Boogie Man (75 page)

Hooker’s next movie experience came five years later, and it was another mixed blessing. This time, he performed with the great harp guy Sonny Terry, plus pianist Bobby Scott and
guitarists Roy Gaines and Paul Jackson Jr on ‘Don’t Make Me No Never Mind (Slow Drag)’, a number composed by Gaines, James Ingram and Quincy Jones for the soundtrack of Steven
Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
, of which Jones was a co-producer. The tune is heard in the scene depicting the Grand Opening of Harpo’s jook
joint – you know, the bit where Oprah Winfrey punches Rae Dawn Chong practically into the next county – and it’s sufficiently compelling for the viewer to end up concentrating
more closely on Hooker’s magisterial vocal than on the dialogue spouted by the actors in the foreground. However, not only do the musicians remain invisible throughout the scene, but the
names of the singers and musicians, including Hooker’s, are omitted from the lengthy end credits. That rankled.

‘I was heard but I wasn’t seen and then they didn’t have my name up,’ Hooker fumes. ‘That was
cold
. I felt I was as important as was
anybody in the movie. Why couldn’t [producer and musical director Quincy Jones] have put my name up there? I thought I was as big a star as any of them in there. People knowed me when they
heard my voice. [Steven Spielberg] did a good job. I likeded that movie, but it was kinda sad. That was the first time I knowed Whoopi Goldberg. She’s in everything now:
Star Trek
,
she’s in all sorts of things.
The Blues Brothers
, I’m on the screen, I got credits, that’s cool. But this movie, they didn’t even have my name up there,
nothin’. I was kinda let down. That was kinda disgusting to me.’

Between the making of
The Blues Brothers
and
The Color Purple
, your correspondent met Hooker for the first time. The great man was in London during the summer of ’82 to play
a dream-ticket triple-bill show, with B.B. King and Bobby Bland, at what was then the Hammersmith Odeon. On a dull, overcast Hammersmith noon, Hooker was propped up in a hotel bed wearing a black
satin shirt over a sky-blue undershirt. He paid tribute once more to Alan Wilson: ‘He was
the man
. He was
the person
. He could play
anything
, and after he dropped out
that band never was the same. He knowed my music like a book. He were really outstanding.’

He talked about his then-current plans and activities: ‘What I’m doin’ now is . . . I haven’t been with a record company in a long, long time; but I just recorded a
brand-new album. What we goin’ to do is find a company to lease the master to. It’s a really good album. We planned it really good, all new stuff on there. My partner, he’s in
Vancouver, Canada – you probably heard’a Vancouver . . . and he sent out a lotta letters to a lotta companies an’ he gotta lotta respond. We lookin’ to un
load
this
album on some company, and it shouldn’t be hard to do. Everybody know who John Lee Hooker is: everybody know what I do. It’s the same kind of thing, but it’s uptempo. It’s a
modern sound . . .’

He described his musical tastes: ‘Awwww . . . soul I even hate to talk about, y’know? I don’t put it down but it ain’t my kind of music, but if kids
like it that’s okay with me. I listen to mainly blues and I like some of the hard
good
rock. I likes
solid
rock, sump’n with a good beat to it. I like the uptempo stuff,
but it got to have a
feelin’
, ain’t got to be just a bunch of noise. And I likes some good jazz . . . but the blues is my bag. That’s the only music that I
love
.’

And he announced, in plain but eloquent language, his personal credo: ‘Others have changed. Me. No. I ain’t changed. I don’t wanna change. I
could
change. I could go
into disco . . . I can play it, but I don’t wanna play it. I don’t
feel
it. I got one cut on the new record where I did it just to try it out, called ‘I’m
Jealous’. It’s got a disco beat to it. I did it ’cause we finished recording an’ we run out of things to do on it and so we just jammed it out. Maybe it could be
somethin’ big, y’know, but I’m so into the blues. I don’t care who change, I don’t care who go for the big money, I’m gonna do what I like an’ what I feel.
I
feel
what I do.

‘An’ I’m doin’ really good. I ain’t hurtin’ for money. I got that. A
lot
. I done invest my money in real estate, I got about five homes in the States.
I could retire and never do it no more, but I love it too much. This is my life, y’know . . . Things I like to do when I’m not workin’: I love baseball, that’s my hobby, and
cars are my hobby. I just got me the new Mercedes. You know the 360SL? I got a new one for ’82, it’s one of the
best
cars made. That’s what I like in life: cars, baseball
and I like
ladies
,’ he chuckled loudly, ‘but I guess everybody do.’

