Boogie Man

by Charles Shaar Murray

  So anyway, the interview is completed, everybody shakes hands all over again, and Hooker and a recent acquaintance wander down to street level to wait until Hooker’s nephew Archie – Hooker’s live-in chauffeur, chef and butler – retrieves the cream Lincoln Town Car with the DOC HOOK vanity plate from the multi-storey car-park across the street. Unfortunately, there is some sort of inexplicable delay, and for nearly five minutes now, Hooker has just been left there, hanging on the corner. At first, this was no hardship: his public arrived. First one, then a couple more, then finally whole knots of people have begun to recognise him; their jaws dropping with awe as if some creature out of legend, like a centaur or unicorn, had suddenly appeared right before their eyes, casually lounging against a wall sluicing from a carton of fresh-squeezed OJ. ‘Are you John Lee Hooker?’ they ask reverently. Hooker smiles seraphically. He presses the flesh – gently though, of course – he murmurs greetings but, nevertheless, the stress begins to look like it’s getting to him. Something unpredictable and unforeseen has happened. A situation has developed over which he seems to have no control. He is powerless. In real terms, of course, he is in no danger whatsoever. Even if Archie and the Lincoln had been somehow sucked into a black hole and vanished completely off the face of San Francisco only to reappear some where near Betelgeuse in the late twenty-fourth century, all Hooker would have to do would be to drop a dime and call the Rosebud Agency, and in ten minutes or thereabouts, someone would have arrived to attend to his every need. He turns to his bemused companion, some English guy he barely knows who’s a stranger to San Francisco, and pulls him by the sleeve, pointing into the car park’s exit, right into the gaping maw from which the cars emerge back onto the street.

  ‘G-go up there look for Archie,’ he orders, ‘fuh-find out where he at.’

  Obediently, the Brit shambles off to locate the errant Lincoln and, not surprisingly, achieves little more than a few hair’s-breadth escapes from sudden death as an assortment of cars – none of them the Hookmobile – zoom within inches of him. Fortunately, Archie reappears, Lincoln intact, before there’s any permanent damage to safety or sanity, and Hooker clambers thankfully back into the comfortable, familiar environment of his car. Hooker loves cars, even though he hasn’t driven one himself for years, and he’ll buy a new one at the drop of a Homburg. The stereo is playing a tape of one of John’s own albums. John likes to listen to his own music – oh yeah – and through just about any conversation he’ll keep an ear cocked to the tape, ready to repeat and emphasize any lyrical sally of which he is particularly fond or proud, either echoing the intonation of his recorded voice or responding to it. Normally, to say that someone loves the sound of their own voice is tantamount to an accusation of being the kind of raving egomaniac or rampant solipsist that Hooker so patently isn’t. He literally does love the sound of his own voice; he’d love it just as much if it were somebody else’s, and he considers his proprietorship of that voice a ‘blessing’ from the Supreme Being; a blessing to be celebrated with all due humility. This album playing now isn’t one of the ones which blues buffs or Hooker aficionados consider to be one of his classics; far from it. Free Beer and Chicken is a gooey psychedelic-soul confection dating from the artistic nadir of the early ’70s, when he was signed to a major corporate record label whose pursuit of the rock-fan’s dollar gracelessly shoe-horned him into a succession of ever-more contrived and inappropriate progressive-rock studio formats. However, even though Hooker himself has little good to say of this particular phase of his recorded career, he picks this album for in-car listening over and above his recognized masterpieces. For over a week, this has been the tape that has kicked in whenever John Lee has set loafer-shod foot past his own front door.

