Boogie Man (67 page)

‘I think John Lee can explain it to you better than I do: he call it “the big head”,’ says Buddy Guy. ‘Every time I see him, he look at me and
say, “How many your men in the band got the big head?” I say, “What’s that?” He say, “J-j-j-j-j-you don’t know what the big head is?” I say,
“No.” He say, “That’s when they get bigger than you overnight.” I say, “Naw, you know whenever I’m round you it’s time for Buddy to
listen.”’

‘I am no stranger
at all
to hit records,’ Hooker would remind interviewers whom he suspected might possibly too young to be as aware as he would like of ‘Boogie
Chillen’, the original ‘I’m In The Mood’ or even ‘Boom Boom’. ‘I’m very proud of this album, but I ain’t carried away like I ain’t never
had nothin’ before. I’m just real laid-back, y’know. I’m
always
laid-back whatever happen. I’ve found that the best way to be.’

But by the following summer,
The Healer
had gone gold in the US and silver in the UK, notching up half a million European sales. ‘I’m In The Mood’, his duet with Bonnie
Raitt, had earned him his first Grammy
.
And a man who had long ago learned not to count his chickens before they were hatched would end up with all the golden eggs he could ever have
wanted.

A legend and a hero and a star
. The rules of mythology, as codified by the likes of Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly, are quite clear. Anyone wishing to become a hero and
attain legendary status must first embark upon a quest, undertake a journey into hardship, adversity and danger. Sometimes this quest is undertaken knowingly and voluntarily, in order to achieve a
specific end. More often it is undertaken simply because there is no other option, and only in retrospect does it become apparent that one is engaged on a quest at all.

Sometimes the hero knows that he is a hero. Sometimes he knows that he is
not
a hero, but wishes to become one. And sometimes he does what he does only to survive and does not realise
that he has become a hero, as part of the process of surviving, until much later, much further on down the road.

By definition, the hero’s task must seem all but hopeless. The odds must be firmly against him, with utter annihilation rarely more than a hair’s-breadth away. Demons, both inner and
outer, must be confronted. Obstacles must be surmounted. Battles must be fought. Some will be lost and others won, but lessons must be learned from both. Sometimes the hero has allies and sometimes
he is totally alone, but his closest companions are failure and despair, dogging his heels at every step right up until the final conflict.

His ultimate triumph can never be a foregone conclusion: what need is there for heroism if the protagonist is invulnerable and his success is inevitable? At the outset of
the quest, the hero – or the protagonist who will become a hero – must appear dwarfed by the immensity of the task ahead. Each small battle won, or lost but learned from, enables the
hero to grow in wisdom, strength and determination until he becomes not only equal to his task but superior to it.

And finally, if the hero does not commence his quest in a spirit of humility, then he will certainly be humbled. The lesson of humility will be learned, hard and painfully, along the way.

In the epic landscape of American myth, the quintessential heroic American journey leads literally towards the sun, on the trail heading west. The gold rush, the dustbowl exodus of
Steinbeck’s Okies, Chuck Berry’s ‘Promised Land’, the hippie pilgrimage to San Francisco, the movie-wannabe’s Star(dom) Trek to Hollywood. Westward ho: California is
where dreams come true,
¹⁴⁰
and it therefore exerts its irresistible magnetic pull on a surfeit of dreamers.

‘I come out here in 1970,’ says Hooker. ‘I drove all the way. I was so mad, I got in my car, throwed all my stuff in the car. Hit Route 66 with my clothes in my car, and a
pocketful of bennies. A little money, not much. About twelve thousand dollars. That’s no money for California. I had a name – not like I have now – and no connections. I went to
San Francisco. I didn’t know nobody out here; I stayed with an old friend of mine called Tess Coleman. She’s gone now, good friend of mine. I might’ve lived there a year, I
don’t know. I left there same year, about the end of that year, went to Oakland. I had an apartment there on 13th Street in Oakland, and Bill Graham started booking me. Different people
started booking me in different places. I just started climbing.’

