Boogie Man (80 page)

Amazingly enough, this startlingly sensuous and intimate music wasn’t
quite
as live as it sounds. During the three-day session, Hooker, Rogers, Taj and the
rhythm section cut for two days, and on the third day Miles came in and overdubbed his stuff.

‘For all the raw and rudimentary type of sound that he has, John is a consummate professional,’ says Taj Mahal. The pleasure with which he recalls the
Hot Spot
date is utterly
self-evident. ‘He is himself and he plays it the way he plays it. The guys that played on
The Hot Spot . .
. all of us love John Lee. The day that Miles came in to play –
Miles,
who never deals with anybody on any other level than, “I’m Miles, I’m here, and this is how it goes” – to watch Miles really completely give the
generational credit, not in any words that he said, but his personal admiration for John Lee Hooker was . . . it wasn’t about the notes. It wasn’t about, “How much jazz do you
play?” He knew who John Lee Hooker was, and what it was all about. The reason that Miles was as hip as he was, is that he was always paying attention to what was goin’ on . . . always
playin’
attention.’ As far as Miles overdubbing on the third day rather than performing live with the rest of the band goes, Taj is equally emphatic. ‘Miles wanted to be
there. If it was a session he didn’t like, he would’ve
sounded
like he didn’t want to be there. Plus he’s dealt with all the technology that was around, and he knew
how to handle it. I love all that stuff that happened there. And Tim Drummond! And Roy Rogers! And Earl Palmer! We had
Earl Palmer
playing with us! All of us loved Earl. It was like a bunch
of musicians that Jack Nitzsche got together. All these guys wanted to play together and had respect for each other . . . so it was
not a problem
.’

For Hooker, sharing a project with Miles Davis was both a professional honour and a personal pleasure: a professional honour because . . . hell, because Miles was
Miles
, just as Hooker
was
John Lee Hooker
; and a personal pleasure because the session provided the opportunity for a reunion. ‘When I was living in Detroit in the ’50s, he used to come in the bar,
slip in the bar where I were. I been knowin’
Miles a long time. He was wild. He was a very young man then. Miles was a very good person; he just had his way of
livin’. He didn’t do nobody no harm, he just didn’t like to have a lot of people hangin’ round him all the time. A man just like to keep to himself. Wasn’t
nothin’ wrong, just Miles bein’ Miles. He wasn’t a mean man, he just didn’t like bein’ around a lot of people.’

Ever the diplomat, Hooker didn’t mention just why Miles had chosen to come hang out in Detroit for the six months which spanned autumn ’53 and early 1954. Never the diplomat, Miles
did.
¹⁶³

The day he recorded his contribution to
The Hot Spot
’s soundtrack, Miles paid Hooker one of the most treasured compliments of his entire career. ‘That is a very big thing
coming from a person like Miles Davis, because he is one of the greatest men that ever lived in jazz. The guy liked me a lot; and when he got through playing, he looked at me, he give me a big hug,
and he say, “You the funkiest man alive.”

‘I said, “What you say?” He say, “You the funkiest man alive. You in that mud right up to your neck.” That mean the deep,
deep
blues, you know, and I think
that was a great compliment coming from him, from a jazz man especially: I mean, jazz and blues, they practically the same thing. It’s great to hear it coming from a great jazz man, talking
about a great blues man.’

In his liner note to the soundtrack CD, Dennis Hopper paid
handsome and eloquent respects to both of these venerable titans whilst pumping up each of their respective
personal myths:

And the sessions just kept on coming. The Salkind movie production dynasty who made the
Superman
and
Three Musketeers
movies had discovered the merits of shooting
two movies back-to-back on the same sets and with the same cast, and Blue Rose had cottoned on to the same trick. What was to become 1991’s
Mr Lucky
formally kicked off on 9 April
1990, with –
miracolo!
– Van Morrison finally showing up to cut a simmering ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ for
Mr Lucky
and a stirring medley of ‘Serve Me
Right To Suffer’ and ‘Backbiters And Syndicators’ which stayed on Mike Kappus’s shelf until 1995’s
Chill Out
. (Booker T. Jones, the Stax mainstay whose Booker T
& the MGs hit ‘Green Onions’ had served as the basis for Hooker’s own Vee Jay-era ‘Onions’, overdubbed his Hammond organ parts in Hollywood the following
February.)