  When he’s making one of his rare forays into downtown San Francisco, or paying a quick visit to the bank – Archie claims John Lee has opened an account at every local bank where he’s ever spotted a good-looking female cashier – or picking up a visitor from the airport, or travelling to a concert, this music is what wafts him there and brings him back. For in-car entertainment, at least, he prefers it to both the reverberant, itchy-foot Detroit recordings which form the foundation-stones of his legend, and the triple-distilled, oak-barrelled mellowness of his contemporary hits. A considerable part of Free Beer’s appeal is that it features the virtuoso Fender electric piano of John’s second son Robert, once the youngest member of John Lee’s touring band and now a minister back in Detroit, out of ‘the world’ and the blues life for good. The same album plays again when John heads out to visit his tailor. It’s been a long time – a decade and a half, easily, since anybody’s seen Hooker in anything other than those smart pinstripe suits: so where does he get ’em? If he so desired, he could easily become a valued customer of Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Paul Smith or even – if he was feeling exceptionally adventurous and fancied the built-in nipple-clamps – Jean-Paul Gaultier. He could shop at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, or any number of fine establishments in London’s Savile Row or Rome’s Via Veneto. He can certainly afford it, and if there’s one thing that a celebrity designer truly loves, it’s a celebrity customer. Nevertheless, John Lee prefers to shop at H. Jon’s, a Jewish tailor based at a shopping mall from hell in Oakland, California; an hour or so’s drive from his home in a cosy San Francisco Bay Area dormitory town named Redwood City.

  Oakland is where John Lee first settled when he relocated from Detroit to northern California almost three decades ago, and it’s where several members of his family still live. The accusation that black celebrities ‘lose touch with the ghetto’ when they make enough money to move out is a common accusation, but a short-sighted one. Unless, like Bob Marley or Ice-T, they simply ‘move the ghetto uptown’ with them, or unless they make so much money that they can afford to move their entire communities with them – or unless they do literally turn their backs on everyone they used to know – the black celeb remains keenly aware of how the less fortunate live. They have relatives and friends still out there where, with each passing day, the jobs grow scarcer and the crack houses more plentiful. John Lee still shops in Oakland, because H. Jon provides friendly personal service, and at least has the merit of being local and therefore easily accessible. The mall is eerily reminiscent of similar establishments in Warsaw under Communism; there, even those who were, by bourgeois Western standards, not over-burdened with liquid capital could afford most of what was on display, except that they wouldn’t want the stuff even – as they say – at any price. This is where poor people shop, and by prevailing community standards, H. Jon’s is Armani, Versace and Savile Row.

  Jon’s range includes just about everything the well-dressed blues singer could desire. If you crave eyeball-threatening big-collared polyester shirts in acidic lime green or vintage Bridget Riley-style op-art, you got it. If you need a double-knit cream-coloured leisure suit with mildly flared pants, seek ye no further. If there’s an acute shortage of patent-leather tasselled loafers in your life, consider your problem solved. For younger patrons, there’s a selection of ‘X’ baseball caps and T-shirts, red-green-and-gold leather pendants in the shape of the African continent, and thinly gold-plated chains which might just fool a hardcore gangbanger at fifty paces if he happened to be on the pipe at the time. For John Lee Hooker, there are rich, soft bolts of the pinstriped broadcloths and slate-blue mohairs he favours, and H. Jon himself ready and waiting to cut suits to John’s measure, or to alter an off-the-peg item until it’s guaranteed to fit to perfection. Plus there are unlimited supplies of star-spangled socks, Hooker’s most distinctive sartorial fetish. Apart from anything else, H. Jon has the merit of familiarity and reliability. Such dependability represents one of the most important aspects of Hooker’s life: comfort, continuity, stability and, above all, trustworthiness. Familiar objects, familiar people, familiar foods, familiar clothes: they all serve to anchor and orient him. They’re the signposts by which he navigates.

  By way of contrast, he displays little mo
re permanent attachment to his homes than he does to his cars. He never seems to have less than two houses at a time; one principal dwelling-place which serves as a permanent open house to family, friends and acquaintances alike, and one bolt-hole elsewhere to which he retreats when he’s had enough of the pressure and clamour inevitably generated by his legions of invited, semi-invited and downright uninvited guests. Right now, the pleasant bungalow in whitebread suburban Redwood City is his main place of residence, supplanting a six-bedroom ranch-style spread in Vallejo, the other side of the bay, which had become a virtual bunkhouse for band members and assorted friends and hangers-on. The Redwood City location was originally chosen for its close, easy proximity to San Francisco airport, a mere twenty-minute drive away, and to the city of San Francisco itself, just a few additional miles further down the freeway. Hooker’s home is in a comfortable little close, at the far end of a long hilly avenue. There’s nothing distinctive about the outside of the house, other than the cars – the cream Lincoln, a black Cadillac Brougham (vanity plate: LES BOGY), and Archie’s roadworn Cadillac De Ville – but inside it’s a different story. There’s lush cream carpet in which you can practically lose your shoes, comfortable matching sofas and easy chairs, a great big fat cat called – inevitably – Fluffy, and cream-papered walls covered in plaques and awards, citations and honours, framed original prints of portraits of the distinguished occupant.

