Boogie Man (73 page)

Economic pressures brought the blues community even closer together. The performers’ paths would cross and recross on club, college and festival gigs, and, not surprisingly, they would
hang out together off the bandstand. Despite cutting four albums for BluesWay, Jimmy Reed had fumbled his chance for a ’60s comeback, but he was still hanging in there. Hooker has fond, if
acerbic, memories of the heavy-drinking Reed, who eventually quit the bottle before dying in his sleep, in Oakland, in 1976.

‘He was such a gentleman,’ Hooker recalls affectionately. ‘He had a drinking problem, like so many people does, musicians ’specially. It wasn’t no disgrace and
shame, but he did. So many people strung out on alcohol, dope and everything else. I had bought this car, a brand new Buick. We was workin’ out of LA, me and Eddie Taylor, before [Reed]
passed in the early ’70s. Might have been ’72 or ’3. Anyway, we was on the freeway, and it was a long way between bathrooms. Eddie Taylor was driving, and Jimmy said,’
– Hooker mimics Reed’s squawky speaking voice – ‘“Pull over, Eddie, pull over! I gotta pee! I gotta pee!” Eddie said, “Well Jimmy, ain’t got no place
to pull over. I can’t just stop in the middle of the road, I can’t do that.”’ As Reed: ‘“Now J” – he always called me J – “you better
tell Eddie to pull over ’cause I got to pee.” I say, “Jimmy, when he get a chance he gonna pull over. All these cars right behind us, you can’t pull over when there’s
no place to pull over.”’ As Reed – “All right y’all.” He was in the back, me and Eddie was in the front. Nice new car. Eddie did found a place to pull over.
“All right, Jimmy, I’m pullin’ over.”’ As Reed: ‘“It too late now, I done peed.” I say, “What?!”’ As Reed: ‘“I done
pissed in the car!”’

Hooker laughs. ‘I say, “Oh,
Lord
! In my new car?! You pissed all
over the back of the car?!”’ As Reed: ‘“Yeah, I
told
y’all to pull over, and Eddie wouldn’t pull over, he
hard
headed. An’ you kept on tellin’ Eddie to go! I just pissed in the car!” He was drunk! Oh, I got mad,
and Eddie got mad. Well, we got to the place, and the next day Eddie took the car to the carwash. They washed it and cleaned it in the back . . . he pissed in the car!’ He laughs again.
‘He cleaned it up, but that was somethin’ else!’

It’s funnier now than it was at the time. Hooker’s still laughing now. ‘Yeah, boy . . . that could happen to anybody. You wanna go so bad and you can only hold it so long. He
was drinking all the time, he stay drunk and he could only hold it so long. Even me or you or anybody, you drink that much, you gotta go. But Jimmy: “I done pissed in the car, now y’all
can keep goin’ now.” Oh, I got so mad, I started cussin’. I said, “God damn this shit.” I said, “Shit, he done pissed in my damn car.”’

As ever, the irrepressible Buddy Guy has a story to cap that one. ‘He’s like that about
his
car, but he was in Junior [Wells]’s car and got a bucket of chicken, and I
wish you could’a seen what he did to Junior’s car. I told Junior, “Don’t say nothin’ because he don’t know.” A year later we goes out to Oakland, and he
picks us up, and he tells Junior when we gets to the car, “T-t-t-t-take your shoes off.” Junior says, “Do you hear that, Buddy?” I said, “Hold it, be quiet. He
don’t know that he was puttin’ all them chicken bones and grease in your car.” He says, “Yes I did, too”, and I saw that expression on his face . . .’

But whilst Hooker might – albeit gently – tease juniors like Junior or Buddy, he would be profoundly supportive of those to whom he, in his turn, looked up. In
Stormy Monday: The
T-Bone Walker Story
,
¹⁴⁷
Helen Oakley Dance provides an intensely affecting snapshot of Hooker’s sensitivity and concern towards his ailing
mentor when both men were double-billed at a Pittsburgh gig in the summer of 1974.
T-Bone was to die the following year and he was in considerably less than great shape, but
Hooker did his best to take the old master under his wing, placing the Coast To Coast Blues Band at Walker’s disposal, encouraging, advising. ‘John Lee lay propped up on pillows,’
Dance wrote, ‘watching baseball on TV. “This is how I take care of things, Bone,” he explained. “Plenty, plenty rest. Kenny [Swank]’s in charge of my group and knows
what to do. They’ll help you, man. Everything will be cool.”’

