Boogie Man (45 page)

The other two Hooker selections which made it onto the album were rather less auspicious. ‘Let’s Make It Baby’ is an undistinguished ‘Boom Boom’-alike during which
Hooker’s idiosyncratic timing
consistently wrong-foots his accompanists: as the piece winds down, Hooker can be heard proudly announcing, ‘My 88 man, T-Bone
Walker!’
⁶⁰
‘The Right Time’ is a leisurely stroll around the perimeters of an old Nappy Brown hit which had been revived to considerable
effect by Ray Charles during his barnstorming show at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival: Walker, Jackson and Dixon recover with considerable poise from Hooker’s decision to start singing the
first verse in the tenth bar of a twelve-bar intro.

By November, Hooker had returned to the States, back to the same old grind. Nevertheless, the European tour had proved to be something of an eye-opener: Hooker’s horizons, both artistic
and financial, had broadened considerably. A bluesman, he now knew, could travel overseas and get the kind of respect – and make the kind of money – which he was denied at home. He
could play the finest concert halls, stay in the best hotels, be treated like an artist, and get paid accordingly. Like General MacArthur and Arnold Schwarzenegger, he would be back.

‘I remember him doing his first big European tour when I was around twelve, something like that. I remember him getting ready to go to Europe,’ says Zakiya. ‘But when he was
working around the United States, we still got to see him pretty regular. When he [subsequently] toured Europe we wouldn’t see him for maybe six [months] . . . long spans of time. We was
always excited when he’d come back because he’d always bring gifts. I look back on it now, and I really admire him because he stuck to what he wanted to do and he didn’t let
anybody take that dream. He did it. He was just so pleased to be doing his music that he didn’t really concern himself a lot with the money. As long as he had enough to take care of his
family, and have the things that he needed, he was pretty much satisfied. I’m sure that he knew that
somebody
was cheatin’ – you know? – but he just wanted to do his
music.’

Meanwhile, Hooker was marking time: touring the folk clubs and
coffee-houses while preparing for his next Vee Jay session, not to mention enjoying being back in the bosom of
his family. ‘I was playing a gig at a club in Toronto called the Penny Farthing,’ says John Hammond, recalling his first meeting with Hooker, ‘and I was on the show with John Lee
– I’m sure he doesn’t remember it, but I do – and he had just gotten off the bus from Detroit, and he didn’t know where he was staying yet. He’d been to Toronto
before – this was in the area called Yorkville, which was the Village of Toronto – and this was a coffeehouse, and not a great one. I admired him right away. He was just himself, you
know, he got himself to his gigs and he played his ass off. I worked on a lot of gigs with him in the early ’60s, when I started playing, when he just played acoustic guitar, in Toronto and
Detroit and in New York at Gerde’s Folk City . . . I’ve seen him play gigs where he just played electric guitar solo.’

A live recording, cut during two successive weekends at San Francisco’s Sugar Hill club in early November of 1962, provides some indication of the kind of shows Hooker was performing at
that time. Playing solo on electric guitar rather than acoustic – as he preferred to do by this time at all but the most rigidly purist venues – he performed standards associated with
other artists, and re-presented or reinvented his older repertoire as well as working up some powerful new material. ‘I Was Standing By The Wayside’ was loosely derived from the same
sources as Robert Johnson’s celebrated ‘Crossroads’, while ‘My Babe’ (the Little Walter hit which Willie Dixon had created by secularising the gospel standard
‘This Train’) and ‘Key To The Highway’ (a Big Bill Broonzy composition most frequently associated with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee) find Hooker singing the original
melodies but junking the chord progressions in favour of his own patented riffs. ‘Dimples’ reappears as ‘I Like To See You Walkin”, and ‘Every Night’ as
‘It’s You I Love, Baby’ alongside an incarnation of ‘Run On’ which bore little resemblance to its original appearance as a precursor to ‘Boom Boom’. An
oddly perfunctory ‘Boogie Chillen’
is offset by a moody, deeply-grained ‘Driftin’ Blues’ and a bouncy, rocking ‘I Need Some
Money’.

Of the two important new songs, ‘TB Is Killin’ Me’ borrowed a line or two from St Louis Jimmy Oden’s standard ‘Goin’ Down Slow’, but it had an ominous
undertow of impending doom which was all its own, while ‘No Man’s Land’ was one of his most important songs of the ’60s. Essentially an answer to Woody Guthrie’s
anthem ‘This Land Is Your Land’, it stated precisely the opposite case: that the land belongs to nobody, and that we, as human beings, are doing no more than simply passing through.
This was what the Native Americans believed, which was why they were prepared to ‘sell’ the land to European traders for beads and blankets: according to their philosophical lights,
anyone who believed that land could be bought, sold or owned was plainly deluded and should therefore simply be humoured. Hooker’s take on this clash of values is as stark and poetic as
anything he ever wrote or sang.

