Boogie Man (81 page)

Less than a fortnight later, Hooker was back in Sausalito, cutting once more with Santana. Apart from Chester Thompson and Carlos Santana himself, it was an all-new band, including the young
Hawaiian bassist Benny Reitveld, soon to jump ship to work with Miles Davis during the master trumpeter’s final years. If the intent was to recreate the magical moment which produced
The
Healer
, then it failed; after all, how often can you catch the lightning in a bottle? ‘Chill Out’ was, indeed, a post-
Healer
attempt to juxtapose Santana’s music with
Hooker’s philosophy, and whilst it was cool, funky and felt – as the world heard when it was exhumed to serve as the title track of Hooker’s 1995 album – it was no
‘Healer’. However, ‘Stripped Me Naked’, the cut that ended up on
Mr Lucky
, was a very different beast indeed.

For subject matter, Hooker strip-mined the residual trauma of his divorce from Maude, two decades past and half a continent away. Where ‘The Healer’’s music was warm and
tranquil, the angular jazz-funk of ‘Stripped Me Naked’ generates a palpable sense of unease. This time, the sonic world Santana constructs for Hooker to inhabit is a treacherous and
inhospitable cityscape, delineated by an undulating chord sequence of serpentine menace, stalked by Reitveld’s spiky bass and chilled by Thompson’s icy synth, using a vocal sample that
sounds like eerily calm robot voices going ‘ahhh’. The contrast with the human voice of Hooker – the most
human
voice ever recorded – could scarcely be greater.

Hooker’s downtown, back in the divorce court from hell. His wife is looking to take him for everything he’s got – his money, his house, his car,
everything –
to
strip him naked. And the judge is on her side. ‘
That was a
mean
old judge,
’ he muses, half-admiringly. And this time, Santana’s guitar isn’t healing him, but
mocking him.

By 11 May, when Hooker and Ry Cooder had finished cutting ‘This Is Hip’ – a Vee Jay outtake which had become a Hooker
connoisseurs’ favourite as the
title track of a 1980 UK compilation – at a Hollywood studio, Blue Rose pretty much had the new Hooker album in the bag, not to mention much of the next one. Cooder brought along drummer Jim
Keltner and bassist Nick Lowe, the rhythm section of Little Village, his short-lived ‘roots-rock supergroup’:
¹⁶⁷
presumably Lowe didn’t
invite Hooker to join him in a quick chorus of ‘Milk And Alcohol’. With Johnnie Johnson on piano and Cooder’s trusty backup singers Terry Evans, Bobby King and Willie Green
supercharging the choruses, the track boasted a swing, solidity and swagger which were utterly impeccable.

Mr Lucky
’s front cover showed a seraphically smiling Hooker, wearing a beautiful suit, reclining against a beautiful old Buick with a beautiful old cherry-red Epiphone Sheraton
guitar in his lap. The back cover triumphantly emblazoned its rollcall of celebrity drop-ins in strict, egalitarian alphabetical order. There they were: Albert Collins, Ry Cooder, Robert Cray, John
Hammond, Johnnie Johnson, Booker T. Jones, Van Morrison, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana . . . ‘and many more’.
Mr Lucky
took
The Healer
’s Guest Star Syndrome about
as far as it could go. With Hooker’s next pair of albums, Kappus and Rogers resisted the temptation to play ‘can you top this?’

Boom Boom
and
Chill Out
reflected the shift in Hooker’s own concerns: as he wound down his touring schedule yet further and concentrated his attention nearer home, he would
start to carry the Coast To Coast Blues Band, plus other – non-famous – friends from the Bay Area blues scene with him into the studio. There would be more solo sessions, or duets with
Rogers. Less and less emphasis would be placed on the participation of big-name colleagues.
Boom Boom
would feature performances by Albert Collins, Robert Cray, Charlie Musselwhite and John
Hammond, as well as, on the thunderous remake of the title track, a stunning cameo by Jimmie Vaughan,
former guitar enforcer of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and big brother to the
late Stevie Ray Vaughan. And
Chill Out
included on its rosters Carlos Santana, Van Morrison, Booker T. Jones and the veteran Charles Brown, composer of the perennial ‘Merry Christmas
Baby’ and Hooker’s own lifetime favourite ‘Driftin’ Blues’, complete with his regular band. Nevertheless, all these names were buried in the credits for their
individual tracks rather than emblazoned on the sleeves.

