Boogie Man (77 page)

The strategy was straightforward, purposeful and impeccably laid back. Every few months, whenever any of the bonded collaborators swung within grabbing distance of San Francisco, Blue Rose would
book an afternoon at Russian Hill. Guests were canvassed as to what song(s) they would like to cut with Hooker. Each session would concentrate on just a few songs, occasionally freshly written but
mostly culled from Hooker’s capacious back catalogue; the backup musicians would be hand-picked to suit the guest, and the songs. And no session would run over three hours. Drummer Scott
Matthews, who played several sessions for
The Healer
and its immediate successors, summarised Hooker’s recording method as going into the studio, asking, ‘Where the food?’,
eating, announcing, ‘I’m tired, let’s do this quick and get out’, doing three takes, and going home. Hooker doesn’t dispute this.

‘Yeah, I’m nervous,’ he admits. ‘I ain’t just sayin’ that. The studio make me nervous. I go in there an’ do what I’m gon’ do an’ get
out. I don’t wanna sit around there goin’ over an’ over this an’ over an’ over that. I have my boys down, I go in there, get me a little sandwich, eat it and say,
“Let’s go to it.” The more you do it, the weaker your voice will get, you know. I do it when my voice is
strong
. I get in there, get the guys together and say,
“
Hey
, y’all, let’s do it.” Two takes and I got it. I do two, maybe three songs, that’s the most. Pack up and get outta there.’

Roy Rogers didn’t have a problem with any of that. ‘It seemed like a natural thing,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have any trepidation about doing it. I was so close to John
and always kept a very close friendship with John, so it really was the three of us that put our heads together: Mike Kappus as executive producer and me being producer in the studio with the
music. It was a question of putting together the right song and the appropriate person, and that decision was never made from
a commercial standpoint. It was always:
what’s gonna work? What’s gonna be fun? Who is John comfortable with?

‘My work is in setting it up: the pre-production is really the thing. You don’t want to work too hard when you’re in there, not with John Lee; otherwise you might as well shoot
yourself in the foot. You want to make it as comfortable [as possible], then either the magic happens, or it doesn’t. We go for that magic, you know. All along I said, “Boss, if
you’re happy, I’m happy.”’ Clearly, the days of locking Hooker into a studio with a bunch of musicians for hours or days on end, and not letting him out before there was a
double-album’s worth of material in the can, were long gone. This was record-making at a pace which suited Hooker. And, bit by bit, the reels of tape mounted up on Kappus’ shelf.

The process began, unassumingly enough, as soon as the debris of New Years Day 1987 had been cleared away from the streets of San Francisco. On 2 January, Hooker and Rogers, plus Hooker’s
longtime friend Charlie Musselwhite and his bag of harps, checked into Russian Hill to cut with Canned Heat. Their personnel had been unstable since the death of Bob ‘the Bear’ Hite
some years before, and sometimes they’d resembled a drummer with a revolving door more than a band, but the trio who made the date were authentic enough: the Canned Heat credentials of
guitarist Henry Vestine, bassist Larry Taylor and drummer Fito De La Parra – all of whom had been on the team for the epochal
Boogie With Canned Heat
album back in 1968 – were
second to none.

They cut four tracks that day: three for the shelf and one for
The Healer
. The track that mattered was ‘Cuttin’ Out’ which, as ‘I’m Leavin”, dated back
to the Vee Jay days. With Hooker, Vestine and Rogers all rocking on guitars and Musselwhite blowing his brains out on harp, it ought to have been cookin’, and it was. Five weeks later Hooker
and Rogers were back for a solo acoustic session which yielded no fewer than eight tracks. Two of these, ‘No Substitute’ and ‘Rockin’ Chair’,
ended up on
The Healer
; two more, ‘Deep Blue Sea’ and a severely Hookerised country song, ‘Hittin’ The Bottle’, the latter uncharacteristically
performed in the key of C, remained in storage, when they were included, respectively, on
Chill Out
and
Boom Boom
. In April, they cut again: this time with Charlie Musselwhite and a
rhythm section including Scott Mathews on drums. This session generated four tracks: ‘That’s Alright’ appeared on
The Healer
, another, the slow blues ‘Thought I
Heard’ was slipped into
Boom Boom
. But the track which actually sparked the session – a remake of ‘Burnin’ Hell’, previously cut in the early Detroit days with
Eddie Burns and on the
Hooker ’N Heat
session with Alan Wilson, remains unissued to this day.

