Boogie Man

by Charles Shaar Murray

  The Bernard Besman you might meet today is a canny, alert octogenarian with a fondness for biscuit-coloured leisure suits, and a luxuriant silver pompadour which wouldn’t disgrace a superannuated rockabilly singer. He moves somewhat carefully, following a stroke a few years ago, but there is no hint of vagueness about him: he evokes the events of half a century before in crisp and loquacious detail. The trouble is that, in matters both fundamental and trivial, his recollections differ so strongly from Hooker’s that it requires a considerable effort of will to remember that both men are, in fact, telling the same story. For example, we’ve already heard Hooker tell us that Besman and his partner ‘went wild’ when they heard the acetates that he’d cut in the back of Barbee’s store; by contrast, Besman remembers being played a disk from a quarter-in-the-slot record-your-voice booth,5 and simply yielding to the mild curiosity he felt about a downhome bluesman who stuttered when he spoke but found his clarity when he sang. Each of them contradicts the other at almost every turn; and each of them is at some considerable pains to minimise the importance of the other’s contribution to the work they did together. It is as if they both feel that the resulting achievement wasn’t big enough for both of them . . . which, of course, it is. And what’s more: they plainly don’t trust each other the proverbial inch.

  The answer to the question ‘So who is Bernard Besman, anyway?’ goes something like this. He was born in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine: a city which had known very little peace during World War I, the October Revolution and the uneasy period thereafter. In the last months of the war, the southern Ukraine was annexed by Germany, and the Polish Army seized Kiev itself in May 1920. They were ejected the following month, but the resulting military adventure put paid to the Ukraine’s brief and ill-fated struggle for independence from the new-born Soviet Union. It gained them little more than the personal attentions of young Joseph Stalin himself, first as Political Commissar and then as Ukrainian Chairman of the Council of Labour Armies. Not surprisingly, Besman’s family fled in 1921, after the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising put paid to any significant challenge to Bolshevik hegemony. However, it wasn’t until 1926 that they finally arrived in Detroit, having had to cool their heels for a British sojourn in Whitechapel, at the heart of the East End of London.

  ‘I went to school there, at 32 Leman Street, because the quota had closed down for the United States, and I had to wait five years before we could come out. I came from a very musical family, and from the age of three I was playing piano. When I finally got to Detroit I formed a band with another fella, called Milt, and we called our band Milt Bernard. That’s how I went through college, making my money by playing piano. My style was like Eddie Duchin or Tommy Cavallero. That’s dance music, society-type smooth dance music, ball room dancing. We played hotels and resorts. We played jazz as part of the programme, but mainly it was for dancing, because that’s all there was. Later I became a booking agent for bands, and I did pretty well. I made records in 1936. I had a band, and I booked bands, and I made demonstration records because as a booking agent, people would come to get a band and I’d play them these records for them to see which band they liked. When the war came along I had to close up, and go into the service, but while I was in the service I was in Special Services, and I did shows. I was with 5th Air Force, and we’d put on shows, and I had a band. We took care of the dances, scheduled dancers, things like that. So actually, I pursued the music club through the service. About three days after I was discharged, I was waiting for a friend of mine that was in the service with me, and one of our other friends walked by where we were waiting in downtown Detroit. He was in the photographic business before he got in the service and he had some records under his arm and he said, “Say, Bernie, I was just in California and somebody there gave me these records and they wanted me to get into the business, but I know nothing about this business.”’

  Besman’s buddy was carrying an armful of Latin American records he’d been given by a company named Pan American. ‘I didn’t know anything about the record business at first, and he didn’t want the business anyway. I’d only been out of the service three days so I said, “Well, let me check into it and see what happens.” I called those people and they said, “Sure, you can be a distributor, but you have to pay immediately for the records.” I put the money in advance in the bank before I even got the records. So I had about $6,000 at that time; that was my whole fortune. This friend of mine that I met, I told him about this deal and said, “I have $6,000, I don’t know how long it’ll last, do you want to be a partner with me?” He says, “You try it for about three weeks, see what happens,” and later he came up with $6,000 and we became partners. The point was that when I did get the records and went out to sell them, nobody wanted them because they were primarily made in a Spanish vein, or Mexican type of music. But the people I went to see told me that if I had this record or that record, they’d buy it from me. So that’s how I got involved, selling records primarily by black artists, and I was the first independent record distributor using these off-brand labels. The $12,000 didn’t last very long, buying records on credit, and after three months it got too big for the area I rented. I rented this basement in one of the houses to start with, and we’d get the records through the window off the sidewalk, so we moved into much larger quarters at 3747 Woodward Avenue, which was the main street in Detroit. Four thousand square feet, and the rent was up from $30 a month to about $400, and I wondered how the hell we were going to make that, because it was quite a jump. But we were very, very successful. By the time I sold my share of the business to my partner to come to California for some other ventures that I had, we did close to a million and a half dollars a year.’

  With Besman’s background, it was a short and predictably inevitable step from distributing records to producing them himself. ‘I had enough experience of making records: by making records I mean use a studio. A fellow that I knew in college went into that business, and we’d get the Capitol Theatre and use their stage to record the bands. You ask how I got into the record business after being a distributor? Well, all of our repertoire was black music, and because there were a lot of black people around, there were a lot of musicians, and good musicians, too. And we’d visit the different clubs and hear all these bands, and there were many clubs in Detroit at that time. Detroit was jumping, there were a lot of clubs, but Lee’s club Sensation was one of the best ones, one of the biggest ones. Some of our customers who were black called me about a band called Todd Rhodes. That was the first band that I recorded. I went to visit the Sensation Club to see Todd Rhodes . . . that’s where Hooker always mentions Lee Sensation discovered him. That’s a lotta crap. In fact, my label that I started was called Sensation, and I used the name of this club which was very very popular, and Todd Rhodes was the first artist I recorded.’

  Though most of the time Besman freely agrees that John Lee Hooker ‘wasn’t my first artist, but he turned out to be the best . . . so far. And the most lucrative artist’, he has a perverse fondness for sometimes claiming the long-forgotten pianist Todd Rhodes, rather than Hooker, as his ‘best and biggest artist ever’. In fact, Rhodes was already something of a has-been by July 1947, when Besman took him to United Sound Studios, at 5820 Second Boulevard, for the inaugural Sensation Records sessions. Rhodes – born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, in 1900 – had co-founded the Springfield, Ohio-based Synco Septette with drummer William McKinley in the early ’20s. Following a change of name to McKinney’s Cotton Pickers, they earned themselves sufficient popularity to become one of the first black bands to broadcast live on nationwide radio. (The most famous, of course, was Duke Ellington’s band, who broadcast live, first locally and then nationally, from the legendary Cotton Club in Harlem.) Rhodes left the Cotton Pickers in 1934, performed with several less distinguished bands and ended up in Detroit, where he worked the assembly line in the Fisher Body Plant during World War II while playing occasional gigs to stay in practice. Returning to full-time
music after the end of the war, he took a four-piece band into the Triangle Bar on Michigan Avenue. They soon expanded to a septet, playing occasional blocks of one-nighters around the Midwest and deftly serving up the jump stylings of the time to satisfied customers at Club Sensation, which is where Besman happened across Rhodes during an eight-month residency which had started as a mere four weeks. Remember Paul Mathis’s observation about how ‘the blues singers was playin’ for a nickel over here, and the guy playin’ the jitterbug, he’s gettin’ a quarter, that sort of thing’? The band Todd Rhodes led in the late ’40s was the kind of ‘jitterbug’ act he was talking about.6

  As Besman tells it: ‘He was the one [with whom] I had one of my biggest records, “Bell Boy Boogie”, which was named after a disc jockey, Jack The Bellboy, who was the biggest disc jockey in Detroit. This was about ’46, and I was just amazed at the music and the crowd there – it was all black – and he’d get off the stage during a number like the “Bell Boy Boogie” and he’d just parade from the stage all around. The people would just get up and get behind him and dance – they didn’t have the jitterbug yet but whatever – and the place was jumping. So I recorded that, and he had a number called “Dance Of The Redskins” which was a real jazzy rhythm-and-blues dance number. I thought, “Boy, this’d be a terrific record”, but let me tell you something: what you hear in the club and what you hear on the record is not the same, which taught me quite a bit. So I recorded that, and it was the first number I released on Sensation, but that wasn’t the number that became a hit. “Bell Boy Boogie”, the reverse, was the hit. So you see, whatever you plan, it doesn’t turn out that way. So I started with Todd Rhodes. He became very big and very famous in Detroit; but they knew him: the black people did, anyway. But the white people picked him up because he did music for white dances. I recorded close to twenty different artists before I recorded Hooker, and I think maybe eight or ten were released on the Sensation label.’

  The first four Sensation releases all featured Rhodes and his orchestra in some capacity or other. The first, second and fourth of them were credited to the band itself while they appeared on the third as accompanists to one Louie Saunders, ‘the newest sensational song stylist of the year’. ‘Dance Of The Redskins’, a slow, sultry blues subsequently reissued as ‘Blues For The Red Boy’, was actually the B-side of ‘Blue Sensation’, whereas the aforementioned ‘Bell Boy Boogie’, from the same session, had ‘Flying Disc’ as its flipside and was the first Sensation release. Outside the Michigan and Ohio area where Pan American held distributive sway, all four titles from Sensation’s Jam Session series appeared on the long-vanished VitAcoustic label.

  ‘After Todd Rhodes,’ Besman continues, ‘I had other bands and artists . . . T.J. Fowler, who was also from the same type as Hooker, played good music. Among the most famous that I recorded – became pretty big, bigger than Hooker ever got – was Milt Jackson, and also Sonny Stitt: terrific sax player. I was one of the first ones to record them.’ In the ’50s, vibraphonist Jackson became such an integral part of pianist John Lewis’s hugely successful chamber-jazz ensemble, the Modern Jazz Quartet, that, as far as many listeners were concerned, the initials MJQ might as well have stood for ‘Milt Jackson Quartet’. Altoist Sonny Stitt emerged from the rhythm-and-blues dance orchestra world, where he’d co-led a big band with tenorist Gene Ammons, to become Charlie Parker’s anointed successor, a brilliant musician who never quite escaped from under Bird’s colossal, looming shadow. ‘Sonny Stitt, who I loved, now there was a real schooled musician. Charlie Parker was sensational, but Stitt equals him. I bailed Sonny Stitt out of jail once in Detroit, he’d been smoking marijuana and he called me at three in the morning. That’s when I did the session with him: I got him out of jail, and he did this and he sure played beautiful music. The recording I have now is out on Fantasy Records. He does “Stardust” in bebop style, so beautiful. This was back in ’48, ’49.’ In addition, Besman recalls, ‘I had a vocal group called The Vocalaires, and some spiritual groups. I rounded out the label: just like any of the black labels that you had around then I had spirituals out, jazz, blues . . .’

  For the sake of convenience, Besman scheduled Hooker’s first studio date as an extension of a previously-booked Todd Rhodes session at United Sound, with Joe Siracuse, the 27-year-old son of the studio’s owner, Jimmy Siracuse, at the controls. As a dance-band musician of the old school, Besman felt comfortable with Rhodes and his band, all of whom were trained, versatile, musically literate players who responded easily and docilely to productorial direction. Where he was ahead of his time was in his recognition of the studio as a brush rather than simply a canvas, and of the role of the record producer as something other than simply a passive transcriber of an existing event. Come to that, he was also a pioneer of the megalomaniac notion that ‘on all the records, I don’t care who does it, it’s more the producer than the artist who makes the record. I don’t care what you say. The producer makes the record. I’m not talking about myself or anybody, because what you sound like in a hall is not the way it comes out on a record. How’s it done? It’s the producer who comes up with some gimmick or song.’ However, he and Phil Spector can fight out the copyright to that particular assumption if they ever happen to find themselves trapped in the same elevator.

