Boogie Man

  Anyway, Siracuse loads up another acetate blank. Hooker picks up his guitar . . . and he launches into a rocking dance piece with which he’s been wrecking the house at parties and clubs for years. Its structure is utterly free-form, its basic beat is the jumping, polyrhythmic groove which he learned in the Delta at Will Moore’s knee, and into this vessel he pours extemporised autobiographical vignettes: snapshots of his mother arguing with Will Moore, and of his own initiation into Detroit nightlife. ‘My stepfather and myself, when I was a kid fifteen years old, he taught me to do that beat and I did it. “Mama don’t ’low me to stay out all night long”: at that time I couldn’t go out and stay, I had to be home. So I put it to “I don’t care what you don’t ’low, I’m gonna boogie anyway.” I been playin’ that – oh Lord – at house parties and clubs; we rocked the house, me and Broomstick Charlie.’ It was as overwhelmingly personal a piece as anything ever done in the blues, or – come to that – anywhere else in the popular arts of the twentieth century: sunk to the knees in the rich, loamy tradition of the Delta, borrowing the open-ended, infinitely adaptable vehicle of the dance-music-with-commentary form used by Pinetop Smith twenty years earlier, but drawing on a musical inheritance and an individual history unique to the man who performed it. What emerged, three takes later, as ‘Boogie Chillen’ was not only Hooker’s key to the kingdom, but his calling card, his badge of selfhood; the ultimate statement of his personality, his experience, his identity, his very existence. For a man of John Lee Hooker’s background, in that particular place and time, making records was just about the only possible outlet through which he could express himself, could tell the world who he was, how he lived, and what the world looked like from where he was. With ‘Boogie Chillen’, Hooker used both hands to seize that opportunity to – to paraphrase a famous Muddy Waters song – let the whole damn world know he was here. If Bernard Besman wishes to consider it merely the result of Hooker’s misunderstanding of, or inability to reproduce, something which Todd Rhodes had demonstrated to him a few moments earlier, that’s his privilege. If we prefer to see it as a supreme example of a man creating art from the raw materials of his own life and his own experience of the world, that’s ours.

  Before stereo, before multi-track recording and certainly way before the advent of sequencing software and computerised mixing, recording studios already offered radically different possibilities both to those musicians who were primarily improvisers, and those who were what Evan Eisenberg, in The Recording Angel, calls ‘master builders’. To cite a ’60s example of the ‘master builder’ tendency, the outtakes of the Beatles’ sessions – highly prized by scholars and collectors before their eventual overhyped release, but fairly unrewarding for casual listeners – are little more than sketches, cartoons, painstaking stages of work in progress, individual steps leading to a finished result. For the improviser of genius – for a Louis Armstrong, a Robert Johnson, a Charlie Parker, a John Coltrane, a Jimi Hendrix, and certainly a John Lee Hooker – every performance, every ‘take’, is a unique entity in its own right. In Hooker’s case, every take of a particular piece is, at worst, a look at the work in question from a radically different angle and, at best, an entirely separate and distinct work based on the same theme. The slow blues pieces from that first United Sound session are examples of the former, but the ‘Boogie Chillen’ variations flawlessly illustrate the latter.

  In the clubs and bars and parties, the song generally ran for about as long as the dancers could hold out, and as long as Hooker could keep his own stomping feet and whiplash right hand going. To cut the piece down to a single-friendly three minutes or so, Hooker had the equivalent of an entire library of variations on which to draw. The very first take – unissued until more than twenty years later, when it emerged as ‘Johnny Lee’s Original Boogie’ – finds that unmistakable groove firmly in place, and the now-familiar narrative segments concerning Hooker’s arrival on Hastings Street, his mother’s reluctance to allow him to go out and rock, and the drowsy boy on the threshold of sleep hearing his folks debating whether the boogie in him should be allowed to come out – are all there, but it all seems sketchy and tentative. The second take, recorded just before the familiar hit version, itself disinterred from Besman’s vaults for a 1970 compilation under the title ‘Henry’s Swing Club’, is far more confident and expansive. Less ‘Boogie Chillen’’s twin brother, delivered from the womb shortly before its famous sibling, than its first cousin, ‘Henry’s Swing Club’ demonstrates Hooker’s unique skills as a raconteur – with no audible trace of a stutter – as well as his extraordinary rhythmic gifts.

