Boogie Man (43 page)

The album itself was a Frankensteinian patch-job derived from a variety of sources, but it made surprisingly cohesive listening. ‘Tupelo’ and ‘The Hobo’ (aka ‘Hobo
Blues’), licensed from Vanguard Records, who’d recorded Hooker’s set from the previous year’s Newport Folk Festival, respectively led off the first and second sides; six
more solo performances came from the aborted Prestige project; and the package was completed by four newish combo sides recorded in Chicago, reuniting Hooker with Vee Jay studio stalwarts Quinn
Wilson (bass) and Earl Phillips (drums) alongside Lefty Bates returning on guitar, plus Jimmy Reed contributing a cameo guest-shot on harp. ‘I’m Going Upstairs’ paid tribute to
Howlin’ Wolf by emphasising their common musical heritage; ‘I’m Mad Again’ represented yet another stage in the evolution of the ‘I’m Mad’/‘Gonna Use
My Rod’ theme into ‘Jesse James’; ‘Wednesday Evening Blues’ and ‘When My First Wife Left Me’ re-ploughed familiar ground, and ‘Five Long Years’
was a relatively unadorned performance of a blues standard composed by Chicago pianist Eddie Boyd. ‘Want Ad Blues’, which began extremely promisingly before fizzling out, was the next
single (though not, it must be said, a particularly successful one), and only ‘Take Me As I Am’ expanded Hooker’s range into new musical or lyrical territory. Performed solo in
the key of C and using an entirely different set of chords from Hooker’s customary open-A and standard-tuning E settings, it was a plea for love, understanding and companionship from a
different kind of woman to the big-legged strutters and mean mistreaters who populate so many of his other songs. Here he sings to a woman who don’t need no lipstick and powder, who
‘
can cook and be a good housewife
’, and
who will, finally, accept him as he is. It should be utterly bathetic, but somehow it isn’t.

(The
Folklore
sessions also included a remarkably ‘straight’ and un-Hookerised version of the ancient gospel standard ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’, with
impeccably cavernous Pop Staples-styled trem-overb guitar performed by Pop Staples himself. Inexplicably, it stayed in the can until 1974, when it was included on the misleadingly-titled
compilation
In Person
.)

Hooker’s only other album release that year came from Chess, who compiled their remaining early-’50s Joe Von Battle masters as
John Lee Hooker Plays And Sings The Blues
, but
whatever his contract may or may not have specified, Vee Jay no longer enjoyed any kind of monopoly on Hooker’s recording services. Hooker had most definitely reverted to his old tricks:
wherever he went, he contrived to seize every opportunity to record ‘outside’ sessions. In Miami, he cut a fifteen-song marathon for Henry Stone, already sitting on a pile of
‘John Lee Booker’ sides dating back to 1953, some of which had been released as singles on the DeLuxe and Rockin’ labels. (Stone promptly sold the entire lot to Atlantic Records:
the best of the bunch were released as the superb
Don’t Turn Me From Your Door
album in 1963, while the remainder surfaced on Stax in 1969 as
That’s Where It’s At!
)
Booked for a date at the Auditorium in Newark, New Jersey, Hooker killed two birds with one stone: he recruited Eddie Kirkland to fulfil his traditional dual role as second guitarist and chauffeur,
and arranged a session for Savoy Records with producer Fred Mendelsohn. ‘I went and made that session. Matter of fact, I drove him there,’ remembers Kirkland. ‘I brought him
[back] to Detroit, turned around and went back to Newark myself to get with Savoy. I wasn’t able to get on Savoy, but I got on Prestige.’ And in California, he even spent a March day in
Culver City, recording a solo session for none other than Bernard Besman, who leased some of these fresh ‘Hooker-Besman compositions’ to the Galaxy label. Demonstrating that his
hand had lost none of its cunning since his ‘retirement’ from the music business, Besman subsequently assigned alternate titles to several of his new masters and sold
them on yet again.

By this time, Hooker was firmly established in his ‘folk-blues’ incarnation. However, his next move not only reunited him – for what proved to be the last time – with the
R&B mainstream, but gave him both his first nodding acquaintance with the pop (read = young white) audience, and the somewhat belated opportunity to complete his hat-trick of million-selling
signature hits. As it happened, he already had a ready-made musical setting: the catchy stop-time call-and-response riff groove he’d used for ‘Run On’ during the previous
year’s
Travelin’
session. The next ingredient came his way when a bartender at one of his favourite hometown dives unwittingly provided him with the requisite lyrical theme.

