Boogie Man (47 page)

However, by the time Vee Jay began proceedings to file for bankruptcy, Hooker wasn’t even in the country. He’d cut one last session for them during early 1964, leaving ten tracks for
what would have been his next Vee Jay studio album. Surviving session logs don’t name the guitarist, bassist and drummer who backed him that time, though the trio in question didn’t
sound terribly dissimilar from the Lefty Bates/Sylvester Hickman/Jimmy Turner combo which had accompanied him on the
Travelin
’ session in 1960. In terms of repertoire, it was
definitely a mixed bag. Revisiting ‘Wednesday Evenin” and ‘Sally Mae’, Hooker nostalgically returned to the programme of his very first session with Bernard Besman almost
fifteen years before. The bouncily lascivious ‘Big Legs, Tight Skirt’ and the rather more romantic ‘Flowers On The Hour’ shot for the jukeboxes and the elusive crossover
market; while the icily
unforgiving ‘Ain’t No Big Thing, Baby’ – in which Hooker threatens to send his woman, whom he brought from the Delta and kitted
out with nice clothes, back down South if she doesn’t mend her ways – showed him in a considerably more ruthless light.

The session’s most significant addition to Hooker’s permanent repertoire, though, was ‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’, an agonised slow blues which he has continued to
sing ever since. ‘Some things it do serve you right to suffer,’ he says, ‘when you shouldn’t have did it, when it hurt someone down the line. Things that you did, when you
shouldn’t’ve did it, but you just can’t change it.’ Hooker cites it as the saddest song in his catalogue, and performing it remains a gruelling emotional experience. That,
he says, is why he took to wearing sunglasses on stage. ‘To keep from crying, yeah. Blues goes
so deep
. My songs sound so good. I’m not praising myself, not patting myself on the
back, but when I hear my own voice, it’s so beautiful. The soul sounds so sad, and the words, the lyrics that I’m saying, just hits me. Sad, loving lyrics. I feel teardrops in my eyes,
and I put on my sunglasses to keep from people seeing me crying, with tears running down my face.

‘But I never know when they’re going to hit me. When I’m just singing the tempo stuff, like “Boom Boom” and the boogie, it don’t. But the slow groove –
so, so sad, and so deep – I have to cry, and I’m the one singing it.’

‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’ stretches the concept of ‘Hookerisation’ about as far as it can go. It would be something of an understatement simply to say that the song
is ‘derived from’ Percy Mayfield’s ‘Memory Pain’: Hooker’s ‘version’ of Mayfield’s song is not so much a personal adaptation as a straight-up
heist. One of the quintessential urbane-blues crooners, a formidable composer and a virtual contemporary of Hooker’s (not to mention being no known relation to Curtis), Percy Mayfield was the
author of a glittering fistful of classics including ‘River’s Invitation’, ‘Hit The Road, Jack’ and ‘Please Send Me
Someone To Love’.
‘Memory Pain’ had been recorded at his 1953 comeback session, following a year-long lay-off necessitated by the near-fatal car smash which robbed him of both his matinee-idol good looks
and his sense of self-worth. Creatively if not physically, his path had crossed Hooker’s before, when both men had been simultaneously contracted to Art Rupe’s Specialty label; and when
a line from Mayfield’s composition ‘Two Years Of Torture’ had provided the stimulus for Hooker’s own ‘Backbiters And Syndicators’.

‘Memory Pain’ is a masterpiece of the blues songsmith’s art. The lyrics are simple and laconic, but epigrammatically taut and evocative, with an emotional complexity which lies
barely concealed just beneath the surface. Ostensibly penitent and self-exculpatory, the song is in fact loaded with resentment and bitterness towards the departed woman: the more the singer
proclaims the justice of his unhappy fate, the more he’s actually playing to the gallery and attempting to arouse his listeners’ sympathy for himself. No wonder it appealed to Hooker,
who must have known the moment he heard it that it was virtually custom-built for him. Mayfield cut the song twice, with the verses sung in different orders, during the first half of 1953, but the
version which directly inspired ‘It Serve Me Right To Suffer’ – not to mention a 1969 cover by Johnny Winter – appears to have stayed in the can until it was included on a
1971 Mayfield compilation. Possibly Hooker heard the first version during his year with Specialty, or maybe he heard Mayfield sing it that way live. Smokily crooning over lightly swinging rhythm
and a soupy horn section led by tenorist Maxwell Davis, Mayfield sings a total of four verses. Hooker retains the first two virtually intact; drops the third to make room for a dark, clawing guitar
solo full of skittering runs, percussive scratching and viciously bent notes; and puckishly replaces the doubled-up first line of Mayfield’s final verse – ‘
I don’t see
well, I’m absent-minded, I hardly sleep at all/My past put me on a habit of nicotine and alcohol
’ – with a personalised full verse of his own:
‘
My doctor put me on milk, cream and alcohol/He said, “Johnny, your nerves is so bad, so bad, Johnny, until you just can’t sleep at all,”
’ thus
enabling him to bring the song to a powerful completion with a full restatement of the first verse.

