Boogie Man (70 page)

ABC kept close tabs on the progress of
Hooker ’N Heat,
and the company learned a lot. The question is whether the lessons they learned were the right ones. It was as if
‘Boogie Chillen No. 2’ was to become the template for Hooker’s future recordings. Even before
Hooker ’N Heat
was in the stores, ABC had him back
in the studio with Bill Szymczyk (the most successful record producer with a vowel-free surname in the history of twentieth-century music) and Ed Michel in charge. Their sophisticated soul-rock
take on updating the blues had worked wonders for B.B. King, whose career had gone into hyper-drive following the massive crossover success of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, but the formula they
devised to sell Hooker to lumpenhippie rock fans was by no means as elegant. What John Lee Hooker’s career evidently required in the wake of
Hooker ’N Heat
was . . . double
albums! Long jams! Guest rock stars!

The first fruit of the new phase was the ominously-titled
Endless Boogie
. Recorded over three November days at Wally Heider’s studio in San Francisco with big-name rockers like Carl
Radle and Jim Gordon (from Eric Clapton’s Derek & The Dominos) and Steve Miller in attendance alongside Hooker’s regular rhythm section of bassist Gino Skaggs and drummer Ken Swank,
the session must have seemed like some blues-rock gangbang. A small army of players trooped in and out of the studio, the only constant factor being multi-instrumentalist Cliff Coulter, wearing
keyboard, guitar or bass hats depending on the demands of the track and whoever else happened to be around. The album ended up featuring four drummers (Ken Swank, Billy Ingram, Reno Lanzara, Jim
Gordon), three bassists (Skaggs, Radle and Coulter), three keyboard players (Coulter, Mark Naftalin, John Turk), and no fewer than seven guitarists other than Hooker himself (Steve Miller, Jesse
Davis, Dan Alexander, Mel Brown, Jerry Perez, Cliff Coulter and even Mark Naftalin, who found himself in the guitar chair when the producers started rolling tape on a between-numbers jam). (Dave
Berger was, however, the only harp player invited.) ‘Supersession’ may well have been the buzzword of the time, but this was ridiculous. In 1977, Miller shared his reminiscences of the
occasion with
Guitar Player
’s Dan Forte:

What Miller was talking about was to record Hooker pretty much the way Canned Heat had done six months before the
Endless Boogie
sessions, and how Roy Rogers would record
him eighteen years later: in other words, to place Hooker front and centre and arrange all the furniture around him. The
Endless Boogie
strategy was almost the exact opposite: to place
Hooker against generic blues-rock backdrops of either the slow-blues or lumpenboogie variety; dilute or dispense with his groove; keep his guitar well down in the mix, and effectively
render him little more than a sideman on what were supposed to be his own albums. In the most extreme cases, it sounded as if Hooker was simply sitting in on somebody else’s
jam sessions, contributing the occasional guitar lick and interrupting the interminable cavalcade of other people’s solos to announce, not altogether convincingly, what a great time he was
having. The boogie ‘Pots On, Gas On High’ and the Chuck Berryish chug of the title track (the latter aptly subtitled ‘Parts 27 and 28’) add up to almost twenty minutes of
generic riffing that could have been peeled off by the yard. Similarly, several of the slow-blues entries, including a remake of ‘House Rent’ (entitled ‘House Rent Boogie’
even though boogie it don’t) and ‘Sheep Out On The Foam’ (yet another ‘Driftin’ Blues’ variant), take a very long time to go nowhere in particular.

