Boogie Man

  ‘I found Johnny very nice to work with. Sometimes he would leave to play gigs by himself, and when he come back I might have another job waitin’ for him, because he would have me manage the band since he saw that I was very dependable and prompt, you know. No problem, no trouble, you know what I mean. He told me he would like me to manage the band. I would hire horn players sometimes, whatever I thought it needed. He had a group formed already when I came to him which consisted of a trumpet, saxophone – didn’t have no bass – piano and drums . . . plus Johnny. I always was bickering all the time because I wanted a bass player. Drummers more comfortable then, more relaxed, to put more into it ’stead of just keepin’ just a steady grind. I didn’t find it difficult. I enjoyed workin’ with him. I like workin’ with him, he give the band freedom. That’s one thing I have to give him credit for; a lot of musicians don’t do that. “You got to play what I’m playin’ and that’s it.” But he didn’t care what we play when he was off the stand. We play whatever we wanted to play, but then when we call him up we play him, and that’s that, and you didn’t mix that up. That’s one of the reasons I really liked playing with him, because he didn’t stay on the bandstand all the time, see. We would kinda get things warmed up, you know, and the people really ready for him when he come up. We played a little jazz, a little this, a little that, a little everything. And then when he comes, they really ready for the blues, and we just played the blues, see. Say, out of a set, he might do . . . say we were playin’ maybe about 45 minutes, he might do 15 or 20 minutes, and the band did everything else. They called us the Boogie Ramblers at that time, but we would play some boogies and play some blues too. The saxophone player sing, and the trumpet player sing, so they would sing some blues numbers and things, so it didn’t annoy the people, you know. They kinda enjoyed it. We would swing, but we didn’t play way out there, for dancin’ and stuff like that. The people liked us, they liked the band also. He’d never stay up there for the whole set; do maybe four, five songs, and go on a break. Then the band play, you know, and the people be lined up every night at the Club Caribe. I never played with him on Hastings Street; I started with him on Jefferson and we play various places round the city. We played at the Apex Bar on Oakland Avenue and Clay, Latin Casino on Lafayette, Prince Royal on Gratiot and McDougal, Masonic Temple . . .’

  ‘That was the first outstanding band that he had, the Boogie Ramblers,’ says Burns. ‘They had horns and everything. Curtis Foster used to play with all of us. I don’t know what happened to him. James Watkins also used to play a lot with me, and we all used to play with John. That was before he got the Boogie Ramblers: Bob Thurman, Tom Whitehead, [trumpeter] Jimmy Miller and Johnny Hooks. It was a long time before he got a bass player, and when he got one, he got one used to be with Paul Williams and the Hucklebucks. One of the things that was clickin’ for him was this variety. We had that for a long time in Detroit. As a bluesman you featured, but you got this variety band. That’s been goin’ on here for years. The band is playin’ everything, including your thing. See what I’m sayin’? That way, you gettin’ a mixed clientele. You was gettin’ a mixed crowd when it was like that. Couldn’t nobody say, “Well, I don’t like blues”, because they could say, “But I like swing music and this rhythm’n’blues.”’

  And with the Boogie Ramblers behind him, the Crawling King Snake consolidated his status as king of the Detroit ghetto. No ’bout-a-doubt it: he ruled his den.

  . . . The bulk of black Detroiters, men and women who toiled in hot, dirty factories all week, were not . . . ‘hep cats’ . . . but folks who wanted a beat to dance away the blues to, and lyrics that talked about the basics of life. In 1953, black Detroit’s favourite performer was not jazz giant Charlie Parker, but John Lee Hooker, a foot-stomping, one-beat-boogie bluesman from Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hooker shared the same values and background as the older black masses of Detroit. His songs catalogued his life, especially the transition from rural to urban living, and, in doing so, created a verbal portrait of life as seen by Detroit’s black immigrants. And Hooker’s metallic guitar strokes were the perfect stimulant for house parties and gin drinking.

  Nelson George in Where Did Our Love Go33

  Though John Lee Hooker was far and away the biggest fish in the Detroit blues pond, the trouble was that it was a very small pond indeed. Detroit and its environs boasted a rich variety of musical traditions during the postwar years, of which the Motown empire is merely the most famous, but if it hadn’t been for John Lee Hooker, the city’s electric-downhome scene would be merely a footnote. Consider some of the talent either spawned or nurtured in Detroit during Hooker’s sojourn: Little Willie John, Jackie Wilson, Johnny Ray and Wilson Pickett, to name but four, all lived and worked there, as did the Reverend C.L. Franklin, African-America’s most charismatic churchman. Franklin recorded sermons and services for Chess Records’ gospel line, but he was based in Detroit, as was his daughter Aretha, who subsequently did pretty well for herself in the 1960s. There was also a thriving jazz scene and – in the late ’60s – a highly distinctive high-energy white rock scene developed around performers like the MC5, the Stooges (starring Iggy Pop), the Amboy Dukes (led by Ted Nugent), Bob Seger and Alice Cooper.34 Hooker was, and is, the only one of the city’s bluesmen to make an equivalent impact on the greater world outside.

  There was a heaping handful of talented bluesmen in Detroit, including harpist Aaron ‘Little Sonny’ Willis (who surfaced with a couple of ’70s albums for the Memphis-based Stax Records as the company attempted to follow its successes with Albert King and Little Milton) plus guitarists Robert ‘Baby Boy’ Warren and Louis ‘Mr Bo’ Collins, as well as Hooker’s own associates and jamming partners like Eddie Kirkland, Eddie Burns, Andrew Dunham and Sylvester Cotton. However, once we subtract Hooker himself from this line-up, the age-old rivalry between the local blues scenes of Detroit and Chicago begins to look decidedly unequal. For a start, the Chicago scene – with its plentiful recording facilities and massive population of Delta expats – had been established far longer, with prewar roots stretching back to the heyday of Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red and John Lee (the original Sonny Boy) Williamson. An average night out in Chicago could offer the footloose punter Chess Records stalwarts like Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson II as well as Elmore James and numerous lesser lights, including veteran pianist Sunnyland Slim and the up-and-coming harpist Junior Wells.