‘“Boom Boom”, you heard that?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘
Bi-i-i-i-ig
hit. I used to go to this bar – I tell people this, it’s true – I played
the Apex Bar on Russell and Oak Street in Detroit, on the north side. I played there ’bout a year in that one bar, and it was packed every night I played there. I always would come in there
late, y’know. I was drinkin’ then, I always had a bottle of Scotch by my seat or in the car. The band would be on the bandstand by the time I’d get there. I run in there, put my
coat up, and this young lady behind the bar, name of Willow – like a willow tree – every night she would say, “Boom-boom, you late again.” Every night, she say,
“Boom-boom, y’all is late”, and it came to me: that’s a
song
. She kept say in’ that, and I said, “Willow, you gave me a song.” She said,
“What?” I say, “Boom Boom.” She say, “Oh yeah.” And she kept sayin’ it. I come in there one night an’ I got it together, the lyrics, rehearsed it,
and I played it at the place, and people went wild. She gave it to me with the words she was sayin’: “Boom-boom”.’

Then finally –
boom boom –
he lucked into just the right band. Scratch that: the
perfect
band.

The catalyst turned out to be right on Hooker’s own Detroit doorstep: his old buddy Joe Hunter, the dazzling pianist who’d worked with him on the city’s
club and bar circuit, as well as playing on his successful cover of ‘I Love You Honey’ back in 1958. Hunter had gone on to become one of the cornerstones of Berry Gordy’s original
Motown studio band, but though Motown had enjoyed a few solid hits by late ’61 – notably Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’. Marv Johnson’s ‘Come To Me’ and
the Miracles’ ‘Shop Around’ – the company was still a good many classic smashes away from becoming the ‘Hitsville USA’ pop-soul empire of Gordy’s dreams.
As a result, the house band, who were making rather less than a living wage from playing what were then comparatively few-and-far-between Motown sessions, were eager to supplement their income with
whatever outside work happened to be available. As well as taking on as many non-Motown studio dates as he could arrange, Hunter kidnapped what was virtually Motown’s entire A-team and carted
them off on tour with Jackie Wilson. This potentially lucrative excursion turned out to be something of a disappointment for the cash-starved musicians: the New York-based Wilson, at that time
recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted by an ‘admirer’, was still on the frail side and therefore under doctors’ orders not to perform his highly strenuous stage act more than
three times a week. This meant that he couldn’t afford to pay each member of the band more than $75 per week. New York City, then as now, was an expensive place to hang out in on a low wage,
and since accommodation and expenses came to around $60 per, the musicians weren’t making enough of a profit to take home any noticeable bacon. The band ended up back in Detroit with their
collective tail between their collective legs, so when the opportunity arose to play some Brunswick and Vee Jay sessions in Chicago for higher wages than the still-impoverished Gordy was then able
to pay, they naturally jumped at it.

Thus it was that Hooker found himself cutting his next album,
Burnin’
, with what turned out to be one of the hottest hit-making studio crews of the ’60s.
The band Hunter brought with him included the classic Motown rhythm section of James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin, the powerhouse bass-and-drums team behind virtually all of the legendary Motown
hits of the next decade. Also along for the ride and the view were guitarist Larry Veeder, baritone saxophonist Mike Terry and, blowing tenor sax, none other than Hank Cosby, later best-known to
his bank manager as co-writer and/or producer of several of Stevie Wonder’s biggest hits, of which ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’, ‘Fingertips’ and ‘I
Was Made To Love Her’ are merely the most significant. ‘Boom Boom’, indeed.
⁵⁴

While that song failed to hit the R&B charts quite as hard as ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘I’m In The Mood’ had done a decade earlier – released at the end of
1961, its stately progress up the charts eventually peaked in mid-June of 1962 at No. 16 – it nevertheless turned out to be Hooker’s most enduring staple, and deservedly so. ‘Boom
Boom’ is, if nothing else, the greatest
pop
tune he ever wrote, not to mention the first to break him into the pop charts: its comparatively modest placing at No. 60 fails to convey
the magnitude of his achievement in getting there at all. It was also the most memorable, the most instantly appealing, and the one which has proved the most adaptable to the needs of other
performers.

So what’s so great about ‘Boom Boom’? For a start, it has just about the tightest musical structure of any Hooker composition: its verses sedulously adhere to
the twelve-bar format over which Hooker generally rides so roughshod, albeit with a neat bar-for-bar call-and-response. ‘
Boom boom, boom boom,
’ sings Hooker;
bam-bam,
bam-bam
reply the band. The tension is released in the breaks: ‘
Who-o-o-ah!
’
calls Hooker, and the band rock out for twenty-four boogying bars, swinging
irresistibly along until the verse returns.

