Boogie Man (60 page)

‘Why are you making me listen to this?’ he inquired. ‘This man can barely play the guitar.’

It was at this point that I hauled myself to my feet, flung open the door and suggested, in the atrically profane terms, that he depart the premises before I hurt him. This was, in fact, an
utterly empty threat – I haven’t had a fight since I was thirteen, and I lost that one – but he did indeed take his leave, muttering into his beard. We never spoke again, and
shortly he moved out of the block, taking with him two albums (Duke Ellington’s
Afro-Bossa
and a rather nice Jimmy Witherspoon compilation) which I had previously been thought less
enough to loan him. It took a long time to replace those records, but the light was worth the candle simply to be rid of his smugly smirking presence. What I’d found most offensive about his
remarks was not so much that he’d dissed
my
taste in
my
home (this is, after all an occupational hazard when something as important as music is being discussed), but that he had
revealed the shallowness of his understanding of the underlying roots, the central core, of his own choice of music. Yes, of course Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were virtuoso players of as
tonishing fluency, and yes, of course, their music wouldn’t have been remotely possible without the ability to apply – virtually instantaneously – an intimidating de gree of
musical theory, physical dexterity, and instrumental technique. Nevertheless, if that had been all that they were doing, their work would be lit tle more than a historical curio. As it is, the
music of Charles Parker and John Coltrane lives and breathes and continues to inspire suc cessive generations of musicians; not simply because of their technical facility or their theoretical
grasp, but because of the soulfulness and spiritual content of their music.
¹¹³

And that is
it
. That is the
whole deal
. Music stands or falls by what it makes its listeners feel, and everything else is simply furniture. My unfortunate
neighbour had fallen in love with the technical means by which his heroes had chosen to achieve their creative ends, and had com pletely ignored the ends themselves.

Of course, on one level he was completely right. If – say – you were looking to hire a guitarist to play in the pit band for a Broadway musical, or to sight-read a complex part for a
big-band jazz or commercial rock session, and John Lee Hooker had somehow been persuaded to come along and audition, you might well conclude that he could ‘barely play the guitar’. On
the other hand, if you were looking for someone to play John Lee Hooker-style guitar and Hooker himself was unavailable or unaffordable, you’d be in deep, deep trouble, since very few people
can even pastiche his style convincingly, let alone create freely within it. Hooker’s style is one of those which is so utterly deceptive in its apparent simplicity that it seems, to those
who worship ostentatious displays of technique and theory, to be almost insultingly easy: literally
artless
. Then you try to do it yourself, or you hear someone else attempting to reproduce
it, and then you realise that it’s virtually impossible. Reviewing Michael Caine’s performance in Lewis Gilbert’s movie of Willy Russell’s
Educating Rita
, Pauline
Kael wrote:

The qualities which Kael detects in Caine’s acting – transparency, purity, authenticity – are precisely those we find in Hooker’s blues. It is the
art which conceals itself: it takes you to the heart of the matter almost instantly, placing the minimum of obstacles or filters between the experience of artist and audient.

To play like John Lee Hooker, you have to
be
John Lee Hooker, and this is because the style is the man. The two are inseparable and indivisible: one cannot discuss the music without
discussing the man, and vice versa. Let us say it once again: John Lee Hooker do not do, he be. His music is the way it is because the man is who he is. What is more, he knows exactly who he is
and, over long, hard, painful years, he has refined that knowledge and placed it all at the service of his art. The unique character of the blues depends on one central fact: that the music is
impossible to perform convincingly unless the performer knows him- (or her-)self inside out and is prepared to place that self on the line, to occupy the spiritual and emotional centre of each and
every song. Blues performed without self-knowledge and self-expression is merely a set of gestures and conventions: it can rock your body but it can’t rock your soul. As Julio Finn put it in
The Bluesman
:
¹¹⁵

This, of course, should not be taken as a suggestion that a blues performer needs to be content, or settled, in order to play the blues. This notion would turn reality on its head; it would be a
complete and utter contradiction of the social, cultural, historical, economic and psychological realities which underpin the music. What Finn is telling us is that in order to fulfil the
music’s function, the bluesman needs the ability to face, to understand, and – please pardon the
Star Trek
infinitive – to fully accept the emotion of the moment, be it
sorrow or anger, joy or regret; and to incorporate that emotion, without let or hindrance or inhibition of any kind, into that performance which is so much more than a performance.

