Boogie Man

  ‘All the records he made for me are published by me,’ Besman insists, ‘and I’m the co-writer on all those songs. All of them. All that he did for me. Don’t forget, he couldn’t read or write – number one – number two, if I let him record, all the numbers would be the same. Most of the time he never came rehearsed, so he didn’t know what we were gonna do, which was a terrific deal, because he was a one-man band. I’d get together with him on a subject and say, “What’re we gonna sing about today?” He’d say something, I’d say something, that was it. It wasn’t like getting together and writing a song for a month. Whatever came out, came out. It was impromptu. He’s like an old troubadour, you might say. You give him subject matter, like the rail strike in Detroit. I’d say, “Let’s sing about the strike” and give him a few sentences, and there it is. There’s a song.26 The next time, it’d become something else. But all the songs I recorded I had to [talk him through them], because if you didn’t you’d just get the same thing. The “Boogie Chillen” theme, with different words, out of the 250 records that I did with him, there are at least 20 songs using the “Boogie Chillen” theme. It’s the same thing: all he’d do is change the words. If I let him, he’d do “Boogie Chillen” or “Sally Mae” over and over again. So I’d be playing the different rhythms for him, to get him to change it a little bit. He has the talent to do that; not many people could do that. But he wouldn’t remember what he did on the first song [laugh] or the second song. I’ve also played bongos or drums or organ, anything to keep the thing moving along. Because if I didn’t, all his tunes would be the same as far as the music goes.’

  If anything can truly be said to contradict Besman’s claim to have been Hooker’s artistic muse – apart from Hooker’s own account, that is – it’s the remarkably varied music which Hooker made for Joe Von Battle, Elmer Barbee and others during the period that the two men worked together. Though that ‘other’ Hooker music may lack the tight commercial focus which Besman brought to his sessions, this loss is, with a few decades of hindsight, clearly counterweighted by the free-wheeling invention and giddy leaps of improvisational inspiration which Hooker was able to produce when liberated from Besman’s constraints. In any case, the majority of contemporary record producers routinely do for their artists what Besman claims to have done for Hooker without claiming a share of the composer credits for their work. Besman was – in the musical sense – Hooker’s producer; in cinematic terms he was Hooker’s director (and sometimes set designer), and if we prefer a literary analogy, he was Hooker’s editor.

  ‘I know exactly how they got those sounds,’ insists Eddie Burns. ‘Johnny always was a feet-stomper. He stomped a lot when he played, you know. Both feet goin’ up and down. Floppin’, you know. He be sittin’ in the chair, but they had these wooden chairs that folds, you know. They would put them under his feet to get the sound, you know what I mean, because when he used to play he used to get happy, and them feet be goin’, they be floppin’ and things. It didn’t sound like a drum because it was a straightforward beat, but it was gettin’ the job done. Some things he cut, Bernie would be in the background and he be poppin’ his fingers some kind of way and Johnny would be stompin’ and you hear the clickin’ from the fingers too, all goin’ at the same time. Then the music would come back in . . .’

  ‘Listen,’ Besman insists, ‘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. It wasn’t like a group who’d come in with arrangements, all rehearsed, and every time they play it it’d be the same. With him he didn’t know anything, so there was no use preparing anything. Mostly, it was just the subject matter we’d discuss, and the rhythms. I think that I contributed with some of my musicians to the style that the records came out in. But you know what was the worst problem that I had with him? He wanted to sing ballads!’ He laughs. ‘I refused to do it. But there were several that I let him do: one was “It’s My Own Fault”, on which I also played piano. That was the closest I let him do to a ballad, but he begged me. I said no, because if I let him play ballads he wouldn’t be John Lee Hooker! That’s like “I’m In The Mood For Love” – he wanted to sing that ballad ‘I’m in the mood for love/strictly because you’re near me’, but that’s what came out. You know why? He can’t remember, but he wanted to sing the ballads. I had a battle with him. I said, “No way”, but that was as close as it came: “It’s My Own Fault”. I had to change that title, because that came out . . . Chess Records stole that master. I don’t know how they got it, but over my piano they overdubbed his voice. I didn’t release that record until 1971, and they already had it out in 1955. But the piano is there. That’s me playing.27 Listen, for money they would do any thing. Chess wasn’t so honest. The experience I’ve had with these other companies is that they’re all crooked.’

