Boogie Man (48 page)

Indeed, it hadn’t been until Blues Incorporated arrived to provide a focus that the isolated knots of blues lovers – first in the south of England, and then all over the country
– got to meet each other, and realise how numerous and widespread they actually were. Even be fore 1962, when the major British record companies began to provide UK outlets for Chicago blues
recordings – Vee Jay via EMI’s Stateside label, Chess through Pye Inter national’s R&B Series – the blues kids collected rare imported records, absorbed whatever scraps
of information they could glean from liner notes, and took their first tentative steps towards teaching themselves to reproduce what they heard on their own guitars, harmonicas and drums.

And they were dedicated.
Boy
, were they dedicated. As well as scouring the specialist record shops, Mick Jagger was sufficiently enterprising to obtain a catalogue from Chess Records in
Chicago and write away to score his Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley records by direct mail. Brian Jones
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once came to the verge of a fistfight with another
customer – writer Roy Carr, as it happens – over an import store’s last copy of a much sought-after Howlin’ Wolf album. Guitarist Tom McGuiness, who subsequently enjoyed a
string of ’60s hits as a member of Manfred Mann but whose first group, the Roosters, had at various times included Brian Jones, Eric Clapton and Manfred Mann singer/
harpist Paul Jones, remembers walking three miles just to look at the cover of a John Lee Hooker album. McGuiness didn’t actually get to
listen
to the record, but just to
see
it was enough of a thrill to justify the hike. The likes of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson, Willie Dixon and – of course –
John Lee Hooker were literally worshipped as gods.

And so were great rockers like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and Little Richard; proto-soulers like Ray Charles and James Brown; and funky jazzers like Jimmy Smith and Mose Allison. The eclecticism of
taste which the Brit bands brought to the African-American cultural continuum can best be illustrated by citing the contents of a record collection which Pete Townshend was fortunate enough to
‘inherit’ from an American friend deported from the UK for the heinous offence of potsmoking. According to Richard Barnes, then Townshend’s flatmate, this cultural treasure trove
included ‘. . . all of Jimmy Reed’s albums, all of Chuck Berry’s, all of James Brown’s, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Snooks Eaglin, Mose Allison, all of Jimmy Smith’s,
Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Howlin’ Wolf, Slim Harpo, Buddy Guy, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, Joe Turner, Nina Simone, Booker T., Little Richard, Jerry Lee
Lewis, Carl Perkins, The Isley Brothers, Fats Domino, The Coasters, Ray Charles, Jimmy McGriff, Brother Jack McDuff, John Patton, Bobby Bland, the Drifters, the Miracles, the Shirelles, the
Impressions and many jazz albums including Charlie Parker, Mingus, Coltrane, Miles Davis, Milt Jackson, Wes Montgomery, Jimmy Guiffre [and] Dave Brubeck . . .’ Townshend’s pal had
brilliant taste: as a cross-section of the most important post-war black and black-derived American music, this particular selection could scarcely be bettered. Anybody using that stuff as source
material would be running on high-octane fuel; as Hooker himself might put it: pot’s on, gas on high.

