Boogie Man (42 page)

However, the real gem was Chess’s
House Of The Blues
, the first album-length harvesting of some of the finest fruits of Hooker’s moonlighting sessions for Joe Von Battle
during the Besman years. These sides were as cleanly and cleverly recorded as the best of the Besman sessions: less pop-friendly but considerably more adventurous, they represent one of the
creative peaks of the entire Hooker
oeuvre
. Even
House Of The Blues
’s superb Don Bronstein cover photo is wonderfully appropriate: depicting a tumbledown Delta shack with its
occupiers posed warily on the porch, it emphasised Hooker’s Deep Southern roots without sentimentalising or mythologising them.

By the summer of 1960, Hooker was certainly not short of career options. The success of ‘No Shoes’ had given him his biggest R&B hit for
years, while
Country Blues, That’s My Story
and his Newport double-header had awakened both folk and jazz audiences to his unique talents. The new ‘coffee-house’ circuit
– folk-music cabarets without liquor licences which served coffee and soft drinks to audiences who were quiet, attentive, respectful and, most important of all, affluent – was his for
the taking. Venues like Philadelphia’s Second Fret, Boston’s Golden Vanity, Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Club 47, Chicago’s Counterpoint and New York City’s Village
Vanguard welcomed him, and he them. It was also a lot easier to take his young family to watch him work in this new environment than it was to bring them to the rumbustious taverns. ‘When we
were small,’ recalls Zakiya, ‘I remember seeing him perform at either the Apex or the Black And Tan, and he would take us to coffee-houses. I remember the Checkmate, northwest Detroit.
I used to love the coffee-houses.’

And so did Hooker. Material which was next to impossible for him to perform effectively in the boisterous ghetto bars in which he had worked for the past decade and a half now became central to
his act. ‘I could do ballads,’ he notes proudly. ‘From loud music to coffee-houses, that was quite a change, but you got to go with the times. You got to put on the brakes with
whatever happens, with the dancin’, the youngsters. You got to keep up. Some of the old blues singers couldn’t keep up. Some of them couldn’t make the switch. I made the switch
because I could already do that some. Coffeehouses, I could already do that. I’d played with a little old band in the Apex Bar, the Caribbean, but coffee-houses were so popular, they was
everywhere. People would listen to you; the waitresses wouldn’t even serve until you finished the song. I could work four, five nights a week in the coffee-houses, get good money. Every city,
was coffee-houses.’

Or as he put it to Greg Drust, ‘I wish those days was here again. I really enjoyed just sitting down with my guitar, playing soft, slow blues, quiet, not loud, talking
to the people, and they were just right around me in those coffee-houses . . . I know those days are gone, but I still weep and wish they was here again. I wasn’t making the money I am now,
but it wasn’t the money. It was the scene and the people, and what I love to do. I would just really express myself.’

For a verbal snapshot of Hooker in the coffee-house years, and an index of how he and his music were perceived by denizens of Planet Folk, we would be hard put to improve on Robert
Shelton’s report, in the
New York Times
of Friday, 4 April 1961, of Hooker’s residency at Greenwich Village’s legendary folk room Gerde’s Folk City, on West 4th
Street. As Shelton described it,

Interestingly enough, neither of the two lyrical extracts quoted by Shelton elsewhere in that piece as indicators of Hooker’s emotional and poetic range were original to him: one was from
Janie Bradford and Berry Gordy’s ‘Money’ and the other from Charles Brown’s ‘Drifting Blues’. And, of course, both were rhythm-and-blues hits (albeit from
different eras), of which folkies were naturally unaware, rather than the ‘traditional’ songs which they seemed to be when Hooker sang them.