Your correspondent’s piece
¹⁵³
concluded,
‘The phone rings. Hooker is informed that he is about to be photographed and hops spryly out of
bed. He zips up his pants, buttons his shirt, claps his hat onto his head
.
He says his health is real good these days, it’s just that he gets awful tired
sometimes.’

As it happened, that Vancouver-cut album with the ‘disco’ tune didn’t get ‘a lotta respond’ from the major record companies.
Jealous
wasn’t released
for another four years, and then only by the tiny-verging-on-invisible Pausa label.
¹⁵⁴
A richly hued portrait of Hooker, painted by Donna Cline from a
photo by Millie Strom, glared from the cover. Inside, Hooker and a Coast To Coast line-up, by then including Mike Osborn and Deacon Jones, worked out on nine tunes, garnished with an extra track,
the churchy ‘We’ll Meet Again’, recorded near Hooker’s new home in Redwood City by a later edition of the band which omitted Osborn but included bassist Jim Guyett and
drummer Bowen Brown.

Produced by Hooker himself in a rare foray into the studio control room,
Jealous
was an impressive stab at contemporizing and updating the fundamental Hooker sound without excessive
dilution or compromise, backburnering concessions to the hard-rock audience in favour of steeping his signature deep blues and rocking boogies in simmering vats of thick, steamy
funk de
luxe
. ‘Boogie Woman’ is one of the grooviest variations extant on the staple Hooker motif, with Deacon Jones and Mike Osborn jamming prototype versions of some of the organ and
guitar licks which later became part of the textbook finale to Hooker’s live shows. ‘I Didn’t Know’, credited to Chester ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ Burnett, is primo
Vee Jay-style shuffleware played with funk accents. The sensuous simmer of Jones’s Hammond lends the slow blues items, especially the deeply moody update of ‘When My First Wife Left
Me’, a richly satisfying ambience, somewhere between a nightclub and a church. The two versions of ‘Ninety Days’ definitely fall, albeit with catlike agility, into the hard-core
boogaloo bag. And that title track turned out to be not so much ‘disco’ as ‘Got My Mojo
Workin” reincarnated as hustling, hard-charging double-time
funk, driven by a steel-thumbed bass riff, supercharged with blasting brass, and generally dead on the double-bump.

Jealous
was a very cool record indeed, and its release created few waves whatsoever beyond the precincts of Planet Blues, whose denizens duly acknowledged its merits with a W.C. Handy
Award and a Best Traditional Blues Grammy nomination. If it had been distributed, marketed and promoted by a major record company (or even a savvier indie), and if the late-’80s blues-power
wave headed by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray had already attained critical mass,
Jealous
would have had a more than fair chance to reach the outside world. However, neither of those
conditions were in place. No matter how ready the record was, Hooker’s business operation, the state of the market and the mindset of the music business were nowhere near prepared.
Nevertheless, the future was just around the bend.

The principal pointers to that future were concealed in the small print on the cover. The ‘Tour Direction’ credit line for the Rosebud Agency was a testament to the steady growth in
strength and closeness that had, over the years, taken place in the relationship between Hooker and Mike Kappus.

‘When I started the Rosebud Agency,’ Kappus recalls, ‘John was one of the first people I called on, or actually, Sandy Getz, who was acting as his manager at the time. I made a
deal to represent John for east of Colorado where she handled west of Colorado directly herself. I’m not sure if it was her or him or whatever, but there were a few problems with John Lee and
his manager cancelling dates. I turned in my resignation, which evolved into him firing his manager and hiring me exclusively as his agent. I made it very clear that in order to keep his reputation
strong, that couldn’t happen. Once he made a commitment . . . he could make any number of commitments he wants to, one every five years or two hundred a year, as long as they were kept.
While we handled many management tasks for John over the years I didn’t [then] see a need for him to hire formal management, and declined a few times when offered. His
publishing problems were being looked after by a lawyer he trusted completely, and he had no real active label deal or interest in one.’

‘Mr Kappus have did more for me than any agent I ever had, and I had quite a few of ’em,’ says Hooker. ‘I never had a lot of managers. I had one, maybe two, but they
weren’t
strong
as this man. He is a very
strong
young man. He don’t back down. Maybe him being that strong, a lot of people don’t like him because they can’t
tear down that fence around him, tear down that fence around his acts. So there’s a lot of people don’t like Mike. You can understand that, because Mike don’t let them intimidate
him. They learn that when they come to me, I’ll send ’em
to
him ’cause I know that if he say yes, it’s gon’ be something on my behalf that’s going to help
me. He not gon’ be intimidated by them. A lot of [managers] would intimidate they artist, double-cross they artist, to get something from the artist that he don’t know about, to get a
few extra bucks in they pocket. He didn’t do that. I got full confidence in him. Full, complete confidence. I got everything right in his lap, and I can sleep at night. Me and him have a
little disagreement sometimes, but we gets that worked out. He have worked
so hard
for me, more than any other agent or manager have. I took [Rosebud] as family, the whole shootin’
match. They takes care of the artist. I was with Mike when I was scufflin’: we stuck by each other. He was scufflin’, I was scufflin’. We got poor together, now we just about got
rich together.’

