Boogie Man (65 page)
Authors: Charles Shaar Murray
They just copy me, and there’s nothing I can learn from them.
Little Walter
However, before we leave the subject of Hooker’s pre-breakthrough critical status
too
far behind, it’s worth pointing out that he has never been renowned as
what journalists consider an ‘easy interview’: a media-wise, self-packaging subject who is both willing and able to serve eager profilers a pre-digested version of his/her life and
work. For that matter, neither was Howlin’ Wolf, but the grumpy giant was such an outsize personality that he was fun to describe even when he wasn’t being notably
forthcoming.
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B.B. King, for his part, has always evinced an intense desire to reach out to others and explain himself, his worldview, his music and its
meaning and context to anyone displaying even the faintest signs of empathy and interest; and the fluency, eloquence and personal charm which originally established him as a Memphis radio
personality have made it comparatively easy
for him to do so.
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And whilst Muddy Waters was neither as awe-inspiring a personality
as Wolf nor as effusively articulate a spokesman for the blues community as B.B., he nevertheless managed to combine elements of both into a charismatic, dignified and magisterial/ambassadorial
persona which rendered him a pleasure, as well as an education, to interview.
Whilst Hooker is celebrated amongst his intimates as a witty, genial and gregarious man, it’s equally undeniable that he is capable of being opaque and uncommunicative in the extreme
towards those with whom he does not yet feel sufficiently comfortable to relax, share a joke and speak his mind. Nowadays, with the mantle of bona-fide ‘stardom’ firmly clasped around
Hooker’s shoulders, misfired interviews still get written up and published, even though in some cases Hooker and his interlocutor barely seem to have been in the same room, let alone the same
conversation.
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However, this is now and that was then: in those early ‘blues boom’ days, a musician’s ability to talk (as well as sing
and play) himself into the front rank counted for a lot, and Hooker’s seemingly taciturn, introverted stance was not exactly a major promotional asset.
The archetypal ‘lone cat’ of the blues was Robert Johnson – the most mythically-correct bluesman who ever lived – but he was in no way unique in this respect: most of the
prewar blues guys were itinerant soloists. The social and demographic shifts of postwar African America in general, and the mass urban migrations of the Delta diaspora in particular, rooted the
bluesmen of the ’50s in bands and communities but Hooker, almost alone amongst the city bluesmen of his time, travelled solo, and performed with borrowed bands. In a famous and oft-quoted
soliloquy delivered to the cameras of ITV’s
South Bank Show
in 1987, Eric Clapton perfectly defined the romantic appeal of the legend of the Lone Bluesman:
I felt, through most of my youth, that my back was against the wall and that the only way to survive was with dignity and pride and courage. I heard that . . . most of all
in the blues, because it was always an individual.
It was one man and his guitar against the world.
It wasn’t a company, or a band, or a group; when it came down to it, it was
one guy who was completely alone and had no options, no alternatives other than to sing and play to ease his pain.
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But few postwar bluesmen still actually lived and worked like that. On the road, they had their bands (albeit often stuffed into cramped, shagged-out vehicles); in the studio,
they had producers to shape their work, studio musicians to augment or even replace their regular sidemen, and songwriters waiting in the wings with additional material should their own inspiration
not suffice. Only the most successful, like B.B. King with his 300-shows-a-year itinerary, toured so much that they could barely be said to ‘live’ anywhere.
Hooker, of course, could sound ‘alone’ even with a full band pumping away behind him. There is more than a little irony in the fact that Hooker’s ’90s success has been
built on collaborations – to the point where some inattentive listeners could have been forgiven for thinking that his full name is ‘John-Lee-Hooker-and’ – because for
decades it was an article of faith among many hardcore fans that Hooker sounded best on his own; and amongst detractors (including Bernard Besman, who of all people should know better) that he was
actually incapable of performing effectively with others.
But no matter whether he was, on any given occasion, accompanied by a dozen musicians or none at all, Hooker’s
performances are invariably one-man shows which take place against the backdrop of his own inner landscape. B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy – to name but three; we could cite dozens
should we choose to do so – are essentially extrovert performers. They aim outwards; they take a show all the way to the audience. Hooker, by contrast, goes within: to his own still centre;
in doing so, he takes the audience there with him, and at his centre, they find themselves. Hooker is thus not only a human exemplar of the most venerable traditions of the blues, but also of a
mystical and spiritual tradition that is older still: far older than the blues, far older even than African-American Christianity.
He is a shaman.
The way he works is just like a preacher. Preachin’ the blues . . .
Charlie Musselwhite, interview with the author, 1991
You know what? If you ever listen to him in that song ‘Boogie With The Hook’ at his closing act, do it to you kinda sound like he’s preachin’
in there?
Rev. Robert Hooker, interview with the author, 1994
The only one who could ever move me . . . was the son of a preacher man.
Hurley & Wilkins on behalf of
Dusty Springfield and (subsequently)
Aretha Franklin, ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’
Forget your troubles and dance,
Forget your weakness and dance . . .
Bob Marley, ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)’
John Lee Hooker was born and raised in the church. Indeed, his earliest and most formative musical, cultural and spiritual experiences came from the church, and from the
preaching of his father, the Rev. William Hooker. He is, as it happens, not only the Son Of A Preacher Man, but also the brother of another, and the father of another still.
