Boogie Man (51 page)

Quiet, well-dressed, polite and unassuming when offstage, and an utterly compelling presence when on, Hooker was as personally attractive to his newfound young fans as any pouting, long-haired
teen idol half his age could have been. One such admirer, whom we will call
‘Sally’ because it is not her name, fondly recalls, ‘I remember going to have a
meal with him, and then going back to the hotel and going to bed with him . . . he was quite gentle and everything. He’s quite gentlemanly in his way. Even though he was shy, he was very
charismatic because he’s got this voice, and I thought he was very attractive in that . . . how can I explain it? People like that are often much more attractive than people who are very
handsome and sort of putting it about a bit more. He definitely didn’t have any trouble with women. He had lots of women, just by being shy. You know how men score in that way.’

Under such circumstances, Roy Fisher remembers, Hooker was understandably reticent about discussing his wife and family back in Detroit. ‘I, because of the nature of the person I am, would
tend to ask questions like that when we had quiet moments here and there. He would answer and say, “Yes, I’m married; yes, I’ve got some kids”, but he wasn’t that
outgoing about it, and I kind of think it was a problem to him. I think the family were a problem and he was going through problems with that, so it was something that he didn’t really want
to get into.’

So by the end of his first headlining British tour, Hooker had formed certain lasting impressions about the UK. He liked the fans (particularly the comelier female ones), the respect, the star
status and the Groundhogs; he didn’t like the food, the weather and Don Arden. Even today, if you say Don Arden’s name to him, he responds as if he’d just been stabbed.
‘
Oh!
Old Don Arden. They run
him
outta town. He was a crook, beat me outta lotta money. Boy, he messed up with me, I’ll tell you that. I come home with a cheque from when
I was over there . . . he give me a cheque for $9,000. Put it in the bank. It stayed there about a week, and then a woman called me up from the bank, said the cheque ain’t worth the paper it
were written on. I was
sick
with hurt. $9,000: took me about two, three months to make that money. I was
hurt
. I called, but I could never get the man on the
phone. Well, they know who was callin’, and they know the cheque weren’t no good. I couldn’t sue: I’m here and he there. He was just a natural crook, and
none
of the artists like him.’

‘The only time that I really saw John get angry during that period,’ says Roy Fisher, ‘was when he was referring to Don Arden and the fact that he didn’t get his cash on
time or that they were trying to rip him off or whatever. That was some time after the tour when he found out that Don Arden hadn’t been paying the taxes and he was getting tax demands in
America, and yet his contract was that Don Arden would pay the taxes.’

Another difficulty was, according to Fisher, ‘that there was a lot of people, which he wasn’t used to, and he’d get nervous when he had to go on stage if he had to push through
a crowd. Sometimes there were minders and people around who would make that easier, but not always. I don’t think Don Arden cared about estimating how popular he would be on that tour, and
really he needed a minder: someone bigger than I or Patrick Meehan, if Meehan had continued to chauffeur him around. They weren’t really interested; it was just shove ’em out, make the
money, and that’s it. While I was at the agency working out some dealings with John, I met Little Richard there, and he was due to go out and tour very soon after that, and I’m sure
they treated him very much the same way as they treated John. As far as Don Arden was concerned, John was just another artist to make money out of.’

In his
Starmakers & Svengalis: The History of British Pop Management
,
⁸⁸
Johnny Rogan describes Arden as ‘the most feared manager in
British pop history’, an epithet which Arden, who was fond of calling himself ‘the Al Capone of pop’, would undoubtedly consider highly flattering. Instrumental in helping Mike
Jeffery break the Animals into the London club scene, he took on the management
of the Nashville Teens (who, needless to say, were neither teens nor from Nashville) later in
1964 and the rather more successful Small Faces the following year. Subsequently involved with the likes of Black Sabbath and ELO, his standard managerial tactics combined elaborate legal
manoeuvres with the threat (and occasionally the use) of extreme violence. Despite his fearsome reputation, it’s worth remembering that he has never been convicted of any offence in any court
of law. Arden’s assistant at that time was a mountainous ex-wrestler named Peter Grant – in fact, it was Grant who had, on Arden’s behalf, announced Hooker’s tour dates to
Melody Maker
– and it’s a safe bet that if Arden had assigned Grant as Hooker’s ‘minder’, there would have been zero difficulty escorting the slender bluesman
through the throngs blocking his path to the stage. As his subsequent triumph as helmsman for Led Zeppelin’s career was to demonstrate, Grant learned several important lessons from his tenure
with Arden. Some were based on what Arden did: always get the money, trust in the power of intimidation – what Grant called ‘verbal violence’ – to get results, drive the
hardest possible bargain; and some on what Arden didn’t do: treat the talent with respect, earn and maintain their loyalty, defend them with your life. Grant would – and, nannying the
Yardbirds on their final US tour, actually did – stare into the barrel of a gun whilst facing down a promoter trying to shark the band out of a $1,000 gig fee.

Hooker’s next British tour was already arranged: he would return in three months’ time for more TV and club dates in October and November, and this time the Groundhogs were signed up
well in advance. In the meantime, though, he barely had time to drop off his suitcase and electric guitar in Detroit before heading off, acoustic guitar in hand, for his annual slot at the Newport
Folk Festival. No more jarring contrast could possibly be imagined. One moment Hooker was in Olde England, slick-suited and rockin’, with a record in the charts and hot-to-trot teenage girls
screaming over him: the next he was sequestered in New England with the earnest folkies and
the antiquarians. Not surprisingly, hardy perennials like Hooker and Sonny Terry
& Brownie McGhee found themselves somewhat upstaged that year, because the 1964 festival wasn’t just any old Newport show. Instead, it was the year that the ancient gods came back to
walk, albeit gingerly, amongst mortals. For years, Skip James and Son House were merely spectral voices on scratched old records treasured as holy relics by collectors. Now, they emerged from the
mists of myth, legends magically made flesh.