Hooker’s three-week stint at Folk City has, as it happens, been rather over-shadowed by the fact that it represented the first fully professional extended NYC engagement performed by the
young singer who was his opening act for the season’s final fortnight. Bob Dylan had been bouncing around the Village folk scene for some little while, lionized by some as that scene’s
rising young prodigy and reviled by others as a bumptious young opportunist. Performing floor spots during the club’s Monday-evening ‘hootenanny’ nights, he had made a favourable
impression on some of Folk City’s habitués, who’d persuaded the club’s proprietor, Mike Porco, to give him a shot at opening for Hooker. ‘He was so excited he was
jumping up and down,’ Porco subsequently told Anthony Scaduto.
⁵¹
‘His first real job, and working with John Lee Hooker who was liked by
everybody, and Bobby probably figured, too, that Hooker would bring a lot of people in.’ Dylan was most assuredly a fan: even during the first week of Hooker’s residency when he
wasn’t performing himself – nobody, not even Shelton himself, seems to remember who opened for Hooker during that first week – Dylan, according to Scaduto, ‘spent every
night in Gerde’s watching
[Hooker], talking to him, sponging up his unique urban-country blues guitar.’

‘I met Bob Dylan in New York at Gerde’s Folk City, him and his girlfriend Susie [Rotolo], who I see once in a while,’ says Hooker. ‘He were hangin’ round me at the
old Broadway Central Hotel. I had this suite there, and he had come to Gerde’s to hear me and see me and talk to me. I met him there and got acquainted and just got real thick. Every night
he’d be right there with me. We’d stay there, we’d party there, drink gin . . . and he got discovered there at Gerde’s Folk City. I thought he was a hell of a folk-singer,
’bout one of the best that come along in that field of music. And he was a hell of a songwriter, that was for sure. He fitted right in the pocket, but he don’t do that no more.
He’s with a band and the rock scene.
⁵²
We all had to get away from that, but Bob fitted perfect, because that was how he’s known, as a
folksinger. He’d sit around and watch me play; he’d be right there every night, and we’d be playing guitars in the hotel. I don’t know what he got from me, but he
must’ve got something. A lot of guitar players have.’

According to the account presented by Shelton in his Dylan biography
No Direction Home
,
⁵³
the Hooker gig was not altogether an unmixed blessing
for Dylan. ‘Bob thought only about having his name on a bill with John Lee Hooker, one of the great bluesmen,’ noted Shelton. ‘His elation soon soured as he sang for apathetic or
noisy drunks and heard the carping of jealous musicians.’ Dylan was also somewhat pissed off at the lack of attention he received from Shelton himself, who had spent much of Hooker’s
offstage time at tempting to extract biographical information from the taciturn, introverted bluesman, then still unaccustomed to confiding in or relaxing around whites, however seemingly
well-intentioned, let alone answering
personal questions from them. (‘His painfully shy manner and his stammer,’ Shelton told his
Times
readers, ‘could
give one the impression of inarticulateness. But only until he starts singing the blues.’) It wasn’t until Dylan was rebooked into Gerde’s Folk City the following September, this
time as opening act for the old-timey Greenbriar Boys, that Shelton was sufficiently convinced by Dylan to champion him in the famous
New York Times
review which was reprinted on the sleeve
of Dylan’s first LP.

Hooker’s ‘rabbi’ on the folk scene was super-agent Albert Grossman, a legendary entrepreneur with two major qualifications for music-biz management: an economics degree (from
the University of Chicago) and an informal grounding in child psychology. Grossman had started out booking the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and the black folk-singer Odetta into Chicago’s Gate
Of Horn club, branched out into management with Odetta and Peter, Paul & Mary, and subsequently served on the board of governors of the Newport Folk Festival. Blossoming into one of the key
rock tycoons of the ’60s, his client roster later expanded to include Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield and The Band. Indeed, in
Don’t Look Back
, D.A. Pennebaker’s
justly celebrated documentary film of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, the burly, pony-tailed Grossman virtually steals the movie from his client, methodically chewing up TV executives, journalists,
hotel staff and anybody else unfortunate enough to get in his or Dylan’s way. Hooker describes Grossman as his ‘manager’ at that time, but Grossman seems to have restricted his
activities on Hooker’s behalf to booking the bluesman onto the folk circuit which he knew so well, taking no interest in Hooker’s recording career or his R&B work. According to
Robert Shelton, Grossman was famously vague about the precise nature of his relationships with artists: rather than categorically stating that he was ‘managing’ or ‘booking’
an act, he would simply murmur that he was ‘working with’ or ‘helping out’ or ‘advising’ whichever performer happened to be under discussion.