Viewed with an Africentric perspective and 20/20 hindsight, it’s tempting to compare the disproportionate degrees of fame and wealth
achieved by the Claptons, Stones
or Zeppelins of this world as opposed to the role models from whom they learned their initial stuff, and conclude that the British blues kids were simply thieves: cultural carpet-baggers,
neo-colonialist expropriators and cynical rip-off merchants who sat around telling each other, ‘Hey, I got a great idea, fellas – let’s rob those old niggers blind and make
ourselves a fortune!’ However, that particular temptation should be firmly resisted. Anyone who’d suggested in those early days – even before the Beatles had busted out of the
Liverpool cellars and Hamburg
bierkellers
to become a national obsession – that there were fortunes to be made, and lifetime careers to be enjoyed, by English kids playing rhythm and
blues would have been mercilessly derided. Many of the musicians were – like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page – still living with their folks; those who’d left home to play the music
and attempted to support themselves by doing so – like Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Brian Jones – damn near starved to death in the process. Chicago blues was an underground taste,
and a self-consciously elitist one at that; a strange fungoid growth which evolved, over several years, in trad’s suburban shadow before ultimately conquering its strongholds in
London’s West End. As George Melly described the process,
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The spearhead of the R&B breakthrough had been the success of the Rolling Stones. By early 1963, Jagger, Richards and Jones had enlisted journeyman rock bassist Bill Wyman
⁷⁸
and former Blues Incorporated drummer Charlie Watts to form their classic line-up, and by the time they outgrew the R&B club circuit and graduated to the theatres,
cinemas and ballrooms, there was no shortage of other bands waiting in the wings to take over their gigs. In London and the southeast, the Who, the Kinks, the Yardbirds (with Clapton on lead
guitar), Manfred Mann, the Pretty Things and many others less distinguished were limbering up; the Animals were coming together in Newcastle; the Spencer Davis Group (featuring Stevie Winwood) and
the Moody Blues lurked in Birmingham; and in Manchester an eccentric multi-instrumentalist named John Mayall, a contemporary of Korner and Davies rather than Jagger or Clapton, was preparing to
relocate to the capital.

The Manchester appearance of the 1962 American Folk Blues Festival had been a significant precursor of what was to come. Jagger, Richards, Jones and their friend Jimmy Page (plus David Housego,
the latter’s buddy from his skiffling teenage years) were part of the London contingent who’d travelled up to see the show, and the writer/photographer Valerie Wilmer is still vaguely
resentful that she had to
miss it because her then-boyfriend’s motorcycle broke down
en route.
However, it was the following year’s package, featuring Sonny
Boy Williamson II, Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Lonnie Johnson and Big Joe Williams alongside regulars Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim, which proved to be the watershed. In sharp contrast with the
’62 tour’s last-minute one-off performance, the ’63 edition enacted a full triumphal march around the nation, delighting the audiences primed for them by the Stones; Sonny Boy
Williamson enjoyed himself so much that he decided to stay. In February of 1964, Sonny Boy, backed by the Yardbirds, was the headline attraction at Britain’s first R&B Festival, held at
Birmingham Town Hall. Further down the bill, Steve Winwood and Rod Stewart could be found as respective members of the Spencer Davis Group and Long John Baldry & the Hoochie Coochie Men.
Stewart’s vocal feature was Jimmy Reed’s ‘Bright Lights, Big City’; Winwood sang ‘Night Time is the Right Time’ and ‘Dimples’. (And sixteen-year-old
Robert Plant, from nearby Kidderminster, was backstage stealing one of Sonny Boy’s harps in the hope that some of that magical mojo would rub off. Evidently it did.)

By this time, of course, the Stones were way too big in their own right to serve as anyone’s back-up band, but the Yardbirds, the Animals and several others were keen to
oblige. The levels of mutual incomprehension thereby reached were staggering, particularly since Sonny Boy was considered a somewhat difficult man even amongst his peer group back in Helena,
Arkansas, but the arrangement ultimately proved mutually beneficial. The expatriate harpist received enthusiastic and committed (if naïve and occasionally hamfisted) back-up, while the groups
got a chance to study at the kind of blues university of which they had previously only been able to dream.

For their contemporaries in Chicago, though, ‘blues university’ was right on the doorstep. Thirty and more years earlier, young white Chicagoans like Gene Krupa, Mezz Mezzrow, Eddie
Condon, Davey
Tough and Benny Goodman had gone to ‘class’ by soaking up everything they could learn from the greats of the New Orleans jazz diaspora. Their
’60s successors – be they locals like Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield and Nick Gravenites or imports like Steve Miller, Elvin Bishop and ‘Memphis Charlie’ Musselwhite
– made similar pilgrimages to the bars and taverns of the South and West Sides to learn their stuff first-hand from the Real Guys. If you wanted to blow harp, you were prepared to buy the
drinks and you could convince Little Walter or Junior Wells that you were seriously down with the programme, you might learn some stuff, be it licks and techniques or upside-your-head zen lessons
in blues attitude. And if you played guitar, then Muddy Waters, Magic Sam, Earl Hooker, Otis Rush or Elmore James were generally there for the approaching . . . if you dared.