As John Lee’s second son, the Reverend Robert Hooker, and their former flatmate, harp virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite, observe above – and as we’ve already noted way back at the
start of this book – the climax of Hooker’s stage act irresistibly evokes the transcendent fervour of charismatic Southern Baptism, wherein preacher and congregation alike are caught up
in the ecstatic whirlwind of the descending spirit. In conventional Western religious services, the congregation are there to worship under the direction of their pastor, but the African-American
ceremony goes further. It is rooted in the tradition of a fundamental, primal encounter with the powers that drive the universe, in which the participants invite transcendence, offering themselves
up to the spirit they invoke in the knowledge that their offer will be, at least for the duration, accepted. It is about more than merely worshipping: it is about
becoming
, and about
temporarily ceasing to be. It is the shamanic principle in action.
Who is the shaman? By way of introduction, our old friend
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
gives us, ‘priest or witch-doctor of class claiming to have sole contact with gods
etc.’, whilst
The Penguin English Dictionary
offers, ‘priest-magician in primitive cultures’. Elsewhere, the shaman is variously described as priest and sorcerer, visionary
and healer, and the shaman is indeed all of these; but as far as most anthropological sources are concerned, the shaman’s defining attribute
is the ability to free his or
her (and at the dawn of humanity it was almost always ‘her’) soul from the tethers of mundane existence.
Through study, sacrifice and ordeal, the shaman is one who has earned sufficient strength and wisdom to part the veils separating realities, to travel between this and other planes of existence,
to contact the spirits and to return with them –
ay, and what then?
The shaman thus becomes, literally, a human gate or bridge between different realms of consciousness, if not
different realms of existence. However, Mircea Eliade, the author of the magisterial
Shamanism and Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy
, emphasizes that,
The specific element of shamanism is not the incorporation of spirits by the shaman, but the ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the descent to hell: the
incorporation of spirits and possession by them are universally distributed phenomena, but they do not belong necessarily to shamanism in the strict sense.
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‘First you lose control
,’ incanted Patti Smith in her visionary ‘Horses’, ‘
then you take control.
’ The art of the shaman is the
cultivated development of such virtuosic mastery of both the highest and most fundamental levels of individual consciousness that direct, deliberate control of the surface of consciousness can then
be abandoned. The shaman loses one ‘self’ in order to contact and assume another, higher, self. Both possessed and possessing, yielding and summoning: the shaman is thus empowered to
transform the experience of others, to transcend and to induce transcendence.
For most Westerners, the primary association evoked by the word ‘shaman’ is of an African or Native American (or Haitian, or Aboriginal) tribal mystic; but contemporary usage (and
abuse) of that term
actually originated with Russian anthropologists studying the Tungus people of Siberia, in whose language ‘saman’ means ‘one who
knows’. It may be instructive at this point to consider, in the light of the extract from Julio Finn’s
The Bluesman
quoted earlier in this chapter, as well as my own description
of a Hooker concert from the first chapter of this book, S.M. Shirikogoroff’s account of a Tungus shaman’s seance:
The rhythmic music and singing, and later the dancing of the shaman, gradually involve every participant more and more in a collective action . . . the tempo of the
actions increases . . . when the shaman feels that the audience is with him and follows him he becomes still more active and this effect is transmitted to his audience. After shamanizing, the
audience recollects various moments of the performance, their great psychophysiological emotion and the great hallucinations of sight and hearing they have experienced. They then have a deep
satisfaction – much greater than that from emotions produced by theatrical and musical performance, literature and general artistic phenonomena of the European complex, because in
shamanizing the audience at the same time acts and participates.
. . . or, indeed, Hooker’s own analysis of his performances, drawn from a mid-’70s interview:
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I watch them. Then I feel their mood with them. I move with them. I get them up and get to rocking with them, and after I get them going, I keep them going – higher
and higher; I just don’t let them down. I take them in complete command . . . and when one or two of the crowd start moving, I start moving with them. And when
they
see me moving,
they
start to move. When I get into it, I feel good all over – higher and higher and higher; there’s no limit . . .
Hooker works on precisely these shamanic levels, to precisely these shamanic ends. His music is simultaneously repetitive and unpredictable, his voice moving freely as his
guitar stays where it is. Performing a Delta staple like ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin”, he starkly illustrates this method by singing a melody which implies a standard three-chord change
whilst the guitar riff obstinately remains on the ‘one’ chord. This trance-inducing effect is the staple resource of modern dance music from James Brown onwards: melodic variation atop
harmonic and rhythmic repetition. Dance music of this nature may use Western instruments and vocabulary, but it operates according to an African grammar. African music, from the most traditional
folk forms to the most lushly sophisticated urban pop, will operate like this: a groove will be set up, either on one chord or on a circular, infinitely repeatable riff, and the resources of that
riff will be fully explored through improvisation before another riff is introduced and the musicians then move on to do the same for another section of the piece.
Such music creates joy and transcendence for some and unparalleled fear and loathing in others because it’s an utter affront to the basic tenets of Western rationalism: in other words, it
disengages the body from the mind and the intelligence from the intellect. It stops you thinking, and starts you feeling. It creates an irrational ecstasy.
Hooker has long been acknowledged as the most African of all major blues singers. Nevertheless, he is unwilling to address or discuss the African aspects of either his music or its purposes: at
least, with white boys he is, and certainly with
this
white boy. Asked if the Rev. William Hooker and the ‘respectable’ religious members of his community disapproved of the
blues because they may have associated the music with the traditional African spiritual beliefs to which the Christianity of the time was unequivocally opposed, his response is
disdainful. ‘Africans were a totally different type of people than the people from around here,’ he replies. ‘African people don’t speak good English; I suppose you know
that. They didn’t consider theyselves part of us, the black people of Africa, they had no association with us in that way. Although they was black people, they was like Jews and Germans: they
all white, but they different nationalities. Part from it come from Africa, but we sung different from them.’