Boogie Man (62 page)

All of this had changed by the time of the Hunter College show. Hooker was performing solo on electric guitar: without the support of a band, but also without the limitations of one. He opens
the show with a brief, hushed version of ‘Maudie’, here retitled ‘I Miss You So’. ‘Dark Room’ itself is preceded here by a letter-perfect performance of
‘(Bad Like) Jesse James’ (aka ‘I’m Mad’ or ‘I’m Mad Again’), one of those rare Hooker songs which, like ‘Boom Boom’, is graven in marble
and almost never changes from one performance to another. In this one, over a single rolling riff which repeats and resolves, repeats and resolves, over and over again, Hooker tells the story of
how he was cuckolded by his best friend, and the awful revenge he plans to exact upon that treacherous friend. The torrential litany of threats – casually recited in Hooker’s badman
voice: hard, dry, uninflected – which climaxes the piece can only be described as ‘gangsta blues’. If Quentin Tarantino teamed up with Ice-T, they could scarcely better it:

Then he goes into detail. Four are going down to the river, but only three are coming back. The victim is going to be gagged, and bound hand and foot, and held underwater –
just hold
the cat there, don’t let him up, he been talkin’ too much.
Hooker even gives us the bubbles of air –
plupluplupluplup –
which signify his cuckolder’s dying
breath.

And yet, incomprehensibly, the audience is laughing. The threats are blood-curdling, the vocal delivery is chilling, yet clearly Hooker is visually undercutting the implied violence with body
language: gestures and facial expressions apparent only to those in the room with him. The subtext, however, is utterly unambiguous: sometimes a tidal wave of grief can be held back only with a
thick wall of anger. On ‘Dark Room’, that wall has crumbled: even the most lurid revenge fantasy must eventually pall, and the sufferer has no remaining option but to confront his pain.
All barriers are down: nothing now stands between Hooker and his grief. Or between him and us. There is no irony, no ‘distance’. Nothing is in quotes.

And, as if to emphasise that point, ‘Dark Room’ remains entirely free of any kind of formal structure. It has no pulsebeat, no lyrical organisation or rhyme scheme and – with
the exception of the single
allusion to the chord of B7 with which Hooker prefaces his vocal entry – no chord changes. It is as close as Hooker ever got to presenting the
raw, unmediated stuff of his music, its heart, soul and spirit, without furniture or frame.

‘Dark Room’ begins with a series of exploratory runs – part meditation, part foreplay, part prologue – bristling with pull-offs and hammer-ons and played out of metre
primarily on the treble strings. The piece is performed in regular tuning in the key of E, and the ominous, booming plunk of the open bass E string, to which each and every run eventually returns,
provides it with its sole anchor. Right from the start, the mood is one of upheaval. The guitar blurts, stutters, interrupts itself. Phrases begin but don’t resolve; notes bump into each
other, choke each other off. Finally the turmoil quiets. Hooker launches a slower, calmer lick upwards from the bass E. A moment of silence, and then – foot quietly tapping in the background
– he quietly and reflectively plays a classic bass-string ‘turnaround’ of the kind which normally occurs at the end of a standard I-IV-V 12-bar chorus, ascending to B7 (the
‘V’ of an E blues) before returning to the root tonality.

Another beat of silence, and then Hooker sets the scene. ‘
I’m sittin’ here
,’ he begins, almost to himself, ‘
in my dark room, dark room . . .’
The guitar stabs twice for emphasis ‘
. . . In my dark room cryin’ ’bout you.
’ The voice is low, soft, meditative, burry with suppressed emotion, but the guitar gives
the game away. Its roiling blurt permits no ambiguity concerning the nature of that ‘thinkin’’. This man
hurts
. He’s not quite ready to admit it to us, but the guitar
keeps no secrets. As with all great blues singer/guitarists, from Robert Johnson to B.B. King to Robert Cray, the guitar tells us what the voice will not, or cannot. The voice is the ego, the
guitar the conscience, the soul.

