Boogie Man (54 page)

Fairly extravagant language with which to denounce a hard-working man thousands of miles from home attempting to put on a decent show with a borrowed band. Back in London,
Hooker had organised himself at least a simulacrum of the comforts of home. ‘I was living with a girl called Shirley,’ he says. ‘She had a nice apartment on Oxford Street. Big
main
street, lotta all kinda clothes shops on that street. I was living over a clothing store.’ Roy Fisher corroborates: ‘I remember Shirley. She was just someone whom he tagged
onto or tagged onto him. He was quite enamoured with Shirley at the time, but then there were many like that.’ A liaison of a different nature – and of considerably greater long-term
significance – commenced on one of his late-night ventures into London’s club scene, when he encountered one of his most devoted admirers: Van Morrison, the stocky, belligerent lead
vocalist of an Irish band named Them, recently arrived in the Top 10 with an artfully arranged rock rave-up of the staple ‘Baby
Please Don’t Go’ primarily
derived from Hooker’s own version. ‘I know Van [Morrison] about twenty-seven years,’ he remembered in 1992. ‘I can’t recall when I met Van, but it was in London, I
think so. At some club called the Cue Club [a primarily West Indian-patronised club in Paddington], and then another place called the Bag O’Nails.’

John Broven’s purist temper tantrum notwithstanding, Hooker’s increasing British familiarity had bred, if not contempt, then at least a degree of indifference. For his second
European tour of 1965, he retreated back into the safety-in-numbers of that year’s edition of Lippmann & Rau’s American Folk Blues Festival revue. By this time, the package’s
traditions were established solidly enough not to require the personal attendance of its original mastermind, Willie Dixon; and the rhythm section was anchored by a Chess studio stalwart, master
drummer Freddie Below. The line-up featured such notables as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Eddie Boyd, Roosevelt Sykes, J.B. Lenoir, harpmeister Big Walter Horton, and, making his
first-ever excursion outside the USA, a wide-eyed young guitarist named Buddy Guy.

‘My first trip in Europe in 1965, American Folk Blues Festival,’ Buddy remembers. ‘First time I met him, and Big Mama Thornton. I had come over to play the festival with them,
and it was at least seven o’clock in the morning. He was drinkin’ at that time, Big Mama was drinkin’, they had a guy on the show named Doctor Ross, Roosevelt Sykes, Eddie Boyd .
. . everybody was drinkin’. Straight whiskey, and hot. I drinks a few drinks, but at that time I didn’t. I couldn’t keep up with them because I thought you drink sociably, but
when I met Little Walter, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy and them, I didn’t know you drink like fish. But anyway, I was upstairs that morning, and all the commotion was downstairs. They had the
whole restaurant in this particular hotel in Baden-Baden, Germany. When I walked down, didn’t nobody know me, and I didn’t know anybody. They was round a table and I heard this guy
stutter, ‘B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b’, and I thought,
“Well, I know
that’s
not John Lee.” So I picked up an acoustic guitar and sat over in a corner
and went to playin’ “Boogie Chillen” and somebody came over and grabbed me then. “T-t-t-t-t-t-t-uhh . . . who are you?” I said, “Ohh, I don’t bother
wit’ you.” It was like ten minutes axin’ me, “Who are you?” before he told me who he was, and he didn’t say, “John Lee” then. He said,
“T-t-t-t-t-I’m Johnny”, and I thought it was somebody else on the show named Johnny – I’ve got to meet everybody sooner or later, somebody come introduce me to
everybody.

‘And finally he kept messin’ with me so much, in a jokin’ manner, and he said, “T-t-t-t-t-t-who taught you how to play like J-J-Johnny?” And I’m
thinkin’, does John Lee stutter like this? Finally I said something like that, and he just fell out, went to laugh. “T-t-t-t-t-you don’t know me?” I said, “No, I
don’t know you.” “Th-th-th-th-that’s my shit you playin’.” I say, “You John Lee?” And ever since then we been the best of friends. He kept me
laughin’ from that day until this one. When I see him now, if I got a concert to do, I try to tell ’em to keep him away from my dressing room, because he keep me laughin’. He got
so many stories he can tell about him, Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, the times he didn’t get paid, and the time they got throwed out of the hotel for tryin’ to cook with the electric
skillet under the bed . . . ohh,
man
! They got so many stories.’

