Boogie Man (68 page)

He certainly did. The primary reason for the extraordinarily high quality of
Hooker ’N Heat
is that Taylor and the band, displaying a blend of erudition and self-effacement
unsurpassed amongst the plethora of blues legend/rockstar acolyte collaborations of the time, were determined to cut a John Lee Hooker album featuring Canned Heat rather than a Canned Heat album
featuring John Lee Hooker. In deference to the band’s chart-riding status, the record was officially credited to ‘Canned Heat & John Lee Hooker’, but there’s absolutely
no doubt about whose record it really is. Nor, for that matter, whose session it was. There is a highly engaging, involving live-in-the-studio semi-documentary vibe to
Hooker ’N Heat
:
the studio chatter,
Hooker’s warm-up guitar runs and the homiletic preambles which stitch the songs together create a genuine sense of occasion, a real feel of the
atmosphere in the room as the record is being made.
Hooker ’N Heat
sounds as if it took little longer to record than it does to play.

The secondary reason was that Hooker himself was then at the absolute peak of his powers: simultaneously still youthful and energetic enough to pump out the boogie with an awe-inspiringly
tireless ferocity; and sufficiently tempered by age and bitter experience to bring to the music a depth and richness to which the comparatively young and callow Hooker of twenty years earlier could
never have aspired. At 53 years of age and still emotionally raw and spiritually bleeding from the traumatic collapse of his marriage, the disintegration of his family and his enforced exile from
the Motor City, Hooker was not only more than ready to boogie, but prepared to bring the full powers of his art to bear on the bluesman’s most pressing priority: the healing of the self by
the self and, by extension, the healing of others.

The liner notes – pseudonymously attributed to ‘Boogie Chillen’ but most likely composed by Taylor and Hite – provide an illuminating background to the sessions:

The format for the album was relatively straightforward. Hooker would kick off the proceedings on his own, harking back to his vintage Detroit years by
performing a few solo tunes in his classic style. Then Wilson would join him for a fistful of duets, playing harp, guitar or piano as required. Finally, the rest of the band would pile in for a set
of full-tilt ensemble performances climaxing with – what else? – a marathon boogie. Canned Heat’s line-up had been going through the early stages of what was to become an almost
permanent state of turmoil and upheaval. Henry Vestine was freshly back in the fold after a temporary absence during which his lead-guitar chair had been occupied by Harvey Mandel, a former Chicago
running buddy of Charlie Musselwhite’s who’d stuck around long enough to appear with the band at Woodstock, participate in a European tour and play on their third hit single,
‘Let’s Work Together’. Vestine had quit after a falling-out with Larry Taylor, and the return of ‘Sunflower’ possibly had something to do with Taylor’s eventual
departure and subsequent replacement by Antonio De La Barreda.

Hite and Taylor’s preparations paid off, big time. The elderly pawnshop amplifier gave Old Blondie, Hooker’s trusty six-string companion, that sublime combination of power,
sweetness, clank and grime which constitutes blues guitar Tone Heaven. The miked-up footstomp – a time-honoured Besman trick recycled by many subsequent Hooker producers, including Bob Thiele
on
It Serve Me Right To Suffer
– put a solidly percussive four-to-the-bar
thunk
into each and every groove. And Hooker’s mature voice was as strong and flexible as even
his most demanding admirer could possibly desire: his command of timbral resource and vocal nuance never greater.

‘Gotta get myself together here,’ murmurs Hooker before he kicks into his opening number, but from the first pounding boot and bass-string riff, it was utterly apparent just how
‘together’ he was. He sounded
huge
: the biggest one-man-band in the world. ‘Messin’ With The Hook’ drew into Hooker’s repertoire one of Chicago harpist
Junior
Wells’s signature songs: a tight, riffy, danceable piece which (unusually in the Chicago blues canon) emphasised the singer’s youth in the lyric. Muddy
Waters, rarely averse to borrowing songs from juniors and Juniors alike – he’d heisted Bo Diddley’s 1955 ‘I’m A Man’ almost immediately on its release –
emphasised his own patriarchal status when he reworked it as ‘Messin’ With The Man’, but Hooker went further, personalising it completely. In fact, he Hookerised and deconstructed
it so thoroughly that by the time he was done with the song, it bore about as much resemblance to the Wells original as Peking Duck does to a duck.