Hooker sings the song much ‘straighter’ – adhering much more closely to orthodox ‘direct time’ – than he does in most of his slow blues performances, hardly
ever yielding to the temptation of ‘gaining’ a bar by jumping ahead of the band, as is his customary practice. It is said that mediocre artists borrow and great artists steal – as
when Otis Redding acknowledged that Aretha Franklin had ‘stolen’ ‘Respect’ from him; though she had left him with his composer credit and publishing royalties intact, the
song now ‘belonged’ to her – and by this definition, Hooker’s annexation of Mayfield’s song undoubtedly certifies him as a great artist. His version overpowers
Mayfield’s; his personalised lyric change puts the stamp of ‘Hookerisation’ upon it; and ultimately he demonstrates his ownership by ‘inhabiting’ the song more
completely than did its author. Copyright law doesn’t work this way – if it did, no songwriter could ever be able to make any kind of a living – but the blues’ unique
melding of oral tradition and pop process certainly does.

Meanwhile, way over in England, a blues boom was raging. EMI’s Stateside label had issued Hooker’s eight-year-old ‘Dimples’ as a single, and it was starting to climb the
charts. A year and a half after he’d touched down in Manchester with the American Folk Blues Festival, Hooker was flying back to England for his first-ever headlining foreign tour. He was
about to re-invade the British Invasion and become a rock and roll star.

‘You ever hear’a Newcastle?’ demands John Lee Hooker of a British acquaintance. The acquaintance fruitlessly racks his brain, mentally scrolling through a
headful of half-forgot ten fragments of Delta lore. ‘Newcastle, Mississippi?’ he enquires eventually.

Apparently not. ‘You ever been to Newcastle?’ Hooker asks again, somewhat impatiently this time. ‘Newcastle in
Britain
. Newcastle . . . boy, that was
rough
. There
was a bar I played every night. It was
rough
.’

‘Was that the Club-A-Go-Go?’ the acquaintance asks, recalling a notorious dive founded in that fair city during the early ’60s – with decor designed by Eric Burdon,
vocalist for the club’s original house band, the Animals – by Mike Jeffery, subsequently manager of the Animals and Jimi Hendrix. Hooker nods:
yes
.

‘Fighting outside,
ooohhhh! And
inside. “Oh,” I said, “that’s
it
. I ain’t gonna play here no more.” They were fighting like dogs! Little
kids carryin’ knives an’ all the rest of it . . .
shit
. Oh boy, it was rough. Everybody say, “Hey man, this ain’t nothin’, they fight here all the time.”
I say, “Yes, ’n I be in the
middle
of it!”’

To most Brits, weaned on lurid horror stories of American inner-city violence, there is something almost ludicrous in the notion that someone who had survived in the Detroit ghetto, more or less
unscathed, for a quarter-century or so, could possibly be taken aback by a bunch of beered-up teenage Geordies. Nevertheless, what’s familiar is often reassuring, even if it may seem scary to
outsiders. And what’s
unfamiliar
is often what catches you unawares.

This is neither the time nor the place for an in-depth account of the birth-pangs of British R&B: the early chapters of any competent biography of Eric Clapton or the
Rolling Stones
⁷¹
will recount that story in far greater detail than is either necessary or desirable in this particular context. However, in order to
understand the peculiar nature of the madhouse in which Hooker was about to find himself – not to mention the differences between the young white blues audiences in the British Isles and the
US – we need a word, or a couple of thousand, about the pre-history of the British Blues Boom.

