Boogie Man (58 page)

It’s not hard to comprehend, nor to empathise with, Hooker’s transparent bitterness: his sense of betrayal and resentment. Out on the road, he was a hero or, at the very least, a
welcome visitor, but on his own home turf, he was not so much a prophet without honour as a prophet without profit. In the wake of the
Real Folk Blues
sessions, Eddie Burns rejoined
Hooker’s road band – at least for the kind of work Burns describes as ‘close around, like Chicago or Cleveland or somewhere like that’. However, in Sweet Home Detroit itself
the boot was firmly on the other foot. ‘Over the years I became lead guitar player for him, and then I played with him quite a bit,’ says Burns. ‘And then in the ’60s, he
played with
me
, because when the Motown and the Memphis sound came, the blues was takin’ a hell of a beatin’ back then. So I went to rizzum’n’blues, because you
couldn’t make no money playin’ blues. A lot of blues guys had to hang it up, because they couldn’t get no action. He was playing with me, but he was playing the
blues
with
me.
I
was playin’ the rhythm-and-blues, because I had that kind of group. I was more or less givin’ him work with me. It didn’t make no difference whether he was
goin’ over big and strong or whatever: it was more or less like givin’ him some work or whatever. By him bein’ John and being with my group and everything . . . see,
he played
all
blues at that time, and I didn’t. So it was a thing like
we
featured
him
. The blues set, he had it. And I was playin’ like
rhythm
and blues: “Honky Tonk”, Wilson Pickett and that kind of stuff. That’s what
I
was doin’. It worked well: we was workin’ something like five nights a week. That
was when he was workin’ with me, ’66, ’67, ’68, somewhere in there.’

Hooker’s first BluesWay album,
Urban Blues
, was pretty much a continuation of Vee Jay by other means, albeit with a higher budget and slightly more care. Produced by Al Smith and
recorded in Chicago over two days (albeit two days a month apart) in the autumn of 1967, it reunited Hooker with drummer Al Duncan as well as with Eddie Taylor, who played bass on the first session
and guitar on the second. In addition to remakes of VeeJay-era chestnuts like ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Want Ad Blues’, the first session yielded Hooker’s recording of the song
inspired by the apocalyptic events of the previous summer: ‘Motor City Is Burning’. On (anonymous) lead guitar was a relatively recent acquaintance newly flitted from Chess Records and
now ‘exclusively’ signed elsewhere: Buddy Guy.

‘I left my day job in August of 1967, my first album with Vanguard,’ Buddy recalls. ‘I was playing locally at night in the clubs in Chicago, and goin’ to my job every
mornin’. The only thing I ever did with John was “Motor City”, and that was done in late ’66 [
sic
]. I axed him about that, you know, I never really heard it. I
don’t know how did I sound or what. I normally done heard everything I ever helped anybody or was involved with, hear a playback, but I never got that, I never heard that played back.’
However, he remembers, ‘I had fun with that.’

‘Motor City’ was by no means the only
Urban Blues
cut attributed to Smith. Out of a dozen tracks, ten were credited or co-credited to Smith; Hooker received solo credit on
only two, and those were the remakes of ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Want Ad Blues’. Hooker and Smith ‘shared’ one of the new songs, ‘Mr Lucky’. Even
‘Backbiters And Syndicators’, with a complex genealogy dating back as far as the Besman years, had
somehow become an Al Smith composition. To add insult to injury,
Smith was, in his capacity as Hooker’s ‘manager’, quoted more extensively in the liner notes than was Hooker himself.

‘Oh, he had a lotta things that wasn’t true,’ says Hooker; clearly
Urban Blues
was a continuation of Vee Jay by other means in more than simply musical terms.
‘[Smith] had his name on a lot of ’em, “Backbiters And Syndicators” and some more of ’em. Jimmy Bracken had his name on a lot of ’em, and he can’t write
nary a tune. Everybody in the [Vee Jay] company put their name on my songs. That was
cold
.’