  Let’s put it this way: the above speech provides considerable scope for discussion, and it should come as no surprise to hear that Hooker vehemently disputes all of it. First of all, he claims never, ever, to have received any advances or front-money from Besman. ‘I don’t owe him no money, and I never borrowed any money from him, not ever,’ says Hooker, very firmly indeed. ‘All I got from him was the money he owed me, and I probably didn’t get all of that. He probably gave me what he felt like giving me. He never loaned me no money . . . never. Never. Never. I would know if I did. I wouldn’t lie, I’d say yes, I had one or two [advances], but I never. I don’t dislike the man, I like him, but I don’t like what he’s saying, and he’s not right.’

  According to documentary evidence cited by Mike Rowe in his liner note for Detroit Blues 1950–1952, a compilation of early non-Besman sides by Hooker and Eddie Burns,28 Hooker himself had apparently requested a release from the then-current rollover of his annually renewable contract with Besman in order to sign with Gotham Records, to whom Battle had leased four singles – with Hooker billed as ‘Johnny Williams’ or ‘John Lee’ – during 1950 and 1951. ‘Please send me the contract so I can sign it’, ran the text of an undated letter to Gotham written above his signature, and enclosing a copy of his current contract with Besman, which had commenced in March 1951 and was due to expire on 29 February 1952. ‘I want 2½ per cent royalty to start and four hundred dollars in advance. Send the money along with the contract. I would like it about Wednesday. If I get my release before my contract is expired I will let you know and you can use my name.’ This particular deal produced no significant fruit – if, indeed, it was ever consummated, which is doubtful – since no further Hooker titles ever appeared on Gotham. The Besman contract must have been renewed, or else there would have been nothing for Besman to release Hooker from. Furthermore, Hooker and Besman cut at least one more recording session before their final falling-out, generating three more Modern singles (and a further pile of sides for Besman’s vaults) before they left United Sound together for the last time on 22 May 1952. (On this session, Besman made what was one of his few audible contributions to any Hooker sides of the period: he played rudimentary organ chords on versions of the standards ‘It Hurts Me Too’ and ‘Key To The Highway’, as he had done on a previous session a month or two earlier.)

  Besides, Besman had another excellent reason for severing his connection with Hooker; one which had nothing to do with his star’s faltering record sales or promiscuous recording habits. ‘I left Detroit in 1952 because I had six months to live,’ Besman explains. ‘I had a very bad sinus condition in Detroit. I’d be sick all the time. When winter came, I was sick. When summer came, I was sick. This doctor said, “You have a blood infection which will kill you in six months unless we operate on you.” So like any other smart guy I went and got three other opinions, and the other three doctors said that if I left Michigan and went to a warmer climate, with medication I’d survive. So that’s why I had to sell my company and stop recording. I went into distribution of an item called Paint-By-Numbers. It was a hobby thing where you had a canvas and pict
ures divided into numbers. In 1952, my cousin was manufacturing this Paint-By-Numbers, we had this company and I was going to go to LA because of the warmer climate, and also because I was stationed in Santa Rosa for awhile, which is sixty miles north of San Francisco, and I got to like California, so I’d decided that I was going to come back after the war. This Paint-By-Numbers, I got the franchise for the eleven Western states, and I made more money on Paint-By-Numbers in one year than I would have made [from music] in a lifetime. It was a very, very big product. That’s why music didn’t interest me. Money is the thing that interested me. I was very successful with that. And then Hooker, at that time, had kinda faded out. He didn’t get revitalised until about 1971, when I leased the records to United Artists and he made some sessions with Canned Heat. That’s what revitalised him, Canned Heat. He made “Boogie Chillen” again with them, called it “Boogie Chillen No. 2”. All those records he made with Vee Jay and Chess weren’t really big numbers, except for one or two, but his records didn’t sell in the quantities they sell now.’

