Boogie Man

  ‘Joe [Von] Battle used to feed Leonard Chess a lot of Detroit music,’ says Famous Coachman. ‘Joe used to get the guys together in his record shop in the back room and cut ’em on a tape, and next day he been an’ sold it to Leonard Chess, and they didn’t even know nothin’ about it. Next day Leonard Chess got a record out on you. You say, “Hey man, that sound like me,” and it is you. Some guy done changed the name and go ’head on with it.’

  Hooker remains utterly unrepentant. As far as he is concerned, he was being systematically cheated by the Biharis, and all he was doing was cheating right back. ‘The Bihari brothers, they was crooks. They know what was happenin’, they wouldn’t give me any money. They was stone crooks. They was rip-off artists. They didn’t pay nobody . . . you had to fight with them to get a little money in advance. They didn’t have grounds to stand on when they knew what I was doin’. I work for the money. Just gimme a name! Texas Slim, Johnny Williams . . . what name you wanna give me? Gimme the money, just gimme any damn name you wanna give me. Pull the name out the hat. [Modern] wasn’t payin’ no money. They knowed that was me.’

  Besman, however, didn’t. What is surprising is how long it took him to catch on. He maintains that most of these ‘illicit’ sessions only surfaced much later on, after Besman had packed up and quit Detroit in the early ’50s. Nevertheless, Hooker worked just as hard at record-making as he’d worked, back in the early days, in the steel mills and auto factories. In 1949, the year of his breakthrough, Hooker released no fewer than thirteen singles. Under his own name he had three ‘legitimate’ Besman-produced releases on Modern and one on Sensation. As ‘Texas Slim’ he had four discs out on the Cincinnati-based King label. As ‘Birmingham Sam And His Magic Guitar’ he had one out on Savoy Records. He was ‘The Boogie Man’ for one on Acorn Records, ‘Delta John’ for one on Regent, and ‘Johnny Williams’ for another on the tiny Staff label run by one Idessa Malone.

  King and Savoy were big-time, nationally-distributed labels, but most of the others were peewees whose releases only ran to a few hundred copies, most of which wound up in local juke boxes. Staff was a typical case. ‘Idessa Malone, Staff Records. Boy, that’s way back. Just a little small company, didn’t ever get nowhere. It was just a little local thing, around town and in Chicago and that was it. Then she went out of bidness.’ Most peculiarly of all, he was ‘Little Pork Chops’ for the Danceland label, run by one Morry Kaplan (no relation to Besman’s partner, Johnny of that ilk); the song in question, ‘Wayne County Ramblin’ Blues,’ was composer-credited to ‘Emkay–Barbee’ and bore the additional legend ‘Direction – El. Barbee’ beneath the artist credit. Not surprisingly, Hooker dislikes this particular pseudonym more than any of the others and, unmistakable aural evidence to the contrary, fiercely denies being, or ever having been, ‘Little Pork Chops’. ‘“Little Pork Chops”? I never heard of such a thing. You put that in your book and I’ll sue you!’20 The ‘Pork Chops’ session, incidentally, was the first one which Hooker cut with pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster, his regular accompanists at that time. Like the Chess brothers in Chicago, who persisted in recording Muddy Waters solo or with minimal backing from bass or harmonica even when he was regularly tearing up the South Side taverns with the greatest electric blues combo in the world, Besman believed that the compromises necessary for Hooker to fit in with his backup men diluted his individuality to an unacceptable extent. Still, if the sessions demonstrated one thing it was this: that even though Hooker needed the money he got from those bootleg sessions, he also needed to express himself without the restrictions imposed by his occasionally didactic producer.

