Boogie Man (49 page)

Unfortunately for Bowie and his chums, they had to ‘share’ Hooker’s catalogue with others who were rather better-known and considerably more adept. Eric Clapton’s
first-ever studio recording was a version of ‘Boom Boom’ cut at the Yardbirds’ first demo session; the Animals also recorded ‘Boom Boom’ for
their
original
demos. Unlike the Yardbirds, the Animals reprised the song, albeit augmented with a few choruses
of ‘Shake It Baby’,
⁸¹
for
their first album – cut in early ’64 in the wake of their first smash hit ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ – and threw in ‘Dimples’ and a bravura version of
‘I’m Mad Again’ for good measure, giving Hooker three of the album’s twelve composer credits (Fats Domino and Chuck Berry had to content themselves with two apiece). For
their part, the Yardbirds could be heard romping through an uptempo version of ‘Louise’ – a minor Hookerization of a standard theme, most frequently associated with Brownie
McGhee, which they’d learned from
House of the Blues
– on their live-at-the-Marquee début offering,
Five Live Yardbirds
. The Spencer Davis Group, having gotten
their Brummie selves into a studio in April ’64 to cut what they fondly hoped was their first hit, essayed a version of ‘Dimples’ which also incorporated large chunks of
‘Boom Boom’, but by the time their single was released that August, somebody else had already had a hit with ‘Dimples’. Against the odds, that somebody was Hooker
himself.

It wasn’t a particularly big hit: the single peaked at No. 23 or No. 24, depending on which of Britain’s competing music-paper charts you checked. Neither was it particularly
lucrative: EMI weren’t paying fabulous royalties to anyone (even the Beatles) at that time, and the monies they did pay were sent to Chicago to be sucked into the heaving quagmire of Vee
Jay’s financial implosion, never to be seen again. But it was enough of a hit to make it worthwhile for Don Arden, a former singer, comedian and MC who had turned promoter in order to
specialise in importing semi-faded ’50s rockers to the UK, to lure Hooker across the Atlantic for a tour. Hooker’s visit was considered a sufficiently momentous event for
Melody
Maker
to feature the announcement as a news-page lead in their issue cover-dated 23 May 1964. ‘Blues star John Lee Hooker flies into Britain from America next week for his first
nation-wide tour here’, the item
ran, beneath a 72-point banner headline screaming: ‘John Lee Hooker – tour all set.’

‘With John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers,’ it continued, ‘Hooker – one of the heroes of British R&B groups – will go round Britain for five weeks. He will
televise on
Ready Steady Go
[the hippest British pop TV show of the era] on May 29, and also broadcast on [BBC Radio’s]
Saturday Club
. . . John Lee’s tour opens on June 1
at London’s Flamingo, and next day he joins Chuck Berry and Carl Perkins on a Granada TV blues spectacular recording in Manchester.’ There then followed Hooker’s itinerary:
twenty-five dates spread over just under five weeks, taking him all over England. The festival package with which he had toured Europe in 1962 had been first-class all the way: the troupe had
performed in ornate, prestigious concert halls and stayed in luxury hotels. This was a completely different proposition: a rough-and-ready club tour with accomodations in the frowsty
bed-and-breakfast boarding-houses which were the British equivalent of the cheap motels to which Hooker and his peers were accustomed in the States. Furthermore, the very nature of the all-star
package format enabled Hooker to travel and perform in a hermetically-sealed bubble of peer-group homeys; this time he was on his own.

John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, appointed by the Arden office as Hooker’s backing group, were no big deal in the summer of ’64. To be precise, they were a hardworking club band
then some ten months away from becoming a big deal; a leap in status directly attributable to Mayall’s recruitment the following April of Eric Clapton, on the rebound from the increasingly
pop-friendly Yard birds.
⁸²
‘John Mayall backed me up when I was over there,’ remembers Hooker, though he
is
characteristically vague about whether Clapton was on the team at that particular time. ‘John Mayall backed me up a long time . . . they were my band. Quite a few people backed me. Clapton
was with ’em at one time then . . . he didn’t remember, but then he remembered that he was with ’em briefly when I was with ’em. John Mayall livin’ in Malibu now. I
bump into him once in a while and we have conversations ’bout the old days, you know.’