  ‘Look on my wall,’ commands Hooker. ‘What do you see? You see the awards and the gold records, trophies . . . all them years brought me that. That hard road. You heard the song say “I ain’t goin’ down that big road by myself”? I went down by myself. That brought me all of this, but I don’t let that, you know, go to my head. It just something that I achieve, that I want people to look at when they come into my home.’

  There are gold discs and silver discs from a half-dozen different territories, commemorating the substantial sales of The Healer and Mr Lucky: 50,000 here, and 100,000 there. Over in the corner, behind the dining table, is a rack of award statuettes: W.C. Handy awards, Bay Area Music awards, and – of course – John’s 1990 Grammy, the one he and Bonnie Raitt shared for their ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’ duet from The Healer. Here’s a huge framed photo of John Lee and Bonnie on their night of triumph, clutching their Grammies. There’s a reproduction of John’s ad for Remy Martin cognac. John, of course, no longer drinks cognac, and even back in his drinking days he was a Courvoisier man. Nearby there’s a gold disc and matching gold cassette awarded for sales of George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone album, which included a version of John Lee’s ‘Boogie Chillen’. And everywhere are photos of John Lee with his peer group. With B.B. King, with Albert King, with Albert Collins, with Carlos Santana and Bill Graham, with Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan; and, more recently, Hooker and Mike Kappus with Bill Clinton. On the mantelpiece is a framed clipping of a lead story from Rolling Stone’s ‘Random Notes’ section, reporting John Lee’s Atlantic City guest appearance with the Rolling Stones during their 1989 ‘Steel Wheels’ tour. The page features two principal photographs, each depicting one of the head Stones cavorting with their most suitably matched star guest. In one shot, John Lee is shown grooving with Keith Richards, standing up for a change as he leads the ensemble, which on this occasion also includes Eric Clapton, through a hectic ‘Boogie Chillen’. In the other, Mick Jagger appears buddying up to the microphone with Guns N’ Roses’ ‘troubled’ lead singer, Axl Rose.

  Then there’s some serious hi-fi and a matching TV, video, cable and satellite system; not one of those ostentatious projection jobs, but nevertheless boasting more than respectable screen acreage. It gets more use than the hi-fi, which occasionally pumps out some of Hooker’s vintage recordings, or tapes of recent recordings by various members of his inner circle, but mainly it remains silent while the TV blasts movies or sport. Lately, John Lee’s grown fond of screening a recently-assembled stash of his own videos, and visitors are likely to be regaled with the promo clips for his own recent singles from The Healer or Mr Lucky, or that in-concert ‘Boogie Chillen’ workout with Clapton and the Stones, or – delving back into the archives – Hooker’s celebrated spot from the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival with the Muddy Waters Band rocking right behind him. Rarer still is a flickering, washed-out late-’60s clip from some local Detroit TV show featuring Hooker, in dashiki and black leather pillbox hat, perched on a stool performing ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’ with his teenage son Robert comping, hunched studiously over the key board of the Wurlitzer organ his dad bought him.

  Off to one side is a narrow corridor, also lined with plaques, posters and awards, from which the bedrooms and bathroom branch off. The first one you pass is a small one, all bed, closets and framed photos, which is occupied by Archie; at the end are two facing doors. The left-hand room is occasionally occupied by John’s god-daughter Crystal; the other is the master bedroom which is the ultimate refuge for John himself. It has its own luxury-size TV and video, permanently tuned to a satellite sports channel, its own toilet and water cooler; capacious closets for all his suits, and for his small but impressive collection of Gibson and Epiphone guitars. Hooker owns a couple of tobacco-sunburst Gibson ES-335s, one the workhorse instrument he has used since the early ’70s and the other a newer model presented to him by Carlos Santana; the cherry-red mid-’60s Epiphone Sheraton with which he poses on the cover of Mr Lucky; and a spanking-new cherry-red Gibson B.B. King ‘Lucille’ signature model which he used when sitting in with the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles. And, of course, there’s Old Blondie. Old Blondie is the only one of his guitars about which Hooker is sentimental: she’s the big-bodied, single-cutaway Epiphone Broadway which Hooker acquired in the late ’50s and carried with him everywhere for the next decade and a half. Blondie doesn’t travel anymore; the 335s are the working guitars. The old one, in standard tuning, is the one Hooker uses for the bulk of each performance; the Santana guitar, tuned up to open A, is reserved for the closing boogies. But unless there’s work to be done, or unless a visitor requests a guided tour of the guitar collection, the closet is where they stay. Hooker doesn’t sit around the house playing the guitar, let alone strumming in a rocking chair on his back porch.