Endless Boogie
does have its moments, though. The free-form slow blues ‘We Might As Well Call It Through (I Didn’t Get Married To Your Two-Timing Mother)’ showcases both
the late Jesse Davis’s sublime slide – he was, after all, the one who devised, on Taj Mahal’s revival of Blind Willie McTell’s ‘Statesboro Blues,’ the
slide-guitar part immortalised by Duane Allman on the Allman Brothers’ subsequent and better-known version – and Hooker’s aptitude for telling anecdotes of domestic strife.
‘Doin’ The Shout’ – the ‘little light acoustic thing’ alluded to by Miller – skips along nicely, propelled by Swank’s brush-beaten snare. ‘I
Don’t Need No Steam Heat’ bumps-and-grinds along with an endearingly raunchy swagger, but this particular lily is somewhat overgilded by the presence of two pianos and three guitars.
And then there’s the impassioned anti-drug plea ‘Kick Hit 4 Hit Kix U’ (the typographical approach way predates Slade, Prince or 2Pac), subtitled ‘Blues For Jimi And
Janis’ and inspired by the deaths, within a month of each other, of two of the icons of the hippie era.

‘I think of a lotta stuff like that and try to reach out and get to people,’ says Hooker, ‘like that song I wrote when Janis Joplin OD’ed. I’m hopin’ that it
reached the young people. You know, they took it
off the air. They wouldn’t play it, why I don’t know. They needed to play that.’ Unwittingly, Hooker did the
memory of Jimi Hendrix (to whom he refers throughout as ‘Jimi Henry’) a severe disservice in that song by ascribing his death, like Joplin’s, to intravenous heroin abuse. Hendrix
died as the result of an accidental overdose of prescription sleeping pills; and post-mortem examination found neither needle marks nor any other physical evidence of hard drug use. Hooker freely
acknowledges that, in this respect at least, he was misled by media speculation and loose talk. ‘When you gone you can’t speak for yourself, and he can’t speak for himself.
Everybody got a different lie. Hendrix did this, Hendrix did that. This killed him, that killed him. Once you gone, they say what they like about you.’

Unwittingly,
Endless Boogie
and its successors negatively proved the same point that
Hooker ’N Heat
had stated positively: that the less musical clutter with which Hooker was
surrounded, the better the records sounded. However, the idea that anybody would buy a John Lee Hooker album in order to listen to John Lee Hooker rarely seemed to be uppermost in the
producers’ minds.
Guitar Player
magazine’s February 1972 issue included a sketch by Michael Brooks of Hooker’s next ABC studio session, which suggests that the real
priority was simple, straight-up market forces. ABC had entrusted Ed Michel with spending their money on recording John Lee Hooker: his task was to generate maximum sales from the minimum
investment, and if in the process he could also help to maintain the artist’s career longevity, that would be a bonus. ‘What really concerns Ed as he sits behind the fancifully designed
sixteen-track machine,’ Brooks wrote, ‘are the 85 per cent of recording dates that never get their costs back . . . dollars are a serious consideration to any producer.’

One man’s gang-bang is the next guy’s supersession. The resulting album,
Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive
, was created at what also turned out to be Hooker’s last
studio date for ABC, but it was far from being his swansong for the label. (For a start, there was a pair
of unremarkable live albums, one cut at San Francisco’s Kabuki
Theatre and the other at Soledad Prison. The latter was chiefly notable for a two-song vocal guest shot by John Lee Hooker Jr, present at the time on what might euphemistically be described as
‘other business’.) Brooks quoted Michel as stating that ‘from the material done [he] can get enough to do a couple of albums’, but as it happened, an intensive two-day blues
binge in late September of 1971 ended up providing enough tape for no fewer than three.

It’s faintly surprising that Wally Heider’s San Francisco studio hadn’t installed a revolving door specifically to cope with the small army of musicians Ed Michel was wheeling
in and out for ABC’s Hooker dates. Many of them were members in good standing of the formidable blues-drain diaspora from Chicago to the Bay Area: harpist Charlie Musselwhite, Paul
Butterfield Blues Band alumni Mark Naftalin and Elvin Bishop (Butterfield himself and guitar hero Mike Bloomfield, the band’s most celebrated grad, were already out there), and one of the two
new members of Hooker’s road band featured on the album. Though only in his mid-thirties, Memphis-born guitarist Luther Tucker was already a twenty-year blues veteran who’d spent most
of the ’50s playing behind the volatile harpmeister Little Walter. Plus there was a new keyboard player in the touring posse as well: a teen prodigy taking on his first professional gig. His
name was Robert Hooker.