Strangely enough, when Hooker moved out to the Bay Area, at
least one old friend – his brother-in-law Paul Mathis, in the military since 1955 – had arrived at
the same destination via a very different route. ‘Yeah, well, when he came to California I was already here. I came out here in July 1970. I left England and transferred to Travis, which is
in Fairfield, California. My sis wrote me, “You know, John is comin’ out there or he’s there already.” She gave him my phone number at the base and we got in contact. He was
livin’ at a small hotel, nothin’ expensive.’

Hooker’s first California album for ABC/Bluesway, cut the previous year, actually turned out to be his last: the parent label folded Bluesway the following year, switching Hooker and B.B.
King to the main ABC imprint.
If You Miss ’im . . . I Got ’im
was a promising but ultimately misfired collaboration with his master-guitarist younger cousin Earl Hooker, already
racked with TB and less than a year away from the end of his tragically short life. It was chiefly notable for its fine cover photo of John Lee and Earl, resplendent in cowboy drag, aboard a
freight train: ‘Boom Boom’ reappeared as ‘Bang Bang Bang Bang’, and on the slower tunes Earl’s wah-wah slide guitar sparred uncomfortably for space with Jeff
Carp’s amplified harp. Its undeniable highlights were the rocking ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ derivative ‘Baby Be Strong’ and two passionate free-form slow
blues pieces, ‘If You Take Care Of Me, I’ll Take Care Of You’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Puppy, Baby’.

However, the next Great Leap Forward in Hooker’s career involved ABC neither as instigators nor direct beneficiaries.

Five years earlier, two Los Angeles blues buffs had formed a jugband. Both shy, moonfaced, introverted Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson and boisterous, hirsute, sumo-scaled
Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite were awesomely erudite country blues record collectors with a yen to perform the music they adored. Wilson was a scholarly multi-instrumentalist adept on guitar,
harmonica and piano (he had been an active participant in the relaunch of Son House) and both sang: Hite in a rumbustious, barrel-chested, gravel-throated Charley Pattonesque mode and Wilson with a
slithery, eerie falsetto reminiscent of Skip James at his most ectoplasmic. By 1967, the jugband had evolved, as mid-’60s jugbands were wont to do, into a full-on electric blues band. Their
project was not so much to approximate the electric-downhome stylings of ’50s and ’60s Chicago blues as to go back to bedrock country blues sources and rock up their roots from scratch.
The name of this band, derived from a 1928 Tommy Johnson record, was Canned Heat. Despite Bob Hite’s ludicrous pageboy haircut, they were one of the surprise minor hits of the Summer of
Love’s Monterey Pop Festival. Overshadowed they may have been by Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Who and Janis Joplin’s startling debut with Big Brother and the Holding Company, but
they nevertheless scored a deal with Liberty Records and had their first album in the stores by the end of the year.

Canned Heat’s secret strength was that they were two bands in one. When Bob Hite sang, they were essentially a superior bar band, albeit one with deep blues roots: they were solid and
earthy and they rocked. With Wilson up front, they conjured up a hallucinatory, ever-shifting blues dreamscape where nothing was quite what it seemed and everything flickered at the corner of the
mind’s eye: they were eclectic and
spooky and they insinuated. In the summer of 1968, the Al Wilson edition of Canned Heat enjoyed a massive and unlikely hit with
‘On the Road Again’: simultaneously as ‘psychedelic’ and as ‘authentic’ a whiteboy blues record as anything cut by anybody in the ’60s.

But if it was Al Wilson who carried them onto pop radio and into the charts, it was Bob Hite’s jovial psychedelic populism – ‘Hi kids! This is the Bear!’ – which
defined them onstage. That, and the boogie. Their second album,
Boogie With Canned Heat
, climaxed with ‘Fried Hockey Boogie’, a cut-down studio version of their protracted
in-concert finale which took John Lee Hooker’s primal ‘Boogie Chillen’ riff, stuffed it full of steroids and hammered it into the ground with extended improv showcases for each
member of the band and Hite as emcee. The follow-up,
Livin’ The Blues
, went further still: the double-album’s entire second disk was devoted to a live-in-concert ‘Refried
Boogie’ which steamrollered along for a full forty minutes.
¹⁴¹