  It begins with a few clamorous, ear-catching chords and then, with Hooker’s steady foot-tap setting the tempo, launches into a variation on the standard boogie-woogie bass-line normally assigned to a pianist’s left hand, but instead of aping the customary progression, Hooker gives us a sinuous, eerie variation in an undulating, close-interval mode more reminiscent of Arabic or North African scales than the bluff, open progression of the conventional ‘walking’ blues or boogie-woogie bass. From there he moves into the classic riff before making his vocal entry. ‘My mama didn’t ’low me to boogie-woogie,’ he announces,‘and I knowed that.’ From there, switching effortlessly from speech to song and back again, he leads the piece off with the archetypal dialogue – ‘Papa said “Mama, let this child boogie-woogie. It’s in him, and it’s got to come outta him”’ – between his mother and his stepfather. Then he offers us a garrulous, evocative Motor City memoir.

  One day I was walkin’ down Hastings Street

  That was when I first come to town

  I didn’t know nobody

  I asked the man ‘What town is this?’

  He said ‘This is Detroit. Boy, it really jumps here’

  I met a little chick, she said ‘Hey there!’

  I said ‘Hey there, baby’, where you goin’?’

  She said ‘I’m goin’ to Henry’s Swing Club, I can jump tonight.’

  Then the guitar, which had been vamping remorselessly on Will Moore’s primal riff, at last changes chord, and Hooker breaks into song: ‘She said “Let’s go, daddy, I can really have a ball.”’ And then the guitar starts to dance before returning to the Arabic boogie run with which the piece began. When the guitar returns to the main riff, Hooker is ready to continue his tale:

  When I got there that night, boy, the chick was in the groove

  I left my coat, you know

  I’d just come to town, I didn’t know all about the racket

  She said ‘Siddown, aw, siddown’

  I said ‘No baby . . .’

  And he changes chord again, breaking back into the sung melody: ‘Let’s boogie-woogie while, while the band is jumpin’ on.’ The guitar restates the intro – wake up! – and then slides into a trance-like repetition of a plangent blues lick. ‘Boy, that chick can boogie-woogietoo,’ Hooker announces proudly. ‘She started boogyin’, Suzy-Q-in’, jitter-buggin’ and everything!

  I never been the kind of guy, you know, that didn’t know how

  I sat around, you know

  After awhile I started jumpin’

  Boy, I was jumpin’

  Then he shifts chord and moves back into the song:

  I started jumpin’

  I been jumpin’ ever since that day.

  The Arabic-boogie riff returns for an instant, then there’s a brief pause, lulling the listener into a sense of utterly false security . . . and then blam! one final chord. It’s an astonishing, exquisite performance, but it wasn’t the one Besman wanted: that indefinable, unquantifiable, undeniable entity that is a sure-fire, can’t-miss, all-conquering, no-argument hit single. That was when Besman took the key decision on which everything that followed depends: he demanded that Hooker perform one more take.

  And that’s when Hooker cut ‘Boogie Chillen’.

  In its own terms, the last side to emerge from that near-impromptu, spur-of-the-moment session is just about as perfect as it could
be.15 The boogie-woogie bass-line has disappeared, and the essential Will Moore-derived guitar riff rules the tune from start to finish. This time Hooker opens the piece with the sung account, referring back to the ancient ‘Mama don’t allow’ line, of his desire to boogie-woogie despite his mother’s wishes, and the twin monologues, shorn of extraneous detail however entertaining, now have the pared-down eloquence of a Delta haiku. Most crucial of all, the song now has its hookline: each section ends with a repeatedly pounded chord, a telling pause and the exhortation – ‘Boogie, chillen!’ – from which the song derives its title. Besman had his hit, though it would be a few months before either he or Hooker had the chance to prove it. ‘I told him to come back,’ says Besman, ‘and we’d sign a contract.’

