Boogie Man (56 page)

With benefit of hindsight, one
Real Folk Blues
track in particular assumes a highly specific significance which could hardly have been apparent at the time. ‘I Put My Trust In
You’ is an ominous free-form slow blues – so free-form that the musicians aren’t always able to agree about exactly where they are in the chord sequence or, indeed, whether
there’s a chord sequence at all – which bitterly recounts the final stages in the disintegration of a relationship. ‘
I just couldn’t believe,
’ Hooker sings,
voice racked and tremulous, ‘
that you hurt me the way you did.
’ He goes on:

And then he abandons all explicit verbal content, moaning and groaning over his and Burns’s eloquent guitar colloquy. Eerily, it seemed as if Hooker had prophetically
opened some psychic time-tunnel three years into the future. He’d tried so hard to keep the home-fires burning, even though they could only be kept alive through punishingly paradoxical
means: the constant roadwork which kept him away from home. Soon those same home-fires would rage out of control, devastating the home which they were intended to nurture and warm; but not before a
real rather than metaphorical Detroit was engulfed by flames both real
and
metaphorical.

On 23 July 1967, smack in the middle of what white West Coast hippies persisted in claiming was the ‘Summer Of Love’, Detroit finally boiled over. Despite the
election in 1961 of the young, liberal Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, who had marched with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 1963, and who appointed a crusading, anti-racist police chief named George Edwards,
the city’s racism remained deeply, endemically institutionalized. Racism in housing, racism in the job market, and – most crucially as far as Detroit’s black community was
concerned – racism in the day-to-day policing of their neighbourhoods.

The city’s administration’s policies, however well-intentioned, proved as unable to eradicate these persistent manifestations of prejudice and social inequality
as had most of the Civil Rights legislation enacted on a national level by the Kennedy and Johnson governments. Detroit was a tough, militant take-no-shit town – Elijah Mohammad’s
Nation Of Islam had been founded in the city and still maintained its national base there – and the build-up of black anger and resentment should therefore have surprised no-one (even though,
the previous year, Berry Gordy was still worrying about the insistence of his former child star, no-longer-so-Little Stevie Wonder, on recording a pop-soul version of Bob Dylan’s anti-war,
anti-racist ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ in case it should prove too ‘controversial’ for the delicate sensibilities of Motown fans). Under the circumstances, it
wouldn’t have taken much to send the city up in flames, and as things turned out, it didn’t.

Illegal drinking clubs are, for some reason, known in Detroit as ‘blind pigs’. One such, held at the premises of an organisation called the United Civic League For Community Action,
had permitted a party which started on the night of Saturday, 22 July, to rave on well into the following Sunday morning. In what could conceivably be described as something of an over-reaction to
this admittedly shocking breach of laws designed only to maintain the city’s legendary peace and tranquility, the police smashed the doors down with sledgehammers, and hauled eighty-odd
customers off to the hoosegow. Someone then chucked a bottle through the back window of a police car, and the Detroit Riot was off and running. Things didn’t calm down until the following
Thursday, by which time snipers and police had shot it out in running gun battles, the National Guard had been called in, thousands had been rendered homeless after being burned out of their
dwellings, and over forty people – including a National Guardsman wasted by so-called ‘friendly fire’ and a shopkeeper battered to death by rioters for attempting to protect his
store – were dead.

John Lee Hooker is not, by nature, a street-fighting man, and therefore did not participate in the proceedings. However, he understood its causes full well. It is wholly
unsurprising that he felt a great affinity for Dr King: they did, after all, have in common a Southern upbringing, a Baptist background, and a firm belief in peaceful reconciliation. ‘This
man did a lot of great, great, great things, but now he’s gone: Martin Luther King. Boy, he changed the world. Too bad he ain’t here now. People like that got so much power to do so
much, sometimes they ain’t
expectin
’ to stay alive. They ain’t lookin’ to get through this. They say, “I’m gonna
die
tryin’. I’m gonna
fight
this battle. I’m not gonna back up. I’m not gonna let ’em scare me. I’m gonna keep
goin
’ with this.” But before he left, he changed
things.’ Nevertheless, he was also an admirer of Malcolm X. ‘I know that speech he did. You knew they wasn’t going to let
him
live. He was
so powerful
! That man was
the powerfullest man you ever seen. He carried a lot of power. People like that, they don’t let ’em live. I guess you noticed that. John F. Kennedy, he was for the right, and they
didn’t let him live. And his brother Bobby? He was going to be for the right, and he didn’t even get to first base. People like [then-President George] Bush, they just do what they want
to do.’

As it happened, Hooker enjoyed – if that is indeed the appropriate term – a ringside view of the proceedings from his home on Jameson Street.

