Boogie Man

‘That was a hell of a record.’

  ‘Didn’t get no money for it ’cause of the damn Modern Records company. Them the cheatin’est damn company. Record companies, whoo! You could have a big hit, wouldn’t be gettin’ nothin’.’

  ‘A cent, half a cent.’

  ‘Wouldn’t even give you that.’

  ‘That was somethin’ else back then.’

  ‘Maybe a little somethin’,’ says Hooker, closing the discussion, ‘just to keep your mouth shut.’

  If ‘Boogie Chillen’ introduced Hooker as a major blues artist, ‘I’m In The Mood’ cemented that status. It even gained him the supreme accolade of an ‘answer’ record: ‘I Ain’t In The Mood’ by veteran blues chantoose Helen Humes. By October, it was No. 1 on Billboard’s R&B chart. It stayed on the list for fifteen weeks, and its success finally gave Hooker enough commercial clout to make it worth his while to call up Eddie Kirkland, pack his bags and go on the road. He stayed out there, on and off but mostly on, for the next forty years.

  7

  GHOSTSES ON THE HIGHWAY

  Some of the stuff we go through, man, people would never believe. I’ve known places that have picketed me for playin’, said we came in and takin’ the money out of town. Also many times when we wasn’t even allowed to play in some places. Certain places we wasn’t allowed to play. Other times it wasn’t a race thing. Some places we went the black people wouldn’t let you play, so I’ve gone through that too.

  B.B. King on touring in the ’50s, interview with the author, 1992

  The road is where the bluesman’s faith is put to the test. Here, on the dusty, hostile line between two points – his place of departure and his destination – his knowledge and courage will be shown for what they are. This aspect of the bluesman’s initiation is particularly intimidating because, fraught with unpredictability as it is, there is never an end to its trials and hardships. As long as he is ‘on the road’, he will be tested . . . The blueslife on the road is a lonely, weary and trying experience, and demands a constant rekindling of strength and faith.

  Julio Finn, from The Bluesman22

  If George Miller and Mel Gibson ever decide to shoot another Mad Max movie, they could do a hell of a lot worse than to hire Eddie Kirkland for a cameo role. A thickset, powerful man in the waistcoat and pants of a pinstripe suit; red shirt, medallion, shades and a black leather cap over a bandana, his heavy leather overcoat slung over his arm, they wouldn’t even need to send him over to wardrobe and props to kit him out with the right clothes and vehicle: he’s already a Road Warrior par excellence. Right now he’s arrived in San Francisco to join John Lee Hooker in his musical home from home, the Russian Hill studio on Pacific, to cut a couple of tunes for Kirkland’s forthcoming album, and hopefully come up with something suitable for possible inclusion on Hooker’s next album, Boom Boom. The contrast between the circumstances of these two old comrades could hardly be more spectacular.

  After a leisurely 25-minute ride down 101, Hooker arrives at the studio with his tobacco-sunburst Gibson 335 and his handmade Bedrock amplifier in the trunk of his white Lincoln Town Car, piloted as ever by Archie Hooker. Meanwhile, Eddie Kirkland has driven non-stop from Denver, Colorado, chewing an unlit cigar while wrestling with the wheel of a beat-up, rusted-out Dodge van seemingly held together with a combination of electricians’ tape and sheer willpower. Anybody wishing to park their carcass in the front passenger seat is required to clamber in through the driver’s door, since the passenger door no longer opens. When Kirkland needs to take a break and catch some en route Zs, he curls up in a sleeping bag in the back of the van right next to his instruments. He carries three amplifiers – a big Peavey, an Acoustic, and an old Fender Bassman – and half a dozen assorted guitars. These include the pair he will use on this session: an ancient ’50s Silvertone encrusted with rhinestones and more pickups than it seems possible to fit on one guitar – well, five – plus a similarly twisted Peavey T30 with the word ‘ENERGY’ emblazoned upon it in stick-on letters.