  John Lee Hooker signed on the line. His deal was a specific agreement with Besman, rather than with Sensation or any other particular designated label. It was Besman’s responsibility as an independent producer to cut the records, negotiate the leasing deals with the record companies, and pass the royalties on to Hooker, who was now a genuine recording artist, even though he hadn’t yet released any records. While he waited for his first effort to reach the market place, life went on very much as before. Occasionally Besman (and others) have suggested that ‘Boogie Chillen’ was preceded by an earlier Hooker release on Sensation which failed to sell in significant quantities, but neither Fancourt’s session logs nor the authoritative Hooker discography by Michael J. Sweeney and Robert Pruter16 contain any mention of such an item. On 3 November 1948, a single pairing ‘Sally Mae’ and ‘Boogie Chillen’ was released, but not by Sensation. Instead of issuing it on his own label, which would have involved him in all the problems of wholesaling it to his fellow distributors outside Pan American’s home turf of Michigan and Ohio, Besman leased the masters to Modern Records, an established LA-based R&B indie with proven national clout. Modern had opened for business in 1945, and had recorded, among others, Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers: it was a family firm, run by three brothers – Joe, Jules and Saul Bihari – who were generally assumed to be of Lebanese origin, though Jules Bihari has more recently insisted that his family was, in fact, Hungarian.17 Later on, a fourth Bihari, Lester, was placed in charge of a branch office in Memphis.

  ‘I didn’t put out “Boogie Chillen” on Sensation,’ says Besman, ‘because I had several of his records like “Sally Mae” and “Hoogie Boogie” and at the same time Modern wanted it, so we thought we’d give it to them and then buy the records from them. So we bought it from them; it was cheaper to buy from them than me pressing it alone. They got it going when they started playing it down South; that’s where it really took off. In Detroit you couldn’t sell Hooker. You couldn’t give it away. Here’s another point that’s very interesting. Hooker’s style was called “dirty blues” or “low-down blues” [for] people who lived down South, the lower class of people. The black people who lived in Detroit weren’t particularly lower class: they did not accept this music and they would not buy that type of record. I had a store with my brother-in-law in a partially black area, but it wasn’t in the Hastings Street area. When they’d come in and ask for a Hooker record, they’d put it under their coat so nobody would see them buying it, and no disc-jockey would play John Lee Hooker records. That’s why I leased it to Modern: they had better distribution down South. Down South, after Modern took it up, that became a very very big hit.’

  That’s something of an understatement. ‘Boogie Chillen’ was a smash. By the time Besman got around to recording Hooker again – in February 1949 – ‘Boogie Chillen’ had already boogied its way to Number One in Billboard’s R&B charts. ‘The label was so little, they didn’t have distribution all over the country. But “Boogie Chillen” came out burnin’,’ Hooker says proudly. ‘It was so big that they couldn’t support it theyself, and they went to this label called Modern Records out in Los Angeles, the Bihari brothers. And they picked it up nationwide, and that thing was Number One everywhere. When I had “Boogie Chillen” it were ringin’ all over the country. It was a real dancing thing; it was a big, big, big hit. Boy, everywhere you went it was all you could hear. Every jukebox, every department store. Everywhere you went – all the drugstores, in the markets – that was all they played. Something new, new, new: “Boogie Chillen.”’

  ‘It didn’t surprise me when “Boogie Chillen” got to be a hit,’ says Hooker’s running buddy Famous Coachman, ‘because John had pretensions of making hits anyway. He would do a lot of songs at the time in the clubs and get standing ovations and what-not, but when he did “Boogie Chillen” it was one of the great things that he could have done. That’s why I said it wasn’t really a surprise, because he’d been doing some of the same things [in the clubs], and somebody picked it up and made it be a hit. That’s the thing. “Boogie Chillen” started him bein’ the Boogie Man, and he is the Boogie Man now.’

  ‘Boogie Chillen’ struck the R&B industry like a bolt of lightning. B.B. King, a year or so away from his own first big hit and soon to join Hooker on the Modern label, was still deejaying on the Memphis-based radio station WDIA when it hit. ‘John and I go back . . . oh God, at least 40 years almost,’ he recalls. ‘See, John was playin’ when I was ploughin’. John was an artist long before I was. “Boogie Chillen” was such a big, big record. I was on the radio and I did play “Boogie Chillen” quite often on my show because it was such a very, very good boogie tune that you could boogie on. There was no crossover as you have today. It was mostly in the black areas, on the black radio that was playing “Boogie Chillen”, but it was very, very big at that time and hardly anybody around who was playing at that time didn’t play “Boogie Chillen”. That’s just how heavy it was. Generally, when there’s a hit record out all the musicians will hop on whatever’s ahead at that time, and for most of us – I, for one, and many others who would go out and play – if you didn’t play “Boogie Chillen” at that time, people probably look at you and wonder what was wrong with you. It was such a big record . . .’

