Boogie Man (87 page)

53
.
No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan
(Penguin, 1987).

54
. The author learned all this, plus a lot of other fascinating backstage stuff about the classic Motown era, from
Standing in the Shadows of
Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson
by Dr Licks (Dr Licks Publications, 1989).

55
. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987.

56
. I am indebted to Norman Darwen for this particular piece of R&B detective work, documented in his liner note for
Let’s Make It
(Charly CD CHARLY 170), a 1989 compilation of Vee Jay sides drawn from the
Burnin
’ and
Big Soul
sessions.

57
. In
I Am The Blues
, by Dixon & Don Snowden (Quartet, 1989), from which much of this account of the ’62 Festival is derived.

58
. Quoted in
Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story
, by Helen Oakley Dance (Da Capo, 1987).

59
. French record producer Philippe Rault, quoted in Dixon & Snowden,
op cit
.

60
. Helen Oakley Dance transcribes this as ‘
Mighty
88 man’: not accurate, but undoubtedly true.

61
. As reprinted in Jones’s collection
Black Music
(Quill, 1967).

62
. As reprinted in
Bob Dylan: A Retrospective
, edited by Craig McGregor (Picador, 1975).

63
. Talking to
Q
Magazine, June 1995.

64
. In Gillett’s invaluable
The Sound of the City
(Souvenir Press, 1970, rev. 1983).

65
. Quoted in Smith’s
On the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music
(Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988).

66
. Smith,
op cit
.

67
.
A Cellarful Of Noise
(Four Square, 1964). The ghost was the late and sorely missed veteran PR, sage and
bon viveur
Derek
Taylor.

68
. Actually, Ifield was a transplanted Australian whose gimmick was yodelling. He peaked with ‘I Remember You’, which reached No. 1 in
1962; unaccountably, his career went into decline with the arrival of the Beatles and their successors.

69
. In
Shout!: The True Story of the Beatles
(Elm Tree, 1981; rev. Penguin, 1991.

70
. Before Starr joined the Beatles, he had made vague plans to emigrate to the States, and had gone so far as to fill out an application form. He
had chosen Houston, Texas, as his destination for no other reason than that Lightnin’ Hopkins lived there. After the Beatles imploded at the end of the decade, Starr fulfilled at least part
of his early ambition by drumming on sessions with both Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King.

71
. I’d recommend Christopher Sandford’s
Clapton: Edge of Darkness
(Gollancz, 1994) and Stanley Booth’s
The True
Adventures of the Rolling Stones
(Wm Heinemann, 1985) respectively, though in neither case is the inquisitive reader spoiled for choice. Despite its clubfooted prose and complete absence of
critical judgement, Bob Brunning’s
Blues in Britain
(Blandford, 1995), a revision of the same author’s
Blues: The British Connection
(Blandford, 1986), is nevertheless
both an invaluable reference work and an engaging personal memoir.

72
. In
Owning Up
(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1965), his autobiographical account of the British ‘trad’ (i.e. New Orleans
revivalist) jazz scene of the 1950s.

73
. In Townshend’s case, the group in question – The Detours – was primarily a rock band which also included his future Who
colleagues John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, but their act featured a ‘trad’ section in which Entwistle and Daltrey respectively played trumpet and trombone.

74
. In his celebrated 1971
Rolling Stone
interview with Robert Greenfield, reprinted in
The Rolling Stone Interviews Vol. 2
(Warner
Books, 1973).

75
. Blues Incorporated eventually schismed: Korner’s preference was for a jazzy, urbane-blues approach, while Davies had pledged fealty to
explicitly Delta-derived music. After Davies’s sudden death, his band, the Cyril Davies All-Stars, was taken over by vocalist Long John Baldry, who renamed it the Hoochie Coochie Men and gave
a young singer named Rod Stewart his first job. But that’s another story, if not several other stories.

76
. Before he teamed up with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to form the Rolling Stones, Jones had been playing as a soloist, and in a duo with Paul
Jones (no relation) under the name of ‘Elmo Lewis’, partly because his full name was Lewis Brian Jones, partly as a tribute to Elmore James, and partly because ‘Elmo Lewis’
was the name of Jerry Lee Lewis’s father.