The Texan titan Albert Collins, the Master of the Telecaster, for whose astonishing guitar sound the word ‘searing’ was specifically invented, was the next to weigh in. For the first
time, Hooker and Rogers brought in members of the Coast To Coast Blues Band for an album session, and so Ken Baker (sax), Deacon Jones (organ), Jim Guyett (bass) and Bowen Brown (drums) did the
honours for
Lucky
’s ‘Backbiters And Syndicators’ with Mike Osborn and Rich Kirch plugging in their guitars to join in on ‘Boogie At Russian Hill’, a storming
jam on Hooker’s patented set-closer which Kappus and Rogers sat on until they assembled
Boom Boom
in 1992. When BBC2 staged their
Hooker tribute concert a year or
two later, Collins paid fulsome tribute to Hooker. ‘He been my idol all these years,’ he told the show’s producer, Mark Cooper, ‘and I’m so glad that he still here to
carry me along with him. He extraordinary because he got young kids playin’ with him, and he playin’ the same thing he did forty years ago. That’s my man. I love him. He’s a
beautiful man.’
¹⁶⁴

Then came Johnny Winter, checking in at Russian Hill to cut ‘Susie’ with his regular rhythm section of bassist Jeff Ganz and drummer Tom Compton. ‘Working with John Lee was
real quick, man. We just went in the studio, set up the equipment and played. It took us longer to set up than it did to record the tracks! We recorded [“Susie”] twice: once with an
acoustic bass and once with an electric bass. We did one other track [the still unissued “Face To Face”], then that was it! Three takes and finished!

‘John didn’t even show me the chords before we started recording, but I know pretty much how John works. He changes whenever he wants to so I knew we were gonna have to really watch
him. I wish he could have stayed longer and done a few more things, but he had a real bad cold and wasn’t feeling that great – he had to get a bunch of stuff from the drugstore.
I’d like to have done four or five tracks and done a few runs through; as it turned out, we didn’t even get to do two takes of each of the songs we recorded. I didn’t sing on the
tracks, just played guitar, changing whenever he changed. In the past when I was doing sessions with Muddy Waters or playing live with him, Muddy would pretty much change on time, but when John has
finished whatever he’s singing, he just changes regardless of whether it’s the ‘right’ time or not – you don’t know when the change is gonna come but you know
it’s not gonna be normal.

‘It was a lot of fun!’

Next up was Robert Cray and his team, cutting
Mr Lucky
’s title
track and
Boom Boom
’s ‘Same Old Blues Again’. John Hammond rounded out
the 1990 studio dates with an absolute peach of a session, which yielded three songs, two of which made the cut for
Mr Lucky
and the third, a joyful canter through Hooker’s perennial
‘Bottle Up And Go’, waiting in the wings for
Boom Boom
. ‘Highway 13’ was an astonishing atmosphere piece: Hooker driving through the pouring rain with Hammond’s
plunking National guitar and eerie mouth-harp by his side, Scott Matthews’s brushed drums wiping his windshield. ‘Father Was A Jockey’ was rocking jump-up braggadoccio –
hey, it’s a guy thing; I’ve never heard a woman boasting in song that she learned her sexual prowess from her mother.
¹⁶⁵

Unlike either its predecessor or its successors, the final sequenced configuration of
Mr Lucky
featured no solo performances by Hooker. As Kappus explains, ‘The reason why there are
two tracks with John Hammond [was] to try to offer that acoustic sound in the absence of solo tracks. We had a glut of . . . by the time we’d finished everything off, we’d put out the
word to various people and we’d worked on the project and as we neared the end, several of the people we’d talked to suddenly came in and said that they were ready to do something. We
found ourselves with more guests than we could squeeze in on the record and still have separate solo tracks. And we hadn’t recorded any solo tracks yet, so John Hammond was the only one with
two tracks on the record, to offer a little taste of the acoustic side.’