Needless to say, the paths of Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker inevitably crossed: even before Hooker relocated to California, students and master had met on the circuit. Hooker and the
whimsically nicknamed Heatsters – as well as the Bear and the Blind Owl, there were ‘Sunflower’ (lead guitarist Henry Vestine), ‘Mole’ (bassist Larry Taylor) and
‘Fito’ (drummer Adolfo De La Parra) – became fast friends, but Al Wilson became more than that: an instant soul-mate. ‘I met him in LA,’ Hooker fondly recalls.
‘He was livin’ out there and they [Canned Heat] was playin’ someplace. They had my music
down
. They was playing someplace and I come down, and I met ’em all at the
same time, the Bear, and little Wilson. We just hung out together, and I got to know him. We got together, started to get to know each other, and they was into me so, and they really wanted to play
with me, they really wanted to do it. My agent and my manager got together and got us together, and we did this album, and it was
so big.
’

In April of 1970, negotiations were complete, and ABC permitted Hooker a one-album holiday from his contract so that he and Canned Heat could team up. ‘This
album’ was
Hooker ’N’ Heat
, cut at Liberty’s LA studio over three days the following month with Bob Hite and Canned Heat’s manager/producer Skip Taylor in the
control room. It turned out to be a major landmark in Hooker’s recording career: an artistic and commercial triumph of resounding proportions which not only recaptured and recreated the
authentic early Hooker sound of the Bernard Besman era, but managed to hit No. 73 in the pop album charts. There was only one cloud in the sunny skies over this seemingly blessed project, but it
was a massive and lowering one: before the album had even been mixed, Alan Wilson was dead. A devoted ecologist and outdoorsman long before such preoccupations became fashionable, he was found in
his sleeping bag, overdosed on barbiturates, in a national park in Torrance, California, surrounded by his beloved redwood trees. He had reportedly become extremely depressed after breaking up with
his girlfriend. Hooker and the band were devastated, and the album appeared with a sombre cover photograph depicting John Lee and the surviving members slumped in a grungy, dimly lit hotel room.
Behind them, a black-framed photograph of Wilson hangs on the wall.

Suggest to Hooker that
Hooker ’N Heat
was one of the best records he made between the great early ones at the outset of his career and the autumnal renaissance which commenced with
The Healer
, and he will reply that it was absolutely
‘the
best’. Opine that Al Wilson was the most gifted and creative of the White Blues Guys of the ’60s, and his
response is equally uncompromising and unambiguous.

‘I say that man was a
genius
. You hit it on the button. You hit it just right. Alan Wilson was such a genius. The young man . . . he passed so young. We never know how he passed;
some say he OD’ed, some say he committed suicide. I know one thing: he didn’t like sleepin’ in beds, he would stay out in the jungle outside. Not in the
real
heavy
jungle, but in parks. He had a van with a camper on it, you know. He could sleep in there. He liked doin’ that. Places like Central Park, but not Central Park, places down LA.
And practise his music, and write. He was a really, really nice person. A little
strange
, but he had things that he wanted to do. If you didn’t know him, you couldn’t get right
into him. You didn’t know how to get into that frame he had around him. Inside him, that was beautiful.
Beautiful
. He studied his music so hard all the time that he just kept his mind
on this music. He was a nice person, but . . . that’s why you thought he was really hard to talk to and get to, but he really wasn’t. He was just into his music. When I got with him, he
had me down, my music down like you know your ABCs. He could
follow
me. Ain’t no way in the world I could lose him when I’m playing. He was just right on me. Alan Wilson you
couldn’t lose. You know what he did before I knowed him and after I knowed him? He be study my music. Listenin’ to it while I’m sleepin’, I didn’t know where he were.
He had me down even before I knowed him. He say, “I just sit up listen to your music, man, listen to the way you play it. Sometimes you play it with direct changes, sometimes you
wouldn’t.” He say he just got used to playin’ like that. Just listen to the records he playin’ with me: you can tell how good he followed me.’