By the time Arden booked him for the Hooker tour, Mayall had a major-label album release under his belt, but it had only sold a minuscule 500 copies. While he had already assembled his first
great rhythm section (drummer Hughie Flint and bassist John McVie, subsequently the Flint of McGuiness Flint and the Mac of Fleetwood Mac), his group was still not quite ready for prime time. Roger
Dean, Clapton’s immediate predecessor as the Bluesbreakers’ lead guitarist, was a competent but grievously miscast player, more comfortable with country-and-western than blues. This was
unfortunate, since the Mayall blues aesthetic was purist in the white-Chicagoan mould, prioritizing ‘authenticity’ at all costs and regarding almost all pop with disdain: his masterplan
for the Bluesbreakers would only be realized once Dean was replaced by Clapton. Nevertheless, with audience expectations whetted by Hooker’s appearance on
Ready Steady Go!
, the first
gig of the tour was deemed a roaring success. According to
Melody Maker
’s jazz and blues guru Max Jones:

‘That was wonderful,’ says Valerie Wilmer, ‘because the Flamingo was
the place
and you had a black-ish audience, plenty of West Indians. It was just this amazing place
because it had these reed walls and it had the feeling of being the hippest place in town; sweat running down the walls and this low ceiling over the bandstand which gave you a sort of compressed
feeling. I can see Hooker now, standing there and singing. He had a sharkskin suit, silvery sharkskin . . . it just felt very authentic and funky and it was something you didn’t often come
across.’

Others were rather less enthusiastic than Jones and Wilmer. Writing in the mimeographed fanzine
Blues Unlimited
, John J. Broven grumpily pleaded the purist case:

No less eminent a figure than Pete Townshend lined up alongside Broven in the Disappointed Men league. ‘I saw John Lee Hooker in London only once in the ’60s. It was disappointing.
He played with musicians who treated him as if he was another Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley and not – as is the real case – the true “boss” of ’60s electric R&B. His
band of British enthusiastic R&B pickup musicians
⁸⁴
seemed to feel nothing of his incredible subtlety and elegance. He seemed to serve himself poorly
too: we were there to see a great soloist. He was there to make some cash and pull some birds, and he probably succeeded on both counts. He wore a red check suit, and although I felt I was in the
presence of a legend, I went straight home and put on some [of Hooker’s] solo records to remind myself of the sheer genius of the man.’

And Townshend was, no less now than then, firmly convinced of Hooker’s genius. ‘John Lee Hooker stands firmly on one side of a line which, once established, allowed all
post-’50s pop to be redefined. Without him there would be no “power chord”. It is time to give the credit for that little invention to the man who really created it, John Lee
Hooker. Take it from me. I know.’

‘We were the first band to play with John Lee,’ Mayall recalled in 1991. ‘That whole thing was something of an experiment. I remember we played the Flamingo, and of course they
were more used to things
like Georgie Fame all-nighters, so it was a big surprise when people from all over the country turned up and there was a big queue down Wardour Street.
Then we toured around the rest of the country . . . and that really paved the way for having British bands play with a lot of other blues artists.’

Like many of his fellow Brit blues-boomers, Mayall had completed a rigorous home-study course in the blues, aided immeasurably by access to his father’s extensive library of jazz and
boogie-woogie 78s, but touring with Hooker – ‘the first real blues guitarist we backed up’ – was his chance to obtain that elusive Blues University degree. ‘It was a
very humbling experience,’ he told Gregory Isola, ‘because we all thought we were shit-hot players and knew what it was all about. Then you get Hooker on-stage and what you know flies
out the window. You feel like rank amateurs. But we picked up a lot. I learned about dynamics from playing with John Lee – the power of not forcing things. You have to be relaxed. John Lee
would just sit down in a chair and a deathly hush would come over the whole audience. Such presence . . .’