His next Vee Jay studio date, early in 1963, represented a headlong retreat from the botched experiment of the
Big Soul
sessions. This time Hooker performed with only
drums for support, though his guitar sound was so full and rich, the (unnamed) drummer so tight and sympathetic, that the absence of a bass or second guitar scarcely proved to be any kind of
problem. ‘My Grindin’ Mill’ revisited the ‘Grinder Man’ he’d cut for Henry Stone in Miami; the venerable ‘Bottle
Up And Go’
harked back to his original Detroit house-party repertoire, and ‘I Want To Ramble’ Hookerised Junior Parker’s 1953 Sun recording of ‘Feelin’ Good’, which itself
had been a reworking of ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘Sadie Mae’ was a virtual ‘answer record’ to ‘Process’: this time Hooker requests Miss Sadie Mae to
‘
curl my baby’s hair for me
’ so that he can see her ‘
long curly hair hangin’ down
’: after all, he tells his listeners, Miss Sadie Mae ‘
can
curl hair better’n anybody else ever hit this town
’. Best of all, however, was the exuberantly lascivious ‘This Is Hip’, with its loose-limbed shuffle beat and memorable
refrain, ‘
I messed around an’-uh . . . fell in love.
’ Inexplicably, the song stayed in the can for almost twenty years, surfacing only in 1981 as the title track of a
British compilation, but it proved popular enough to be revived, at a delightfully rowdy and rockin’ session with Ry Cooder and the rhythm section from his short-lived ‘roots
supergroup’ Little Village, for 1991’s
Mr Lucky
.

Next time around, though, it was back to the big-band format with the Motown moonlighters’ last Hooker hoorah. ‘I Want To Shout’ was full-blown jump – deviating only from
the archetype with Hooker’s resolutely irregular timing and the enthusiastic shooby-doobies (or maybe it’s ‘
Shout, baby, shout
’) from the Andantes (or maybe this time
it actually
was
the Vandellas) – as was ‘I Want To Hug You’, the debut of a boogying staple-in-the-making sounding rather less confident than it would do in subsequent
incarnations. ‘Love Is A Burning Thing’ borrows its chord changes from Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’, its lyrical core from Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring Of Fire’
and its ambience from the post-gospel big-balladry of Ray Charles, Solomon Burke and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. The moving gospelly-ballad ‘Don’t Look Back’, later covered by
Van Morrison and Them and revived yet again as a Hooker/Morrison duet, had been attempted at an earlier session, but this version was the clincher. The lyrics steadfastly denounce those who are
‘
living in the past
’, but the weary, regretful tones which cloud Hooker’s voice undercut them by saying something rather different.
The words tell us
that we must be resolute and forward-looking: the voice tells us that things are never quite that simple, and that moving on can be painful even when you know that there is no real alternative.

‘Birmingham Blues’ paraphrases the classic opening line of Tommy Johnson’s 1928 ‘Big Road Blues’ as ‘
I ain’t going down to Birmingham by
myself
’, by way of reference to the Civil Rights marches which Dr Martin Luther King Jr was leading on Birmingham, Alabama, in April and May of 1963, and then follows it with as
uncompromising and passionate an expression of pure, cold rage as you’ll find in any African-American music of its decade. ‘
Get me a plane,
’ he sings, ‘
and fly
over Birmingham/drop me a bomb, keep on flyin’ on.
’ Soon he’s junked the structure (what little there is of it) and begun to preach. He returns to the theme of ‘No
Man’s Land’ – ‘
GOD made this land, this land, and he made it for no one man!
’ he cries. ‘
GOD made everybody equal! Equal! EQUAL!
’ – but
it is now blended with the politics of ‘Democrat Man’, as Hooker begins to praise not Dr King, but President John F. Kennedy, for his support of the Civil Rights movement. ‘
One
thing I do know,
’ he says. ‘
Our President . . . he are doin’ all he can . . . for every man . . . equal rights.
’ On the fade, he recites a list of the Southern
states soon to be visited by those prepared to go down the big road together. Some commentators never tire of pointing out the apparent lack of overt social comment in the blues, but even they
would have to concede that ‘Birmingham Blues’ goes an awful long way towards redressing that particular balance.

And ‘I’m Leaving’ simply rocked. There’s a certain kind of Hooker song that’s really nothing more than a band playing a single riff in a certain groove over and
over again while Hooker free-associates on two or three key lines: but when it’s the right band playing the right riff in the right groove and Hooker’s doing his stuff with the right
two or three lines, then the effect is nothing less than magical. ‘I’m Leaving’ is one of those.

The fruits of these sessions were combined on
The Big Soul Of John
Lee Hooker
’s successor,
John Lee Hooker On Campus
. To a greater extent than
anything that had come before, it epitomised the increasing schizophrenia of Hooker’s career and of Vee Jay’s approach to it. The cover depicted a charcoal drawing of someone clearly
intended to represent Hooker, though the white-haired, benevolently smiling, grandfatherly figure shown strumming his acoustic guitar into a pair of microphones bore a rather greater resemblance to
Leadbelly in his last years than to Hooker in his mid-forties. Anybody who concluded from the packaging that what they were getting was a live recording of Hooker playing solo to a college audience
would have been somewhat nonplussed by the record itself, which juxtaposed selections from both the down-homey drummer-only session and the uptownish big-band date.

On Campus
, which turned out to be Hooker’s last studio album for Vee Jay, arrived complete with a loftily condescending liner-note finely calculated to appeal to the most
patronising instincts of white readers, and equally likely to offend just about any African-American unfortunate enough to read it, let alone Hooker himself. ‘John Lee Hooker is one of the
few authentic blues artists left in this country today,’ begins the anonymous author, not unreasonably. However, he (it’s bound to be a ‘he’) then goes on to assert:

In other words: Roll up! Roll up! Getcha ‘raw, unbridled, painful’ ‘misery, ignorance and destitution’ right here! This guy doesn’t ‘enjoy the best of
luxurious living’! His family don’t ‘attend the best colleges and universities’! His speech is not ‘clipped and articulate’! He’s still ‘singing
dejectedly about his problems’!

With supporters like this, who needs backbiters and syndicators?

10

. . . BLUES BOOM