Hooker repeats the scene-setting, sitting there in his dark room, adding one more piece of information: ‘
on my bedside
’
,
and the guitar underlines it. He starts to
repeat: ‘
on my bed . . .
’ and now the guitar
will let him go no further, interrupting, blurting out the pain the singer refuses to acknowledge. He’s
striking the bass strings hard enough to distort both tone and pitch: one could describe it as a self-consciously ugly sound if there was anything whatsoever about this performance which was
self-conscious at all. ‘
I’m sitting on my bedside
,’ he continues, undulating the final syllable through eight or nine notes – ‘
on my bedside cryin’ . .
. cryin’ about you
.’ The guitar takes over again, always reaching up-and-out for the treble, always tumbling back down to the bass.

‘You know sometimes,
’ Hooker confides . . . one single, jabbing interpolation from the guitar. Then a beat of silence. Then the interpolation, repeated. ‘
I have
friends around me
.’ The guitar mutters, sceptically. ‘
We be sittin’ down in the livin’ room talkin’
’ – the guitar interrupts once again, and the
voice breaks in bitter self-mockery – ‘
me an’ my friends
. ’
Huh
says the guitar. ‘
Havin’ a little nip together.
’ The guitar says
Yeah, sure
. Hooker says, ‘
I get to thinkin’ ’bout how she done treated me so bad . . .
’ and then it changes. The guitar stops talking back and just tolls, like
a church bell. Once. Twice. An E octave: the open bass E string and the D string at the second fret, the open E thumbed so hard that it rings sharp –
BAAAAAongg
– under the
pressure. A quick bass run and then back to the awful, tolling E; the remorseless low E from which there is no escape: not in this piece, anyway.

‘
I don’t want my friends to see me cryin’
’ – the word ‘cry’ melismatically stretched across half-a-dozen notes, the guitar keening into a hurtful
trebly blizzard – ‘
I say,
“
’Scuse me, people . . .
”’ – another treble storm, this time ending on an A, the fourth of the E blues scale,
implying a continuation – ‘‘
. . . I got to step into my room.
”’ Another treble blurt. ‘
And then I sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down
’
–
the guitar tries to get a few notes in edgeways but now Hooker will be interrupted no further. ‘
I sit down on my bedside
’ – and now it is the turn of the
voice to interrupt the guitar. ‘
You know tears come down
my face
,’ he sings, and the guitar follows. Instrument and voice are no longer in opposition,
but in harmony: the public and private faces and voices have now fused. The guitar simply marks time for a beat and then – all anger burned away, leaving nothing behind but a bottomless pit
of melancholy, a vale of tears stretching to each and every faraway horizon – it begins to sound the ominous slow bass-string riff from ‘Tupelo’, that tale of an external, rather
than internal, flood which subsumes all before it.

‘
I don’t want the people
,’ Hooker murmurs, guitar still restating ‘Tupelo’ beneath his voice, ‘
to see me cryin’ ’bout you
.’
Now his voice strengthens, becoming both deeper and sharper as well as richer and louder, anger flooding back: ‘
you know she did me so bad, so bad
’
–
that shift from
second to third person as ‘you’ becomes ‘she’. He says it again: ‘
you know she did me so bad, so bad
’
–
a hit on the bass E –
‘
you know she did me
’ – a giddying swirl of melismae on the last word, and now his rage has become a tidal wave, towering, irresistible, and those savage treble runs return
– ‘
Whoah Lord she did me so bad
’ – back to the bass, jabbing down furiously with his thumb until you feel that the string just has to break, or that
something
must break – ‘
that every time I think about it
’ – voice softening and lowering again, guitar muttering indistinctly – ‘
you know I can’t keep from
cryin’
. ’

Another moment of silence, and then he starts to hum,
mmm-hmmm
, guitar and voice united, blending in seamless union. It almost sounds as if he’s ‘violining’ – an
electric guitarist’s technique in which the volume is turned off as each note is struck and then turned back up as it rings, so that you have a note that fades in from nowhere, with no attack
at its leading edge – so soft and sweet is the sound. And then he moans, ‘
awwwww-hawwwww ohhhhhh-ohhhh
’. It is literally
awwwww
-ful: the pure, unalloyed sound of
human grief, not a sound made for an audience, but simply soul and body trying to make itself feel better, to handle the pain any way it can.

