Boogie Man (66 page)

If his questioner is sufficiently foolhardy to pursue the point beyond this rejection, he responds with crushing finality. ‘Well, I think you goin’ beyond my recognition. Maybe you
read about it, but I can’t explain it to you.’ Quite understandably though, he is far less inhibited in the company of those he considers part of a more authentic peer group.
‘He’d talk about it with
me
,’ harpist/entrepreneur Chicago Beau once told this writer, ‘he’ll sit with me and say, “Sure, we African men.”’
‘Quite understandably’ because, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois notwithstanding, African-Americans of Hooker’s generation and background were not encouraged to cherish the
‘African’ in themselves. Indeed, the reverse held true: African culture and history were misrepresented, disdained and denied. In Western popular art from
Tintin
to
Tarzan
, it was the ‘Dark Continent’: depicted as a place of cannibalism, grass skirts, bones-through-noses and living in trees. For African-Americans, it was precisely that
‘African’ which impeded their full participation as ‘Americans’, which held them back, which was cited by white racists as the root of the ‘inferiority’ which
justified their unjustifiable treatment. Thus African religious and spiritual values and rituals were mere ‘primitive superstitions’; light skin was superior to dark; ‘good’
hair was lank, fine, soft, Caucasian, whilst ‘bad’ hair was rough, coarse, nappy, African. Blond was beautiful, African was ugly. To call someone an African was dangerously close to an
insult.

As far as the Malian singer/guitarist Ali Farka Toure, at least, is concerned, the African-ness, the
negritude
, of Hooker’s music is so
apparent as to be barely
worth discussing, as is Hooker’s wariness of its discussion. ‘It’s a complex,’ Toure shrugs. ‘When I met him in Paris . . . I invited him to come to Mali to see the
source of what he does. I’m not running away; I’m in complete agreement that John Lee Hooker was the first. I’m very proud of what I do, but up ’til now I still have a lot
to learn. I only know a little bit, but if we are together we are going to discover. He will show me the truth. I invited him to Mali, to come and see his source, which would be good for him. I
don’t want him to die before he comes to Timbuktu. If he comes, he will find his history and his strength. I told him he must come to Africa. He laughed and waved it off, but then I got quite
insistent that it’s necessary that he goes, that he
has
to go . . . and then he really started listening. If he went there he would never regret it. I also told him how well-known he
is in my village, which really quite surprised him. I told him, “We all listen to your music”.

‘I thought he was Malian because of what I heard. It was 100 per cent our music. Musically, it’s African, but the words are in American. When you take music such as John Lee Hooker
does, you’re going to find what we have at home; the greenery, the savannah where you have water. It’s poetic, truly poetic, very poetic. All that was missing was for him to speak our
language to complete the truth. Everything he does, without exception . . . he can give you the A to Z original resource of the roots of this music.’

From such music comes trance. From trance comes ecstasy, and – in the shamanic world – from ecstasy comes healing. In the record which marked his return to the centre of the blues
stage, and to an honoured place in the popular culture of the world, Hooker asserted this truth about as clearly as it is possible to assert anything. ‘
Blues is the healer
’, he
sang over Carlos Santana’s hypnotic music, and with that lyric he redefined not only himself and his career, but the hidden history and purpose of the art form to which he had dedicated his
life.
Blues is the healer
indeed, but Hooker himself is
The
Healer: with capital letters.
That extraordinary cover photo – Hooker’s looming figure in
silhouette, hands raised and spread – simply sets the visual seal on his assumption of that iconic, shamanic role.

The blues healed me, it can heal you:
Hooker acknowledges his own wounds, and his own pain. No-one can heal who has not himself been wounded. The Healer is the one who can come with you
into your Dark Room. And even if he cannot lead you out, even if his message is that you yourself are the only one who can bring you forth into the light, he can nevertheless be there with you,
telling you that the sun
will
rise again, comforting and strengthening you with his presence until the coming of that new dawn.