  Russian Hill is a small but luxurious studio. Wood-panelled, warmly lit and pile-carpeted, it suggests what the bridge of the Starship Enterprise might look like after Laura Ashley got through redecorating it. Most of the West Coast sessions for The Healer and Hooker’s subsequent renaissance sessions have been cut here: Hooker knows the studio like he knows his own house, and he’s almost as comfortable in it. In a break from the precedent set by those previous sessions, Bowen Brown and Jim Guyett, the Coast To Coast Blues Band’s drummer and bassist, have been chosen for this particular job, and they’re already set up, miked up and warmed up. Hooker’s producer, Roy Rogers, a bearded elf with a face-splitting grin and an almost telepathic awareness of his client’s needs and wishes, has already sound-checked everything in sight; all Hooker has to do is walk in, sit down, plug in and play. He and Kirkland catch sight of each other, and warmly wring each other’s hands. They have not seen each other for five or six years, nor played together for three and a half decades.

  ‘Hey, how you doin’?’

  ‘You lookin’ good.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s young girls keep you young.’

  ‘Mm, got to try some of that.’

  Rogers does a final check on Brown and Guyett’s drum and bass sounds. Hooker and Kirkland sit opposite each other as a cassette of an earlier version of ‘Ain’t No Big Thing’, the first tune Hooker and Rogers have chosen for the session, plays through the speakers. Hooker first cut the song back in 1964, during his final studio session for the long since defunct Chicago label Vee Jay. ‘When I first got you, baby, you didn’t have a change of clothes . . . You ain’t no big thing, baby, I’ll replace you right away.’

  ‘Let me hear your rhythm,’ requests Kirkland

  ‘I ain’t quite sure yet.’

  ‘You gonna stay right there on the one?’

  They begin to work the tune over, Kirkland playing sliding ninth chords, John Lee jabbing away with mean, low-down bass-string runs. Kirkland isn’t happy. ‘It’s all that background noise,’ he complains, putting down his guitar and stands up.

  ‘Can I turn you up a little bit, Eddie?’ asks Rogers from behind the desk.

  ‘Jesus Christ . . .’

  ‘It’s clean out there, but . . .’

  They try it again. The old telepathy operates only intermittently: sometimes they sound like they’re playing one big guitar; at others like they’re playing two different tunes. ‘Let’s do it over,’ says John, even before the hiss of Bowen’s cymbal has died away. ‘If you was startin’ it,’ he asks Kirkland, ‘how would you start it?’ Kirkland tries his hand at a new intro. John and Eddie discuss certain chords: ‘If it fit, do it,’ says Hooker. ‘If it don’t fit, don’t force it.’ They’re rolling: the song’s already changed from the demo tape. ‘Now you got a few rags on your back and a car to drive, you ain’t no big thing, baby. You got a big head. Your two-timing friends try to tell you what to do. Send you back to the lowlands, where I brought you from.’

  ‘Let’s do it quick so we can pay the fellas cheap,’ says John, glancing over at the rhythm section. ‘Gimme two on the top,’ requests Kirkland. Hooker stops the take after six bars. Rogers aborts the next one: John has ‘a string acting funny’. This time, the lyrics change yet again. On the one-chord rideout, Hooker hits a powerful guitar/voice unison: ‘No more, no more, no more.’ The groove rolls until Hooker cuts short the proceedings with a grave ‘Thank you, fellas’, his favourite cue for an ending.

  ‘You like that, boss?’ asks Roy.

  ‘Let’s do “Dimples”. That’s old.’

  They hunt for the cassette featuring ‘Dimples’. They find ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Boogie Chillen’ but no ‘Dimples’. Kirkland adjusts his BOSS effects pedal and rolls some heavy Bo Diddley-style vibrato onto his guitar; the band jam while the cassette hunt goes on. Eventually they just jam the tune. ‘Well, it feel good to me,’ says Hooker.

  ‘Bowen knows where to come in and he’s going to come in right with y
ou,’ advises Rogers. ‘We’re rolling right . . . now!’ It’s faster and rougher than the original. Roy holds up his fingers to indicate I, IV or V chords. Next time through it sounds like ‘Baby Lee’. ‘John, I got to stop you.’

  He races through into the studio.

  ‘When he starts singing, you should be on the one. When he does that last line, Eddie, go to the five.’ There are still a few collisions.

  ‘That were a little fast too, wasn’t it?’ asks Hooker.

  ‘He’s into it,’ replies Rogers. ‘Let him do it again.’