‘I know what they were fightin’ for,’ he says. ‘Maybe they didn’t have to do that, but they hoped to bring out the anger, straighten out a lot of the segregation. I
feel bitter about that. A big city like Detroit . . . you know, racial like that. It wasn’t like Mississippi, but . . . you know, they hide it under the
cover
there. In Mississippi
they didn’t hide it, they just come out with it, and that’s the only difference. We all could go together in Detroit, everybody the same: white, black, Chinese, everybody go to the same
places. It was racial, but they kinda tried to smother it, you know what I mean? It finally got so hot, people
got so fed up, that the riot broke out, with all the
burnin’ and the shootin’, the killin’. I could just look at the fire from my porch or my window, outside in my yard . . . I could see places goin’ up in
flame
, hear
guns shootin’, robbin’ stores, runnin’ the business people out of they stores. There was a lotta lootin’ goin’ on, y’know . . . the po-
lice
was even
lootin’. They was gettin’ them some
stuff
. There was an old jewellery store . . . oh, it was big. He run out in the street . . . I felt bad about that, me’n a lotta other
people. We felt it was nonsense, that it shouldn’t’a hap pen. We didn’t know who started it, but once it started it just kept up. Boy, it burned down. They like to have burned the
whole city down. Throwin’ bombs, lootin’ . . . a kid brought me a brand new
git
-tar, a Gibson twelve-string. Cost about $1,500, boy . . . I got it for five dollars. The kid
didn’t know what he had!’ Hooker laughs in memory of the kid’s naïvety. ‘“You wanna buy this?” “
Oh yeah!
” “You got five
dollars?” I say, “
Yeah!
”

‘You could see the fire burnin’. You could see the bombs, the smoke goin’ up, buildin’s goin’ up. You see the people runnin’ out the stores, the business
people leavin’ everythin’ in there. They was throwin’ firebombs in the stores. Run ’em outta there. And they run outta there. A Chinese guy, couldn’t speak English . .
.’ laughing, he breaks into mock-Chinese babble ‘“
Black-man-burn-down! Help! Black-man-burn-down-store!
” He laughs again, not altogether humorously. ‘It was
layin’ in the streets, man. Clothes, brand-new shoes, just layin’ there. Couldn’t tell no-one not to pick it up, and some people did pick it up. Went to jail for stealin’
stuff. Two policemen . . . four or five of ’em, they found a
whole
lotta stuff that they done took. They suspended them, and put
them
in jail.
Everybody
was
lootin’. The white, the black . . .’

‘You know, Detroit never was like down South: you couldn’t go here, you couldn’t go there. You go anywhere you want to go: some places you could feel it that they didn’t
want you there, but they couldn’t make you leave. Down South, stores you couldn’t go in there,
or you’d have to come in the back door, stuff like that. You
couldn’t drink out the same faucet. It wasn’t like that there, up North. See, down South they let you
know
how they felt. Here, they shake your hand, stab you in the back. You go
any place you wanted to go, and we was all in there together, but it still was there. They’d throw a brick, hide it in they hand. You could feel it in the air. I can’t forget how all
that started. It was pretty bad. And after that, the whole country went. Watts got burned down. A lotta other places got burned down. Like a
cancer
. You hear everybody say, “Burn,
baby, burn.” That’s what they said. “We gon’
burn, baby, burn.
” They burned down a lotta stuff. Big apartment buildings . . . they run ’em outta there.
People be in they shop, and they come outta there in droves, throwin’ firebombs, burnin’ up the clothes, you know, comin’ in there takin’ the stuff . . . I was livin’
on Jameson, over Charlevoix Avenue. They was burnin’ three or four blocks over, but they never come down to where I was.

‘And after that I wrote that song called “Motor City Is Burnin’”.’

That, however, is not what the song’s stated composer credit claims. Both Hooker’s original 1967 recording of ‘Motor City Is Burning’ – cut barely two months after
the events it describes – and its 1968 cover by rabble-rousing Detroit anarchopunk pioneers MC5
¹⁰⁷
are officially attributed to former Vee Jay
executive Al Smith; and thereby hangs a tale, if not several. Smith had landed on his feet following Vee Jay’s demise, working with Bob Thiele at ABC on the launch of BluesWay Records, a
blues-dedicated sister subsidiary for Impulse. The inauguration of BluesWay was the first acknowledgement by any of the major corporate labels of the existence of a new American phenomenon: a
significant white audience for electric blues. This audience was the baby of a new coalition: kids whose interest in the
music had been stimulated by the early British
bluesrockers – even though most of those bands, plus the bulk of their domestic clientele, had themselves subsequently moved on to proto-psychedelia, nascent heavy rock, or first-generation
Britpop of varying degrees of artiness – and former folkies who had found that the music enabled them to reconcile the conflict between ‘real’ (i.e. acoustic rural) blues and
danceable, hi-decibel electric sounds. The principal standard-bearers of new-generation, rock-friendly, white-boy blues had been Chicago’s Paul Butterfield Blues Band featuring – or, as
far as much of their audience was concerned, starring – Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar; and the Blues Project from New York City, whose original ranks included organist Al Kooper and
guitarist Steve Katz.

These matters had come to a head at the turbulent Newport Folk Festival of 1965. That particular Newport is best-known in rock lore for the stormy encounter between the traditionalist audience
and management, and the new-look Bob Dylan, backed for the occasion by an ensemble including Al Kooper and several members of the Butterfield band; Kooper and Mike Bloomfield had played behind
Dylan on the historic sessions for ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and what became the
Highway 61 Revisited
album. Less notorious but in its way equally significant, was the extraordinary
prelude to the Butterfield band’s own performance, earlier that same day, at an afternoon blues workshop away from the main stage. The MC for the workshop was Alan Lomax, visibly and audibly
miffed to have the purity of his show polluted by young white guys with amplified guitars. Accordingly, he made no attempt to conceal his feelings when it came time for him to introduce the band.
In an interview with Tom Yates,
¹⁰⁸
Mike Bloomfield described, not without a degree of relish, the resulting melee: