Boogie Man

  By this time, Hooker had gained his first celebrity admirer: none other than the great Aaron ‘T-Bone’ Walker, a Texas-born, Oklahoma-trained guitarist whose influence on postwar Western popular music is almost impossible to underestimate. At the time, according to Hooker, Walker was ‘the hottest thing out there’. The first to adapt the single-string improvisatory flourishes of the progressive country blues guitarists to the electric instrument and juxtapose the resulting joyful noise with the brassy blare of a swing band, Walker created a style and a repertoire which has long outlived him: wherever electric blues guitar is played, you’re still hearing what T-Bone Walker developed in the ’30s and ’40s. His ‘T-Bone Blues’ was first recorded in 1940, and he cut ‘Mean Old World’ and a few others for the then-tiny Los Angeles-based Capitol label in 1942, but it was the seminal sides recorded between 1946 and 1948 for Capitol’s Black & White subsidiary which caused the revolution. In Memphis, the young B.B. King heard Walker’s 1947 recording ‘Stormy Monday Blues’ (aka ‘Call It Stormy Monday’) and went straight out to buy himself an electric guitar. Others like Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Lowell Fulson and Albert King were right behind him, and the word soon spread to hundreds and thousands more. T-Bone’s mellifluous crooning vocals, sly lyrics, dry woody guitar tone and jumping jazzy back drops made him the role model for an entire generation of bluesmen. A former dancer, he was also a hugely extrovert performer, copyrighting many of the guitar-badman stunts (favourite: playing the guitar behind his head while sinking into a perfect splits) which subsequently provided such sterling service for athletic performers like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Guitar Slim, Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Johnny Guitar Watson, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. ‘Stormy Monday’ itself became part of the core repertoire of the blues. Hooker met him at what later became the Rainbow Bar on Hastings Street. At that time it was Sporty Reed’s Show Bar; subsequently immortalized as ‘Sportree’s’ in some of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit-set novels. ‘T-Bone was playin’ there,’ remembers Eddie Burns, ‘because they used to bring a lotta out-of-town acts into that club. It was a real nice club with padded leather walls.’

  ‘He played there, and he used to take me there with him,’ says Hooker. ‘I’d sit up there and watch him. He put me on the bandstand after the first time I went there, and I like freaked out. Boy, it was a high-class place, y’know, women with evening gowns an’ stuff on . . . and I was just a kid. He give me some liquor and I got on the bandstand . . . “Drink this down, kid.” So I drink it down to build up my nerve, and I had the house a-rockin’. He liked to drink, and he was sittin’ out there drinkin’. He was a stone ladies’ man. He was a ladies’ man. Always was sharp, all the time; stayed dressed up all the time. You never see him in jeans an’ stuff, he always would wear nice suits an’ slacks an’ stuff like that, but he had the money to buy that with. He’d just had “Stormy Monday” and the streets were filled with women, looking for romance. He were just a great man . . . the great T-Bone Walker.’ The great man presented his protégé with a gift that would change his life: his first electric guitar. ‘It was like a gift from God, just like a gift from God, the Supreme Being, handed down from heaven. I tell everybody, “Ol’ T-Bone Walker give me that guitar.” “You’s a liar!” “Oh yes he did! He did too!” “He too big, he’s a big star, he ain’t give you nothin’ like this!” But he was my buddy. He was crazy about me. He liked to call me “kid”. “C’mere, kid. Go do this, kid. Do this for me, kid.” I jumped like a frog an’ do anything he said. I was in love with that man, and followed him around like a little puppy.’

  Hooker was almost 30 years old at the time; he was a father and a three-time husband, yet in most of his anecdotes from this time, people seemed to persist in calling him ‘kid’. ‘Yeah! They were, ’cause I was little and skinny. They called me the Iron Man at one time. The Kid. The Iron Man. “Man, that kid can sing.” I didn’t look old. Till I was forty, forty-five, almost fifty, I looked like twenty-one or -two.’

  Hooker worked hard at his day-jobs and his music alike, and he played hard, too. ‘He and my husband were both big drinkers,’ says Bernethia Bullock. ‘My husband and Johnny and the gang that they were with would come home some nights and I didn’t want the kids to know that my husband had been drinking, so I would sit up and wait for him to come in, and steer him to the bedroom. Sunday morning when they’d wake up, we’d get up, take the kids to church and they didn’t know he’d even had a drink. Sometimes five o’clock in the morning, I didn’t want the neighbours to see ’em coming in. I said, “God, what you going to say about y’all struggling in here at five o’clock in the morning?” He said, “Ain’t nothing they can say, we just been out of town, just getting back in.” It didn’t make Maude no difference, she said some of the time she’d be one place and Johnny would be another and it didn’t make any difference, because she was a nightlifer herself. Me not being a nightlifer, you know, it kind of worried me . . . it was just a little embarrassing to see them coming in that time of morning.’

  Initially, Maude Hooker claims, she didn’t make too much of a fuss about her husband’s new project. ‘Not at the beginning, because I knew that he would have to be workin’ here and there and be out half the night. I understood that and I went along with that, you know. As my kids were born, I stayed home and tried to raise them to the best of my knowledge, that I could. Afterwards it got kinda hard, after the rest of the kids was born.’ Her brother Paul recalls that she wasn’t always quite that sanguine. ‘I recollect a little party, just before he started making records, at this lady’s house – the one that I was friendly with, Lucinda – John was playin’ and we was havin’ a good time. Oh, we was really havin’ a good time. And Maude came in and said, “C’mon John, let’s go.” Well, John was havin’ a good time, and John wasn’t ready to go, so Maude promptly yanked the guitar out of his hands and hit it ’cross the amplifier and broke it into smithereens. She tore it into splinters. I don’t think it was so much that she disapproved of his playing. The disapproval was that there was women there. There was women there, you know what I mean, and they shakin’ it, you know what I mean, and he’s playin’, and that was the disapproval.’

  By 1948, John Lee was beginning to make some real headway. This was just as well, since his and Maude’s second child, Vera, was born on 1 April of that year. He’d also graduated to playing an occasional show at Lee’s Sensation, a slightly more upmarket club than his usual Black Bottom venues. ‘It was a kind of a swinging, classy joint, not really a blues bar’, according to Eddie Burns. ‘Lee’ was the name of the owner and ‘Sensation’ was the name of the club – as Burns remembers it, anyway – but over the years the names of bar and boss have fused to the point where most people, including Hooker, remember both simply as ‘Lee Sensation’. ‘“The Lee Sensation Bar.” That was a nightclub. Nice nightclub, oh yeah. I used to play there for Lee Sensation. That was a high-class club. I played there, I thought I was in heaven. I thought I’d never get to play there. That was on Oakland, on the north end of Detroit. Lee Sensation, he named his club after his name. That was before I recorded . . . that was a long time ago. I wasn’t too famous then. I’d been wanting to play in that bar for a long time, but nothin’ but big people played there, big names and stuff like that. T-Bone Walker and Ivory Joe Hunter, Jackie Wilson, people like that . . . big people. I was so famous around town that he booked me in there.

  ‘It was just a matter of findin’ the break. I got discovered out of a little bar by my manager Elmer Barbee. He was a very good person, very smart. He was mixed Indian and black; very nice, very honest person. He knew how to get ’em. He the one discovered me, playin’ around night clubs, little honkytonk bars, house parties. I had a little trio, I was playing electric guitar.’ Before Maude broke it, one assumes. The trio was filled out by pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster, two musicians who could adapt to Hooker’s rough-hewn, rural approach. ‘I was playing a little bar called the Apex Bar on Monroe Street, and I w
as the talk of the town. Little John Lee Hooker, they would be callin’ me. And he come in there. He made a special trip to come in that bar and see me. He had never seen me, but he had heard of me. He had a little record store on San Antoine and Lafayette, 609 Lafayette, which is long gone. The building was tore down years gone. He was livin’ in the back with his wife and son, and he come down to that place and saw me and he said, “Kid, come down to my record shop. I’m a manager, and you are the best I ever heard.” I said, “Yeah?” and I did, I went down there, and I went on about six months to a year, just recordin’ in the back of his place.’

  ‘There was this record store called Barbee’s,’ says Paul Mathis, ‘with a little studio in the back, and he would go down and try to play, and then nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and try to make another record and nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and make another record and nothin’ never would happen.’

  ‘Nobody knew John Lee Hooker ’cept playin’ at little clubs, no record, nothin’,’ says Hooker. ‘The clubs were packed every night with people wantin’ to see me, but I wasn’t known in the States. I come down to [Barbee’s] place one Wednesday, and we started recordin’ and talkin’ all night, drinkin’ wine and goin’ over these different tunes, ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘Hobo Blues’. Finally, he taken me downtown on Woodward Avenue with all this material to a big place like Tower Records, and the guy had a little label called Sensation . . . Bernie Besman and Johnny Kaplan. They was partners, both of them was big wheels, and they heard the stuff and they went wild and they recorded me.’

  ‘Do you want me to tell you how Hooker got into the picture?’ asks Bernard Besman expansively. ‘I didn’t look for him; he just happened to come in. One of the dealers that we had brought him in. His name was Barbee.’

  To John Lee Hooker, still a country boy at heart despite his years in the big city, Elmer Barbee – or ‘E’ Barbee, as he was also known – was a person of some consequence. To the considerably more worldly Besman, whose business had a million-dollar annual turnover, Barbee was simply ‘a very small record dealer who had a store. These people would come in every day bringing in artists. Barbee said, “Here, I have a terrific blues singer for you and I’d like you to hear him.” He brought John by in person, and he brought a record that John had made in one of those auto . . . those music-machine booths . . . a record made in this quarter machine. I think I got it some where, but I don’t know where it is. I haven’t lost it, because we keep everything. I listened to the record, and it was already practically worn out, and you could hardly hear anything on it. Anyway, he sang “Sally Mae” on that thing, a blues number, and I’d never recorded a blues artist up to that time. Although we were selling the blues and I was familiar with the blues, he didn’t sound like any of the blues artists we were selling. The blues we were selling at that time were like Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers with Charles Brown, T-Bone Walker . . . twelve bars, you know. This was something altogether different that I frankly didn’t understand.

  ‘On top of that, when he sat talking to me, he stuttered. I figured, “Jesus, how can this guy sing for stuttering?” I didn’t believe it was him. I thought, “This guy must be lying. He’s not singing here. This must be a fake.” So I said to Elmer Barbee, “Okay, next time I have a session, bring him over and I’ll make a dub at the studio with him.” So that’s what happened. The reason I recorded him was the fact that he could sing and not stutter. Otherwise I wouldn’t have recorded him. He didn’t mean anything to me.’

  Not surprisingly, Hooker remembers these events from a very different perspective. ‘Me, I brought [Besman] a long ways,’ he says. ‘A long ways. He had a little old label named Sensation Records, a little label right there in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue. Barbee brought me in the store there. I had never met Bernie, I didn’t know him from Adam. Me and Barbee played all those tunes [‘Sally Mae’, ‘Boogie Chillen’ et al] for him and Kaplan right there in the store. Barbee had come in and said, “Man, I got a kid. Discover this kid.” [Besman] know Barbee real good, they was good friends. “Sally Mae”, yeah. Me and Barbee did that in a studio on Lafayette and St Antoine; he had a record store. We would sit there all night . . . we’d be playin’ guitar all night, me’n him, his wife and so on. Then he told me, “I got a friend, Bernie Besman and Johnny Kaplan. I’m gonna take you down to they store; they got a record store and a distributing company there.” Me’n him went down there. They had blanks then: they didn’t have tape recorders, they had wax disks. We recorded [an acetate] on that, we went down there and we played it for them. “Sally Mae”, “Boogie Chillen” . . . I was playin’ that in little old night clubs round then, all the stuff that I recorded I was playin’ around. All the stuff I played for Barbee I was playin’ in parties, nightclubs, the Apex Bar. Barbee would come round nights when I wasn’t playin’, and we would play these tunes: “Boogie Chillen”, “Sally Mae”, “Hobo Blues”, “When My First Wife Left Me”.’

  By the end of World War II, just about every definable section of the American public was ravenously hungry for the new music of which they’d been starved for the previous couple of years. Two separate bans on recording had just ended. One was caused by a shortage of shellac – the basic material from which the ten-inch 78rpm biscuits current at the time were made – for which the war machine’s need had taken understandable precedence over that of the record business. The second was the result of a fierce industrial dispute between the major record companies and the American Federation of Musicians; by the time it was resolved, a thriving crop of independent operators had started up, unimpeded by the battle between the union and the majors, and serving the markets for hillbilly and ‘race’ music in which the majors were no longer so interested. Or, as Eddie Burns puts it, ‘one of the reasons John got in and a lot of us got in, was that the musicians’ union had a ban on the studios. What happened was them Jews found a way to record blues musicians and people like that, but your contract wasn’t worth the paper that it was written on. They had a way of settin’ these dates when they released the stuff, sayin’ it was recorded back then [i.e. before the ban]. So a lotta blues people got in on the deal, which mean that you automatically was gonna get a screwin’, because it wasn’t legal in the first place.’