The blues is an art; the blues is an entertainment; the blues is a commodity; the blues is cultural history; the blues is any number of things to any number of people. But, above all, the blues
is an eminently practical and functional set of methods and processes for dealing with the most painful aspects of life. Like meditation or yoga in Buddhist or Hindu societies, it is a discipline,
a structure, for the focusing of self.

Using the blues as a means of achieving this end is not only the highest priority of Hooker’s art: it is almost the
only
priority. In order to do so, he has evolved a style which is
unlike any other: it is, simultaneously, utterly unique and personal to him; and a grand archetype which can sound as if it is the fundamental blues on which all other blues, even music recorded
before Hooker himself ever even picked up a guitar, let alone walked into a recording studio, is based. Let us therefore look a little more closely at the mechanics of Hooker’s music, the
materials from which it is constructed, and the processes by which
it is made. Hooker himself, as it happens, heartily despises all things theoretical or intellectual . . .

‘No matter how much education I didn’t have,’ he will insist, ‘book education didn’t have what was in
here
’ – tapping his chest –
‘and in
here
’ – tapping his head. ‘I could’ve been a professor, but I repeat myself to you and to whoever read this book after I’m gone: you can
not
get what I got, out of a book. You got to have a talent. There is no-one I heard yet can go into a studio like John Lee Hooker and just produce something right on the spot. I can go into a studio
with nothin’ and come out with one of the beautfullest songs, because I’m very wise up here. People say, “How can you do that?” I say, “It’s a gif’ from
God, if there’s a God – a Supreme Being.” I have written more songs than any other blues singer –
I
think so – and they wasn’t written on a piece of
paper.
Here
’s my paper’ – and he taps his head once more. ‘You can’t find a feelin’ on a piece of paper. I don’t believe in no
paper
. Take
your paper, stick a match to it. My paper’s right in
here
, and in
here
.’

. . . but we’re going to need some theory – musical and cultural – even if Hooker doesn’t.
Especially
because he doesn’t.

If we look at Hooker’s first and most prolific years as a recording artist, we find that whilst he didn’t precisely ‘go into a studio with nothin’’, he went in with
what may objectively seem like very little. He had mastered two keys, each with its own tuning; a very few basic song structures, and even fewer beats.

Keys first: Hooker’s music was – and is – mainly performed in one or other of two basic modes. The first is in the standard ‘concert’ guitar tuning of E-A-D-G-B-E,
low to high, and almost invariably in the key of E. The second is in an ‘open’ tuning – i.e. one in which strumming the unfretted strings produces a full chord – which
mimics the characteristic sound of a first-position chord of A major, in which the second, third and fourth strings are held down at the second fret.
Depending on whether those
strings are tuned up a full tone or the first, fifth and sixth strings are slackened by the equivalent interval, this tuning (known to traditional guitarists as ‘Spanish’, after the
nineteenth-century parlour-guitar standard ‘Spanish Fandango’, which introduced the tuning to the American musical vocabulary) produces either a chord of G (D-G-D-G-B-D) or A
(E-A-E-A-C#-E). Most country blues men preferred, as do the majority of contemporary musicians who perform in this style, to tune down (which places less strain on precious, hard-to-replace
strings), but the higher ten sion of the A-tuning imparts a correspondingly greater sharpness and urgency to the sound. This tuning is also frequently used on the banjo and the Hawaiian guitar:
‘Once I figured out how to put the banjo G to the guitar,’ Ry Cooder told
Guitar Player
magazine,
¹¹⁷
‘all of a sudden there were
all of John Lee Hooker’s chords.’