To speak of ‘a glut’ may seem ungracious, but there was certainly no famine. The album was completed in four more sessions between January and May of 1991. The first brought in
Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry’s piano-playing alter ego from St Louis, alongside Ehrman, Matthews and Mike Osborn, for a romp through ‘I Want To Hug You’, and a still-unissued
‘Up And Down’.

‘I first met John Lee Hooker in New Orleans, when NRBQ called
me to come do some work on the piano,’ Johnson recalled. ‘It was a great thrill to be with
him, you know, because for years I’ve always heard of John Lee Hooker and his music, and to find out that I was going to play with him . . . hey, this is awesome. I couldn’t wait until
I met the man, and then when we finally did meet, face to face, we hit it off. That was when he asked me would I be interested in making a recording with him. I told him never to make a record or
nothin’ ’less he call on me to be his piano man. So far, so good! So I made the recording with him. He is the
easiest
man I worked with yet to record or play with. He’s
very cooperative in everything, so I wouldn’t say he’s hard to work with. If you’re a musician, you can shift too. You can’t just go up there with one thing and think you
can blend in with what he’s doin’, so you got people prepared to do what he do. You can feel it comin’ on, if you a musician. I been playin’ blues for quite a while, and it
was when I was with Albert King that I learned all these different keys which came in handy when I played with artists like John Lee Hooker. So I had no problem with him, and his character is
beautiful, he has his own style of playin’, his own style of singin’, and the songs that he sings hold everybody’s attention.’

And then in April came Keith Richards, the Human Riff, the heart and soul of the Rolling Stones. ‘The first John Lee Hooker record I heard was ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’,
funnily enough. Maybe that’s why I said, “That’s the one I want to do for the album.” I just thought “Crawlin’ King Snake” was so mysterious and so
individual. You’re not going to mistake John Lee Hooker for anybody else, and it was just such a fascinating sound, and so different to other stuff I’d heard; in a way more archaic. It
felt so electric, and sounded as if he’d jumped a generation. It was so dark and swampy. I learned those John Lee Hooker chords, which are very strange shapes, and it immediately affected
everything I did since.

‘At the Stones’ gig in Atlantic City, John came on, and Eric [Clapton]
was there too. John came by and I’d heard [
The Healer
] and said, “Nice
job, John.” Then at the beginning of this year [1991], John calls up and says, “I’d really like you to do a track on this album.” He asked me what song I’d like to do.
I said, “I wanna do a song about a subject you’re really interested in, John. Let’s do ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’.”

‘We just went in the studio and did three takes, and I think it was the first take we used on the record. It was all over in an hour and I said, “John, that’s too short”,
and he said, “Yeah, I’m too tired.” He’s a sweet guy. I had a great time with him. I think
I’m
getting on, but this guy’s nearly twice as old as I
am,
¹⁶⁶
and he’s still playing. It kind of gives you hope!’

The evening after the session, Rich Kirch discovered that you don’t have to die to go to heaven. It was his birthday, and there he was, having dinner and a post-prandial jam with his two
all-time musical heroes, John Lee Hooker and Keith Richards. He and Keith even wrote a song together.

The version of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ which John Lee and Keith cut on 11 April 1991 – with the omnipresent Scott Matthews on drums and Canned Heat’s Larry Taylor
anchoring the bassline – is one of the stellar items on an album already embarrassingly over-stuffed with gems. Both men are past-masters of the greater and lesser arcana of
‘Spanish’ tuning; and both men are renowned for the idiosyncracy of their phrasing. The meshing of Keith’s weird way with a groove and Hooker’s weird way with a groove
creates an agonisingly beautiful rhythmic tension behind Hooker’s menacingly reverbed vocal.

‘John Lee is definitely a man,’ says Richards. ‘He’s no spring chicken, but I went over to his house for a barbecue just after the session and he had a whole school of
young ladies with him, all of them guitar players, so you end up in John Lee’s front room with everybody
plugged in hammering away, and John just sits in the back there
eating, going, “Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty good.”’