Boogie Man (79 page)

‘The Iron Man’ had been one of Hooker’s nicknames back in Detroit: the honorific bestowed on him by his friends to acknowledge his powers of stamina and endurance during those
long years of working in steel mills by day and playing in bars by night. Now he
was the Iron Man once more: not just to his friends, but to the world.

The character has two songs to sing in Townshend’s musical: ‘Over The Top’, in which the Iron Man, smashed to pieces in a fall from a clifftop, faces the task of rebuilding and
reconstructing himself; and ‘I Eat Heavy Metal’ wherein, restored to full metal health and prowling the countryside for sustenance, he takes on all the military equipment deployed
against him. A demo tape arrived on Hooker’s doorstep in late ’88; listening to it, he found himself initially nonplussed. Naturally, he recalled Townshend and the Who from ’60s
days in London – ‘Yeah! They was
loud
! He’s deaf, y’know!’ – but this kind of music was a very different proposition from his memories of the brash young
bashers of yore.

‘When Pete Townshend asked me to do it I laughed at him,’ Hooker confesses ‘“Iron Man? Gargling gasoline? What do you mean by this? That ain’t me. That ain’t
the blues.” But he just said to me, “If anyone can do it, you can.”’

Pete Townshend has fond memories of the session. ‘It was completely natural. It was tricky to get used to the fact that his young blonde girlfriend was younger and prettier than any I had
known, but despite his crisp suit, elegant hat and sharp demeanour, there was humility. He couldn’t read music or text, and learned each line parrot-fashion. He said it wasn’t blues,
but he could feel it nonetheless. It was an affirmation for me to sense that he felt at home with what I was doing because I know how deeply everything I do is rooted in his own work.’

Eventually released a month or two in advance of
The Healer
,
The Iron Man
served notice that, no matter how familiar the world might feel it was with John Lee Hooker, the old
master was still capable of coming up with a surprise or two. The songs, and the title, soon attached themselves to Hooker, so it was just as well that he liked the songs –
‘[“Over The Top”] is such a pretty song, and that “I Eat Heavy Metal” sounds good’ – even though recording them was extraordinarily
difficult for him. ‘This was a very rough day in the studio,’ remembers Mike Kappus. ‘The words and phrases were completely out of John Lee’s vocabulary and
even with on-the-spot coaching, Pete ended up just having John speak most of the words, later using a synclavier to make them sound sung.’

Needless to say,
The Healer
received
major
good press. Two exceptions stand out, for vastly different reasons. The first has all the tragi-slapstick appeal of
full-tilt farce: a review of the album by Bay Area rare record dealer Frank Scott, in his
Downhome Music Catalogue
, fumed,

Anything which elicits that kind of chickenbrained response from a blues purist just
has
to be wonderful (he shouldn’t have joined if he can’t take a joke).
The second was rather less easily dismissed. Robert Christgau, the ‘Dean of American Rock Critics’, unchallenged master of the single-para album review and possessor of a wit
sufficiently arid to turn the Atlantic Ocean into the Gobi Desert, drastically misread the situation as he drily opined in his syndicated column,

There were inevitable downsides to
The Healer
’s success, and to Hooker’s newly elevated status. One was a flooding of the album market by
cheapjack reissues and compilation albums issued by record companies who weren’t overly conscientious about royalty payments. The other is a feeling amongst some of the old Planet Blues posse
that John Lee Hooker had somehow passed beyond their reach and left them down in the bottom.

In the back room of his club in Austin, Texas, one night in 1992, Cliff Antone is thumping a table and working himself up into a rage. ‘Nowadays [Hooker’s] management has come
between people like me and him, and that is something I hate very much. His management is under the philosophy that they need to make him the most money possible, and they have no regard for
friendships like mine and his. It’s not John Lee; it’s his management and booking agent that are just so
hard core
that they’re only concerned with
how much money
they can make. Now maybe that’s the way to be, but if that was the case then I wouldn’t be here, and he wouldn’t be there either. You’re takin’ him away from the club
atmosphere. This is family. They’re going to book him here this month at a rock club, a reggae club, a punk club because we can’t pay $10,000 for one night.’

