‘I’m a crawlin’ king snake,’ sings Hooker in one of his signature songs, ‘and I rules my den.’ How does he rule his real-life den? Like a benevolent patriarch who issues few direct orders anymore, because his wants and needs are so clearly established that they no longer need to be stated. The only thing he lacks is privacy: his door is literally always open. Like this one time, a few months later: John was sitting on the sofa chatting to an acquaintance, laughing over some of the misconceptions surrounding him and his career, and the degree of attachment which many people bring to pet misconceptions, based on an over-literal assumption that all Hooker’s lyrics are directly autobiographical. The one about the freight train, for example, from ‘Hobo Blues’. That’s one of Hooker’s most affecting performances, the one that begins ‘When I first started hoboin’, I took a freight train to be my friend, oh lord . . .’ And ever since he cut it, it’s been trotted out as an article of faith that Hooker spent years as a hobo, riding the blinds on the Southern freights. ‘I never rode a freight train!’ he insists, laughing.
‘Oh John, it’s such a great story,’ replies the acquaintance. ‘How can you spoil it for everyone?’
‘I would never spoil it,’ ripostes Hooker, laughing all the harder. ‘Go right ahead and say it! That’ll ruin they ego, they illusions. Tell ’em I rode all over the world, freight trains here, there . . . got shot on freight trains, broke my leg on freight trains . . . tell ’em all that! They likes all that!’
‘Tell ’em you robbed a freight train,’ interposes Martin Thompson, lounging in a nearby armchair. Martin is a big, iron-pumped guy with a droopy moustache, a lazy grin and a deadpan sense of humour. He started out as a handyman, doing some work on one of John’s houses, and the two men hit it off to the extent that Martin graduated to being John’s deputy driver and occasional bodyguard. He and Archie are taking a beer-cooled break from the arduous task of varnishing the hardwood floor of the living room’s lower level, when suddenly a truck door slams outside.
‘Oh God,’ breathes Hooker. ‘Jeff.’
We’re calling this particular guy Jeff because it’s not his real name. He’s one of those people Hooker just meets, and he seems to have become semi-permanent. It could have been at the vet’s surgery while getting some essential maintenance work done on Fluffy, because Jeff’s dog had been run over by a careless driver and needed considerable veterinary work, and Hooker – who likes to think of himself as being tough and hard-headed about money but in fact seems to end up putting his hand in his newly capacious pocket for the benefit of at least half the people he knows – wound up footing the pooch’s bills. Bearded, plaid-clad, long-haired, baseball-capped Jeff is hugely amiable and essentially harmless, but undeniably a touch on the weird side. For example, he has this story that he regularly insists on telling: apparently before they got famous the Beatles flew John Lee to London for a whole year so that he could teach them guitar, and it was only after John Lee thought they were ready that they made their first records. So why hasn’t this story ever been told before? Easy; it was hushed up. And they paid John a lot of money not to tell anybody.
So here’s Jeff tramping up the front garden path and before you know it, there’s a whole family of complete strangers standing over John in his sofa, and a thickset blind guy is shaking hands with John, telling him that he’s been a big, big fan since forever and it’s a real thrill. Seems Jeff met these people somewhere, mentioned that he knew John, asked if they felt like meeting him, and here they are. So they all shake hands, and then John tells Jeff that he’s busy – which he’s not, particularly – and that they’ll all get together soon. And so Jeff leads them all out again.
‘This kid Jeff, he’s a nice kid but he’s a pest,’ sighs Hooker once the coast is clear, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. ‘You know me, I’m a very easy-going, quiet person. I’m just a softie. I don’t tell ’em to go to hell or get out or nothin’; I don’t do that. A lotta stars, they couldn’t even get in the house, but I’m not like that. That blind guy, he really nice. A lot of ’em nice. This Jeff kid nice. They all be nice. But . . .’