Mayall backed Hooker again in 1966. Peter Green, freshly recruited as Eric Clapton’s replacement, has his own memories of that particular occasion. ‘I met him when I first joined
John Mayall. It was in the very early days, and we had to back him at the Ram Jam Club in Brixton. I was very unsatisfied. I couldn’t figure anything out. I tried to back him but I was too
loud and I couldn’t seem to get the whole thing
down
so I could play ever so quietly and let him go along. I was barely touching the guitar, afraid to do anything because he
don’t need nobody. Afraid to do anything before he gets used to you and accepts that you’re there. I don’t think what I did was very good. He was all right, I guess. He’s
pretty steadfast, for want of a better word, and does his thing. Whatever you’re doing, he don’t need you particularly. Very delicate, very difficult. It was far too
“experienced” an experience. I couldn’t guarantee it would be any different now. What
can you play? He doesn’t need anyone, does he? Most of his records
are him on his own, aren’t they?’

Broven was right about one thing: despite Mayall’s indubitable enthusiasm and eagerness to please, the Hooker/Blues breakers combination had failed to gel. Part of the problem was Roger
Dean: reliable and musicianly though he was, he not only wasn’t much of a bluesman, he wasn’t much of an improviser either. ‘Keeping up with the way John Lee played wasn’t
much of a problem for me, as I was well used to listening to that kind of player,’ Mayall says, ‘but for people who were more used to reading music, for instance, it was more of a
problem. I think that Roger Dean was confused for a while. We had to tell him, “Just keep on your toes, and listen to his voice.” We found [Hooker] great to work with; I’d read
that he was blunt and not very communicative, but that wasn’t the case at all.’

One Hooker fan in particular found the recruitment of the Blues-breakers especially disappointing. Guitarist Tony McPhee was a charter member of an informal clique of blues fans based in
Streatham,
⁸⁵
south London; not only were his group, the Groundhogs, named after Hooker’s ‘Groundhog Blues’, but their singer/harpist John
Cruikshank actually called himself ‘John Lee’. As soon as the band’s manager, Roy Fisher, had spotted the tour announcement in
Melody Maker
, he’d grabbed the phone,
called the Arden agency, and offered them ‘John Lee’s Groundhogs’ as Hooker’s accompanists, only to be told that Mayall’s group already had the job. Fisher, McPhee and
the Groundhogs duly showed up at the Flamingo for Hooker’s opening night, and came away feeling somewhat aggrieved. ‘They brought Hooker over and put him with John Mayall’s
band,’ McPhee griped to Bob Brunning. ‘I went to see him and I thought, “this just ain’t Hooker, not with keyboards behind. It just ain’t working.”’

However, John Lee’s Groundhogs – drummer Dave Boorman and
bassist Pete Cruikshank completed the quartet – eventually got their chance to work with Hooker.
For reasons now obscured by the mists of time, Mayall & Co. were unable to complete the full duration of the tour, and a stand-in ensemble were urgently required. The Arden agency, according to
Roy Fisher, ‘were looking for the cheapest band that would do it, and the Groundhogs were cheap at that particular time’. Fisher had a meeting with Hooker at Arden’s offices, a
deal was cut, and Hooker and the ’Hogs arranged to meet up in Manchester on the afternoon preceding their first gig together. The band arrived at that night’s venue, the Twisted Wheel
club, in their beat-up van; Hooker in a car chauffeured by Arden employee Patrick Meehan. For all concerned, it turned out to be a serendipitous encounter: the South London boys and the Delta
veteran clicked, big time. ‘He met the band, liked them, got to talking,’ Fisher recalls. ‘The rehearsal was thirty minutes on the afternoon of the first gig, a
soundcheck-cum-rehearsal. Even John said that McPhee knew some of his old blues songs better than John remembered them, so therefore it wasn’t a problem and it just went from there. Because
he liked the guys and respected the way they played, he decided the very next day that he didn’t want to tour with the chauffeur any more: he wanted to tour with the band.’