As things turned out, everything was
not
cool: much of Walker’s stagecraft and stamina had deserted him, though his fierce pride had not. In defiance of both Lowell Fulson and Helen
Oakley Dance advising him to ‘do like Hooker and use a chair onstage’, T-Bone gave the show his best shot . . . and blew it. Dance describes him attempting to placate the audience by
promising to do better next time, despite Hooker standing in the wings muttering, ‘Don’t apologise, man. Don’t open your mouth.’

Hooker’s professional life at this time was quiet but steady: clubs, colleges, festivals, occasional TV gigs and regular swings through Europe. Which was just as well, because he
didn’t exactly have the smoothest-running machine in the music business behind him, being booked into different parts of the US by different agents, and his drinking didn’t help. It was
within this context that Hooker launched, somewhat inauspiciously, one of the key professional relationships of his career: with a fledgling agent booking jazz and blues artists into clubs in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The young agent’s name was Mike Kappus, and to suggest that things began poorly between them would be a major understatement.

‘My first experience with John Lee was in the early ’70s,’ says Kappus, ‘booking him in a club in Milwaukee that I brought national talent into, ranging from rock to jazz
– John Hiatt, Cheap Trick, Roger McGuinn, to Eddie Harris, George Benson, Les McCann, Mose Allison, Grover Washington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Horace Silver and many
more,
to Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Freddie King, John Hammond, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee – basically anyone currently touring in the blues world at the
time. I booked John Lee for a date and called up the day beforehand to see about his travel and how he was coming in. John was completely unaware that he was booked here.’

‘I said,’ recalls Hooker, shifting into querulous, mock-pathetic tones, ‘“Aw Mike, I just been to the
dentist
. I’m
sorry
.” He said,
“Huh?” I said, “I just been to the dentist. I can’t come to Milwaukee.”’

‘So that was my first experience of John: him cancelling a date on one day’s notice,’ Kappus continues. ‘But things did improve after that.

‘One of the problems he was having at the time was that there was several people doing business with him and sometimes handling different parts of the country, and they would offer him
different jobs, sometimes in conflict with each other, and I’m not sure if anybody was really taking care of coordinating it, and so there was a problem. When we first started working with
John on a more full-time basis, there were people who didn’t want to work with him because he had a chequered past with problems with drinking and not showing up for gigs, which was probably
just a matter of this lack of coordination. But he stopped drinking: there wasn’t any of that kind of problem when I started working with him.’

Nevertheless, the ‘problem’ had been an acute one while it lasted. In 1975, various members of Dr Feelgood – the definitive British R&B band of the era – had been out
on the loose in Los Angeles with Nick Lowe (then on a paid vacation as their roadie, but subsequently to become their producer), and had decided to go check out Hooker, a longtime hero whose
‘Boom Boom’ they had cut on their first album, on stage at the Starwood Hotel. As Tony Moon, the band’s biographer, described the occasion:
¹⁴⁸

Lowe and the Feelgoods subsequently transformed their memories of that night at the Starwood into a British hit single, ‘Milk And Alcohol’, the title of which
referred back to the remedy prescribed to Hooker by another doctor entirely in ‘It Serve You Right To Suffer’, Over a pitiless neo-boogie riff, singer Lee Brilleaux gritted out the
lyric Lowe had hastily scribbled on the inside of a cigarette packet:

As it happened, it was Lee Brilleaux who predeceased Hooker – passing away from lymphoma in April 1994 – but not before cutting a hair-raising version of ‘Mad
Man Blues’ which will for ever stand in the front rank of whiteboy Hooker covers.

More flattering snapshots of Hooker’s in-concert work around this time are provided by a couple of late-’70s live albums released by the since-collapsed Tomato
indie.
Alone
,
¹⁴⁹
recorded in 1976, presents in their entirety two forty-minute solo sets performed for a New York college audience, whilst
The
Cream
, cut the following year, finds him working out for a California club crowd with that year’s edition of the Coast To Coast Blues Band.

