Boogie Man (50 page)

It should come as no surprise that Hooker preferred to squeeze into a rundown van already crammed with musicians and amps, rather than travel in the solitary chauffeur-driven grandeur to which
his star status entitled him. He was in a foreign country (albeit one from which he was – in the words of Winston Churchill – ‘divided by a common language’), and he
didn’t know a soul. He was travelling alone, with no hometown buddy like Eddie Burns, Eddie Kirkland or Tom Whitehead to provide musical, emotional and practical support, and thus he needed
companionship. The Groundhogs were not only a nice bunch of kids who idolised and adored him, but a hard-working team led by a guitarist who knew his music – certain areas of it,
anyway – back to front. ‘The Groundhogs were able to follow his changes because they were that much familiar with his records,’ continues Roy Fisher. ‘He was
surprised, and actually commented that they knew his music better than he did. He had forgotten a lot of the early stuff, but those were the things that people wanted to hear, so he had to relearn
them, but it was like the group were teaching
him
how they went.’

Even
Blues Unlimited
was prepared to grant its approval to the Hooker/’Hogs team. After the ‘aural torture’ of a set by Georgie Fame & The Blue Flames, wrote Graham
Ackers of a show at the Savoy Ballroom in Cleveleys, near the northern seaside resort of Blackpool:

‘We went on from there,’ recalls Fisher, ‘touring around in a battered old Transit van, which had definitely seen better days, with the band, me, John and
all the equipment, but he preferred that to being chauffeured around. He wanted to be with the band, so that’s how we toured. This was fine other than the fact that it was a fairly warm time
of year, and John suffered with a cold, so there he’d be up in the front seat with his coat, scarf and hat, a blanket over his knees, the heater on, and still complaining about the cold.
We’d all be there in T-shirts saying, ‘Oh my God’ with sweat pouring off us, and every now and again, when we thought he was dozing off and having a little nap, we’d sneak
the window down a little bit and he’d wake up and say, “Who cracked the glass?” We’d say, “Oh, sorry, John”, and wind it back up. But it was good that he was
travelling with us. The other thing about touring like this would be that also, of course, he decided that he would stay in the same places as the band. Now, bearing in mind that the amount the
band were getting for the tour was a pittance – the exact amount I don’t remember – we were staying at the most grotty boarding-houses, not hotels. Of course John was staying
there as well, so we’d arrive there and usually I’d check out the place before hand, so by the time John saw the place, it was one o’clock, two o’ clock in the morning
[before] we’d go back there. It would be freezing cold, of course. His room would have this little gas heater which we had to put on for him, and he would huddle over it. Then in the morning
we’d go down to breakfast and this Northern landlady would bustle around saying, ‘How’d you want your eggs?’ or ‘How’d you like your room?’ John would go
on to complain . . . in a very polite way, but nevertheless complaining, that the room was cold, there was no phone in the room and so on and so forth, because he expected, from the hotels that
he’d stayed at on the blues [festival] tour that he’d been on, that he’d have the same situation; not realising that we were paying the cheapest rate. Lippman and Rau did it well,
but unfortunately, the group couldn’t afford
these places on the pay they were getting, and he wanted to tour with the band. I suggested at the time that maybe we should
check him into a better hotel and the band should stay where they were, but he didn’t want to do that.’

Nevertheless, Hooker hated the food. ‘In a lot of places, breakfast would be the typical English fry-up: fried egg done not the way you’d want to eat eggs anyway, and bacon that
didn’t look like American bacon. It was absolutely always a problem. You’d go into a restaurant, and all he’d ever want to eat would be a burger, and they didn’t have those
here then. They had sandwiches or whatever.’

Even in the comparatively sophisticated capital, not everything was to Hooker’s liking. ‘In London I got up in the morning, and in America you get TV all day. I turned my TV on and
there was
nothin
’! I said, “This TV is broken! I can’t get nothin’!” and I called down stairs. They said, “Oh, you don’t get nothin’
’til about twelve o’clock, and then you get the BBC, Mr Hooker.” I said, “Is that all?” Then you be sittin’ there watchin’ TV, and at a certain time of
night it go
off
early too! And I wouldn’t be sleepy!
Click
! Right off and you couldn’t get nothin’! And warm beer that make you drunk quick. The pub close up, open
up . . . warm beer, the water was warm, the Coke was warm. Warm beer but
strong
. You drink two pitchers of it and you
loaded
.’

So there was Hooker, plopped down right smack in the midst of Swinging London. Make that ‘relatively swinging London’: many of the goodies and facilities routinely demanded by
Americans – even African-Americans excluded from vast tracts of mainstream American life – were considered luxuries in a Britain still in the process of exorcising the spectre of
postwar austerities; a Britain deeply ambivalent both about the loss of its old empire and its fear of becoming part of somebody else’s. Hamburgers were difficult to find, and good hamburgers
impossible. Restricted pub hours, weird food, part-time television with only two channels, a labyrinthine class system and a set of bewilderingly inconsistent social and cultural codes rendered
Britain as ‘foreign’ a country to visiting bluesmen as anywhere else in Europe.

Valerie Wilmer was, at that time, just beginning to make the transition from eager fan to professional photojournalist; and she frequently found herself adopting the role of tour guide and
interpreter to visiting African-American jazz and blues musicians. The potential for mutual misunderstanding was massive, and her formidable diplomatic skills were frequently tested to the full.
‘I used to find myself having to help people out: where to get different kinds of food, where to get drinks after hours, where the off-licences were . . . There’s a story which will
illustrate the strange gap between American and British ways: you know that in the States there’s nearly always toilets in any kind of restaurant, and it’s the law that they have to
have them and they have to let you use them? Well, Wimpy Bars had just started here; the first hamburger places in Britain. Curtis Jones, the piano player, was here, and we went out to have a
hamburger after a show, and he wanted to use the bath room. He asked could he use the bathroom and they said no. What they meant was that they don’t have one for the public, and you
couldn’t use theirs. He thought it was racial, and being a deeply sensitive person, he was deeply hurt. He was actually in tears. That would have been in 1963. I had to explain it to him.
Things like that were difficult.