  Besman claims that ‘[Hooker] came to me about late 1946, and I think the first session was in about November of ’47.’ However, since he’ll also opine, in the same conversation, that ‘“Boogie Chillen” must’ve come out in early 1947’, and at tribute his ‘Bell Boy Boogie’ Todd Rhodes session to 1946 rather than 1947, it is not impossible that his steel-trap memory is capable of occasionally playing him false. In fact, ‘Boogie Chillen’ was released in November 1948. The session at which it was recorded was generally assumed, for many years, to have taken place in October or early November of that year, but recently surfaced paperwork suggests that ‘Boogie Chillen’ and its B-side ‘Sally Mae’ – plus the other items cut at the same session – were already safely in the can by September. Still, the controversy over the date of that session is negligible by comparison with the still-smouldering arguments over exactly what took place, who did what at whose behest, and why.

  Despite Hooker’s popularity as an in-person attraction playing trio with pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster in Black Bottom bars, Besman opted to record him solo, placing the aural focus even more squarely on the featured singer/guitarist than the successful Hopkins and Waters records had done. The object of the exercise was to lay down four releasable tracks, enough for the A- and B-sides of two 78rpm singles, during the three-hour session which was then the basic, union-recognized unit of studio time. Evidently, Besman and Hooker had agreed that the featured release was to be a slow blues, because Hooker arrived ready to perform three different numbers in that style. Well, sort of ready. ‘When Hooker came into the studio,’ claims Besman, ‘all he had was this one guitar, a box [acoustic] guitar he’d just got out of the pawnshop. He had no guitar; when I gave him an advance before the recording he went and got the guitar and he said that after the session, which I also paid him, that he would buy it. Anyway, the first session that John Lee Hooker did, and the fact that he stutters, and the fact that he didn’t have any experience, and the fact that he drove me crazy because he repeated the same song . . . I only did three numbers in the three-hour session that I was allotted. And I wanted four.’

  According to Besman’s session notes, those first three tunes that Hooker played for him were ‘Sally Mae’, ‘Highway 51’ and ‘Wednesday Evening’. However, if we consult Les Fancourt’s definitive Hooker discography,7 we find a slightly more complex story. According to Fancourt, the session did indeed begin with two takes of ‘Sally Mae’; the other songs, also deep slow blues, remained unreleased until the early ’70s, when Besman demonstrated that he’d learned at least one specific lesson from Hooker by leasing the two takes he’d cut of each piece under two different titles to two different record comp
anies for two different retrospective anthologies. Neither song had fully matured: Hooker returned again and again over the years to ‘Wednesday Evening’, a song which mourned his failed marriage to Alma Hopes; later versions of this free-form slow blues attained depths of cathartic emotion which ‘She Was In Chicago’ and ‘Crazy ’Bout That Woman’ (the titles which Besman later assigned to the discarded takes from this particular session) failed to plumb. ‘War Is Over (Goodbye California)’ shared the same eerie modalities as ‘Sally Mae’, but had only a passing lyrical reference in common with ‘Highway 51’, a traditional Delta theme approached rather more conventionally at a subsequent session.

  Hooker’s approach to what must have originally seemed like fairly standard material turned out to be so idiosyncratic that Besman, to whom the very notion of a free-form slow blues was utterly oxymoronic, must have wondered just what the hell he’d let himself in for. In fact, the session represented a flying leap into the unknown for both artist and producer. Thanks to several years of hard experience, Hooker was fully confident of his ability to rock the house solo or with a band, acoustically or amplified, at house party or a club, but though his demo sessions with Barbee had taught him to compress his lengthy free-form improvisations to accommodate the limited recording-time available on the wax discs, he was still first and foremost a live performer, geared to instant communication with the hearts and feet of an audience he could see in front of him. Besman, by contrast, was a hard-bitten record man who knew both that a single had to grab its listeners within the first few seconds, and also that what worked brilliantly in a club or at a dance might not necessarily have the same effect when stripped of its original context and laid bare in the cold light of the recording studio.