13

INTO THE MYTHIC

An iced-up New York City Wednesday night in December 1989. On 74th & Broadway, every breath you take freezes your lungs from the inside out with Gotham fog, but inside the
Beacon Theatre, Van Morrison has just spent the best part of an hour and a half inducing a fair facsimile of total audience meltdown. Backed by ’60s Britsoul vets Georgie Fame & The Blue
Flames with Fame himself behind the Hammond organ – plus a pulse-stopping cameo from Mose Allison, the Mississippi-born senior-hipster pianist/vocalist/composer who was and remains
Fame’s prime vocal model – the stumpy Celtic spellbinder entrances and galvanises the theatre’s 2,400 denizens with an extended R&B meditation, waves of tension contracting
and relaxing with a profoundly feral, viscerally erotic intensity.

Somewhere around the second encore, he begins to pluck at the maple-necked black Fender Telecaster hanging from his rounded shoulders, grabbing fistfuls of bass runs, scrabbling for clusters of
razor-sharp trebles. ‘Sometimes I get to thinkin,’’ he muses, ‘about Jo-o-o-o-o-ohhhhhhnn Lee Hooker.’

The band settles into a rock-steady boogie groove as Morrison launches into Hooker’s ‘Dimples’ – but the audience isn’t watching any more.
Their eyes are fixed at stage right where, amidst a sudden flurry of roadie activity, John Lee Hooker himself ambles into the spotlight in his preacher’s hat, arms raised and fingers spread
in benediction, light glinting off his bad sunglasses and the diamond motifs on his jacket: the star on his left lapel and the dollar sign on his right.

It is an almost supernatural moment: as if Morrison had, by dint of sheer sorcerous imagination and will, conjured Hooker into existence, materializing him from ectoplasm,
¹³⁹
summoning his spirit from blues valhalla. At that instant, Hooker seemed as if he had walked straight off the cover of
The Healer
, out of the mists of legend into
fleshly reality. In fact, he’d done almost the exact reverse: he had
become
legend, for ever left behind the ranks of the half-forgotten bluesmen of the electric-downhome ’50s
and the blues-boom ’60s to assume titanic, iconic stature, like King Arthur emerging from beneath Glastonbury Tor into the harsh light of the dying twentieth century. Not only to fully
inhabit his own myth, but to shoulder the entire mythic weight of the blues.

Someone hands Hooker his trusty Gibson 335, and he and Morrison go head-to-head at stage centre, song structures and bar lines melting in their collectively-generated heat. As ever, Hooker
operates in his own time, to the pulse of his own inner clock, refusing to let go of a line or a phrase until he has wrung from it every conceivable emotional nuance. And Morrison – one of
Hooker’s very few peers in the pantheon of improvising vocalists, alongside Burning Spear and Diamanda Galas – shadows his every step: Belfast echoes Clarksdale as the Fender echoes the
Gibson. Hooker and Morrison have their heads together, guitars rumbling and sparking, and they are practically
speaking –
singing –
in tongues, messages from
an inner blue space, and then suddenly it’s over, and he removes his guitar, waves at the audience, and stumps back into the shadows. Even the yuppies are going majorly hogwild: a pink and
blue paisley tie – Bill Blass, pure silk – drifts down from the balcony on high and settles lazily into the lap of an acquaintance of Hooker’s seated in the stalls.

That’s transcendence. And
this
is show business.

A few hours before and a few blocks downtown, a studio audience sits in tiered seats listening to a warmup man hosing them down in preparation for the taping of yet another edition – the
1232nd, as it happens – of
Late Night With David Letterman
.

Even more so now than he was then, David Letterman is an utterly familiar part of America’s cultural furniture; the man who delivered postmodern irony and detachment –
yeah, sure,
whatever –
to the hix-from-the-stix via the mundane magic of television. To a British observer, though, he was simply a toothy preppie from Indiana with an unnerving resemblance to the
young Teddy Kennedy, whose basic
schtick
was the shared assumption that he’s much too smart to be running a late-nite chat show and that we-the-viewers are much too smart to be
watching one, so let’s have some
fun
, gang. The show’s house band, led by keyboard guy Paul Shaffer, has historically been staffed by A-team En-Why studio heavies: on this
particular night the band includes drummer Anton Fig, guitarist Sid McGinniss and bassist Will Lee, the latter a Major Party Animal in cowboy hat and buckskins who racks up his high score on the
Wild-And-Crazy-O-Meter by tapdancing on Letterman’s desk during the warm-up number.