Yeah, but Cliff, if John’s regular price is $15,000, then you’re getting a third off . . .

‘That’s only because no-one else would pay that much down here. He knows it’s wrong. There’s no way around it. This is serious bullshit, man. I stood by him when no-one
wanted him. So if those people that can draw don’t play at the club any more, then it makes it that much harder to keep the club going. They have to give back . . . there’s no other
clubs like this, maybe one or two out in the country, but not many. He’s got to help me keep this going. It’s not like I’m making a big piece of money doing this. We’re
strugglin’ to keep the doors open. We’re doin’ a benefit just to pay our taxes. It’s a serious problem. It always happens, too. They did this with Robert Cray. The people
that made him, as soon as he was big, they took him away, you see? They don’t give nothin’ back. Their only concern is money. Well, is that what it’s all
about? How much money can he have? How much money can he use? Is that all there is to life? Should I turn this into a college disco and make ten times more money? I worked with him for seventeen
years and now, because of the Rosebud Agency and their philosophy, it’s either pay $10,000 or you can’t have him. That’s what success has done, and it needs to be noted – in
my opinion. It shouldn’t be overlooked if the truth is to be known about this. Success isn’t all it’s made out to be, if you turn your back on the people that helped you.
Didn’t he call me? Didn’t I stand by him all these years?’

This argument cuts way little ice with Mike Kappus. Still behind his desk at Rosebud long after his employees have gone home for the evening, Kappus sighs deeply. ‘Oh. That’s a
unique case. There’s a circuit of bars [that JLH used to play] but everybody else understands and appreciates the fact that John has had success and they know perfectly well . . . actually,
most clubs don’t call for John any more, because they understand that he’s not going to be playing clubs, but those that do will say, “I gotta ask, I’m sure I can’t
afford it, but how much is John Lee getting these days?” We tell ’em, and they say, “It’s a shame, we’d love to have him back, but I understand that it can’t
work.” The fact is that maybe it’s harder for people that deal strictly with blues to understand something like that, because they’re not used to quick changes in an
artist’s popularity in the blues world, and the same goes for the jazz world. Generally, there’s a gradual change over a long period of time.

‘We actually did run through this with a major blues festival, too, where they were contacting us and not making a very quick decision about whether they wanted to spend the money for John
Lee, but they started contacting us as
The Healer
was at maybe 100,000 sales, and John Lee’s price was above what it had been prior, but the next time they called it was at 200,000
sales, so in the time between the
two calls it had already sold more than any other blues artist in America had sold in any given year for the last ten years, so obviously
there’s going to be a slight price increase. By the time they finally decided they definitely wanted to move, every time they would call back, they left such a large space in their pondering
whether or not to pay the new high price for John Lee Hooker, it did go up. The price doesn’t stay the same when, since the last conversation, you’ve sold more records than you have in
the preceding ten years. The price does tend to change, and that caught at least this one place by surprise. Most people understood this. They look at the charts; they turn on VH-1 and they saw
John Lee on there all the time; they saw John Lee on an awful lot of magazines . . . they realized that this wasn’t just an interesting coincidence, and now for [the extra] $5000 he’ll
draw so many more people.

‘Well, there’s business people around who know that if you draw a lot more people, you’re worth a little bit more money. We’re primarily reacting to price, and the
highest prices that we get for John generally are those that are offered to us by people trying to convince us to take a date, or percentages that are earned by the actual sales on the door:
we’ve actually made a guarantee of a lower amount. Frequently, the new ground is set by the commercial performance, or by somebody trying to convince us to take a date. In the blues world or
the jazz world, career movements upward are generally much more gradual, and those that aren’t thinking in terms of what happens in the world of rock, in that kind of realm that John is in
– his pop sales, he’s in the pop charts and everything – those people understand that if you sell ten times as many records as you’ve ever sold before – John’s
probably sold ten times as many records on
The Healer
as he’d sold in the preceding ten years all combined – that’s certainly going to have an effect.’