So how was it for Musselwhite to cut with Hooker? ‘Well, I’d get a call, and it would be like no rehearsal. Just into the studio and “what key is this?” and then John
would just start everybody off. Listen and follow. For
The Healer
, which Roy Rogers was producing, he said, “Listen, we’re gonna do ‘Burnin’ Hell”’, and
he sent me a copy of the original version that John did, and we get in the studio and I remember thinkin’, “John’s really gonna do this tune, huh? Just like this? On the
record?”’ He laughs. ‘So I listened to the original recording with Eddie Burns playin’ and we cut it, but it weren’t no relation to the original at all.’ Not
surprising: it was actually a different tune, ‘Heaven And Hell’, which, according to Mike Kappus, ‘has the same groove as “Burnin’ Hell” but with different
lyrics’. ‘There was another tune that John and I did together,’ continues Musselwhite, ‘just the two of us, that was really deep, but according to Roy it was just too heavy,
so they didn’t want to put it on the record, but it might get released some other time. After all these years of knowing John, and knowing him as well as I have, I’m still in awe of him
when I’m around him. I just have so much respect for him. I can never look at him or think of him as just a
buddy
. He’s just a great human being, you know, who plays the deepest
blues that ever was. No deeper was ever played.’

And so it went, through the rest of 1987 and into 1988. Rosebud’s
star client Robert Cray came in bringing his bass player Richard Cousins – with Mathews back
behind the drum kit – to recut ‘Baby Lee’, with its tricky-funky stop-start backbeat. ‘“Baby Lee”? I told Robert I wanted to do it just like the old one,’
says Hooker. ‘He listened to the record, the old one, before we did it. And we went in and
what a job he did on it
.’ A richly soulful singer and a sparkling guitarist, Cray was
an army brat, born in Georgia but raised on the move in various bits of Europe and the US, who’d cut his musical teeth on a classic ’60s mix of Beatles, Hendrix and soul, leavened by
the fertile loam of blues-rich family record collections. He’d launched the first baby-band edition of the Robert Cray Band in the Pacific Northwest during the ’70s, working his butt
off around the club and college circuit, and by the second half of the ’80s he’d even become a pop star, scaling the upper reaches of the album charts with
Strong Persuader
and
getting his handsome mug onto the cover of
Rolling Stone
.

‘The first time I heard John Lee Hooker must have been in the mid-’60s,’ says Cray. ‘My aunt was a big blues fan: she had Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker
. . . what really amazed me was the deepness of his voice and his style. It wasn’t until later on that I really started to understand and listen properly, ’cause that first time I was
around twelve years old. Then later on when I was seventeen I started listening some more, and the thing I really liked about John Lee Hooker was how many bars he played – like 13, 14, 15
bars! It was a type of music where there aren’t any rules – the man is saying what he wants to say, and I enjoy that to this day. When he’s playing with other musicians he always
tries never to do the same thing twice, so you got to stay on your toes. You got to be listening to him all the time. He’ll change the words, he’ll change the bars: he’ll play 13,
14, 15 bars! So when he makes a change you really got to be on your toes, otherwise you’ll be left behind.

‘The first time I worked with John was probably in the late ’70s [with] a younger version of the Robert Cray Band that was playing at the University of Montana.
We’d never met John Lee before, but we were booked together and we had to be his backing band on the spur of the moment. He joined us on the bandstand and sat on a chair and he just started
playing. We didn’t know what songs he was gonna play, and we didn’t know what key anything was in, we didn’t know what or where the changes were, so it was quite a challenge. The
whole band was just thoroughly confused and disappointed and were going, “Who the hell is this guy and what is he doing?” I just laughed and said, “This is one of the greats, the
original guys.” And he was so friendly, so nice afterwards. We said, “John, how many bars are there in your songs?” And he said, “Hey, you just gotta make the change . .
.”

‘When you record with John, the thing that I notice the most is that you won’t spend a lot of time in the studio. You follow John in what he does. And you’re gonna get it in
one or two takes and that’s about it. John’s gonna get up, put his hat on, and go, “Thank you, fellas.”’