And it’s horrible. This band are horrible in the particular manner in which only highly gifted, expert and experienced musicians can be horrible. Imagine a Holiday Inn lounge band in the
late ’60s who get terminally pissed off with their gig one night, drop some acid and decide that tonight of all nights they will
play their own music the way they rilly feel it
. So
they arrive at the job and open with an instrumental
version of Steppenwolf’s ‘Magic Carpet Rid’. It’s horrible. And these guys are going to back John
Lee Hooker? Oh, puh-
leeeeze!

The show winds its inconsequential way through an urbane gagfest. Actor and comic Harry Shearer – best-known as the alter ego of
Spinal Tap
’s Derek Smalls – holds the
congregation enthralled with his account of an argument with an inept TWA ticket deskperson, but the first true highlight of the proceedings arrives off-air during a commercial break, as Letterman
tapes a quick promo sting for the night’s broadcast. ‘For comfort you can afford,’ he deadpans, ‘watch
Late Night
!’ Without missing a beat, someone in a top
audience tier shouts, ‘Take Two!’ There’s nothing quite like a New York audience.

Behind the row of seats signposted as being reserved for guests of John Lee Hooker, a bespectacled nerd catches the attention of one of the occupiers. ‘Is that the guy who sings on Pete
Townshend’s album?’ he inquires eagerly.
Yep
. ‘Is he going to sing “Iron Man”?’
Nope.
‘Ahhhh,
shit
!’ No doubt about it, John
Lee certainly has a whole new following these days.

Eventually, Letterman announces ‘one of the world’s greatest blues singers’, and Hooker himself, guitar at the ready, impassive in hat and shades, ambles out with the
funky-hobbit figure of Roy Rogers at his side. The band launches into ‘Think Twice Before You Go’, a track from
The Healer
which had featured Los Lobos backing him up in the
studio, but the opening bars are almost obliterated by an eardrum-shredding
SKKRRREEEETCHH
of unwanted feedback. The self-styled ‘World’s Most Dangerous Band’ lumber
through the song in a welter of missed beats and dropped cues, and the warm-up man milks applause even before the song’s trick ending has been delivered.

Finally, Hooker extricates himself from his guitar and slumps into the guest chair for a quick burst of badinage. Such is his degree of composure that for one surreal moment it seems as if he is
the host and Letterman the guest. They discuss the then-recent San Francisco earthquake and Hooker allows that it weren’t no big deal: when the
quake hit he thought his
pet cat had just jumped onto his bed. Must be a big cat, says Letterman; yep, says John Lee. Then Letterman asks Hooker to explain the motifs he wears on his lapels. Why the star? ‘Because
I’m the star,’ Hooker tells him. And why the dollar sign?

‘Because,’ John Lee replies, ‘I plays for money.’

Then Letterman calls another commercial break. Stagehands swarm like ants re-dressing the set for the next guest, a heavily
designed
woman plugging a cookbook. Throughout this frantic
buzz of activity, Hooker remains curled up in his chair until someone is sent over to tell him that his segment of the show is complete. It has all been a rush and a mess, two things Hooker simply
cannot abide: he may be seriously laid back, but in the end he always gets to where he’s going. ‘When you push people, you make people
nervous
,’ he states firmly,
‘and you won’t get as good stuff as you would if you just let it flow. You can’t be pushing me and gettin’ down my throat, ’cause I’m gonna get all nervous then
and may get pissed off.’ On this occasion, backstage, it had fallen to Mike Kappus to soothe his client, who by his own account was indeed ‘gettin’ all nervous and jittery. I had
the jitters, and Mike was saying, “C’mon, c’mon” and I was sayin’, “Hey, hey . . .”’

But none of that was apparent on the set, even when, after the audience has left, quality control prevailed and the song was reshot in the empty theatre. Since David Letterman rarely gives
interviews, it proved impossible to ask whether John Lee Hooker meant anything more to him than just another guest to fill a five-minute slot on a wintry Wednesday night. For his part, Hooker was
standing on the threshhold of a moment which would utterly and irrevocably transform not only his own career but the art form to which he had dedicated his life. He was, however, determined not to
become overly impressed with the own new-found success and eminence accompanying the burgeoning phenomenon of
The Healer
; to remain cautious; to resist any temptation to grow what he calls
the Big Head.