Though their paths had never crossed before Newport, Nehemiah ‘Skip’ James and Eddie ‘Son’ House were almost exact contemporaries. They had been born within a few months
of each other in 1902, in small Mississippi hamlets within a few miles of each other. They made their classic early recordings a mere year apart (House in 1930, James in 1931) for the same company
(Paramount), and in the same location (Grafton, Wisconsin). Both had subsequently abandoned professional music-making, though House had recorded a series of Library of Congress sessions for Alan
Lomax in 1941 and ’42. Oddly enough, they were ‘rediscovered’ within a few days of each other by two cliques of the same informal network of scholars and aficionados – House
working as a school janitor in upstate New York, and James recuperating from surgery in a veterans’ hospital in Mississippi – and were reintroduced to live performance at the same
Newport festival: House on the main stage, and James at what Samuel Charters has described
⁸⁹
as a ‘blues workshop on a cold and damp Saturday
afternoon.’
⁹⁰

Beyond that, they were as different as any two Mississippian singer/guitarists could possibly be. Son House was virtually a founding father of Delta blues: he had learned from, and travelled
with, Charley Patton himself, and had in his turn mentored and tutored both Robert
Johnson and Muddy Waters. Hammered out on a steel-bodied National guitar and sung in racked,
grainy chest tones, House’s music was muscular and overwhelmingly physical, as solidly rooted in the soil and stone of his home state as a mountain or a tree. James, by contrast, was utterly
sui generis
and represented no significant school, movement or tradition: similar musical devices were indeed used by other bluesmen in and around his native Bentonia, but in terms of
artistic achievement or critical acclaim, they hardly represented a peer group. Uniquely unsettling and evocative, he sang in a spooky, brooding falsetto and picked a minor-tuned guitar: his music
was as ectoplasmic and eerie as wind through branches. Both men had influenced Robert Johnson – House through direct contact, James through his records – and their twinned legacies
embody the mesmerising conflict at the heart of Johnson’s music. With two such men on board, it should have come as no surprise, that year, that Vanguard didn’t even bother to record
Hooker – or, for that matter, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.

Nevertheless, some of the participants in those two great ‘rediscoveries’ were to play a considerable part in Hooker’s future. The posse which tracked down Skip James included
a young Californian guitarist named Henry Vestine; in the same car was John Fahey, a guitarist/musicologist with proven credentials in that area since, in 1963, he’d helped find Booker T.
Washington White, another ‘missing’ Delta great of the ’30s who just happened to be B.B. King’s uncle, and was better-known – to his lasting annoyance – as
‘Bukka’ White. Among Fahey’s circle was one Alan Wilson, a Boston-born prodigy working simultaneously on a university degree in music and on developing a formidable theoretical
and practical mastery of country blues guitar and harmonica. Pudgy, moonfaced and myopic as he was, Al Wilson was certainly no glamour-boy, but he ended up coaching Son House for his return to
public performance. Like most elder bluesmen who create – and recreate – their music afresh each
and every time they pick up their instruments, House had paid
little attention to the precise details of his each and every recorded performance; and since he had not played for decades, he was incredibly rusty. Like most young white blues devotees, Wilson
was intimately familiar with each and every nuance of House’s classic recordings but, unlike most of his contemporaries, Wilson possessed the musical skills necessary to reproduce those
nuances himself. In
The History of the Blues
,
⁹¹
Francis Davis quotes Dick Waterman’s exploration of the resulting paradox:

And when House cut his magnificent
Father Of The Country Blues
comeback album the following year, Wilson was never far from his side in the studio, functioning simultaneously as coach,
cheerleader and harp-and-guitar backup man. Vestine, in the meantime, had returned to California, spending a few grievously miscast months with a prototype line-up of Frank Zappa’s Mothers of
Invention. Soon Wilson was to head west to join him in the formation of a band which
would – in honour of a 1928 Tommy Johnson song – eventually be known as
‘Canned Heat’.

Meanwhile John Lee Hooker was poised for his second British tour of 1964. If Roy Fisher is correct, Hooker’s long-held nervousness concerning Newcastle in general and Mike Jeffery’s
Club-A-Go-Go in particular may have its roots in one specific occurence during this jaunt.

‘It was without a doubt the best place that John played,’ says Fisher. ‘Yes, it did have its rougher element and I think he was kind of nervous about that, but it was really,
really good. He was nervous in crowds, and because of the hit record, most places were jam-packed. In Newcastle it was big, and there were about eight hundred people packed into this place, which
at that time in a club was a lot of people. The dressing room wasn’t at the side of the stage, it was at the back in the managerial offices, so to get him on stage we had to push him through
the crowd, so I guess that’s probably what he means. In retrospect, I don’t think it was as dramatic as he thought of it at the time. Me, who’s not too tall, and John, who’s
very very small – five foot seven – it was a problem to get him on stage, because we didn’t have any assistance, which at the time pissed me off as well. I had to manoeuvre him
through this crowd. It was the first time in the whole tour that he hadn’t been on time to go on stage; most times, unlike many of the other blues singers I can recall, he was always very
punctual. The band went on, they played their set, then they would play his intro music and he’d be standing at the side of the stage and then he’d come on. The Geordie reaction was
incredible.’