Like Cray, George Thorogood was a circuit veteran who’d taken his bareknuckle boogie and bullyboy slide – a four-alarm chilli concocted from freshly-minced chunks of Hound Dog
Taylor, Elmore James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and not a little John Lee Hooker – from Delaware bars to the satellite stage of Live Aid, where he brought on Albert Collins to play to half of
the planet as
his
guest. Thorogood’s first, eponymous album, released by Rounder Records in 1977, carried an amusing period-piece liner-note in which the label formally apologises for
sullying its folkie purity with such a vulgar release, and featured a masterstroke conflation of Hooker’s ‘House Rent Boogie’ and ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’
into a single narrative. ‘He told me he was gonna do that,’ recalls Hooker, ‘and I said, “Okay, go ahead.”’ Thorogood’s commercial breakthrough album,
1982’s
Bad To
The Bone
, had included an insanely speeded-up ‘New Boogie Chillen’; a copy of the gold-album award hangs on Hooker’s wall.
Factor in his band’s agency deal with Rosebud, and it should therefore come as no great surprise that Thorogood contributed to
The Healer
, weighing in for a duo session remaking the
venerable ‘Sally Mae’, the B-side of ‘Boogie Chillen’, originally cut for Hooker’s very first session with Bernard Besman in Detroit at the dawn of Hooker’s
recording career, from before Thorogood was born.

Most of the guest participants in
The Healer
were friends of Hooker’s before the sessions. After the sessions, they all were. ‘I’ve known Carlos Santana a long time,
Bonnie Raitt a
real
long time,’ Hooker mused, ‘I didn’t know Los Lobos,
¹⁵⁷
but they sure know my music.’ That they did.
Having led a double life as a traditional acoustic band playing Mexican folk music in restaurants and parties – if you got married in east LA between the mid-’70s and the early
’80s, Los Lobos probably played your wedding – and taking their hard-edged, lyrical electric roots-rock into Hollywood’s post-punk club scene, they found themselves as incongruous
chart-toppers with the uncanny recreations of Richie Valens’ music which they cut for Taylor Hackford’s Valens biopic
La Bamba
– the movie for which Carlos Santana had
created the score which generated the musical background for ‘The Healer’; wheels within wheels, synchronicity-a-go-go. Their showcase was ‘Think Twice Before You Go’, still
unfortunately credited to Al Smith, which had originally seen the light of day on Hooker’s debut ABC release, 1967’s
Urban Blues
. Hooker sang live with the guitars and rhythm
section; Rogers overdubbing Steve Berlin’s rumbling baritone sax and David Hidalgo’s exuberant accordion immediately afterwards.

And then, of course, there was Bonnie Raitt: ‘My baby!’ as Hooker affectionately dubs her. In a lengthy career more fraught with ups and downs than most, the former Boston folkie,
Delta blues maven, Mellow
Mafia singer-songwriter and virtuoso slide-slinger has been platinum and she’s been nowhere, and along the way she’s been everywhere in
between. When she and Hooker cut ‘I’m In The Mood’, she was definitely ‘in between’. She was in-between record deals: dumped by Warner Bros, who’d been her home
base since 1971, but not yet picked up by Capitol, with whom she confounded the conventional wisdom of the music business by scoring the biggest successes of her career.

‘Bonnie had been doin’ it herself on her shows, which I didn’t know until she told me, and she had it down
so pat
. She said, “I’m gonna do that’n with
you, ‘I’m In The Mood’. If I ain’t gonna do ‘I’m In The Mood’ I ain’t gonna do nothin’.” I said, “Okay Bonnie, you do it.”
She said, “Yeah, I do it all the time.” So we didn’t change anything. We just sat down. It was just tremendous, is all I can tell you. She’s such a beautiful person, and I
love her like I don’t know what.’

‘It was love at first sight,’ says Raitt of her first encounter with Hooker, back in the early ’70s. ‘I never really played with him until we did the duet, because we
weren’t really in a situation where it was possible. There wasn’t a lot of jamming at blues festivals, and I always admired him so much it would have been intimidating.’ This
time, she wasn’t intimidated at all. The basic quartet – Hooker, Raitt, Rogers and Matthews, no bass player – didn’t quite get it in one take, but, as Raitt says, it was
‘pretty close. We just went over the structure of the song, and we really didn’t know what it was going to come out like.

‘It was really one of the most erotically charged afternoons of my life. He just wore me out. The lights were low and we were just
looking
at each other and neither of us knew how
to end it. We just got into it. He had his sunglasses on and I was just staring at him, head to head, sitting on chairs. At the end of it I just said, “I need a towel!”