‘[Pianist] Roosevelt Sykes – who I was also very friendly with; I used to stay with him in New Orleans; a wonderful man, a real philosopher – he and I went out somewhere one
day, and he said he wanted chicken and chips and apple pie and ice cream; and he wanted them all on the same plate. This was in some cheapo chicken-and-chips type place, and of course they were . .
. you know. And I had my own culture shock when I went to the South and was in people’s homes: there was only one plate because they either only had one plate or simply didn’t want to
bother with it. You
did
have it all on the same plate. Now Roosevelt had been away from that kind of life
for years, but it was his sort of thing and I wonder now if he
did it just out of devilment, or to say, ‘I’m down home.’ Another thing about food here was that, among people of my generation, chicken was not very common. You only had chicken
at Christmas and Easter, maybe. The Marble Arch barbecue was the first place they had chicken on a spit, that horrible stuff which I [now] refuse to eat, but at the time we thought it was
wonderful. It had only just been introduced at the time when those guys came over here, so it was kind of unusual to have chicken and chips. It was not a regular thing to eat here. Those people
were really deprived of food. They had the adulation of the fans, and all those people who asked them about records they were in on back when God was a boy, and yet they didn’t have the food
they wanted, and there was always a very ambivalent attitude to wards them and their women.’

Ah yes, women. Both the African-American musicians and their European female fans were enmeshed in all the complexities of mutual precepts and notions of ‘otherness’ and
‘exoticism’; each, as far as the other was concened, had the sweet tang of fruit forbidden in theory but accessible in practice. For many of the bluesmen, born and raised amidst the
sexual claustrophobia of the South, the readily available company of friendly white girls soon became one of the recognised bonuses of European touring. ‘When Muddy [Waters] and Otis [Spann]
first came here,’ remembers Wilmer, ‘it was in ’58 – that was when I first met them – and then there was the show that Hooker was on that we didn’t get to see,
and then there was the big blues package show in ’63. Memphis Slim was a very intelligent man and very skilled in the ways of the world, and he was actually very nice, but he had a very
unfortunate habit of telling tales on everybody. This could be kind of funny, but then you know that he’s going to be talking about you when
you
go out the room. He would always tell
everybody that when Muddy and Otis first came here, they got a couple of prostitutes and took them back. I know that men always
laugh at other men who go with hookers –
unfortunate word, that – but the finger was always pointed at them because they were the guys who went with the hookers, rather than the nice girls.’

Few, if any, of their peers were to make that mistake again. It was on this and subsequent tours of Britain that Hooker first acquired his formidable ladies’-man reputation amongst white
blues-rockers: it is virtually impossible to mention his name to any of the British musicians with whom he worked during the ’60s without receiving a metaphorical dig in the ribs and an
anecdote beginning with something along the lines of, ‘I remember John Lee and this girl . . .’ For the hardened, dedicated blues buffs Hooker may well have been a legendary hero with
fifteen years of classic recordings behind him, but for pop fans he was simply a guy with a danceable record in the charts. And you know what happens to guys with danceable records in the
charts.

‘He was 45
⁸⁷
at that time,’ says Roy Fisher, ‘and again this was something which was surprising, in a way, because he had the hit
record, so therefore when we went to the concerts, he had a mass of young people, male and female, in adulation, because that’s the way they respect someone that’s in the charts. This
was something he really was not used to, had never really had before, because he wasn’t regarded in the same way in America, and even with the blues [festival] concerts you get a very sedate
. . . ed elderly audience that would just sit there and politely clap at the end of each number, but not exactly get too aroused, whereas these kids were screaming and yupping and wanted to know
about him. As far as the audience were concerned, he was someone that had a single in the charts, therefore they were in awe of him, and he got the adulation that went with that, and all the rest
of it. The kids who came to see him after “Dimples” and “Boom Boom” were unaware of his status as a blues singer, they didn’t know
about that.
Some of the hard-core blues fans would come along too, and they were in total disgust of what was going on at that time, from what I know about blues enthusiasts and jazz enthusiasts. He handled it
very, very well, but it was something which was obviously totally different for him.

‘Undoubtedly he has an interest in ladies,
period
, and at this time, the thought of all these young ladies wishing to know him and wanting to get close to him was very interesting,
but that was fine until an occasion which happened soon after we started touring, where I came back into the dressing room at one particular point and he was in a very, very upset state. He was
stuttering away and it was obvious that he was upset and I was trying to work out what it was that had upset him, and it was because he had found out that one young lady who had been particularly
forceful and had got through to him . . . he had found out about ten minutes later that she was only fifteen.’ As Hooker must have been keenly aware, back in Mississippi that would have been
the cue for a lynching. ‘He realized very, very fast and got very upset about it. I saw this particular lady, and no way did she look fifteen. She looked eighteen, nineteen because of the
make-up and all the rest of it, but she was only fifteen, and that had only come out because he’d asked her how old she was . . . which he did most times. After that he always asked how old
they were before he even got involved. He knew the ramifications of America; over here they would have been pretty bad, but not as bad as he thought they would be. She had got very very upset,
because I’d come back as she was leaving, and she was a very pissed young lady because he’d told her to go. He was at least sensible about that, and after that he always made a point of
finding out how old they were first.’