Boogie Man (57 page)

In the event, ‘bad blood’ notwithstanding, the electric guys won the argument. Or rather, both camps eventually realized what John Lee Hooker could have told them if anybody had
bothered to ask him: that it was
all
blues and it was
all
legit.

BluesWay, however, left the white boys – however funky, street-legal and blues-approved they may have been – to the rock labels. The new imprint preferred to invest its budget in
signing up the Real Guys and marketing them to the new audience. Their flagship act was already in place in the extremely substantial form of B.B. King, who’d been on ABC’s books since
1961; the Big B was therefore moved over to BluesWay and given the honour of providing the new label with its inaugural release. BluesWay BLS 6001 was
Blues Is King
, a superb live album
easily comparable with, though less celebrated than, B.B.’s earlier classic
Live At The Regal
,
¹⁰⁹
but BluesWay BLS 6002 came from Thiele and
Smith’s first fresh signing: John Lee Hooker. The decision to bring Hooker to BluesWay was highly logical, Captain Smith knew Hooker from the Vee Jay days, Thiele had worked with him
successfully on
It Serve You Right To Suffer
for Impulse, and since the arrangement with Chess for
The Real Folk Blues
had been a one-shot deal,
Hooker was then
‘at liberty’ (as opposed to ‘at Liberty’, which would happen later), and eager to sign a new contract with a solid, credible record company. Uncharacteristically, he’d
stay (almost) faithful to the ABC group for several years. Equally uncharacteristically – given his legendary reluctance to say anything nice about any record company,
ever –
he
appears to have been relatively happy with them, acknowledging that they displayed a greater degree of financial probity than his previous labels.

‘They was straighter than a company like Chess or Vee Jay, which was
outright
rip-offs,’ he allows, albeit a little grudgingly. ‘They was a lot more legitimate. I made
some money with them. I wouldn’t say that I got
all
that was comin’ to me, but I got treated better. Chess and Vee Jay was just stone cut-throats, and they acted like they
didn’t even care if you knowed it.’

The first fruits of the BluesWay liaison had sprouted in the form of
Live At Cafe Au Go-Go
, cut in concert on 30 August, 1966, at one of Greenwich Village’s premier venues: a Delta
dream-team collaboration with Hooker’s old friend Muddy Waters and his band, including Chicago’s master pianist Otis Spann, Muddy himself, and no fewer than two other guitarists. In his
liner note, Stanley Dance beautifully evokes the scene:

Beyond pointing out that George Smith’s ‘keening cries and wailing embellishments’ are nowhere to be heard on the record as issued, the most salient point to
be made about
Live At Cafe Au Go-Go
is that it provides a fascinating glimpse of what might have been if Hooker had invested as much effort into forming and maintaining a first-class
full-time band as Waters so evidently had. True, the performance is far from utterly unflawed – the opening seconds of the curtain-raising ‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James’ find
drummer Francis Clay anticipating a different song entirely and therefore crashing in with a very different beat; there are sour little pitching discrepancies between the tunings of the four
guitarists’ instruments (with Hooker himself, unfortunately, the prime culprit); and the rumbustious version of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch And One Beer’ is, if anything, even more
chaotic than the Chess studio cut recorded the previous spring – but the overall tone of the music is dark, slow, swampy-deep, and the degree of emotional rapport between Hooker and the band
(particularly the astonishing Spann) nothing less than extraordinary.