Maybe Hooker was tired when he gave the performance preserved on
Alone
. Maybe he was simply in a particularly reflective mood that night. Or maybe his advancing years were beginning to
tell on him, draining him of the ferocious energy displayed only a few years before on the
Hooker ’N Heat
sessions but providing, by way of compensation, a mastery of emotional nuance
and detail dwarfing even the startling degree of empathy already displayed in his previous work. Whatever the reasons may or may not have been, the boogies and uptempo pieces – what Peter
Green would call the ‘rock and roll’ numbers – seemed oddly undercranked and perfunctory, whereas the slower and more meditative end of Hooker’s repertoire blossomed as
rarely before.

That repertoire was certainly a familiar one: simultaneously as comfortable as a pair of old shoes and as elegant as a vintage Savile Row suit. Relaxed, chatty and discursive, Hooker opened with
an abbreviated ‘Maudie’ (here retitled ‘I Miss You So’), slipping expertly out of the groove into freeform guitar and back before moving through the exquisite back-to-back
renditions of ‘Jesse James’ and ‘Dark Room’ we checked out earlier, to a scarifyingly intense and heartfelt ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’: brooding and
monumental, the sound of the soul speaking to itself, an internal dialogue rendered audible. The audience applauds, Hooker snaps the guitar into his open-A tuning, and he launches into ‘a
little thing call’ “Boogie Chillen”’.

When Hooker first cut ‘Boogie Chillen’ for Bernard Besman back in late ’48, it was an account of what was happening in that particular ‘now’:
indeed, the events in the song seemed to be unfolding before him even as he sang. Here at Hunter College, he seems to be singing in sepia, looking back on a very long time ago, into the vanished
world of Henry’s Swing Club and Hastings Street – ‘That’s in Detroit,’ he deadpans – with a mellow nostalgia which ripens and diffuses the buzzsaw immediacy of
olden days from the harsh, urgent house-rocking of a young hotshot with stuff to prove into the indulgent playfulness of a doting patriarch bouncing grandchildren on his knee.

Still open-tuned, he moves deep – deep, deep,
deep –
into the eerie modalities of ‘When My First Wife Left Me’. ‘Give some time to change my keys
[retune],’ he says, ‘and I’ll get “Boom Boom” for you.’ It’s a populist rather than aesthetic choice for set-closer, since the song doesn’t really
happen without a band groove no matter how enthusiastically the audience clap time. For similar reasons, the encore of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ fares little better.

The proceedings reopen for the second show with ‘Feel Good’, Hooker’s variation on Junior Parker’s variation on Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, and
‘Some People’, a homiletic monologue in the tradition of ‘The World Today’ or ‘This Land Is Nobody’s Land’. Next up: a fine, dramatic reading of ‘TB
Blues’ and a slow, hushed saunter through a ‘Wednesday Evenin” variant (mistitled ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, and duly credited to Big Joe Williams, though
it’s more an extended meditation on the lyrical themes of Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’), which is as structurally loose as it is emotionally taut, and vice versa. An
engaging canter through ‘Bottle Up And Go’ (which Hooker introduces as ‘Mama Killed A Chicken’) is marred only by the unmistakeable sound of a sparse audience clapping
resolutely out of time in an echoey room; it briefly lightens the mood before a clenched, intense diptych of ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Ain’t Gonna be Your Doggie’, the latter
incorporating an unscheduled harmonica intervention from the
audience. ‘How deep and how low can you get,’ says Hooker through the applause. It isn’t a
question.

‘Sometimes I get to singin’ these songs,’ he tells the audience as he tunes up, ‘and they reaches me so deep . . . because so many people are living in fear, in misery.
They
tortured
. You see people on the street: you think they happy, but they not. Deep down inside, behind closed doors, you just don’t know what’s goin’ on. A lotta times,
money don’t make you happy . . . if you don’t have peace of mind, you have
nuthin’
. If you have health and happiness and peace of mind, and a little money to get by –
to survive, I should say – it’s a beautiful life. You cannot buy love, you cannot buy happiness . . . it’s got to flow into you.