Exactly. But. John Lee – as he never tires of repeating – loves people. All people. All kinds of people. People in general, and people in particular. But . . . that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wants all of them in his house, all the time. However, sometimes that’s what he gets. So, while we’re briefly looking ahead to spring, imagine a quiet Saturday night in Redwood City. Tell you the truth, it’s moderately difficult to imagine any other kind of Saturday night in Redwood City, but on this particular Saturday evening, the only real option seems to be to call up a mutual friend to hustle a lift over to John Lee’s house. It’ll be mellow. It’ll be so nice and laid back. Just sit around, watch a movie or a game, pop a couple of lite beers, chit-chat a little and kick back.
To start with, that’s just exactly how it goes down. There’s something fairly inconsequential like a Karate Kid movie on TV, and John is recounting Albert King’s riposte to a female fan who asked if she could take his picture – ‘Buy my album, there’s a picture of me on the cover!’ – when there’s a crunch of miscellaneous footsteps outside, and craziness walks in. First of all, there’s a hardbodied bleach-blonde woman in an elaborate black leather and PVC ensemble, waving a bottle of tequila and screaming in an ersatz Southern accent. By comparison, Madonna comes across like a morbidly prim Victorian schoolgirl. Because it’s not her name, let’s call her Cathy. It later turns out that during the week, Cathy is a seriously high-powered business whiz in San Francisco, holding down an extremely responsible and gruelling job involving eleven-hour days, seven-figure budgets and entire floorsful of people reporting to her. During the week, she works out conscientiously, she touches not one drop of alcohol, she is the precise, rigorous, disciplined, supremely organized Ms Jekyll. Guess who emerges at the weekend. Following in her wake is a bemused-looking, guffawing, denim-clad high-school kid with a blond shag-cut and a wispy moustache; two quiet and extremely obese women in stretch slacks, cardigans and training shoes; and assorted others whose best bet for weekend fun is to hang out at the home of the world’s most accessible superstar. Instant party. In fact, Cathy is a party all by herself: laughing and screaming like a jam session between a hyena and an air-raid siren, strutting and stomping in her stilettos, teasing everybody in the room in enthusiastic parodies of their own accents, she steals the show from The Karate Kid. Soon the TV is silenced, replaced by a rocking Albert Collins tape. She even starts flirting with Hooker’s Brit acquaintance, despite the fact that he is the kind of pallid-skinned muscle-free zone not generally considered attractive in California.
Hooker delivers polite, cordial greetings and encourages everybody to make themselves at home, but within moments he’s disappeared, barricading himself in his bedroom at the back of the house with his TV and his telephone. An hour or so passes, the noise level mounts and suddenly – brrriiinnnnggg! – there’s an insistent ring on Archie’s private telephone line. It’s John Lee, calling from the back room, demanding that the noise be held down. Fortunately, a natural break in the proceedings soon occurs as the booze runs out. Cathy threatens to drive out and pick up fresh supplies of beer and tequila and come right back to continue the festivities, but she’s eventually persuaded to gather up her entourage and seek her next round of wild delights elsewhere, preferably somewhere a long way out of John Lee’s earshot. The following morning, Archie and Martin ruefully assess the damage to the still-soft varnish of the hardwood floor. The varnished surface they’d so painstakingly applied, coat by coat, only two or three days before is now scarred with hundreds of tiny, shallow bullet-pocks, each one the approximate size of a stiletto heel. ‘No more fat broads,’ they announce, but it’s another couple of days before anyone remembers that the ‘fat broads’ had been not only trainer-clad but as quiet as a pair of admittedly generously-sized mice. The ‘fat broads’ probably won’t be back. But Cathy will. After all, she’s a friend.