‘My daddy had moved to California,’ the Reverend reminisces, ‘and I came out to move to California too, and that’s when I started playing with him, round about ’71,
’72, something like that. He sung the song “I’ll Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive”. I started playing with him at the age of . . . what? I might have been sixteen or
seventeen years old. I played organ, and I played piano. We went everywhere. We travelled, man, and people
love
John Lee Hooker. I remember we’s on a show with Ike & Tina Turner.
They were supposed to be the top over him, but the people wanted to hear
John Lee Hooker. One of his favourite songs, we used to end it up with “Boogie With The
Hook”’.

Cliff Coulter, Mel Brown, Ken Swank and Gino Skaggs were back: also on board was another bassist (John Kahn), two other drummers (Ron Beck and Chuck Crimelli), keyboard guy Steven Miller (no
relation to the guitarist of almost the same name), and no fewer than three other guitarists, including slide guy Benny Rowe. And therein lay the rub: vast swathes of the album presented a case of
too many guitarists spoiling the broth. Too many guitarists overplaying and underlistening. Not enough songs. And too many off-the-peg generic backdrops which could just as well have been slotted
into place behind almost any competent Delta-rooted bluesman. Despite the impeccable craftsmanship of the musicians involved, way too much of the music sounds enervated and fussy, deficient in both
energy and focus, lacklustre,
tired
. But the album nevertheless has its moments. The boisterous ‘Boogie With The Hook’ – ‘Boogie Chillen’ stripped of its
narrative structure and reduced to raw groove – which lived on as Hooker’s set-closer for the remainder of his performing career, contrives to rock like a beast despite its ponderous
load of duelling solos. ‘TB Sheets’ was a dankly haunting free-form slow-blues which Hooker had recorded before, notably for Bernard Besman as ‘No Friend Around’ in 1950 and
in performance at Sugar Hill as ‘TB Is Killing Me’ in 1962, but this was where the song attained full maturity. Playing Robert Hooker’s spooky Hammond off against Michael
White’s rustily eloquent violin whilst still leaving enough space for decisive, commanding interventions from Hooker’s own guitar, it’s a harrowing performance with the emotional
power to leave you frozen to the bone.

And then there was Van Morrison.

The one-time Them singer, whom Hooker had first encountered on the London club scene way back in the mid-’60s, had relocated to New York City in 1967 to work with songwriter/producer Bert
Berns,
who’d cowritten Them’s second hit, ‘Here Comes The Night’, but their partnership was already proving problematic even before the producer’s
unexpected death, and Morrison made his escape from New York to settle in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Peter Wolf, lead singer of the J. Geils Band, was at the time working as a late-night DJ at a
Boston radio station, and he remembers an extremely persistent caller with a grating Belfast accent who was always phoning in to request John Lee Hooker records.) There Morrison crafted the
distinctive soul/jazz/folk fusion of his groundbreaking
Astral Weeks
and
Moondance
albums. Those records made him a legend, but their hit-bearing followups,
His Band And The Street
Choir
and
Tupelo Honey
, made him a star. By 1971 Morrison had once again shifted his base of operations, this time to California, and was thus perfectly placed to show up at
Heider’s studio to duet with Hooker on the album’s title track. Hooker sounds clearly delighted with his famous guest, especially since that guest was an old friend made better than
good. ‘This is
Van Morrison!
’ he announces proudly, over the swirl of Naftalin’s piano, Robert Hooker’s organ, Elvin Bishop’s slide, his own and
Morrison’s guitars and the Skaggs/Swank rhythm section, during Morrison’s first vocal chorus. Then he goes to work.