  Most of the songs for those impromptu cash-in-hand sessions were, Hooker claims, written in the car on the way to the studio. While Barbee drove, Hooker would hum to himself and pick his guitar in the back seat. When they arrived, he would lay down the tunes in one or two takes and be back in bed before dawn, with only the roll of bills on the bedside table to tell him whether he’d really been out to cut a session, or simply dreamed that he had. He still gets faintly ruffled at any mention of a ‘three-hour session’. ‘Three hours? No, wouldn’t be no three hours! I never was in the studio that long. I was in about an hour and a half, maybe two, then I’m out of there. Three hours was the limit, but I was never up to that limit. I went in there and did a whole five or six songs in an hour, two hours. I’m gone!’ Did good days produce uptempo boogies and bad days deep brooding slow blues? Hooker laughs at the very idea. ‘No comment! They all was good days . . .’ – he pauses for effect – ‘. . . when I go out there knowin’ that I’m gonna get some money that night. That was a good night. A good day. Rest a couple of hours at night and come on by.’ For a man who claimed that he ‘didn’t go much on writing songs until I wrote “Boogie Chillen”’, Hooker proved to be astonishingly prolific. Given the pressure to produce which the intensive recording efforts demanded by Barbee necessitated, he created an extraordinary body of work virtually overnight. ‘After “Boogie Chillen”,’ says Hooker, ‘I got a real interest in writing songs. I can sit down in a studio or a house and write songs’ – he snaps his fingers – ‘just like that.’

  ‘He’d do it for a few bucks,’ says Besman, somewhat crossly, ‘and he’d do it for a few drinks. He’d record for me, let’s say, and two or three hours later he’d be in some record shop with someone with whom he was friendly and they probably give him a few drinks or some food or some money and he’d do the same song, supposedly, but they weren’t the same because he couldn’t play the same. He didn’t know what he’d recorded in the first place.’ If it was any consolation to Besman, his Hooker recordings – rather than any of those Barbee-sponsored backroom sessions for Joe Von Battle and the others – were the ones that sold. By early summer, both sides of the ‘Hobo Blues’/‘Hoogie Boogie’ pairing had charted separately, peaking at No. 5 and No. 9 respectively, and ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ hit in early December, eventually reaching No. 6. Apart from the raging ‘Burnin’ Hell’, a devastating repudiation of Christian notions of the afterlife, with Hooker backed by Eddie Burns’ harp, which Besman – understandably worried by its incendiary subject-matter – released locally on Sensation, everything Hooker cut which Besman felt was worthy of release was sent to Modern. The records sold, but Modern paid late, light and grudgingly, and Hooker and Besman got more and more peeved: both with the Biharis and with each other. ‘Bernie didn’t tell me; you know they ain’t gonna tell on each other. “We ain’t got to give him nothin’, give him a few dollars, that’ll make him happy. Give him seven–eight hundred dollars, that’ll keep his mouth shut.” And it did.’ He laughs, not altogether humorously. ‘So for a long time I did that.’ Meanwhile, even today, Besman is fairly cagey about the full extent of the discrepancies between what he was paid for his masters, and what he estimates Modern actually earned from their sales.

  ‘Well, I finally got to sue them; so did Hooker. We have no facts to speak of. When I settled with them, I regained all my masters that I leased them, and all the copyrights they had that they had no right to, and I got some money. Hooker sued ’em separately, and he and his attorneys regained the masters and the copyrights. He settled and I settled, so it’s settled, closed, period. They had the masters, my masters I’d leased ’em, plus the copyrights of “Boogie Chillen”, “I’m In The Mood For Love” and all those songs. I didn’t know that. I didn’t know any better at the time that I recorded ’em. When I recorded, I recorded the records but I didn’t know too much about the publishing. That was in 1984. Whatever they made, they made. I settled with ’em, he settled with ’em. So that chapter’s closed. Right? So who cares?’

  Hooker still cares, for a start. The memory of his relationship with Modern still rankles: he had a young family to support and bills to pay, his records were charting, and the money that he considered rightfully his seemed to be everywhere other than in his own pocket. ‘He got beat out of a lot of . . . a lot of money,’ says Maude Hooker. ‘But he never stoppe
d. He just kept on going.’

  If you is not a fighter, you won’t make it in Detroit. See what I’m sayin’? You will not make it in Detroit, because Chicago has always gotten all of the recognition. You got some super good musicians here, but they trapped. They don’t know how to get out.