And
Jealous
also carried a warm, eloquent liner note written by a fellow-resident of the Bay Area and stalwart pillar of the local music scene: a long-term fan turned new personal friend.
It read: ‘John Lee Hooker is a supreme force in American popular music. Listen to Jimi Hendrix’s “Blues Child”
[sic]
,
¹⁵⁵
listen to Van Morrison’s phrasing, listen
to nature’s beat: it’s keeping time with John’s heart, foot and fingers. Boogie within and boogie without, but
boogie till you shake off all your worries. John Lee is an ocean of inspiration.’

It was signed, ‘Carlos Santana, March 17, 1986.’

Tijuana-born, blues-marinated and Bay Area-based, Carlos Santana had been playing – and, most important, thinking and feeling in terms of – World Music way before the term was
codified, let alone banalized. His eponymous groups, showcasing his rich, sweet, sustain-drenched lead guitar, had been fusing urban blues, percussion-heavy
salsa
and transcendently modal
jazz since the late ’60s, and had gone national – and international – with a bravura performance which had been a major highlight of the Woodstock festival and resultant movie.
And he was a John Lee Hooker fan, big time: a devout admirer of man and music.

‘I met [Hooker] a long time ago, in ’69 in New Jersey, at the Capitol Theater,’ Santana recalled in a 1991 interview.
¹⁵⁶
‘I
didn’t get to meet him again until ’84, when he invited me to play with him at the Blues Festival in San Francisco, and we actually jammed together. From then on he started calling a
lot, and when he’d be in town I’d go to see him, or he’d come to see me.

‘I admire him. He’s another calibre, another standard. He’s one of a kind. He’s very original. He doesn’t sound like anybody. The only person who sounds like him is
Ali Farka Toure, or Jimi Hendrix when he did “Voodoo Chile” . . . John Lee is more earthy. He definitely fits in the category of Supreme Universal Music, ’cause when he moans,
everybody understands what he’s talking about. You don’t have to understand English. A Buddhist monk, or people in Jerusalem or Russia, can understand what he means.

‘He made me realise I have to feel absolutely and completely what I feel before I play it. Some people, like Ornette Coleman,
would say, “If I hear something I
won’t play that, I’ll play anything but.” That works for some musicians, but for me I have to feel it completely before I play it. With John Lee you hear the note before he hits
it on the guitar. It’s like you can hear his hand before it actually hits the note. Jimi Hendrix was like that, but I think it’s ’cause he learned it from John Lee. Some people,
the emotions are so strong . . . he doesn’t play loud, but it’s loud when it comes out. It disarms you, it gives you chills . . . he’s a very raw, naked person. There’s no
bullshit, nothing fancy, no fancy chords. It’s just as raw as you can be.

‘That’s why he always has young girls around, he’s got a young beautiful woman next to him, and they’re always grabbing his hands and rubbing them and feeding him candy .
. .

‘He invited me to his house, and I brought him one of my guitars, and I had this cassette and I said, “John, I have this song . . .”’

Around the time Hooker was releasing
Jealous
, Santana had taken a movie gig, accepting a commission to compose the incidental music for
La Bamba
, film-maker Taylor Hackford’s
biopic of Ritchie Valens, the legendary Chicano rocker of the ’50s. Not surprisingly, Santana’s score was somewhat overshadowed by the uncanny re-creations of Valens’s classic
records, performed by Los Lobos, to which the movie’s star, Lou Diamond Phillips, mimed so energetically; and by the exuberance and fidelity to detail with which Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly
and Jackie Wilson were impersonated by, respectively, Brian Setzer (formerly of the Stray Cats), Marshall Crenshaw and Howard Huntsberry. These performances, plus Bo Diddley’s thunderous
remake of his epochal ‘Who Do You Love’, produced by Willie Dixon himself, dominated
La Bamba
’s big-selling soundtrack album, and Santana’s original score
didn’t get a look-in. Nevertheless, there was one piece of music composed for the movie which was to have a second and far more spectacular lease of life. It came from a scene in
La
Bamba
where Ritchie, played by Phillips,
and his macho blowhard elder brother (Esai Morales) take a trip to Tijuana and visit a shaman.