main emotion is sheer relief that he happened, on that particular night, to be playing an acoustic
guitar with a pickup attached, rather than his solid-body Gibson Les Paul. If he’d taken a blow from the notoriously dense and heavy Gibson model, Hooker notes ruefully,
‘I’d’a been crippled the rest of my life.’

‘My mom wasn’t too thrilled about him being a musician,’ says his daughter Zakiya (or ‘Vera’, as she was still known at that time). ‘She would have preferred
him to go out and get a nine-to-five job, but this was not what he wanted to do, so he wasn’t gonna go for that. And there was a lot of pressure there, you know, and there was the pressure of
raising the kids. Now that I’m a parent I understand what he was going through, and what it was like having to make sure that we had enough to eat, making sure that we were taken care of even
when he wasn’t there. Before he had his first big record, he worked at CopCo Steel . . . I don’t remember that, but he worked manual labour. I would never ask anybody to go back to
that.’

‘I would go by his house with Maudie his wife, and all the children,’ says Famous Coachman. ‘A lot of times his wife would get mad ’cause of me and him stayin’ out
at night together. He goin’, “Co-co-co-coachman kep’ me out with him all night. I were ready to go but he weren’t ready to leave.” They didn’t have it that easy
when they was raisin’ those children. They had a small amount of money and a small amount of everything in the house. We all was makin’ it makeshift. He weren’t makin’ a lot
of money, but John would keep him a good car.’

‘One thing that John did do,’ Kirkland affirms, ‘he
loved’ed
his family. He scuffled for his family, and he was concerned about his kids. He
was so good to his children: the same now. That was Godlike to see for a man.’

‘John was really a family man,’ says Paul Mathis. ‘The only time he was away from home was when he was takin’ care of business, when he was touring. Other’n that,
you find him at home.’ And every time Hooker left Detroit, he felt that he was missing out on another of those precious moments of watching his young family growing up. ‘They were
there, they was at home,’ he muses. ‘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’ – he chuckles – ‘so I got to take care of ’em. So that’s what I did.’

And just as he valued each moment with his children, they valued each moment with him. One thing Hooker need never fear is that his children might have failed to appreciate him, and what he went
through for them. Zakiya realized quite early on that her father was a musician. ‘I was fairly young. I just considered it to be his job. I didn’t look at it as different to other
peoples’ jobs, it was just what he did. I thought it was great. He was home with us more than the ones who worked nine to five. I remember he was always a great baseball fan, so we were
forced to watch baseball. I
hated
baseball. I mean, to this day I hate baseball. We’d sit there and watch baseball while he smoked a cigarette and drank his coffee. So I never
considered it as being different from any other line of work. I loved Detroit, I really loved it. It was nothing like it is now. It’s very depressed and . . . dirty and dingy and grey, but
when we were coming up . . . I guess maybe we saw it with children’s eyes. This was home, and this was where we’d get up and go to the local swimming club or go to
parties or visit our friends. This was where our social life was, and it was really, really nice. It wasn’t like these children have to grow up to day. It wasn’t like that. We had a
very secure upbringing; my father saw to that. If there was anything that was going on in the undercurrents, we were pretty much shielded from that. We saw some [aspects] of it, but not a whole
lot.’

So when did her younger brother Robert learn of their father’s unusual lifestyle? ‘Oh man, at a very very young age. He used to go on the road, man, when I was young, and I used to
cry. I used to listen to his records, man, and it just did somethin’ to me, you know? He’s very down-to-earth with you. Some people might get famous and get the big head, look over you
and stuff, but he’s a down-to-earth person, and he believe in helpin’ people. He was a beautiful dad, a compassionate dad. Mama might
pow! pow!
’
–
he mimes a
brace of powerful slaps and laughs heartily – ‘he might get you, but it wasn’t like mama. He was more compassionate. That’s how it was. A beautiful man.’ Nevertheless,
coping with John Lee’s occasionally lengthy absences wasn’t easy for the little boy. ‘I just had to endure it, had to live with it. He was doin’ his thing. That was his way
of supportin’ his family. It wasn’t no job like he was going to Ford or Chrysler or somewhere like that, you know: he was playin’ the blues. He was a singer. Sometimes he had to
go out of town and play. Well, we just had to live with it.’