  Eddie Burns, interview with the author, 1992

  During 1950, it seemed as if the law of diminishing returns was setting in. No fewer than twenty-two Hooker records came out on various labels under various names, but the closest he got to a hit that year, ‘Huckle Up Baby’ on Sensation, only reached No. 15 on the Billboard chart. Under his own name, he released four singles on Modern, four on Sensation, two on Regal and one on Blues Classics. In addition, ‘Texas Slim’ had three discs out on King; ‘Johnny Williams’ had three on Staff, two on Swing Time and one each on Gotham and Prize, while ‘John Lee Booker’ made his debut for Gone. (‘Little Pork Chops’, on the other hand, remained inactive.) Certainly he needed money: Famous Coachman remembers him as being broke a lot of the time, even after his first few hits, and in 1950 it must have seemed as if the hits were already drying up. ‘He became successful,’ says Besman, ‘on the spur of the first record session, and it was only because of this original kind of beat. His other blues records weren’t successful like “Boogie Chillen”. It was just this beat he originated.’ The problem was that, hits or no hits, there were limited possibilities for live work around Detroit. The clubs that he’d packed before ‘Boogie Chillen’ couldn’t get any fuller than they already were, and the working-class, blue-collar home crowd that he drew couldn’t afford to pay much more to get in than they were already paying.

  ‘He had it pretty tight,’ Coachman says, ‘raisin’ a family and gettin’ no money from gigs and what-not. I mean, he worked in some places for a small amount, but he hasn’t worked that much, and he tried to make music, take care of him and his family. It was just small money, that’s all. [After “Boogie Chillen”] he got more money for shows. He used to work in different clubs, and bars, places like that. He used to work with a guy named Little Sonny, with Bobo Jenkins, and [the late pianist] Boogie Woogie Red, Mr Bo, all of ’em. Used to go up the strip to Oakland Avenue, up and down the strip to Apex, Champion Bar, Sugar Hill, many many places, you could just go up and down the strip and work. They didn’t do the advertising then like they do now, you know, sometimes they have to have a sound system on a truck go round to let you know that a certain show is gonna be on. They didn’t let ’em put it on the radio; the radio weren’t open to ’em like it is now, you see. You never got a chance to go on the radio and play music ’til the later years, because this wasn’t the music they were playin’. They didn’t like it. Most people didn’t like it who were goin’ on the radio. So he stayed here in Detroit and worked at things that got tightened up and tightened up and tightened up . . . You know what it is with Detroit: one guy get a gig, he just starts the night to pick up Johnny Lee Hooker, Eddie Burns, Little Sonny and some body else and go and make a gig. All of ’em weren’t in the same band, but that’s the group he choose that night for that gig. Now maybe Eddie Burns got a gig for tomorrow night, so tomorrow night they drop Eddie Burns and pick up someone else, and go runnin’ with the gig. If the man there, somebody playin’ the music that he wanted, he satisfied. Mr Bo was here at the same time Johnny Lee was here, at the Apex and Champion Bar, the Caribbean and other places these guys used to play. Like I say, one get a gig, everybody would sub under the title of the man that get the gig. See, it wouldn’t be John Lee Hooker And His Blues Band, it’d be Mr Bo And His Blues Band. No matter how big you was, you had to sub under the man who got the gig.’

  Elmer Barbee was still nominally Hooker’s manager, but while he may have been a whiz at setting up bootleg recording sessions, he didn’t have much of a clue about keeping his client in regular work. ‘He was managing Johnny, so-called,’ snorts Eddie Burns. ‘The management wasn’t too strong, but he was John’s mouthpiece at that time. He would try to keep up with John, and tell him what to don’t do, and what wasn’t good for him.’