  ‘Take four,’ Hooker announces. Is this a record, heh heh. Yes, it is: everyone declares themselves satisfied. Rogers retunes Hooker’s guitar to open A for the next tune: one of Eddie’s songs entitled ‘There’s Gonna Be Some Blues’. He wanders back into the studio and whispers in Hooker’s ear before returning behind the desk. He turns round to smile conspiratorially at the assembled company. ‘I just told John his guitar is sounding exceptionally funky today,’ he says. This particular number is seriously rockin’, with Hooker supplying the backing vocals and Eddie tailing into falsetto on the title line.

  ‘I don’t think you can do no better,’ Hooker announces proudly at the end of the first take. Nevertheless, they run through it again. Rogers lopes back into the studio to retune Hooker’s guitar, switching it back from open-tuned A to regular-tuned E. The song seems to have turned into something called ‘Big City Behind The Sun’.

  By now, Hooker seems to be getting a little restive. ‘Let’s go,’ he says, ‘I wanna look at pretty girls. They get the girls in here yet?’ He cackles. Sheila McFarland, the red-haired female engineer, doesn’t. They cut it. ‘That’s it!’ Jim Guyett and Sam Lehmer, the other engineer, debate a few changes which indicate a certain degree of difference of musical opinion between Jim and Eddie as to whether overdubs are required. Apparently they are not. Eddie packs up his gear. Archie packs up John’s. The session has lasted exactly one hour and fifty minutes. John rides back to Redwood City in the Lincoln to watch TV, chow down on some of Archie’s virtuoso downhome cuisine, and chat to his friends on the phone. Kirkland climbs back into the Dodge, but tonight Hooker is treating his guest to the luxury of a night’s rest in a nearby motel. Tonight Eddie Kirkland doesn’t have to sleep in the back of the van.

  The following morning, getting ready to drive up to Hooker’s house to hang out and chit-chat for a while before climbing back behind the wheel of the Dodge to catch up with his next job, Kirkland is still euphoric, still flying, after the experience of playing with his old buddy again after all those years. ‘One thing I always learned comin’ up in the music,’ he insists, ‘was you listen to a man, what’s comin’ from his heart. You don’t change that, you just figure out a way to do it. I would always listen to him, whatever he was doin’, and think in my mind what to do to put on top of that to make what he done better. That’s what I did the way I played behind him in those days, the same way I did yesterday.’

  He had a few problems, though, playing with the Coast To Coast rhythm section. ‘Even the musicians, the bass player, that I heard yesterday behind him was not playin’ . . . good bass player, but he was not playin’ on top of Hooker. On “Dimples” the bass player was playin’ another beat . . . that’s why I talked him into playin’ a cajun beat, because that fitted. I’m not downin’ the musicians, but they did not have the idea what to put behind him. They was puttin’ behind him what they feels, but it’s not right. Whatever he do with his hands, you got to fit it. You don’t play somethin’ else. That’s why I was more sensitive playin’ with him than anybody else.’

  Both ‘There’s Gonna Be Some Blues’ and ‘Big City Behind The Sun’, the two tracks on which Hooker backed Kirkland, end up on Kirkland’s next album, All Around The World, heralded by a prominent cover sticker on which Hooker’s name looms large.

  However, several months later, when Hooker, Roy Rogers and Mike Kappus – the three partners in Blue Rose Productions, the production company which makes and licenses Hooker’s current records – review the session tapes, it is decided that there are simply too many bloopers on the Hooker/Kirkland tunes, ‘Ain’t No Big Thing’ and ‘Dimples’, to justify their inclusion on any future Hooker release. Indeed, that session was the first one undertaken by Blue Rose since the inauguration of The Healer which produced no useable material whatsover. But by the time the decision is taken, Kirkland is long gone. Back to the Midwest, driving 1,500 miles nonstop through a blizzard, to play a 45-minute set with a borrowed band.

  Music didn’t interest me. Money is the thing that interested me.

  Bernard Besman, interview with the author, 1992

  In 1952, in the wake of ‘I’m In The Mood”s success, Eddie Kirkland accompanied Hooker on his first major road trip – in every sense of the word. Kirkland was the band, the musical arranger, the road manager, the business manager, the driver, the mechanic, the bodyguard and anything else Hooker needed. His original partner in crime, Elmer Barbee, was out of the picture by now. According to Eddie Burns, Barbee ‘just disappeared. [He] used to run a record shop and he also was a good TV repairman. Barbee divorced his first wife and got married to another young lady and started a family all over, and he weren’t that young a man. Kids, kids, kids . . .’