&nbs
p; The regular cast of characters chez John is a fascinating one, and we may well meet more of them later on. However, right now we’ve got a show to go to, and we don’t want to be late
Christmas is coming, and John Lee is playing his major hometown showcase of the season. As its name might suggest, the 600-capacity Great American Music Hall is tricked out in velvet-plush Victorian kitsch. Archie rolls the Lincoln in with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a walkie-talkie into which he’s talking quietly and urgently, making sure that the pavement is clear, the parking space is free, and the side door is open so that John Lee can disembark as smoothly and easily as possible. Inside, the band is assembled at rather more than full strength. The elusive Deacon Jones is back, there being no other activities with a prior claim on his attention, and so is his wife’s T-shirt stall. Deacon Jones is a screwdriver-jiver and a half: slick, loud, impossible to ignore on or off stage. In contrast to the laid-back hippie demeanour of his colleagues, Jones is dressed up to the nines and beyond; a vision of elegance in his crisp pin-stripes, snowy French cuffs with gold cufflinks, tie pierced with a diamond stickpin, and an immaculate black Homburg hat easily the match of Hooker’s perched on his head. He seems to have some friends with him: the basement dressing-room designated for the band is full of mustachioed guys in major hats, commandeering the table, pulling tricksy one-hand river-boat-gambler shuffles with their decks of cards, and saying things like ‘My name is Jake and your money I’ll take.’ Even with Jones back in the band, his replacement Lizz Fischer is still around, celebrating the season by topping off her Little Black Dress with a jauntily drooping red Father Christmas cap. As it turned out, her fears concerning the precise nature of her role as Hooker’s companion during that summer’s New York sojourn had been entirely unfounded. She’d occupied the hotel room next to John Lee, all that had been required of her was her company, and she’d had a hugely enjoyable time.
Yep, ’tis the season of good will; yep, John Lee is headlining a major San Francisco venue of the kind that he works during his increasingly infrequent road trips, as opposed to the unadvertised small-club gigs he normally plays in the Bay Area, both to stay in shape and help out the friends who run his favourite bars. But there’s something else that’s very special about the show tonight: if you caught sight of the Music Hall’s marquee on the way in you’ll have noticed the other name on the bill. It’s a family affair: tonight’s opening act is Zakiya Hooker.
Zakiya is John Lee’s Number Two daughter. Originally christened ‘Vera’, she subsquently changed her name to something she felt suited her better. She’s a tiny little woman with a slick cap of hair that looks as if it had been painted across her head with a single stroke, and if you saw her only from a distance you might be tempted to describe her as ‘doll-like’. Close-up, though, the warmth and mobility of her mouth and the humour and pain in her eyes would wither the word on your lips. She is in her early forties, though most people would find it hard to reconcile her hip, youthful appearance with her chronological age unless they were shown a birth certificate first. Tonight she’s making her major-league debut, fronting a bandled and directed by her partner Ollan Christopher, formerly a member of the Natural Four, a vocal group who used to record for Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago-based soul set-up, Curtom Records. However, this is more than a simple coming-out party for a late-blooming ‘new artist’, even one who happens to be related to the headliner. Just a few weeks previously, Zakiya had lost her youngest son, John Sylvester, in a road accident. By all accounts, he’d been a lovable, sparky teenage kid; for his entire life a favourite of all who knew him. His doting granddad’s friends adored him, too.
‘His grandson must’ve been about five years old, and John used to bring him over to see me,’ recalled B.B. King. ‘For some reason, his little grandson, named John, like his grandfather, liked me. I don’t know why, but he took up with me, seemed to like me, and John knew it. So every time he would come or I’m near him, he’d always bring little John. And when little John got old enough and big enough, he would ask [John Lee] to take him to see me. And then, about a year or so ago, I had a call from John telling me that his grandson had been killed in an automobile accident.’ The Coast To Coast Blues Band have their own memories of that awful night. John Lee was playing a low-key show at his favourite club, The Sweetwater in Marin County, and he was given the terrible news of young John’s death only seconds before showtime. His face just closed up like a fist be fore, as Rich Kirch remembers, ‘he hit that stage . . . rockin’’.
By all accounts, it was the one of the most powerful shows anyone could recall him playing. When Hooker found himself tumbling into a moment of deep, intense personal sorrow and agony, his music was there to catch him, to bind the wound, to enable the Healer to begin the painful, wrenching process of healing himself. And tonight it is Zakiya’s turn to face the world from her father’s stage, to assert her position as her father’s daughter and her son’s mother, and to dedicate herself, slowly and haltingly, to the new future towards which those relationships steer her as she begins her life afresh. Her show is more significant this particular night for what it represents than for what it is; a few harsh words are exchanged after the band comes offstage, and the line-up is radically reshaped shortly afterwards. Reminded of this occasion some two years later, after Zakiya has her first solo album under her belt and her second one halfway to completion, Ollan Christopher is happy to dismiss it. ‘Different artist,’ he says, with crunching finality, but the artist Zakiya is now could not exist without standing on the shoulders of the artist she was then.