The evening’s programme broke little new ground. ‘Jesse James’ (aka ‘I’m Mad’, ‘I’m Mad Again’ or ‘Gonna Use My Rod’) was a
hardy Hooker perennial, premiered in 1954, to which he returned again and
again throughout his career. The powerful statement of artistic intent ‘Heartaches And
Misery’ reworks 1954’s ‘Everybody’s Blues’; ‘She’s Long, She’s Tall (She Weeps Just Like A Willow Tree)’ dates from the Besman era; whilst the
Tony Hollins-derived ‘When My First Wife Left Me’ goes back further still, to Hooker’s earliest demo sessions in Elmer Barbee’s back room. Others were of rather more recent
vintage: ‘I Don’t Want No Trouble’ is simply a retitling of ‘Peace Loving Man’ from
The Real Folk Blues
; and ‘Seven Days’ had enjoyed its first
outing during the November ’64 London session with the Groundhogs. The occasion did, however, introduce one important new song, ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’, which would
remain in Hooker’s repertoire for the remainder of his career. Its theme – ‘man’s inevitable fate’, as Dance aptly chooses to phrase it – and title are distantly
derived from ‘I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive’, a doomy, prophetic song by country titan Hank Williams, who died barely two months after its release in November 1952:
Hooker’s substitution of ‘these blues’ for ‘this world’ speaks volumes about the similarity, and the differences, between the two men’s respective outlooks. The
Williams record is fiddle-driven,
faux
-jaunty, mock-rueful, tightly-rhymed catch-in-the-throat country with a neat, snappy pedal-steel solo; Hooker’s is a deep, meditative free-form
blues set to a reflective, slowed-down variation of B.B. King’s ‘Rock Me Baby’ riff, with the band telepathically responding to Hooker’s cues by shifting back and forth
between conventional blues changes and one-chord mode.

On its uppermost surface level, ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’ is about a man whose woman has left him – what a surprise, a bluesman singing a song about a woman who done
left – and as a result he can’t sleep, he chainsmokes, he slugs down black coffee, and he can’t envisage the day when he will no longer be unhappy. One layer further down,
it’s one of the purest examples in Hooker’s catalogue of the archetypal blues response to sorrow and despair: the process of dealing with your situation by first acknowledging it. It
represents the exact opposite of the state known in contemporary therapy-speak as ‘denial’. The bluesman but rarely ‘denies’, and even on those
occasions when he does, the listener is not intended to be fooled: the ‘denial’ is a bluff which exists solely so that it can be called.

What could emphatically not be denied was the overwhelming need for a massive readjustment of the blues economy: a shift from producing and marketing singles for a black ghetto market to albums
designed to appeal to white youth. The denizens of Planet Blues were accordingly divided into those judged to be potentially hippie-friendly, and those who weren’t. Blues guys deemed
appropriate for the new market received new boots and contracts, whilst those who weren’t were left to wither on the vine and fend for themselves in a rapidly contracting commercial
environment. Thus the second half of the ’60s saw Vanguard Records add Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite to the country blues already in their primarily folk-based
catalogue; Atlantic recording Otis Rush and Freddie King for their Cotillion subsidiary; Chess retaining the services of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf but – at the behest of Leonard
Chess’s son Marshall, entrusted with the mission of retooling the label’s Old Masters for the Next Generation – decking them out in highly unsuitable psychedelic drag. By
contrast, Columbia preferred to invest in new-jack blues talent like Johnny Winter and Taj Mahal. For their part, BluesWay expanded their roster by signing up Jimmy Reed – already severely
past his sell-by date – and T-Bone Walker. The latter’s 1968 BluesWay excursion,
Funky Town
, was a sad affair: the brave new world of post-Stax grooves and
heav-ee
guitar
sounds suited T-Bone about as well as a pair of paisley satin bell-bottoms. Writer Ed Ward recalls seeing a late-’60s T-Bone gig where members of his young, aggressively Afro’ed and
dashiki’ed band – who’d probably have rather been playing behind James Brown – were mocking the founding father of electric blues guitar behind his back every time he took a
solo.