And then he sings once more ‘
And then the tears come down my
face
’, and it is just the most extraordinary moment. You see the tears, you see the
face. Hooker’s voice is, most frequently, smooth and mellifluous: nothing further from the stereotypical Delta bluesman’s rasp – and the ersatz constricted-throat gravel employed
by so many white wannabe bluesers – can possibly be imagined. But on the word ‘tears’ a deep, leathery grain colours his voice, supernaturally evocative of the lines on a face no
longer young as the tears which can no longer be withheld trickle down, gathering in seams of weathered skin; of the texture and fabric of a life of much pain endured, with no end to that pain in
sight.

He moans once again and strikes one sharp chord –
bap! –
on the guitar, and it’s over, and we’re into something else. But the moment, and the feeling of the
moment, remain: the specific moment in a human life which a song evokes, and the moment in which it is performed. No other artist could have delivered that particular performance; Hooker himself
could not (would not?) replicate it precisely no matter how much money you offered him to do so. What it is, right there in five minutes (minus applause time): the purest essence of the blues. Not
only of John Lee Hooker’s blues, but
all
blues. It’s what the wood looks like when you learn to stop looking at the trees.

Of course, for some there is no wood: only trees. According to Bernard Besman, what Hooker does isn’t the blues at all. As Besman wrote in the liner note to a compilation of Hooker
outtakes:
¹²⁴

By such criteria, whiskey served in a champagne flute rather than a shot glass or highball tumbler would be whiskey no longer. A performance like ‘Dark Room’ is certainly not
a
blues in the purely descriptive sense, i.e. form – in other words, it’s not a twelve-bar, doesn’t have a regular beat or adhere to either a three-chord harmonic structure
or an A-A-B lyrical pattern – but in function and content, it is
the
blues.

Reminiscing about his travels during the early part of the twentieth century, Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax, ‘There wasn’t any decent music around [Houston, Texas], only
jews-harps, harmonicas, mandolins, guitars and fellows singing the spasmodic blues – sing awhile and pick awhile till they thought of another word to say.’
¹²⁵
In other words, the kind of music Hooker still plays –
the
blues. The original, undiluted, uncut blues.

The deepest blues there is.

To say that it is all a matter of feeling is at once to explain everything and nothing. All artists have feelings: hell, everybody has feelings. Even lawyers have feelings.
Rather, it is about a particular relationship, or
set of relationships, to feeling. And feeling was something of which that young, untried Hooker of the late ’40s and
early ’50s had no shortage. Into that basic gallery of vessels – the traditional slow blues, the free-form slow blues, the boogie, the ‘Bottle Up And Go’,
‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ and ‘Catfish’ templates – he poured the stuff of his life, his observations of his day-to-day world, fragments of things he’d
heard on jukeboxes, snatches of blues or gospel songs or romantic ballads he’d heard as a child. And each time the red light went on, these elements would be combined and recombined into
something new and unrepeatable.

Sometimes a slow blues would start out with standard changes and then loosen into free-form. Sometimes he’d supercharge a ‘Bottle Up’, ‘Catfish’ or
‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ sequence with his boogie groove. Sometimes he’d play what was usually a fast song slow, or a slow one fast. Sometimes a piece he normally played
solo would be transformed into something different by performing it with drums, sax and piano. And sometimes a song ‘Hookerized’, or adapted from another source – Roscoe
Gordon’s ‘No More Doggin’,’ or the celebrated ‘Driftin’ Blues’ originated by Charles Brown when he was with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazes – would
settle into Hooker’s repertoire and become an archetype in its own right, capable of being spun off in turn into a galaxy of further variations. ‘Driftin’ Blues’, for
example, became Hooker’s own ‘Wanderin’ Blues’, and each time it was performed it drifted – or wandered – further from its original source. Brown had depicted
himself driftin’ ‘like a ship out on the sea’; Hooker, by contrast, wandered ‘like a sheep out on the farm’. Sometimes – thanks to various producers’
mistranscriptions of Hooker’s Mississippi accent – the two images combined to create the surreal vision of ‘a sheep out on the foam’. Brown’s song had been thoroughly
‘Hookerized’.