‘The Feelin’ Is Gone’ borrows its title and its agenda, though not much else, from the same 1951 Roy Hawkins tune upon which B.B. King had based ‘The Thrill Is
Gone’, his breakthrough hit of the previous year. Hooker seems tentative at the start of this free-form slow blues: he’s so worried, babe, he don’t know what to do, babe. But
soon, via a lyrical allusion to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’, the ambiguity disappears, swept away by the same tidal waves of grief and anger above which Hooker is
struggling to keep his head, and his heart. ‘
I done got over it, babe
,’ he defiantly declaims: like Fox Mulder in
The X-Files
, he wants to believe. And we want to believe
him. But he’s not quite convinced. And neither are we.

But then he convinces himself, and us. ‘
The feelin’ is gone from me, babe
,’ he hollers, over and over again: the process of catharsis enacting itself before our very
ears. This achieved, he quietens down, secure in his newfound certainty. ‘
I done got over it, babe
,’ he tells us once more, before –
whammp! –
one final chord,
like a mulekick to the spine, slams the song to a close.

‘[Play something] a little funky,’ suggests Taylor. ‘A little boogie?’ offers Hooker. ‘A little funky,’ repeats the producer. ‘Okay,’ says Hooker,
and launches into ‘Send Me Your Pillow’, from the 1962
Big Soul
sessions. By now he’s moved up a gear or six into total overdrive: voice, guitar and foot-stomp locked into
perfect sync and locomoting
with an irresistible surge of pure power. If Hooker’s credentials as a grandmaster of groove needed any confirmation, this is where
you’d go to get it: no solo performer has ever rocked harder. The propulsive force behind this astonishing performance is raw need: loneliness and desire calling out, crying out, reaching out
into the void.

By way of decompression, it is succeeded by ‘Sittin’ Here Thinkin”, a meditative slow blues in the ‘Wednesday Evenin” mode with Hooker’s brooding, abstracted
footstomp and vocal offset by eloquent, quicksilver guitar flurries, which Hooker had first cut (as ‘Sittin’ And Thinkin”) for Joe Von Battle back at the very dawn of his career.
Then it’s back to the boogie for ‘Meet Me In The Bottom’, a traditional Delta piece best-known via Howlin’ Wolf’s 1961 interpretation ‘Down In The Bottom’:
in characteristic Hooker fashion, the intensity deepens and the pulse accelerates even as the structure unravels.

The next number concerned a topic clearly at the forefront of Hooker’s mind, if not exactly close to his heart. Garnished with stormy guitar rumbles and flashes, ‘Alimonia
Blues’ looks musically back to the same ‘Wednesday Evenin” template he had used a little earlier on ‘Sittin’ Here Thinkin”, and forward lyrically to the epic
‘Stripped Me Naked’ he would record more than twenty years later with Carlos Santana. In terse, sparse lyrical strokes, Hooker sketches a scenario in which he’s hauled before a
judge to debate alimony, child support and similar painful stuff. It’s the last of the session’s solo pieces.

‘We’re gonna bring Alan out now, John,’ announces a voice from the control room. ‘You wanna take a little breather?’ But it’s straight into
‘Drifter’, a distant scion of the extended slow-blues song-family Hooker derived from Charles Brown’s ‘Driftin’ Blues’ with the Blind Owl’s reverb-soaked
amplified harmonica illuminating Hooker’s desolate blues-scape like neon lights through dockside fog. If Wilson’s entry seems tentative, it’s because he’s
listening
:
not just with his ears, but seemingly with his entire nervous system. His acute sensitivity and empathy with Hooker’s celebrated idiosyncrasies are nothing short
of
astounding: it’s as if he’s extending temporal antennae into the immediate future to predict exactly where Hooker is about to go. Seemingly, he was capable of anticipating not only
whether or not Hooker is about to leave a space, but whether that space is one which should be left empty or filled by a harp intervention.

Furthermore, Wilson’s harp sound is utterly extraordinary: talky and squawky but never thin or flimsy; huge and rich but never flabby or cloying. Every timbral and stylistic resource in
the blues-harp tradition seems to be literally at the tip of his tongue, to be alluded to or utilised at will, and yet he seems free of the need to plagiarise, to ape or mimic the major stylists he
has evidently studied so assiduously. Whether delicately simmering like a muted Hammond organ or brassily blasting like a trombone from hell, he is utterly his own man.