To someone who had never seen him before, John Lee’s show would be a revelation. To someone more familiar with his set, it’s a better-than-okay night which definitely has its moments. Vala Cupp flutters around him like a thirsty butterfly hovering over a succulent plant when they duet a feverish ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’; a puffy-eyed Gregg Allman sits in – on guitar, as it happens – to perform what he evidently expects to be a marathon version of T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday Blues’, only to find John Lee bringing the song to a close, some what irritably, after a single verse and a couple of solos. A stalwart young woman with a baritone sax flanks Kenny Baker on tenor, providing the band with the rich thickness of an actual brass section. The textures created by the blend of Lizz Fischer’s deep-rolling piano and Deacon Jones’s exuberant Hammond organ are almost obscenely luxurious, and the climactic boogie – Jones launching great washes of Hammond that threaten to drown the audience in funk – induces a joyful, sweat-slick meltdown that blows the last remaining particles of dust off the mock-Victorian velvet seats in the balcony.
A good job well done, in other words. Backstage again, Hooker greets his final flock of visitors as regally as ever before settling back into the Lincoln for his forty-minute ride home. Before the car clears the city limits, his eyelids begin to droop. He is fast asleep well before the headlights lick on the street-sign reading ‘Hastings Avenue’.
5
WHEN I FIRST COME TO TOWN, PEOPLE
When I first come to town, people,
I was walkin’ down Hastings Street,
Everybody talkin’ ’bout Henry’s Swing Club,
I decided to drop in there that night.
When I got there,
I said ‘Yes, people, yes,’
They were really havin’ a ball.
Yes, I know . . .
Boogie, chillen!
John Lee Hooker, ‘Boogie Chillen’, 1948
Nineteen and forty, babe: halfway round the world, thousands of miles away, the Nazis were on the march and Europe was awash in blood and terror. Closer to home, John Lee Hooker was desperate to join the US Army. These particular circumstances were, however, entirely unconnected. Like the vast majority of Americans at that time, Hooker was sublimely unconcerned with the geopolitical implications of imminent American intervention in a distant foreign war. His desire to enter the armed forces had rather more to do with the strangely ap
hrodisiac effect that military uniforms seemed to exert on the local girls.
Hooker had but recently arrived in Detroit from Cincinnati: he had a little money in his pocket and, for the first time, he hadn’t had to hitch-hike. ‘I’d heard about all these big things in Detroit. The Motor City it was then, with the factories and everything, and the money was flowing. You could get a job paying money in any city in the United States, but this was the Motor City. All the cars were being built there. I said, “I’m going there,” and I went. Took me the Greyhound and I went straight to Detroit. Detroit was the city then. Work, work, work, work. Plenty work, good wages, good money at that time.’ He soon settled in, finding himself a job as an usher at the Park Theatre, and lodgings with a rather friendlier landlady than the one he subsequently immortalised in ‘House Rent Boogie.’ ‘She would give parties too, and I would work in the theatre and come down play on the weekend, Saturday night parties. It was nothin’ but work goin’ on there.’ Unfortunately, Hooker’s cosy Detroit applecart was soon upset. ‘When I come to town I had a girlfriend and I lost her. The army was a big thing; the soldiers became heroes and when they come into town all the girls was flocking up to them. She just flocked up to those soldiers, and I said, “I’m going to go to the army.” I went in on account of girls. They wanted a uniform. Guys come to the army, come out on a break with the uniform on, girls’d eat ’em up. Now uniforms don’t mean nothin’, but back then, uniforms was a big, big thing. I loved army life because that was the thing: the women would go crazy over an army suit. You get on a suit, you could get any woman, any chick you wanted.’
Boogie Man Page 13