The spotlight was now firmly on John Lee Hooker; not on his famous friends, but on the man himself, and his music, and his own unique gifts. He was also mastering the art of Zen Stardom, the
mystical process by which an artist does less and less work whilst their media presence becomes progressively more and more ubiquitous. If, to mangle a cliché in a phildickian manner,
nothing ubiks like ubiquity, then Hooker in near-retirement loomed larger over the media landscape than most bluesmen at their active peak. The paradigm indicator of Hooker’s iconic status
was, of all things, a TV commercial. Lee Jeans, conscious of ranking a distant third to Levi’s and Wrangler in the Great American Legwear League (Mythic Division), launched a campaign around
the slogan ‘The Jeans That Built America’, centring around Great Americans Called Lee, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Robert E. Lee, Gypsy Rose Lee, Marvel Comics figurehead Stan Lee, and
guess who. In a truly giddy piece of mythmaking, Hooker – or, to be more precise, a stunt double shown in long-shot silhouette – is seen clambering from a railroad boxcar in a haze of
mist to the strains of ‘Boom Boom’. Then cut to the great man himself, performing the song on stage with the Coast To Coast Blues Band.

In Britain, where folks care about such things, the song promptly zoomed into the Top 20. A clip from the vid was even shown on
Top of the Pops
, and the revisionist take of ‘Boom
Boom’ thereby became a bigger hit than the original had been almost thirty years earlier. The commercial spawned a legion of imitators, wherein blues became a
signifier
of authenticity, and all manner of African-American senior citizens in Big Suits and jaunty hats certified all manner of products as The Real Thang. Nothing and no-one, it seemed, could be more
‘real’ than John Lee Hooker – or someone like him. It didn’t even have to be the real John Lee Hooker.

Meanwhile, the real John Lee Hooker stayed home, and took life easy. Even when
Boom Boom
was nominated for a Grammy, he spared himself the hassle of making a trip to New York to attend
the awards ceremony. Instead, he stuck to his sofa, and watched the proceedings on television. After firing off a few cursory comments about performers like Whitney Houston (‘Oohh, I could
just
kiss her all over
’) and a certain crew of veteran hard-rockers (‘They ain’t
shit
’), he tipped his hat over his eyes, folded his hands across his paunch,
and went to sleep.

He looked after his health and watched what he ate, though the exercise bike his daughter Zakiya bought for him gathered dust despite her thoughtfully taking the precaution of setting it up in
front of the TV set, and his resolute aversion to most kinds of physical activity generated some cause for concern amongst friends, family and colleagues. He saw a star with his name installed on
the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevarde. Like Buddy Guy in Chicago and B.B. King in Memphis, he even lent his name to a club: John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Room, opposite the old Fillmore West
site in San Francisco. And back in the music, he lent his colossal presence to the endeavours of others: when, in the spring of 1993, B.B. took a leaf out of Hooker’s book to record
Blues
Summit,
an album of duets,
¹⁶⁸
Hooker was there, with Roy Rogers and most of Robert Cray’s band, including Cray himself, to cut a version of
Willie Dixon’s ‘You Shook Me’ which saw King venturing into Hooker’s musical turf, rather than the reverse. The highlight of an album by no means deficient in great
moments – other featured guests included Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Etta James and Cray – the track was a testament to the generosity of spirit of both men, and to the
strength and durability of a friendship which had lasted almost forty years.

Others who benefited from Hooker’s benign intervention included Van Morrison and President Bill Clinton: he guested at a San Francisco concert by one which was subsequently issued as a
live album, and played an election rally on behalf of the other. And over a decade after the project was first mooted, the full-scale John Lee Hooker/Van Morrison collaboration finally took place.
Though its lead track was a storming version of ‘Dimples’ performed with, and produced by, Los Lobos, Van The Man’s participation in 1997’s
Don’t Look Back
was
literally hands-on; he produced and played guitar on ten of the eleven tracks, and sang on four. The title track was a vintage Hooker blues-ballad Morrison had recorded with Them back in 1964.
Apart from ‘Dimples’, the album’s wildest card was a radically Hookerized and thoroughly deconstructed version of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’; Hooker had recorded
the song once before, for a limited-edition CD release which justaposed several
very
different takes on the piece by Hendrix himself with a 1989 Hollywood-cut reading of the song by Hooker
and, among others, Booker T. Jones. Then he’d sung it more or less straight, faithfully following ‘the great Jimmy Henry’’s original blue(s)print and personalizing it only
with his patented one-bar anticipation of each chord change. This time, under Morrison’s production aegis, he took Hendrix’s signature slow blues all the way back down the line to
Hooker Central Station.