When Hooker works with accompaniment from others, a variety of things can happen. If the accompaniment is insensitive and overbearing, it can trample him underfoot like a herd of elephants
rampaging through a rose garden. If it’s sympathetic and solid and supportive – like The Coast To Coast Blues Band, for example – he’ll sit on it as if it was a comfortable,
reliable chair. But if it’s empathic and inspired, genuine sparks will fly, and he’ll respond and engage: ‘Drifter’ ends with an electrifying call-and-response between
Hooker’s voice and Wilson’s harp which creates real anticipation for what is about to follow. They even hit the final chord in perfect unison: Hooker’s guitar slams and
Wilson’s harp sizzles out of the sustain.

Next up: ‘You Talk Too Much’, a bootstomping uptempo piece which does little more than enable Hooker and Wilson to refine their partnership by checking out each others’ boogie
chops. Grouchy, ill-tempered and misogynistic, it counterpoints the bin-done-wrong tenor of much of the session repertoire by suggesting that however flawed his spouse, and their relationship, may
or may not have been, Hooker himself was possibly not always the easiest guy to live with.

‘You got about ten [songs] now,’ Hooker informs Hite and Taylor,
‘I told you, it don’t take me no three days to make no album.’
‘It’s a triple album,’ ripostes a voice from the control room. ‘Well,’ Hooker replies, ‘you go for a triple album, you gotta go for triple money.’ And
everybody breaks up laughing, Hooker loudest of all. ‘Lots of money!’ cajoles the producer. ‘This is a hit album. Don’t worry about that money, just keep
rollin’.’ And it was, and they do. ‘Nothin’ but the best,’ says Hooker, rolling out one of his favourite catchphrases, ‘and later for the garbage.’ He then
pays tribute to his studious, self-effacing new sidekick. ‘I dig this kid’s harmonica, you know. I don’t know how he follow me, but he do.’ Then, directly to Wilson,
‘You must’ve listened to my records all of your life. I just can’t lose you.’

What follows – after some brief verbal byplay concerning the legendarily awful cooking of the Grateful Dead’s PigPen – is a resounding endorsement of all of the above
assertions, Hooker’s and the producers’ alike: nothing less than the definitive take of one of the key songs in Hooker’s repertoire. ‘Burnin’ Hell’ was also one
of the earliest: Hooker had recorded it as a duet with Eddie Burns at one of his first United Sound sessions with Bernard Besman, and revisited it a decade or so later – at the same studio,
as it happened – as an acoustic ‘folk-blues’ exercise for Riverside. The original ’49 take is clangy and clamorous; Burns’s harp and Hooker’s voice and guitar
distorted and compressed, high-pitched and urgent, hopped-up and bursting with callow young-blood energy, a torrential outpouring of riffs and images. But there’s an aura of real danger to
it: in terms of the Baptist codes in which both Hooker and Burns were raised, ‘Burnin’ Hell”s central assertion – ‘
Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no
burnin’ hell/ where you go when you die, nobody can tell
’ – is profoundly transgressive and challenging. (Interestingly enough, Son House, from whose epic ‘My Black
Mama’ Hooker borrowed the lines, was both a deeply religious and a deeply bitter man who took lengthy sabbaticals from his blues life in order to preach the very gospel which the song claims
to disdain.)

The Riverside take, cut ten years later, is more measured, but also
more muted: Hooker’s acoustic guitar – and Bill Grauer’s dry, earnest folkie production
– simply lacks the sheer wham of the electric instrument, and Hooker seems inhibited by the absence of an instrumental foil or a partner in crime. However, his voice has grown in richness and
weight, the song seems ‘sorted-out’ in terms of both its musical structure and lyrical content, and experience has given Hooker audibly increased confidence in both his artistry and his
message. Nevertheless, it’s the
Hooker ’N Heat
version which brings the song all the way home. Wilson’s performance is simply astonishing. It could be said that, whereas
Eddie Burns had to create his original harp part on the fly, Wilson had the advantage of having studied Burns’s performance on the ’49 take over and over again, not only learning the
basics of the part but the ability to improvise and elaborate on it; and thus only seems tall because he was standing on his predecessor’s shoulders. Even so, he – you should pardon the
expression –
burns
all the way through. If, in movie terms, Hooker’s voice is the protagonist and his guitar and footstomp the location, then Wilson provides the lighting and the
entire supporting cast.