Other veterans developed different strategies for coping with
changing times. The more sophisticated Junior Parker, Little Milton and Bobby Bland had already reached an
accommodation with the soul era by de-emphasizing the more overtly downhome aspects of their music (Parker had, seemingly, left his harps back in Memphis), and retained the allegiance of the black
community by ostentatiously eschewing anything which could possibly be interpreted as pandering to funny-looking white kids. The decidedly downhome Albert King had lucked out by signing in 1966 to
Stax Records, the pride of Memphis. The company’s stellar studio crew – Booker T & The MGs, Isaac Hayes and the Memphis Horns, backed Albert’s big fat croon and mean, slicing
guitar with funky dance grooves easily as hot as those on their massively successful Otis Redding and Sam & Dave hits, which appealed to black and white listeners alike. And B.B. King cruised
imperturbably onwards, pulling off the improbable stunt of being all things to all men whilst remaining no-one but his own sweet self. He provided BluesWay with its only hit singles, climaxing in
1970 with the Top Twenty pop triumph of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’.

Many of the same forces which led young whites to accept and cherish the blues had long since driven their black contemporaries away: classic ’50s-style citified Delta blues was about to
succumb to the same fate which had once overtaken its direct musical ancestor, the country blues. Part of this can simply be attributed to the cyclical nature of the pop process and its inevitable
generational shifts in taste, style and fashion: black youth didn’t listen to the same music as their parents (or grandparents) any more than did the white youth for whom blues was an
exciting novelty. But there was much more to it than that: the blues is, essentially, a stoic music which celebrates endurance. For blacks in the ’60s, in the era of Black Power, Black Pride
and Black Panthers, stoicism and endurance were no longer enough. It was time to move on up, to say it loud, to demand R-E-S-P-E-C-T, to overcome not in an unspecified future ‘some day’
but
right now
. ‘I’ve been down so long,’ Albert King used to sing, as did J.B. Lenoir before him, and
Ishman Bracey before
him
, ‘that down
don’t bother me’. Down definitely
did
bother African America’s Next Generation, and the blues was
definitely
considered to be all about ‘down’. As B.B.
put it in interviews at that time, ‘A lot of the younger Negroes don’t want to be associated with the blues. [They] are trying very hard to raise [their] standards . . . and when
they’re approached with the blues, [they] figure in a lot of cases, this downs them . . . they don’t even know about it, and when they do hear about it they think, “Well,
that’s old mom and dad’s music.”’ For his part, Hooker concurred: ‘A lot of them don’t want to accept [the blues], will not accept it. They think it’s a
hangover.’ The emergent new consciousness was thus a mixed blessing for many bluesmen: after decades of being an authentic voice of their communities, they were finding themselves regarded as
jokes, Toms or sell-outs by the younger generation within those communities, and increasingly dependent on the whims of whites.

As far as John Lee Hooker was concerned, there was more than an element of unfairness in this new dilemma. ‘Old-fashioned’ and ‘down-home’ his music may have been, but
with songs of the calibre and content of ‘Birmingham Blues,’ ‘Democrat Man’ and ‘This Land Is Nobody’s Land’ in his catalogue, he was amongst the most
politically forthright and engaged of the front-rank bluesmen. Nevertheless, he was still vulnerable to both political and generational shifts, and nowhere more so than in his own home town. As
Michael Haralambos relates in
Right On: From Blues To Soul In Black America
,
¹¹⁰
‘John Lee Hooker, in Detroit for a couple of weeks in the
summer of 1968 to appear at a rally in support of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the presidency, appeared only once at a black venue, the Rapa House, during his stay. Although the Rapa
House is hardly a suitable place for a large blues audience – a coffee house run by blacks and patronised mainly by a theatrical and show business crowd – Hooker’s
appearance, despite advertising in the black press, drew fewer than twenty blacks . . . a young black modern jazz quartet preceded [his] act. As John performs his four numbers,
singing intensely and stomping his foot, the young musicians shout mock encouragement and slap their thighs in amusement as they crack jokes about the old blues singer. After the show, John Lee
Hooker expresses annoyance . . .’ As well he might. ‘The whites, they really appreciates the blues,’ he told Haralambos, obviously still simmering from the humiliation received at
these young brothers’ hands. ‘They really gets with it, y’know, they really sincere, it’s no come-on, it’s no gimme, it’s no put-on, they for real, y’know,
and it can make you feel real good. I can’t believe they dig it so deep.’