Cold it may have been, but the album itself was hot. Nevertheless, by the next time Hooker stepped into the studio for BluesWay, Smith was nowhere to be seen.
Simply The Truth
was cut in
New York rather than in Chicago, and it reunited Hooker with Bob Thiele, who took personal charge of the session, rounding up a Big Apple session A-team which included legendary drummer Bernard
‘Pretty’ Purdie. Liner-note writer John F. Szwed, a contributing editor to
Jazz and Pop
magazine who sat in on the sessions, found Purdie’s antics – arraying signs
reading DID IT AGAIN! THE LITTLE OLD HIT MAKER ‘PRETTY PURDIE’ and BING BANG BOOM PRETTY PURDIE AT IT AGAIN: THE HIT MAKER around the studio; sending out for a complete chicken dinner
which he set up on his tom-toms whilst he played – almost as fascinating as Hooker’s method of outlining the songs to his accompanists, none of whom (with the exception of harpist Hele
Rosenthal), he had ever met before the session. All of the players (apart from Purdie and Rosenthal), the others were guitarist Wally Richardson, bassist William Folwell and keyboard guy Ernie
Hayes on rolling piano and simmering Hammond organ) came up trumps here, but it was Rosenthal’s salty harp which provided Hooker with this session’s primary instrumental foil.

The final release version of
Simply The Truth
demonstrated how far a little care and attention could go when it came to making the
difference between a bunch of
songs, however cool, and a satisfying album. The eight songs recorded on that particular session were beautifully and sensitively sequenced by Thiele, resulting in inspired juxtapositions of both
topic and mood. Hooker’s devastating ‘I Don’t Want To Go To Vietnam’, a pointed ‘answer’ to the patriotic shibboleths of Junior Wells’ then-current
‘Vietcong Blues’, is immediately followed by a paean of praise for ‘Mini Skirts’ and their wearers, particularly those of the ‘big-legged’ persuasion. The joyful
boogie vibes of ‘I Wanna Bugaloo’ and ‘(Twist Ain’t Nothin’ But) The Old Time Shimmy’ alternate with the exquisitely eerie moods of desolation evoked by
‘Tantalizin’ With The Blues’ and a Hookerization of Mercy Dee Walton’s classic ‘One Room Country Shack’. And there’s no nonsense about composer credits
going astray here: the sleeve uncompromisingly states ‘All tracks written by John Lee Hooker’.

And the road was good to John Lee Hooker at this time, not just the studio. The era of monster open-air festivals was in full effect by now: only a few months before
Simply The Truth
was
recorded, in May of 1968, Hooker had played the Miami Pop Festival – promoter Michael Lang’s dress-rehearsal for Woodstock – alongside Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry and the Mothers of
Invention. And in October of that year he’d rejoined the American Folk Blues Festival package for another swing through Europe, in the company of – amongst others – T-Bone Walker,
Eddie Taylor and ‘Big’ Walter Horton, though for some reason no album was released even though the now-traditional Cologne recording session did indeed take place as usual. He was
making good money, bringing it home and stashing it away; but as it turned out, that wasn’t going to be enough to keep his world intact. The Motor City was still burnin’ . . . all the
way down.

During his Detroit years, John Lee Hooker was, effectively, an absentee father. A loving, loyal father, by all credible accounts, but an absentee father nonetheless. ‘John
was really a family man,’ says Paul Mathis. ‘The only time he was away from home was when he was takin’ care of business, when he was touring. Other’n that, you find him at
home.’ Undoubtedly true, as far as it goes, but when most of your business is on the road, it is incredibly hard to be ‘taking care of business’ at home as well.

One consequence of Hooker’s incessant roadwork was that his sons went virtually unsupervised at times when, at least according to the conventional wisdoms, the presence of a father-figure
is at its most vital. Detroit legend depicts John Lee Junior and Robert as a pair of sharp-dressed wild ones, though according to Zakiya Hooker, this is only partially true.

‘We always had nice clothes,’ she concurs. ‘We did not really want for a lot. Junior was really the person getting in trouble, as opposed to Robert. Robert was kinda almost
nondescript. He was just
there
. He was the baby at that time. So Robert was just so’ – she makes a disdainful
pfft
sound. ‘Junior spends a lotta time in [jail].
Drugs seem to be his nemesis. He just can’t seem to get past ’em. That was why he couldn’t do the music. He and Robert both got involved in drugs,
and that
and music doesn’t mix. They were young, it was an exciting life, they had money, cars, they had anything they felt they wanted. Daddy had made sure of this. I think he can look back now and
admit the errors of his ways, but looking back in retrospect doesn’t always help. No it doesn’t. They say hindsight is 20/20 vision. They could’ve had anything. Robert plays
excellent keyboard. He was on the albums
Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive, Free Beer And Chicken
. . . Robert played very, very, very good keyboard.