  (Here Besman is being somewhat disingenuous, not to mention just a leetle self-serving. It was during those years, when Hooker ‘had kinda faded out’, that he wrote and recorded ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’ – two of his biggest, most influential and most-covered hits; that he made his breakthrough to the young white mass audience, first through the folk scene and later as an icon to successive generations of young blues-rockers, playing to the largest crowds of his career thus far; that he discovered, or was discovered by, a vast new potential audience in Europe; and that he enjoyed his first mainstream album-chart success. But we’re getting somewhat ahead of ourselves: all of that lay ahead, in an unwritten future impossible for either Besman or Hooker to predict.)

  ‘Mr Besman, I admire his courage, but he didn’t write [“Boogie Chillen”],’ Hooker insists. ‘I don’t know why he claims he writes my songs. He have never written a song for me. Bernie Besman didn’t know anything about it until I met him. I had that song and I was playing that around there before I knew him. I didn’t know Bernie Besman. I want you to make sure you put this in the book, because it’s the truth. I met Elmer Barbee and I was playing around and we got it on blank and that went to Bernie, who heard all my stuff I had down on a blank. He never written any of my songs.’

  But did Hooker talk to Besman about what he was going to do before he did it? ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘like I do now in the studio’. Nevertheless, he insists that he never talked about what a song was going to be about, or what it was going to say. ‘No. I just do it, like I do now. I don’t talk about it. Matter of fact, I didn’t know he was a songwriter. So many people got they name on my records, say they wrote. Jimmy Bracken, his name on saying he wrote this. Al Smith, Calvin Carter29 – all them gone now – he wrote this. How can anybody say they wrote John Lee Hooker’s songs? Like Bernie Besman. I got nothing against Bernie, don’t get me wrong, but I think he shouldn’t do these things. I got nothin’ against the man, but nobody can write for John Lee Hooker. You can, but I’m gonna change it the way I feel it. He never wrote no “Boogie Chillen”; I didn’t know him when I were playin’ it around town. When I put it on the record, that’s when he come to know me, when I played it on the record. I didn’t know no Bernie when I wrote that “Boogie Chillen”. You write the facts and the truth. The man didn’t write “Boogie Chillen”. As a person I like him, but he shouldn’t say he wrote my song. I write all my songs. Roy [Rogers] and them will tell you: nobody writes songs for John Lee Hooker. Since I left Bernie I’ve written over a hundred songs. I didn’t get ’em off the top of my head; I fix ’em like I want to fix ’em. When I met Bernie I had “Boogie Chillen”; I got “In The Mood” from an old big band and put the words to it. It’s a completely different song. I’m surprised Bernie didn’t say he wrote that.30 Oh boy. The stuff he got’s not big sellers, but he got money comin’ in all the time. If it wasn’t for money, he wouldn’t’a did it. He didn’t do it just for nothin’. For the money and publicity he could get out of it, build his name. It wasn’t right. He could at least have said, “John wrote all these songs, but he was on my label, and I helped to make him popular. I started him out on my Sensation label, went on to Modern. I discovered him then; I didn’t write any songs, but I helped him get over the hill.” I could respect that very much, but I can’t respect that he say he wrote the songs. He didn’t know the songs; he had never heard them ’til I come into the studio, and I had it down.’

  Hooker still grumbles about the money that he feels that he should have earned back in those days, not because he particularly needs it now, but because he certainly could have used it then, back when he was broke and scuffling. (I once asked Charlie Musselwhite if he was familiar with a song, recorded by Hooker in London in the mid-’60s, which begins ‘You know that I love you but don’t be messing with my bread.’ He laughed heartily and replied, ‘No, I don’t remember that one . . . but I can almost hear it.’) Further to this, deponent sayeth not, except to point out two things: firstly, that as part of his separation from Besman, Hooker did indeed sign the agreement that relinquished his rights and, what’s more, that he signed it again almost twenty years later when Besman commenced the first major reissue programme of his Hooker material by leasing sides to United Artists and Specialty in the early ’70s. And secondly, that whenever Besman has found it necessary either to assert or defend the legal validity of that agreement in a court of law, he has won.