Furthermore, Kappus points out, Hooker has played the tiny Sweetwater Club in Mill Valley (capacity 125, jam-packed) more times than
any other venue during their entire
association: it’s simply that he likes the vibe there and gets on well with the owner. ‘This is only one clear example among many,’ Kappus asserts, ‘which would counter
Antone’s claims, including an endless list of benefits and other events in which John Lee gives back to friends and the less fortunate at little or no compensation to himself . . . or his
representatives.’

Meanwhile, as
The Healer
went through the roof – or what passes for the roof on Planet Blues – Hooker was continuing his version of Bob Dylan’s ‘Never Ending
Tour’: the Never Ending Recording Session. Hooker is never
per se
working on an album: by the same token, he is never
not
working on an album. Sessions went down whenever they
needed to go down: some towards Hooker’s own albums, and some towards the outside projects for which Hooker was increasingly in demand. One such was Roy Rogers’s lovely take on Robert
Johnson’s ‘Terraplane Blues’ – a Rogers/Hooker duet with the former playing exquisite Johnson-style guitar and the latter supplying equally immaculate Hooker-style vocals
– which appeared on
Slidewinder
, Rogers’ second solo album. Another was a rather more ambitious project: Hooker’s first full-scale movie soundtrack. No
Blues
Brothers
or
Color Purple
-style cameo appearances, but the full-on real deal.

In movie-crit terms,
The Hot Spot
was a chunk of botched Texas noir, in which some promising ingredients – Dennis Hopper as director, legendary pulpmeister Charles Williams’
novel
Hell Hath No Fury
as source material – were counterweighted by a poor script and a charisma-bypassed leading-man performance by
Miami Vice
alumnus Don Johnson. The score,
on the other hand, was an absolute gem, which is cast-iron guaranteed to outlast the film. The man in charge was Jack Nitzsche
¹⁶²
(co-composer of
‘Needles And Pins’, former cohort of Phil Spector, the Rolling Stones, Neil Young and collaborator with Ry Cooder on the stunnning blues-noir scores for
Performance
and
Blue Collar
) who opted for a semi-improvised blues soundtrack, and assembled a dream-team to perform it. On drums was legendary studio musician Earl Palmer, who’d
played Little Richard’s New Orleans sessions in the ’50s and been on Phil Spector’s Wrecking Crew team in the ’60s. (More controversially, Palmer had – by his own
account, anyway – worked key Motown sessions in the ’60s, with himself and Carole Kaye, on drums and bass, creating and performing parts generally ascribed to the famed Detroit rhythm
section of Benny Benjamin and James Jamerson. However,
that
particular can of worms is best not opened here.)

On bass was Tim Drummond, another known associate of Neil Young and a hardened studio veteran; but the most startling item on his CV was a tour of duty with James Brown, which included playing
to black GIs in Vietnam: about as funky a credit as any groove-crazed white boy could desire. On acoustic guitar and vocals was Taj Mahal. John Lee Hooker and Roy Rogers appeared as themselves. But
Nitzsche’s masterstroke was drafting Miles Davis as featured soloist, taking what would essentially have been, in any conventional blues ensemble, the harmonica player’s role. And, no
matter who the harp player might have been – Charlie Musselwhite, Junior Wells, the resurrected ghosts of Little Walter or Sonny Boy Williamson,
anybody
– it would still have
been a deluxe, allstar version of the standard blues jam. With Miles on board instead, it became something else entirely: a haunting collection of ominous moans, bump-’n’-grind boogies
and slow shuffles which enabled Hooker to prove that he didn’t need words – apart from disconnected phrases like ‘
so sad
’ and ‘
it ain’t
right
’ – to sing the deepest and most emotionally complex blues; Miles to demonstrate that he was as much at home in Hooker’s menacing dreamscape as in any of the myriad
territories he explored during his long and extraordinary career; and Taj to recycle his beloved ‘Wild Ox Moan’. Plus the rocking ‘Bank Robbery’ was utterly unique in the
annals of contemporary music. After all, where the hell else can you hear Miles Davis do the boogie?