‘That’s another dream I want to follow, learn to play piano . . . I wanted to play keyboards, but when Robert got keyboard lessons, I got a sewing machine
[laughs]
. I had
originally been given the choice, because I was taking sewing in school and I was having such a hard time. I hated the teacher. I hated her; she was just evil, she was the devil. I wouldn’t
buy my material, I wouldn’t do anything, I would just do anything to harass her. So after I’d failed the class three times, I said, “Okay, it’s time to get outta here with
this woman”, so I passed the class and I says, “Well okay, you know you can sew, get a sewing machine.” So then when Robert got the organ it was just
wow
, and I wanted to
take piano lessons. And they wouldn’t let me take piano lessons! You don’t ask why. As a kid you don’t ask why. Women were expected to do . . . certain things. Sewing’s one
of them. My mother taught us to cook, and we’re all very good cooks. Junior didn’t learn to cook until he was grown. Never had to cook. Robert learned to cook because he loved to eat.
He used to be very heavy, had to slim down because of his asthma. Junior was just a spoiled brat.’

Was that because he was the oldest boy?

‘Sure was. He was just allowed a lot of leeway. From a child, Junior was getting into trouble, in juvenile hall, at maybe thirteen. Junior was strung out. I didn’t realise he was
strung out until I was grown, because I never really saw it. I don’t think [John and Maude] ever found out while he was small, because parents have a tendency to
close
their eyes to a lot of things, and they probably just attributed it all to him just being a little bad kid.’

‘We just got to a point where we got wild, man,’ remembers the Reverend Robert Hooker. ‘Whew . . . from a long time. My other brother, man, he still is wild. I was in school
when I got started, man. I was in Foch Junior High, on Fairway St in Detroit, Michigan. It was a pretty school. Back then it was bad, but you look up and it’s 1994 and it’s worse,
man.’

John Lee Hooker says to this day that it is not strange that his two sons went such different ways. Robert Hooker, decades away from his teens, gives fervent thanks for that.

‘Well, when you try and be a good father, man, like any father in his right sense, he want his son, his daughter, he don’t want them to live a low-down life. My brother, he let him
down, man. He let him down. He was in a different religion to me, but he was in there three–four years, and my daddy was
proud
of him, man. He changed his life, he was workin’,
got his own business, man, you know? And he just . . .
pssheew
. He let my daddy down, man. Lost his job, his business went under, went back into that old raggedy life . . . and that’ll
hurt a father, man. I’m glad I’m able to stand, and I’m still standin’. He got one son he can really look to and say I’m proud of, and he can continue sayin’
that, because I’m gonna keep on livin’ for Jesus, brother, I’m gonna keep on standin’. Man, my brother, he started messin’ up probably about the age of fourteen years
old. Thirteen, fourteen, somethin’ like that. Temptations was there. We just couldn’t handle it.

‘You ever heard that thing where you be around a person so much their spirit come off on you? You ever heard that? Never heard that, huh? I’m gonna show you an example. Let’s
say you don’t drink no wine. You not no wino. But all the time you hangin’ around a wino. You know what’s gonna happen? You gonna turn out to be a wino, you keep on bein’
around that person. You take
a little bit, then
boom!
These demons is real. Dope demons, wine demons, liquor demons . . . you keep on bein’ around a person
doin’ these things, these demons gonna jump off onto you. That demon gonna get into you, man. They real. You know when I see it? My brother came to the house in Detroit, Michigan, before I
ever started shootin’ any heroin. That boy went in the bathroom, man, he shot some dope. I said I will
never
shoot no dope. But see, that was just
talk
. No Holy Ghost power,
just
talk
. Next I wind up shootin’ dope. Turned out to be a dope
fiend
. I wasn’t no bad boy, man. I was a
good
boy. Just didn’t have no power.
Temptation
around.’