Like – but also
un
like – other Europeans, Britons had loved African-American music, in both its ‘traditional’ and ‘commercial’ forms, for decades; but
it was a rarely consummated love affair, conducted from afar via records and the occasional visit from a genuine American bluesman. ‘For me,’ wrote George Melly, the British singer,
critic, author and raconteur,
⁷²
describing his emotions en route to Big Bill Broonzy’s first British concert in 1951, ‘the idea of hearing an
American Negro singing the blues was almost unbearably exciting.’ Melly had heard his first Bessie Smith record during his childhood in the ’30s, and had carried a torch for
‘classic’ blues and New Orleans jazz for almost twenty years without ever experiencing a performance by a ranking exponent of the art. In the US, the carriers of that blues torch were
fans and musicians whose primary concern was ‘folk’ music, for the excellent reason that since the blues is a cornerstone of America’s folk heritage, no valid exploration of the
folk roots of American music could legitimately exclude it. The British folk
musicians and collectors, on the other hand, devoted themselves primarily to exploring and renewing
their own folk music; songs from the native Anglo-Celtic traditions. Such musicians were encouraged to perform music from their own home communities: Euan McColl, the scene’s patriarch, even
frowned on the idea of a Londoner performing a Scottish ballad, let alone a Mississippi blues piece, in his Singers’ Club. In the United Kingdom, therefore, listeners of Melly’s
generation primarily collected and appreciated the blues as a member of the musical family ruled by that other great African-American creation: jazz.

The generation fifteen or twenty years younger than Melly and his contemporaries heard the blues in a somewhat different context. Some came to the music via Britain’s mid-’50s
fascination with ‘trad’: home-grown variations on New Orleans jazz. Both Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Pete Townshend of The Who began their performing careers as banjoists in
‘trad’ bands,
⁷³
and
Wunderkind
polymath Stevie Winwood was playing piano in a trad band led by his bass-playing elder brother Muff before
he was out of short pants. Some arrived via ‘skiffle’, a home-made, low-budget grab-bag of assorted American folk musics drawing heavily on the Leadbelly repertoire: John Lennon’s
first instrument was banjo and his first group a skiffle band. Others still had been simultaneously exposed to radio broadcasts by Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Josh White
– the latter an ersatz bluesman who had, uniquely, started out as a real one – and to the first wave of the rock and roll explosion of the ’50s. The likes of Keith Richards and
Eric Clapton literally heard Big Bill Broonzy with one ear and Chuck Berry with the other.

‘On one hand,’ affirmed Richards,
⁷⁴
‘I was playing all that folk stuff on the guitar. The other half of me was listenin’ to all
that rock and roll.’ And it was in the rough, rumbustious energies of Chicago blues that the two streams converged, with the vestiges of the ‘trad’ boom providing the
infrastructure. British traditional jazzers had ranged from the most commercial and popsploitative to the most austere and puritanical – in their musical tastes rather than their personal
lives, as Melly’s
Owning Up
makes hilariously clear. The real ayatollahs, like the legendary Ken Colyer, considered that Louis Armstrong had ruined jazz by introducing the concept of
‘soloing’, and that the music had been in artistic decline ever since 1926. Others, like the enormously influential Chris Barber, had taken a broader view, exploring a variety of
opportunities to expand the range and definition of his band. Britain’s first skiffle group had been formed within Barber’s band and featured Barber’s banjoist, Tony Donegan, as
its front man: following a surprise hit with a version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’, Donegan changed his first name to ‘Lonnie’ (in homage to Lonnie Johnson) and
launched his own group.

Barber then repeated the trick with a Chicago blues band-within-the-band, spotlighting the Bessie Smith-styled vocals of his wife, Ottilie Patterson; the guitar of Donegan’s replacement,
Alexis Korner, and guest harpist Cyril Davies. It was as guest artists with Barber’s band that Muddy Waters and his pianist Otis Spann became the first Chicago bluesmen to visit the UK,
creating a major controversy with their rock-scaled levels of amplification. Even without a Donegan-sized hit (or
any
hit, for that matter), Korner and Davies were eventually inspired to
leave the Barber band and form
their
own group. Launched in 1962, Blues Incorporated became the first blues-dedicated electric band in Britain – and, indeed, probably the first white
Chicago-style
blues band anywhere in the world – and it was Blues Incorporated, and the club which Korner and Davies founded in west London, which provided a focus for
the kids who would form the first wave of British R&B bands.
⁷⁵