Yet the album’s centrepiece was a song called ‘The Healing Game’. It clearly meant a lot to Morrison, who by now had taken to sporting a full-scale John Lee Hooker look,
complete with trademark Hooker-style suit, hat and shades, because he not only included the song on an album of his own which he was recording more-or-less back-to-back with the Hooker sessions,
but he made it his record’s title track.
Due to the tightness of Morrison’s own schedule, the album provided an unwelcome flashback to the bad old recording ways of
the pre-
Healer
era: too many songs cut at too few sessions; too much haste, not enough speed. Once again, many sparks are struck – with Hooker and Morrison together, how could it be
otherwise? – but too few tracks catch fire. Nevertheless, on ‘The Healing Game’ itself, they catch the lightning. Morrison’s own subsequent version seems flat by
comparison.

These days, Hooker does what he wants, how he wants. He listens to advice from those he considers qualified to give it, and then he does what he wanted, anyhow –
boogie, chillen!
Those whose advice he doesn’t take generally appreciate why he doesn’t take it. Unless, that is, that person is Bernard Besman. ‘I saw him play a concert at the Palace,’
recalls the venerable entrepreneur, ‘and I told him at that time . . . as a matter of fact, he’s had a lot of bad reviews when he plays with his group.
Terrible
. Because people
want to hear him play how he plays. I talked to him some time ago and I said, “John, do some numbers yourself and then have them come in at the end, because people don’t come to hear
the band, they come to hear you.” But he doesn’t follow that advice. He still plays with the band.’

Hooker knows full well that people still love to hear him play solo, but he has his reasons. ‘Oh, I know that. Yeah, I know. I been told that a lot of times, but I don’t like playing
by myself any more. I play by myself some once in a while, but not all the time. I wouldn’t want to do that all the time. With the band, a small trio, something like that . . . but people do
want to hear me by myself a lot, they want to hear some of my records of me playing by myself. I give ’em some of that. Whenever I cut an album I try to do a little solo stuff on it, but I
don’t want to do it all the time. Things change, but I’m still playing the same thing I played then. I ain’t playin’ no different. I just ain’t playin’ as
much
. I just go with the band, sit on top of the groove, just sit there and enjoy it. I might do a solo album sometime. Oh boy, I can play by myself.

‘I can play the
hell
out of it by myself.’

So, these days, who are Hooker’s true peers? No-one in the blues, that’s for sure. There’s B.B., of course, and B.B. is fabulous indeed, but he’s a different kind of
creature and a different kind of artist, and he has walked a very different kind of path. We not only need to look beyond the blues, but beyond music itself, to two of Hooker’s most
distinguished contemporaries: to Nelson Mandela and William S. Burroughs.

After decades of imprisonment, Mandela only assumed his rightful place on the world stage at an age when most politicians are retiring. However, when he was finally able to do so, he became the
best-loved statesman not only in Africa, but in the entire world. He was admired for what he stood for; for what he’d been through, and – ultimately – for what and who he was.
Simultaneously Burroughs – another guy, incidentally, who knew how to wear the hell out of a snappy suit and hat – had spent decades defining an art incomprehensible to most and derided
by many; gaining the approbation of a (comparatively) small but highly discriminating audience; enjoying an ineradicable effect on world literature but receiving comparatively petty rewards for
doing so. His career then came under the direction of a young, tenacious, loyal and hard-working acolyte named James Grauerholz – Burroughs’ equivalent to Mike Kappus, if you like
– who got his tangled business affairs under control and negotiated the contracts that enabled him to produce one final burst of great work: the trilogy comprising
Cities Of the Red Night,
The Place Of Dead Roads
and
The Western Lands
. Burroughs died in 1997 at the age of 83: lionised, wealthy, dripping with awards, and waited on hand and foot: his place in world
literature, and in the art and culture of the twentieth century, finally acknowledged and utterly beyond dispute. It was a long time coming, but it came.