  Together, the bans created an artificial caesura which served only to magnify and dramatise the already immense cultural and demographic shifts in the patterns of both production and consumption of popular music, caused directly by the war. The dominant postwar blues styles were indeed still the post-Basie jumpin’ jive exemplified by Louis Jordan and subsequently customised by Roy Brown, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Amos Milburn and Wynonie Harris alongside – as Besman indicates – the smooth and sophisticated night club-blues crooning of Johnny Moore And His Three Blazers, featuring the sublime Charles Brown on piano and vocals, plus T-Bone Walker, ruling the roost as both guitar hero and matinee idol alike. Nevertheless, a new set of realities, a new set of circumstances, a new set of ambitions: these all required a new vocabulary of expression, a fresh language of style. Of joyful necessity, old idioms were required to reinvent themselves, and new ones began to emerge. One such was a Northern industrial-metropolitan transformation of the music of the Mississippi Delta diaspora: downhome blues electrically heated into an urgent, stream lined distillation of its rural ancestor, an aural reflection of the new experiences of rural peoples relocated to the rough ends of the big cities. Furthermore, the first completely black-oriented radio station, WDIA, had just commenced broadcasting from Memphis. Audiences, musicians and record labels alike were ready to roll. And they did.

  The first signpost hit from this particular New Wave was ‘Short-Haired Woman’, a surprise 1947 hit by Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins (from Texas: regional boundaries aren’t infallible, after all), which racked up the surprising aggregate of 50,000 sales for a tiny Houston in dependent label called Gold Star (and, incidentally, annoyed the hell out of Aladdin, the larger, Los Angeles-based lab
el to which Hopkins was contracted at the time, by outselling the version he’d cut for them). A year later came Stick McGhee’s light-hearted ‘Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, a cleaned-up version of a much older, much rawer downhome blues – the nonsense syllables replace the Oedipal compound noun – which sold somewhere in the region of 400,000 copies and served as the foundation stone for the Atlantic Records empire. Then there was Muddy Waters’ ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’, cut for Aristocrat Records in Chicago and featuring the big, booming Delta voice and urgent, amplified slide-guitar of a wartime Mississippi migrant, accompanied only by a fidgety, funkily slapped acoustic bass. Electric downhome had found a standard-bearer; that record, and its maker, laid the foundation stone upon which Chess Records’ Chicago empire would soon be founded. In Detroit, Bernard Besman and his partner Johnny Kaplan had taken over Pan American, a derelict record distribution company, and in a mere three years, they had built it up to a more than respectable size. Besman was well aware that a distributor could sell significant numbers of copies of the right single by a good downhome bluesman, and since downhome music was ridiculously cheap to record, a small label could break even on as few as 5,000 sales. In his other identity as boss of Sensation Records, an archetypal fledgling independent label with a name borrowed from a popular local club, he was equally well aware that he didn’t have such a downhome bluesman under contract. But, in Elmer Barbee, he knew a man who did.

  John Lee Hooker and Bernard Besman worked actively together for less than four years. Any direct comparison of the two men’s accounts of their collaboration leads to the inescapable conclusion that they spent much of their time together speaking entirely different, and mutually incomprehensible, musical and cultural languages. Nevertheless, those four years were among the most intensively productive years of Hooker’s career. His two biggest early hits, ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’, were both Besman productions, and Besman is undeniably one of the pivotal figures in the entire John Lee Hooker saga. It was Tony Hollins who first set the young John Lee’s feet on the path, and it was Will Moore whose support, tuition and inspiration gave him the keys to the kingdom. Nevertheless, it was Besman’s decision to record the stuttering little guy in the long raincoat, a decision taken – as he claims – on a whim one damp Detroit afternoon, which opened the floodgates for everything which was to follow. The history of the blues is littered with brilliant talents who failed to receive the fame and acclaim to which their gifts rightfully entitled them because they had the misfortune never to be in the right place at the right time, but John Lee Hooker would still have made his professional break through – somehow, sometime – even without Besman’s intervention. The only relevant questions are: how big would that breakthrough have been, and how much longer would Hooker have had to wait?