In Willie Dixon’s absence, the package’s bassist-in-residence was ‘Lonesome’ Jimmy Lee Robinson, a journeyman all-rounder willing and able to move between guitar, bass or
drums, depending on what was required on the night. However, such was the warmth of the spontaneous rapport between Hooker and Guy that the latter ended up playing bass for Hooker’s portion
of the proceedings. The show was recorded in Hamburg on 8 October; of the two Hooker numbers, accompanied only by Guy and Below, which surfaced on the resulting album, ‘Della Mae’ was
little more than a retread of ‘Maudie’ sailing under marginally different colours. The other, ‘King Of The World’, was rather more intriguing: an idealistic, deeply-felt
state-of-the-universe meditation in the tradition of ‘Crazy Mixed-Up World’, ornamented by a loping descending Guy bass-line which only occasionally collides with
Hooker’s idiosyncratic metre.

‘King Of The World’ had been Hookerized from a source incongruous even by Hooker’s own catholic standards: it derived from ‘If I Ruled The World’, the Big Number
from the stage musical
Pickwick
. Based on Charles Dickens’s novel
The Pickwick Papers
and, like most modern Dickens adaptations churned out by the British heritage industry,
downplaying the darkness and pain in Dickens’ work in favour of warm, twinkly faux-Victorian sentimentality,
Pickwick
had been commissioned in 1961 and staged in 1963 as a vehicle for
the mountainous Welsh singer/comedian Harry Secombe, co-conspirator with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan in BBC Radio’s groundbreaking
Goon Show
. Composed by Leslie Bricusse and Cyril
Ornadel, ‘If I Ruled The World’ had subsequently been revived by Hooker’s ballad-singing hero Tony Bennett, and it was Bennett’s version which had installed itself in the
British Top Ten during Hooker’s May ’65 tour. ‘
Eef I-I-I-I-I ruled the wuuuuurld,
’ Secombe had shrilled in his manic tenor, ‘
eff-ree day wood bee tha
fi-i-i-i-irst day off spreeeeeeng . . .
’, but Hooker had a different agenda. If
he
was the king of the world, his initially hushed baritone informs us with gradually intensifying
passion, ‘
there wouldn’t be no fightin’ . . . wouldn’t be no war.
’ Furthermore, he tells his beloved, he’d make her his queen and put her on his throne.
On Planet Hook, ‘
there wouldn’t be no race riots . . . I’d make everybody equal . . . in the world . . . there wouldn’t be no sickness, wouldn’t be no
death.
’

Hooker, certainly, considers the song to be nothing less than a personal credo. ‘I wrote one called “If I Was The King Of The World”,’ he says proudly. ‘Did you
ever hear that one? If I was the king of the world, and my woman was the . . . I be the king, she be the queen. Wouldn’t be no fightin’, be love and peace everywhere if I were the ruler
of the world. That’s that song. Roy Rogers heard that and he
said, “That’s so true.”’ He breaks into song: ‘“
If I were the king of
the world, wouldn’t be no fightin’, everybody would get along/I’d make my woman queen of the world, and I’d be the king/Wouldn’t be no fightin’, wouldn’t
be no racial, if I was king of the world.
” The king rule everything, and people listen to that, people who fightin’ for peace, fightin’ for they rights, fightin’ to make
everybody equal. This land is no man’s land. We just passin’ through, and that song tell all of that.’ In the Bricusse and Ornadel ‘original’, Secombe (and Bennett)
call for little more than a perpetual Christmas party, where a beaming Mine Host provides perpetual roast beef and mulled wine for suitably grateful poor children. By contrast, Hooker –
‘
talkin’ ’bout a new-born king
’ – promises nothing less than heaven on earth and an immediate end to all human suffering.