The best of the white Chicagoans learned their lessons very well indeed. They soaked up attitude and ambience as well as licks and riffs, and their ‘blues’ was certainly
idiomatically purer and more authentic than anything the Brits were playing. As imitators of the ‘real guys’, they had their transatlantic counterparts beaten all hollow, as any direct
comparison of, say, the first Paul Butterfield Blues Band album with the early work of the Yardbirds or the Stones will demonstrate. However, the spiritual and geographical distance which separated
the Brit bands from their sources ultimately proved to be their greatest asset. Lacking first-hand knowledge of and access to their role models, they were forced to reinvent the music, to juxtapose
styles and idioms which rarely mixed on their native soil, to join up the dots with their own ideas. ‘If I’m building a solo,’ Eric Clapton once explained to
Guitar
Player
’s Dan Forte, ‘I’ll start with a line that is definitely Freddie King . . . and then I’ll go on to a B.B. King line. I’ll do something to join them up, so
that’ll be me – that part . . . Of course, it’s not my favourite bit. My favourite bit is still the B.B. or Freddie lines.’ But out of their creative misunderstandings of
the distant worlds of the South Side and the Delta, Clapton and his kind
accidentally-on-purpose invented something uniquely their own: a new kind of rock and roll. Indeed, the
Rolling Stones, who took the process further than anyone else, ended up virtually reinventing America.

The Brit-blues posse began by identifying with the music because its gritty realism rang truer to their own lives and aspirations than the candy-ass white pop of the time. As Eric Burdon of the
Animals explained to a BBC interviewer, ‘I heard John Lee Hooker singing things like, “
I’ve been working in a steel mill, trucking steel like a slave/and I woke up this morning
and my baby’s gone away
”, and I related to that directly, because that was happening to people . . . grown men on my block.’ (The lyric Burdon is quoting – or rather
mis-quoting – comes from Eddie Boyd’s ‘Five Long Years’ which Hooker had covered on 1961’s
The Folklore Of John Lee Hooker
, but the principle remains the same.)
But what began as a process of imitation and emulation, an urge to reproduce the mythic power of the music they heard on their treasured records, ended up as a quest of self-discovery and personal
liberation. They set out to unlock the heart of the blues, but instead ended up unlocking themselves. As Roger Daltrey of The Who told Dave Marsh,
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‘Because so many of the songs sounded exactly the same, we had to use our imagination to build them up. Blues taught us to use musical freedom. Playing pop before, you just copied a record
and that was it. If we got near to the record, we were happy. But blues was a completely different thing altogether. We’d play one verse for twenty minutes and make up half the
lyrics.’

Pausing only to note the similarity between Hooker’s own improvisatory methods and the kind of experimentation described by Daltrey, let us posit that if the Brits had learned to play the
blues as ‘authentically’ as Butterfield and his Chicago circle, they might well have
rested on those particular laurels, understudying the old masters and refining
their craft. Instead, they were impelled to use the blues as a springboard to launch their unlocked selves into work which innovated rather than imitated. If the Kinks or the Moody Blues had been
content to remain blues bands, they would have been utterly forgotten by 1966.

Thanks to the good offices of Stateside and Pye International, the R&B kids had enjoyed simultaneous access to two distinct limbs of Hooker’s body of work. His early ’50s style
was well represented by Chess sides originally cut in Detroit for Chance by Joe Von Battle, but his more recent Vee Jay material proved rather more adaptable to the needs of these fledgling bands.
By comparison with the more structured repertoires of Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters – let alone those of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, who had one foot in the blues and the other in rock and roll
– Hooker’s fluid, semi-improvised music was, for British kids, easier to enjoy than to emulate. Nevertheless, quite a few of them tried. According to David Bowie, one of his teenage
groups ‘did a lot of stuff by John Lee Hooker, and we tried to adapt his stuff to the big beat – never terribly successfully. But that was the thing: everybody was picking a blues
artist as their own. Somebody had Muddy Waters, somebody had Sonny Boy Williamson. Ours was Hooker.’
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