  ‘When [Hooker] signed with me, he didn’t have any manager to book him or get him jobs,’ says Besman, ‘so I got Todd Rhodes’ manager Stutz Henderson, who was a very big wheel in Detroit, to become his manager. [Hooker] wanted me to become his manager for a while, but I had no time. So Stutz Henderson booked him, but I got him some gigs to start with through contacts I had with people. He would go to the jobs, you know, and there would always be people who would invite him to gamble, like dice between sets, and sometimes I would come to collect the money and it would be already gambled away, the money that he earned. People would always take advantage of him. It didn’t matter how much you gave him, he always needed the money because even if he worked he probably gambled some of it away.’ This allegation infuriates Hooker, and he is at some pains to deny it with all the vehemence at his command. ‘I ain’t never been a gambler. I never gambled in my life for money. I can’t see myself doin’ that. I hate to lose. I work too hard for my money to lose it in a game. They say, “Why don’t you go downstairs and gamble?” I say, “Oh no. I ain’t no gamblin’ man.” I don’t go where they gamble too much. No way.’

  Besman was still recording Hooker regularly, but more and more of the resulting material was remaining in the can. ‘I can only tell you about the times that I would come up and he would play and say that he would need some bread. When he came to the sessions, he never came alone. He always had a gang of people with him. He was gregarious. That’s where Eddie Burns came in, Andrew Dunham, Sylvester Cotton, and they’d sit in. That was all right by me because he had an audience, which was good for him. He was easy to work with; he was never angry. One thing I had to do was what he called “taste”. I had to bring some “taste” down, which meant a little liquor . . . and sandwiches. He’d say, “Bernie, don’t forget to bring the taste.” He’d never get drunk or anything like that . . . he used to cook his own food for many many years; he’d carry this little electric thing whenever he’d go and play someplace. Listen, many times I recorded him for nine hours straight just to get the money back. I’d bring in corned-beef sandwiches, work as long as I had to. He didn’t care.’

  Eddie Burns has slightly different memories of some of those sessions. ‘Bernie Besman used to have money on the table,’ he recalls. ‘Money and whiskey was it. Bernie would always have plenty whiskey around. Shenley Black Label, that was a real rotgut drink. So hundred-dollar bills would be stacked here, tape-recorder be runnin’ here, and the whiskey sittin’ everywhere. He used to ask John, “How many [sides] can I get today, John?” John look at the money and say, “Wellll . . . how many you want?” And by John liking the money and everything, you know, he would give him what he want, that way. I don’t know how much money, because he would never share that information. I could see money but . . . I didn’t ever know what John was getting. All I know was Bernie was get ting what he wanted, and John was getting what he wanted.’

  And what they both wanted most of all was another hit. In mid-August of 1951, Hooker went into the studio with Besman, bringing Eddie Kirkland along to play second guitar, and cut a tune which he still insists was inspired by Glenn Miller’s ‘In The Mood’, though the resemblence has never occurred to anyone else. A haunting, incantatory, devastatingly sensual blues with a lyric which includes the most deliberately overt non-rhyme in the entire Hooker canon, it had ‘hit’ emblazoned all over it in glowing blue neon letters. And Besman, whose ears were still not only attached to his head but definitely connected to both his brain and his wallet, rose to the occasion with what was possibly the most inspired production of his entire association with Hooker. ‘I thought I was going to try something else, and I may have been one of the first to do this, so when the mic and the speaker came back on “I’m In The Mood” and I was quite happy with it, I said, “Sing it over.” I was probably the first guy to overdub something like that.21 But I just experimented. So he sang it with two voices. Then
I did it the third time so I had three voices, then a fourth time with four voices, with him doing it. The first release of “I’m In The Mood” was with two voices: that’s why it was a hit, because it was so different. I experimented a lot; we had fun. Not him: me and Joe Siracuse. I had only one channel to record, compared to now, so I used a lotta mics wherever I could. It was still one channel, but I’d get some effects. The mic might be further away, or the instrument might be ten feet away. I would say it was maybe equal to [‘Boogie Chillen’], possibly bigger.’

  ‘“In The Mood”, that was tearin’ the country up,’ Kirkland says, reminiscing with Hooker during one of their rare reunions. ‘That was a standard, man. They played that record in every club. Back then they had what you call “high class black clubs” at that time . . .’

  ‘Black and tan,’ prompts Hooker.

  ‘That record played in all the places.’

  ‘Drugstores, markets, everywhere. You walk in, they have that on. I felt like a king.’

  ‘Tore Nashville, tore Tennessee up, man.’

  ‘Oh boy.’