On a somewhat less exalted level, Hooker’s main priority once back home in the USA was to kick-start his stalled recording career. A full year had elapsed since the ill-fated London
session with the Groundhogs, Hooker’s only studio date since the demise of his relationship with Vee Jay. His next port of call was Impulse Records, the jazz subsidiary of ABC-Paramount
Records, itself a division of one of America’s three principal television networks, who commissioned a day-long session in New York City on 23 November, 1965. A hipper, feistier label than
one might have expected considering its heavy-duty corporate origins, ABC had started getting serious about African-American music in 1960, when the company just about broke the Ertegun
brothers’ collective heart by seducing away Atlantic Records’ human crown jewel, Ray Charles. ABC subsequently followed up this coup by picking up the Impressions after Vee Jay fumbled
Curtis Mayfield’s ball, and signing B.B. King away from Modern. The Impulse success story was founded partly on borrowing Brother Ray from the parent company to cut 1961’s epochal
Genius + Soul = Jazz
, and partly on the spoils of another corporate raid on the Erteguns, in which Impulse practically chased Atlantic out of the modern-jazz business.
In 1962, Impulse acquired the services not only of John Coltrane (just as the tenor titan, whose previous important recordings as a leader had been made whilst still a member of the
Miles Davis Quintet, was finally ready to break away from Miles and form his first working band) but also of the ‘controversial’ Ornette Coleman, the walking definition of avant-garde.
The proud slogan ‘The New Wave of Jazz is on Impulse!’, an integral part of the orange-and-black Mondrian-inspired graphics which adorned the label’s sleeves, was therefore no
idle boast.

Impulse’s A&R chief, the late Bob Thiele, took personal charge of the Hooker project. His production strategy blended the aesthetics of the Vee Jay years and Riverside’s
That’s My Story
by recording eight sides rather than the usual ten (thereby allowing each performance to determine its own length, thus freeing Hooker from the need to compress the
songs to the arbitrary length of a single), featuring Hooker on electric guitar rather than the folkish acoustic instrument, and teaming him up with veteran sidemen from the New York jazz world.
Certainly, admirers of Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Gil Evans and Coleman Hawkins would have been rather more familiar with the liner credits of bassist Milt Hinton and drummer David
‘Panama’ Francis than fans of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed or Sonny Boy Williamson, but the match was nevertheless a good one. Guitarist Barry Galbraith was an electric
folkie who’d recorded with Bob Dylan: he, Hinton and Francis may not have been ‘blues’ players in the most literal sense of the term, but they were keenly aware of the common
heritage of jazz and blues, plus they had ears and knew how to use them. Furthermore, they were well accustomed to following musicians who were themselves following their noses. The pulsebeat
supplied by Hinton and Francis was solid but sensitive: simultaneously firm enough for Hooker to sit on and sufficiently sparse and discreet to allow his improvisational instincts the freedom to
wander wherever they might. Galbraith, for his part,
provides subtle textures and colouration whilst adroitly staying out from under Hooker’s musical feet: since Hooker
juxtaposed the conventional tuning he generally favours for ensemble pieces with the open-A ‘Spanish’ tuning of his early solo work, Galbraith, sensibly enough, sat out the open-tuned
songs and performed only on the numbers in ‘straight’ tuning.

The resulting album,
It Serve You Right To Suffer
, broke no significant new ground in terms of Hooker’s repertoire, revisiting as it did such staples as ‘Money’,
‘Bottle Up And Go’, ‘Decoration Day’, ‘Shake It Baby’ and the title song, a recasting of Hooker’s Percy Mayfield-derived ‘It Serves Me Right To
Suffer’. However, whatever the album may have lost in terms of fresh material it gained in increased emotional depth. The longer track-lengths gave Hooker the space to explore the sideroads
of the songs rather than simply cruise along their main drags; thus the taut stomping groove customary for Hooker’s assorted variations on ‘Bottle Up And Go’ unwinds into an
eerily incantatory modal shuffle, and Sonny Boy Williamson I’s ‘Decoration Day’ – which Hooker had first essayed back in 1950, during the Besman era – loses its
formalised structure to become a free-form slow-blues meditation on the agonies of bereavement. The title song’s shift from first to second person represents a change in emphasis as opposed
to attitude: rather than moving the song from ostensible self-accusation to vindictive
Schadenfreude
, Hooker is talking to, rather than about, himself. Of course, this change plays hell with
Mayfield’s rhyme-scheme, but Hooker was the last guy in the world to worry his head overmuch about
that.