‘I get the feel that I want,’ Hooker says of the ‘Spanish’ tuning. ‘It’s a different sound. Different tuning, different sound. Playing open, you’re not
playing chords. It’s picking, it’s a different sound altogether, different feelin’ from A to E. A-tuning is a real blues funky key. You play slow, not fast – not
countin’ the boogie, you gotta play that fast. But the slow stuff, you really get the feelin’. It’s a deeper feelin’ I do in open A than I do in regular tuning. It’s a
little deeper . . .
real
funky. E is deep but A . . . there’s just something about it. It’s a really
blues
key.’

Then there’s picking and strumming: the right-hand stuff. Hooker plays strictly fingerstyle: striking downwards with the thumb on the
bass strings and plucking upwards
with his index finger on the trebles. Sometimes, for fast chord strumming, he will use his middle or ring finger, but most of his playing depends on the interaction between that downstroking thumb
and upswinging index. The first time he saw Hooker live and close up, Pete Townshend was awestruck. ‘His . . . rhythm playing totally stunned me . . . he appeared to achieve this simply by
flailing at the strings aimlessly with his huge hands, but the results were precise . . . Hooker’s chord work convinced me that pinning down a precise and solid chordal structure was far more
important for me than learning by rote the solos of virtuosos like B.B. King and Buddy Guy.’

The bulk of the hundreds of songs Hooker recorded in those early years were constructed around a mere handful of basic templates; a small number of bottles into which to pour
an infinite ocean of wine. First and foremost amongst these was ‘the boogie’, the signature groove he learned from his stepfather Will Moore; but though Moore’s is the primary
influence most frequently cited by Hooker, his big sister’s one-time suitor Tony Hollins, who was the first bluesman Hooker ever heard, comes an extremely close second. And it was Hollins who
introduced Hooker to the fundamental themes which were the building blocks, the DNA, of Delta blues.

‘[Hollins] used to play, “
I wisht I was a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea,
”’ says Hooker. ‘That song go way-way-way back, man. Muddy didn’t
write that song; the first time I heard it was [Hollins]. Tony Hollins would play it when Muddy was a little kid. “Catfish”, he used to play that all the time, and another song which he
give me was maybe a hundred years old. He give me “Crawlin’ King Snake”. I turned that around and made it different, but he give me that song. At that time there wasn’t no
songwriters, there wasn’t no publishers, nothin’. They just made songs up in the cotton fields and stuff like this. It was just a song he made up and passed it on to me, so that made me
the writer
when I did it my own way. Now the song become so popular, everybody was doin’ it, the “Crawlin’ King Snake”. Everybody do’s that
now.’

Among all but the most erudite blues buffs, Tony Hollins’ name is not exactly one with which to conjure. He recorded a mere handful of singles during the 1940s, and the two most durable
compositions with which he is associated are most commonly attributed to others. ‘Crosscut Saw’, first recorded by Tommy McClellan – of whom more in a moment – was adapted
by the Binghampton Blues Boys
¹¹⁸
and credited to ‘R.G. Ford’; their recording in turn inspired Albert King’s, from which all subsequent
versions, including those by the Groundhogs and Eric Clapton, were derived. Hollins cut the original ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ in 1941 – or rather, he
sort of
did: Big
Joe Williams recorded a very similar ‘King Snake’ the same year – but up until very recently the song has generally been credited to Hooker. Listening now to Hollins’
slender body of work, and hearing it not only in the context of Hooker’s music but of the recorded legacy of the great Delta bluesmen who were Hollins’ contemporaries, he sounds a
marginal figure indeed: almost all his sides are minor variants of his basic ‘King Snake’ template, his work neither deep nor broad. To child John, of course, Hollins was a revelation:
the man who first opened the door into the realm which Hooker would explore for the rest of his life.