And then there are those lyrics. As freely unrhymed as the music is tightly disciplined, they represent probably the purest – and least sexist or patronising – expression of sheer
lust in all of popular music. The eroticism of Hooker’s music takes many forms: some of his slower, sexier blues, like ‘Solid Sender’, ‘I’m In The Mood’ or the
duet version of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ he performed live with Vala Cupp literally shiver with passion; others give free reign to volatile blends of lust and anger, desire and
hostility. But ‘Boom Boom’ simply and perfectly encapsulates those moments familiar to anyone with a functioning libido – male or female, straight or gay – who has ever
caught sight of a member of whichever gender they find attractive, and has simply gone, ‘
Wow.
’ Or – in Hooker’s case – ‘
How-how-how-how.
’
When he sings, voice thickened with passion, ‘
You knocks me out/right offa my feet
’, he evokes the memory of every beautiful stranger any of his listeners has ever seen.

‘All the ladies like that,’ Hooker says of that song, and of ‘Dimples’. ‘I say things that cater to women
and
men. Women can think the same ways: shoot those
guys down, boom boom, come home with me. So the words make sense. So many songs say the same old things: ‘my woman, my baby’, every blues singer says that. I try to say something
different. They hit you something like that – like ‘Dimples’, ‘
you got dimples in your jaw
’, you know. Women like that, men with dimples, you know. Things like
that just catch on.’

Which ‘Boom Boom’ certainly did. It was unquestionably the pick of the
Burnin
’ litter, but the rest of the session certainly had its moments. Hunter, Cosby, Jamerson,
Benjamin and their colleagues are unquestionably best-known for the versatility and virtuosity with which they implemented Gordy’s vision of a new black pop which was simultaneously sweet
enough for the suburbs and soulful enough for the projects, but they’d learned their stuff in the Detroit bars
and they surely had not forgotten how to play the blues,
albeit with a sophistication unprecedented in the Hooker
oeuvre
. All that prevents
Burnin
’ from being a quintessential ‘modern’ blues recording for the time is the
absence of the then-ubiquitous B.B. King-style lead guitar. ‘Process’ was a slow-rocking blues, with darkly riffing horns, in which Hooker inveighs against hair-straightening: not for
ideological or æsthetic reasons, but because the fashion induces women to take all their housekeeping money down to the hairdresser’s rather than the grocery store. Elsewhere,
‘Thelma’ revisits the musical and lyrical turf of ‘Maudie’, while ‘What Do You Say’ reveals that Hooker was keeping a close ear on his competitors: it opens with
a guitar riff similar to some of Bo Diddley’s before erupting into a variation on Howlin’ Wolf staples like ‘Howlin’ For My Baby’ or ‘Moanin’ In The
Moonlight’.

Most outré, however, is ‘Keep Your Hands To Yourself’, based on the rocking, mock-Latino ‘Tequila’, a huge hit for The Champs back in 1958. The band steam through
‘Tequila”s four-bar riff, driven by Benjamin’s lashing cymbals and abrupt tom-tom fills while Hooker warns a male interloper of the potentially dire consequences of taking
liberties with his woman. What gives the record its tension is that Hooker makes his vocal entry on bar three of the four-bar sequence, half-way through the riff, creating a jarring, disorienting
effect which doesn’t resolve itself until he realigns with the band.

Not surprisingly, the Motown ‘experiment’ was judged a success – Vee Jay even rushed out a hasty
Best Of John Lee Hooker
in the wake of ‘Boom Boom”s success
– and Hunter, Cosby and company were recommissioned in the latter half of 1962 for two more sessions from which Hooker’s next Vee Jay album,
The Big Soul Of John Lee Hooker
,
released in early ’63, was assembled. The first was a ‘quickie’ which produced a mere four sides in the same horn-riffing, piano-tinkling, easy-rocking vein. ‘Old Time
Shimmy’ found Hooker announcing for the first, if not the last, time that ‘
the twist ain’t
nothin’ but the old-time shimmy
’, but
‘Onions’ picked up where ‘Keep Your Hands To Yourself’ left off as a vocal ‘Hookerisation’ of a recent instrumental hit. As the title might suggest, the piece
was based on Booker T & The MGs’ then-current hit ‘Green Onions’, with its starkly memorable principal riff transferred from slinky Hammond organ to abrasive saxes and the
beat stomped rather than shuffled, as Hooker demands that his baby bring him her onions, not to mention black-eyed peas, chicken and other delicacies. ‘You Know I Love You’ and
‘Send Me Your Pillow’ respectively Hookerised Barbara Lynn’s ‘You’ll Lose A Good Thing’ (a recent R&B No. 1 which also cracked the pop Top Ten) and the
sentimental ’40s ballad ‘Send Me The Pillow You Dream On’. Hooker was to repeat the latter trick at his next studio date, when he audaciously Hookerised no less a standard than
‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’.