  ‘After “In The Mood” I didn’t have a manager, he dropped out,’ says Hooker. ‘I was on my own and didn’t use a manager at all. I just had only the booking agency; I pick up the money and the booking agency pick up the deposit. I run my own business, pick up the money, look after the business on the road. I didn’t need roadies and stuff, I didn’t use ’em. We set up our own ’quipment. I did good with “Boogie Chillen”, but “In The Mood” made more money.’

  After ‘I’m In The Mood’, Hooker says, his career ‘changed tremendous. ‘“Boogie Chillen” was much, much bigger, but when “I’m In The Mood” come out I made more money than with “Boogie Chillen”, because at that time I got more popular. I was popular with “Boogie Chillen”, but I felt that I couldn’t afford a band. It was a big, big success. I’d go out with just me and Eddie Kirkland, use pick-up bands, you know? Whatever we needed, drums, bass, piano or whatever. Different towns had different people. We didn’t carry the band, we’d use a drummer in that town and move on to the next town. They’d know we was comin’ and they have a band there for us rehearsed in each town, good blues bands.’

  One such band, in Montgomery, Alabama, included a young blind guitarist named Clarence Carter, who surfaced on Atlantic Records fifteen or so years later, as a deep-fried Southern soul star in his own right. ‘I learned how to play guitar from those old blues records,’ Carter explained to Gerri Hershey.23 ‘John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jimmy Reed, I used to imitate them. John Lee used to come down to Montgomery, where I come up, and every time the club owner that was booking him would get the same thing. John would say, “What the hell you got to back me up? If you ain’t got those blind boys, I ain’t comin’.”’

  ‘I couldn’t afford to take a band all round the country, Detroit and everywhere.’ Hooker explains. ‘They’d have to have transportation, need a van. I hadn’t reached the stage when I could do that. For years I would travel with just a guitar, amplifier and a big old Pontiac. The car wasn’t too good. We would just carry our guitars and amplifiers, pile it in an old four-door car, blow out our tyres, fix ’em up with old pieces of tyre ’cause we couldn’t afford no new tyres. We would get used tyres, put two or three of ’em in the car if one blow out.

  ‘Eddie Kirkland worked on the car, he could fix anything. I met him in Detroit. He was playing around when I was. He was scufflin’ too. I got a break before he got a break, so he came with me, and we started travellin’ all over the country. I had this big hit out there, and everybody know John Lee Hooker. We travelled the South the most, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama. I made Macon, Georgia, my headquarters. Set up there, get a hotel or a rooming house, and stay there, go into other states. Our bookin’ agent was old C
lint Brantley. He was a big man, and he booked us all over Georgia, Alabama, some parts of Mississippi once in a while, every where he could book us.’

  Macon, Georgia, used to bill itself as having the highest proportion of churches per head of the population of any town in the US. Its most celebrated musical alumni include Little Richard, James Brown, Otis Redding – all Brantley clients in the early days of their careers – and the Allman Brothers. Some of those early tours could get chaotic: one time John was sharing a bill with the Muddy Waters Band just as ‘Juke’, an instrumental single with Muddy’s virtuoso harpist Little Walter as the featured artist, was starting to break big. When the tour reached Shreveport, Louisiana, Walter cut and run: he headed back to Chicago to put his own band together, and – according to Mike Rowe in Chicago Breakdown24 – when Muddy & Co. returned to Chicago after struggling through the rest of the dates without their popular harp man, Walter was on the leader’s doorstep asking for his money from the tour. With truly epic restraint, Muddy replied, ‘I thought you brought it wit’cha.’

  ‘Then it was big, big money,’ says Hooker. ‘We got two, three hundred dollars, that was a lot of money. We could survive, had money in the pocket, send money back to the family, whatever. Some places we got $500, some places less. Some places we do two shows in the same city one night; do one here and then jump over to the next club and do one. Oh, it was fun back in those days. Sometime I wish that I could relive it. The prices of food and clothes was now like it was then. Honest truth, the money was equally the same thing now as it was then. I’ll explain this to you: we make a lot of money, lots of money. But you pay a lot of rent, food way up there, everything way up there. And if you look at it, it about equal out the same way it was then. Wages was very cheap and food was very cheap. Rent was very cheap, almost dirt cheap. The money you made then balanced out. Now you make big money and you got to pay big rent, big everything. It balance out, you know what I’m sayin’?’