  But, over and above whatever monies Hooker may or may not have received, what distresses Hooker the most about having to share composing credits with Bernard Besman is the implication that his music isn’t really entirely his own. It’s one thing to have to give up a piece of your royalties – just about everybody in the blues world has had to do that at some time or another – but it’s an entirely different proposition when you have to give up a piece of your soul. ‘How long since I been without him?’ Hooker asks rhetorically. ‘I’ve invented plenty stuff, right? I’m gonna say he did not write the songs. He did not write “Boogie Chillen”. He did not write no song at all. He don’t know how to write a song. I never saw him play no piano. Organ: one record got that on.’ Hooker mimics the organ chord from ‘It Hurts Me Too’. ‘That’s the only one.31 I don’t like to say it but I’m gonna say it: I’m a genius when it come to writin’ songs. I am. I wrote more blues songs than anybody, and Bernie ain’t wrote nary a song for me. Not ever. I haven’t seen him in the studio since,32 and I been writin’ ever since 1952. I write my own lyrics, my own songs, my own way’a doin’ it. I can be in the studio and write songs right in the studio. Right in the studio. “Boom Boom”, “Dimples” – all those tunes, all the new tunes . . . I’m surprised that he said things like that. He said I had to have him, and I ain’t usin’ him now, so who doin’ it? Me. He never wrote a song with me. He had part of it, he put his name on it, like a lot of other record companies did.’

  Left to his own devices, Hooker signed himself direct to Modern. In business terms, this must have been something like jumping from the frying pan straight into the fire. Musically, Hooker was effectively producing himself, with engineer Joe Siracuse still manning the board at United Sound. As he had done on his ‘outside’ sessions, Hooker now alternated between solo recordings – with the occasional participation of Eddie Kirkland – and rough, rocking combo sides featuring an assortment of the local musicians with whom he worked the clubs and bars. Whilst the economics of touring had dictated that he mostly travelled only with the faithful Kirkland, he had worked locally with a band which, at various times, included pianists Bob Thurman, James Woods and Vernon ‘Boogie Woogie Red’ Harrison; saxophonists Otis Finch and Johnny Hooks; and drummers Jimmy Turner and Tom Whitehead.

  Whitehead was a stocky Alabama-born drummer, raised by his mother variously in Detroit, Chicago and Cleveland. He’d played drums in school before he quit music to get married, but by the early ’50s the lure of the sticks and cymbals had proved too seductive t
o resist, and he was back behind the kit. ‘I played with little jazz groups, met John – I hadn’t heard nothin’ about him – in ’53. A piano player – we’d worked together in his band – and me got a job with John. I guess he was havin’ a problem, his drummer was ill or something, so this Bob Thurman, he deceased now, he called me up and asked me if I was busy. I said, “No, not this weekend.” So he said, “Well c’mon, I want you to come and play with John Lee Hooker.” I said, “Who is that?” I had never heard of him. He had made “Boogie Chillen” already. I wasn’t with him then. Fact, he did that by himself, with the box, stompin’. He was playin’ at the Club Caribe, down on Jefferson Avenue. I went there and I played with him that night and he asked me, “What about tomorrow night?” I say, “Okay, I’ll play tomorrow night.” After that he say, “Hey, I like the way you play. What about playin’ with me regular?” I say, “Okay.” Eddie Kirkland had played with him on and off, and Eddie Burns had played with him on and off. They knew him before I did. Reason I enjoy playin’ with him – I’ll be frank – is that we could play everything, and then we bring him up. We could play jazz, we could play . . . you know, that’s the reason I got attached with him, see. Otherwise I probably wouldn’t have, at that time, I bein’ younger, you know. He gave the band a lot of freedom. And he was a nice person.