77
. In
Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts In Britain
(Penguin, 1970).

78
. Wyman was fundamentally a rocker, but as the late Ian Stewart, the Stones’ pianist-turned-road manager-turned-pianist-again, told Bob
Brunning in
Blues in Britain
(
op cit
), ‘As Bill actually got in the band he went completely overboard on blues, and he really got hung up on the worst blues players, he had to
empathize with everything by Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, you know, the kind of stuff that would put you to sleep.’ There’s no accounting for taste, is there?

79
. In
The Story Of The Who
(St Martin’s Press, 1983).

80
. From an interview by Timothy White in
Rock Lives
(Omnibus Press, 1990). Bowie’s kid bands never got around to recording any of
Hooker’s material for release, but at his fiftieth birthday concert at Madison Square Gardens on 8 January 1997, DB performed a decidedly Hookerised intro to his 1972 hit ‘Jean
Genie’.

81
. The Animals’ version of ‘Boom Boom’ was released as a single in the USA – though not into the domestic market –
in December 1964; it stalled just outside the Top 40 and was speedily chased by one of their British hits ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’.

82
. The knock-on effects of this particular coup were the establishment of the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers as the hottest guitar chairs in
British rock, and the formation of Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac: Clapton was replaced in the Yardbirds by Jeff Beck and then by Jimmy Page; and in the Bluesbreakers by Peter Green and then by
Mick Taylor.

83
. A shortlived band formed by organist Pete Bardens, later to join Van Morrison in Them, which included Mick Fleetwood on drums.

84
. Townshend is unspecific concerning exactly when he saw Hooker play the Flamingo or which band was backing him, but the point he’s making
remains unaffected.

85
. Though the name is theoretically pronounced ‘Strettam’, glottal-stopped local pronunciation generally renders the ‘t’
silent.

86
. An Epiphone, actually, but let’s not be too picky.

87
. 47, actually.

88
. Macdonald Queen Anne Press, 1988

89
. In
The Bluesmen
(Oak, 1967).

90
. James was rather readier for the world than House, by all accounts: legend has it that after both men had performed, House’s
rediscoverers approached James’s and conceded that ‘we found the wrong guy’.

91
.
The History of the Blues: the Roots, the Music, the People from Charley Patton to Robert Cray
, by Francis Davis (Secker & Warburg,
1995).

92
. In his liner-note to the Jimmy Reed compilation
Upside Your Head
(Charly CRB 1003), whence also cometh the above diary extract.

93
. Kenny Lynch was a jack-of-all-trades who darted between singing, song-writing, acting and comedy. His peak musical achievement came in 1965,
when he and Mort Shuman co-composed ‘Sha La La La Lee’, a No. 1 hit for Don Arden’s protégés The Small Faces. For no apparent reason, he received a knighthood in the
early ’70s.

94
. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1998.

95
. In
Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday
(Viking, 1994).

96
. The novel was by Max Miller; the movie, directed by James Cruze and starring Ben Lyon and Claudette Colbert, was – according to Pauline
Kael in
5001 Nights At The Movies
(Hamish Hamilton, 1982) – ‘a commonplace romantic melodrama’ which nevertheless included ‘some strong, memorable scenes’.

97
. Not that it matters, but the Creation were actually quite an interesting band. Briefly perceived as potentially serious challengers to the Who,
they proudly proclaimed, ‘Our music is red . . . with purple flashes’ and mounted a spectacular stage show in which guitarist Eddie Phillips sawed away at his guitar with a violin bow
(
way
before Jimmy Page) whilst singer Kenny Pickett frantically spray-painted giant paper backdrops. Their first single, ‘Making Time’, occupied the no-mans-land between
proto-psychedelia and proto-punk with crunching surliness, and their second, ‘Painter Man’, was almost as good, but neither reached the UK Top 30, and the group broke up. ‘Painter
Man’ subsequently resurfaced as a ’70s disco hit for producer Frank Farian’s protégés Boney M . . . but I digress.

98
. Quoted in
Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Postwar Pop
(Faber & Faber, 1989).