  For many younger musicians and wannabes, it was the wondrous simplicity of Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’ riff that intrigued them. It sounded totally cool, plus it created the illusion that it was easy enough not to be intimidating: by the time you got past its deceptive crudeness and naïvity to the complexity and sophistication that lay beneath, you were already hooked. In that respect, it was the R&B equivalent of punk rock. At least, that was how it seemed in Chicago to Mississippi-born Ellas McDaniel, not yet ready to mutate into the mighty Bo Diddley, and encountering ‘Boogie Chillen’ a few months shy of his twelfth birthday. ‘I think the first record I paid attention to was John Lee Hooker’s “Boogie Chillen”,’ he told Andy McKaie. ‘When I found John Lee Hooker on the radio, I said, “If that guy can play, I know I can.” I mean, John Lee’s got a hell of a style.’

  Way down in Letchworth, Louisiana, the record had a similar effect on thirteen-year-old George Guy, known to his friends and relations as ‘Buddy’. ‘Actually, that’s the first thing I learned how to play. I was half asleep, my brothers and sisters had ran me out of the house with an acoustic guitar. Don’t know how to tune it, don’t know how to finger it, and you know what I’m talkin’ about if you in the house with somebody that can’t play nothin’, so they say, “Mama, get him outta here.” Down South in Louisiana this time of year, you can go out and lay in the sun and if the wind’s not blowin’ it’s warm. So I was layin’ out there on a wood pile just pickin’ away, and I dozed off. And when I woke up I had a riff like “Boogie Chillen” and I played it for six hours, because I thought if I moved my fingers I never would find it again. I went found all of my country friends, which is about four, and I said, “I got it.” And that was the first thing I thought I learned how to play that I knew sounded right when someone would listen. And each time I got to one of ’em that followed me I’d say, “I got it.” “Yes, you got it, that’s it.” I’d say, “I got this John Lee Hooker”, and that’s the first thing I learned how to play.’


  Over in Texas, in Houston’s Third Ward, the revelatory ‘Boogie Chillen’ effect was similarly experienced by a young man named Albert Collins. ‘He was my influence: between him and Lightnin’ Hopkins was my influence,’ Collins told a British TV crew during a break in filming a tribute concert to Hooker. ‘And the first tune I learned to play on the guitar was “Boogie Chillen”. He have been my idol all these years, and I’m so glad that he still here to carry me along with him. I was raised up with Lightnin’ Hopkins, who was a cousin of mine, in the family, but I said, “John Lee Hooker, I always wanted to meet the man and one of these days I’m gonna play ‘Boogie Chillen’ with him.” Because he’s my influence. I learned how to play listening to his type of music.’

  In taverns and pool halls, in barber shops and record stalls, down South, up North, in the Delta itself and throughout the Delta’s urban diaspora, ‘Boogie Chillen’ just kept blasting, hanging in there on the Billboard chart for three full months. Legend has it that the record sold a million copies, though Besman disputes that. ‘Well, that’s probably a crock of shit, pardon my French. I’m glad people say that now, but we didn’t get paid for a million copies. No blues or any race record at that time sold a million, no way, but it’s good publicity. I never said anything about it, and when you’re writing you can use it or not use it, but that’s what they all claimed. I think it’s great, but I sure never saw that money. I know we hardly sold what you’d sell today in Detroit on a black artist, and on this thing – which wasn’t accepted – I doubt that we sold five hundred in Detroit maybe. I would say that Modern probably sold more than the other blues records: there’s a possibility that it could have gone to a quarter of a million, because down South they bought a hell of a lot more records than they did in the North. But I’m proud that they’re saying a million. It’s a good feeling. Hooker never got paid for a million, because we paid him royalties on what we got from Modern. The Biharis were a charming, terrific family, but as far as money was concerned? No. But everybody in the record business was crooked.’