  Meanwhile, there’s nearly always something cooking in Archie’s tiled, open-plan kitchen. Only on particular ceremonial occasions are meals consumed at any particular set time; sometimes it seems as if the entire day consists of people wandering in and out helping themselves to microwaved leftovers from the previous evening’s feast, or improvised snacks from the fridge, or to the freshly prepared delicacies du jour. The cuisine is the kind of Southern soul food that you don’t get in restaurants, the kind of stuff you only ever get to taste if you’re fortunate enough to get your knees under the table of someone who learned their culinary chops down home. There’s cornbread to die for. Fish, baked in foil, fresh from the Bay. Ribs from heaven. Chicken from hell. A colander of turnip greens sprinkled with chunks of fatback done . . . just . . . right. Peach or pun’kin pie. Mmmmwah! (The one thing you’ll never find on the menu chez Hooker, though, is lamb. You’d be more likely to find beef served in a Hindu home, or pork at a Muslim’s table. For John Lee and Archie, both raised as Baptists, the lamb is quite literally holy, and to cook and eat its meat would be utter anathema, a blasphemous offence against the Lamb of God.) Some times Archie, in affectionate exasperation, wishes out loud that he could plan his menus far enough ahead to allow him to do a week’s worth of shopping at one time, but John Lee only decides what he wants to eat about two or three hours before he’s fixing to be ready to eat it. Sometimes even then he changes his mind, and a raiding party gets dispatched to ‘The Colonel’s’ – that’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, to folks not born and raised in the South – for buckets of chicken and fries and mashed potato and biscuits and gravy.

  And it’s warm. Somewhere along the line, Hooker developed a marked aversion to being cold, and – as someone raised in the heat of the South – he define
s ‘cold’ very differently from those accustomed to cooler climes. Sometimes the temperature in the Hooker home reaches the eighties. ‘Well, I lived in Detroit so long in the winter that when I come out here I was used to the heat,’ he explains. ‘Back in Detroit it didn’t bother me at all, cold weather. I used to shovel my car out, take my kids to school. Got out here, I just . . . I guess my blood got thin. Don’t like cool weather no more.’

  Everything’s laid back at John’s house. It’s mellow. Everything’s cool. Everything’s easy, just the way John likes it. There’s no hustle, no hurry-up. Everything happens when it’s supposed to: not earlier, not later. The only surprises are pleasant ones. No-one shouts at any body else. No-one quarrels with anybody else. No-one gets angry or uptight or loud. There are comparatively few house rules, and as long as those rules are obeyed, everybody has a good time, all the time. Anyone can take a drink – they can help themselves to a little nip from John’s well-stocked liquor cabinet, or if they so desire they can fetch in a case of beer or a bottle of wine from one of the nearby stores – but noticeable intoxication is frowned upon, and regular display of its symptoms constitutes grounds for withdrawal of visiting privileges. Ever since John Lee himself abandoned tobacco, under no circumstances does anybody smoke in the house. John Lee’s health in general (and his increasingly delicate throat in particular) is the house hold’s most precious asset, and therefore a total-exclusion smoke-free zone is rigorously maintained within the four walls. However, if you should happen to crave a cigarette, all you got to do is step over the threshold, and then you can smoke to your heart’s content. Similarly, it’s not a major problem if a visitor feels like enhancing the joys of a warm summer evening by blowing a little weed in the back yard, but anybody foolish enough to bring serious drugs anywhere near the premises will find themselves under extremely heavy manners. That shit has done too much damage to too many of John’s nearest and dearest for it to be anything but banned. Above all, Hooker’s Law states that anybody who steps into the house is required to display courtesy and respect to everybody else on the set.