99
. The archivist who supplied the author with a copy of this particular clipping has appended the scribbled comment: ‘Blues fans! Dontcha
just love ’em?’ Say no more.

100
. The reader is once again referred to Dixon and Snowden’s
I Am The Blues
(Quartet, 1989).

101
. Bass couldn’t be referring to Howlin’ Wolf by any chance, could he?

102
. Twice, as it happens: once for Bernard Besman and once (as ‘Johnny Williams’) for Idessa Malone’s Staff label.

103
. Scorchingly revived by James Brown in 1961.

104
. I am not making this up. Honest.

105
. A textbook example of the Hookerization process, this demonstrates as effectively as anything in Hooker’s repertoire the manner in
which his ‘organic sampling’ approach to composition is a precursor of hip-hop’s approach to production. This notion will be explored in greater depth in the next chapter.

106
. The notion that the guy in ‘Bourbon’ could well be the same protagonist as that of ‘House Rent’ (albeit in its
‘boogie’ rather than ‘blues’ incarnation) was not lost on Hooker’s admirer George Thorogood, who incorporated large chunks of the ‘House Rent’ narrative
into the splendid version of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ which graces his 1977 debut album. ‘He told me he was gonna do that,’ says Hooker, ‘and I said,
“Okay, go ahead.”’

107
. Marcus Gray posits, in his
Last Gang In Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash
(4th Estate, 1995) that the MC5’s version of
‘Motor City Is Burning,’ included on
Kick Out The Jams
(Elektra, 1968), provided the inspiration for ‘London’s Burnin’, a key song from The Clash’s
eponymous 1977 debut album. The Clash song subsequently lent its title to a long-running British TV drama series celebrating the capital’s firefighters.

108
. Subsequently recycled by Ed Ward in
Michael Bloomfield: The Rise And Fall of an American Guitar Hero
(Cherry Lane, 1983).

109
. In this writer’s admittedly warped perspective,
Blues Is King
is actually superior to
Live At The Regal
: it was recorded
in a club rather than a theatre, with a correspondingly higher-voltage audience contact, and B.B. had a particularly fabulous guitar sound going that night. This is a minority viewpoint, but please
feel free to obtain both albums and compare them at your leisure.

110
. Published in 1974 by Eddison Press as part of their BluesBooks series.

111
. Not to mention between ‘form’ and ‘content’, but that’s another argument.

112
. Alternative Boogie: Early Studio Recordings 1948–1952 (Capitol Blues Collection, 1996).

113
. Any Miles Davis fan should be able to tell you that. When Charlie Parker hired a fragile, inexperienced young Miles to replace Dizzy
Gillespie – who unlike Miles could boast flawless execution and a terrifying command of the upper register of his instrument – in his quintet, a whole bunch of people, by no means all
of them white, thought Parker’d finally flipped. ‘Miles can hardly play,’ they said. So much for the experts.

114
.
The New Yorker
, November 14, 1983; reprinted in Kael’s collection
State of the Art
(Arena, 1987).

115
.
Op. cit.

116
. Italics mine.

117
. Interviewed by Jas Obrecht,
Guitar Player
, November 1992. Elaborating on this theme, Cooder explained to the producers of
Hooker’s BBC-TV mini-special that he had enjoyed comparatively little previous success trying to figure out how to reproduce what Hooker was playing on record. ‘I never got anywhere
until, a couple of years later, I picked up the banjo, began to play it and it was always in G-tuning. I began to see these chord progressions and these notes occur in the G-tuning, so I started to
tune my guitar like that. I went back to the record, pulled the record out and said ‘Ah,
here
it is’. Here’s the notes and the chords, and you just had to sit there and
figure it out. That led me into the idea of tuning the instrument to chords, which nowadays seems like a simple and obvious enough thing. Back in those days, that was a major discovery for me: in
fact, the first major discovery I made on my own without being taught.’

118
. About whom your humble servant is ashamed to admit he knows nada.

119
. This pair were also great favourites of the mighty Howlin’ Wolf, as it happens.

120
. Chuck Berry’s revved-up, justly celebrated tongue-twister ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ is built on a ‘Bottle Up And
Go’ chassis.