Let’s put it this way: no-one who was fully represented by a manager of Albert Grossman’s formidable firepower would need to have his contracts read to him by a
teenage daughter. Zakiya fondly remembers how much her father loved to have her read to him, but ask her exactly what he liked to have read to him and she replies, ‘His contracts!’

‘Read my contract! What’s this say? What do I get?’ he would enquire. ‘In my little mind,’ Zakiya says, ‘I didn’t realise what it was. I just knew he
would say, “Tell me how much I’m makin’”, and I would look it out and say, “It says you’re makin’ this and this and this, and then there’s a certain
percentage that goes to somebody else.” I would get through, and that was my first encounter with music. I was the one whom he would bring them to and say, “Read this and tell me what
it is.”’ It may seem surprising that it was his daughter, rather than his wife, to whom Hooker would bring his paperwork, but that is, most emphatically, another story. ‘If he did
[consult Maude], I didn’t know,’ Zakiya flatly insists. ‘He would bring them to me. I loved him to pieces, and I was glad he’d bring ’em to me to read.’

Hooker is, however, adamant that his connection with Grossman helped to kick-start Bob Dylan’s career. ‘He was my manager, Albert was. He did some good things for me, you know. He
was there [at Gerde’s], he come there every night, just about. “John,” he said, “this kid’s a hell of a folk singer. I think I’m going to sign him up.” And
I told Bob what he says, and he goes, “Oh-oh-oh, he ain’t going to do that,” and I say, “He said he will.” Then he took Bob out for lunch or something – I
wasn’t with them – and they got together and he signed him up . . . I was really happy for him. I still is.’

For what it’s worth, there are several conflicting accounts of the origins of the Dylan/Grossman liaison. Robert Shelton recalls brokering what he then assumed was their initial contact by
effecting an introduction at the Gaslight, where Grossman had dropped in to see Dylan perform during a week-long stint in June of 1961; while Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul & Mary, a Grossman
client himself, made a pitch to the
big guy on Dylan’s behalf at around the same time. Grossman didn’t manifest any formal presence as Dylan’s manager until
after the release of Dylan’s eponymous first album – produced by the elder John Hammond, who’d signed him to Columbia Records against massive corporate opposition – in March
1962, but it is widely believed that he was working behind the scenes on Dylan’s behalf for quite some time prior to that. Apart from the fact that Hooker is the only person who specifically
recalls Grossman hanging out at Gerde’s during that April ’61 stint, these various accounts are in no way mutually irreconcilable, as Grossman was notorious both for keeping his cards
close to his massive chest, and for generally playing a very long game indeed. Plus it goes without saying that an endorsement from John Lee Hooker wouldn’t exactly have done Dylan’s
chances with Grossman any harm. Still, we’ll leave the further ramifications of that stuff to the full-time Dylanologists, of whom there is no shortage.

Meanwhile, Vee Jay continued their policy of separate targeting for Hooker’s albums and singles.
The Folklore Of John Lee Hooker
, his latest long-playing release, featured a garish
oil-painting of a black guitarist, his face and body in shadow but his hands and instrument clearly depicted, performing to a rapt, and almost entirely white, audience. Pete Welding’s
liner-note reiterated the now-familiar ‘itinerant’ myth, but Welding also proffered a nicely-observed first-hand memoir of Hooker’s folkie period. ‘When John Lee came to
Philadelphia for a week’s engagement at the mid-town coffee-house and folk music centre the Second Fret,’ he wrote, ‘I welcomed the opportunity of spending considerable time with
him. Watching him perform two sets a night, evening after evening, at after-hours parties, impromptu sessions in his hotel room, etc . . . I found myself amazed time and time again at the undiluted
intensity, power and conviction which he brought to each number, often vesting material which would have seemed vapid or superficial in the hands of lesser artists with real significance, earthy
vitality and
effusive intention. This ability to create moving and meaningful blues which project his own emotional involvement, utterly absorbing the listener, is a
considerable gift, one he has inherited from his Mississippi forebears. Hooker is but the latest spokesman of a strong, continuing and fructifying tradition.’