  ‘Unfortunately, Detroit is not the same kind of scene that Chicago was, or is today,’ says Eddie Burns. ‘You got a lot of great musicians here, but [Detroit is] a strange scene, has always been, still is. To be successful in Detroit you cannot just become a real successful blues musicians only; you have to learn to play something else in Detroit. You don’t have to do that in Chicago, but here you do. The biggest, strongest musicians is the ones that has a large variety of what they doing, and the city is still like that today.’ Tom Whitehead agrees. ‘The Detroit style is a little different,’ he says. ‘See, the Chicago [blues style] is exactly like it was in the Deep South. Detroit doesn’t sound direct from Mississippi or Alabama.’ This is possibly the reason why, ever since Hooker left town, the Detroit blues scene has enjoyed little respect from its more famous cousin across the lake. As Famous Coachman states, more than somewhat resentfully, ‘Every year we bring Chicago guys in and all through the year we put ’em in places, in the nightclubs here, but Chicago never see fit to book any Detroit acts over to Chicago, not even playin’ in a nightclub, or on the festival. Nine years they had a festival; this year is the first they put one guy on there; that was Eddie Burns.’

  ‘Since I’ve been travellin’ around,’ Burns concurs, ‘I find that the Detroit musicians gets less recognition than any of the musicians I know. Now why that is I don’t know, but it’s true, and 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. It’s politics, you know, just like cattle or sheeps standing in the stall, and they separatin’ them, you know. It’s not another bluesman here today that’s more better known than me. Since Hooker left here, I’m Number One, but I’m not the only one here, and I feel for these other guys, but the connections is so delicate to come by it’s pathetic. And that remains today that way. I guess the reason I’m still survivin’ is because I am a fighter.’

  Hooker was thus the sole exception to the prevailing Detroit rule. Though Tom White head and the Boogie Ramblers could – and did – perform in a variety of styles during the curtain-raisers they played before Hooker took the stage, he was the only one of the city’s bluesmen getting by with nothing but straight, deep blues. His new records for Modern, some of which featured him alone or with Eddie Kirkland but an increasing proportion of which showcased him with piano, drums and saxophone accompaniment, were selling well, even if not as spectacularly as had ‘Boogie Chillen’ or ‘I’m In The Mood’. Nevertheless, he was still broke. ‘Every time I see him he was out of gas, heh heh,’ laughs Coachman. ‘He had a big engine in the car with a little bitty gas tank, and the small gas tank mean that the car were drinkin’ more gas than he could keep in the car. And every time he needed some money he would come by the store: ‘H-h-h-h-h-e-e-e-e-e-y-y-y Famous Coachman, I’m outta gas.’ He had a TV, and every time it’d break I had to go fix it, and he never had no money to pay me. He had one of them big old pot-bellied stoves right there in the middle of the floor, and they put coal in it to keep them warm. He had a big old TV, had a cabinet that was big, and a seven-inch screen. That’s all there was out there then. I used to have to go out there every two, three weeks and put a brand-new transformer. That was the record: about two, three weeks. Runnin’ the whole set with that. When that go out, the sound go out, picture go out. Everything, boy.’

  By now, the Hookers had moved again: to the house on Jameson and McClellan which would remain as the family home until Hooker finally packed up and quit Detroit for good. There were still bills to pay – a second son, Robert, had been born on 25 July, 1953 – and there was never quite enough money coming in to take care of everything. Despite Hooker’s perennial suspicions that Bernard Besman had been underpaying him, at least Besman had managed to extract some money from Modern Records. Hooker himself had rather less luck until, one day, he decided to take matters into his own hands once and for all.

  ‘I never see a true royalty statement. You go over, they be hidin’. Go down to LA, they say, “He ain’t in.” You call, they say, “Is that Mr Hooker there? Just a minute. Oh, he stepped out.” And he sittin’ right there, all that kinda crap. I go down there, lay down the law . . . I caught him one day, I went about three times, four times. He didn’t know I was comin’. I walked right in, and Jules and Joe were sittin’ right there. They eye nearly popped out. I had this guy with me, knew all about publishing, stuff like that. I didn’t know about publishing and different stuff, this and that, but he know, and he walked in with me, and they knew him. He said, “We got to have eight or ten thousand dollars.” And I say, “What!?’ I ain’t never heard of that kind of money.” I know he was up there, I know I had made way, way, way, way more than that. He took them back in the office, and I sat there for about an hour and a half, and he came out of there with a cheque for about ten thousand dollars. I don’t know what he did to them to get that, but he had all the papers in the world, and he knowed all about the business, and he must’ve threatened ’em, he must’ve scared them. His percentage was 10 per cent, and I had never saw that much money before. Not at once. Barbee would give me money like six, seven, eight hundred, twelve or fifteen hundred when I do those recordings, which was big, big, big money. I thought it was. This guy Paul Oscar was the lawyer from LA, I had been talking to him on the phone, somebody recommended him.

  ‘He had all this stuff set up so I could come down from Detroit to his office. He had made a few phone calls to them, but that day they didn’t know he was comin’. He was a big man then. I sat there about an hour and a half, two hours. I sat there by the receptionist, and she said, “Son, I know you hungry, do you wanna eat something?” I said no. She went next door, got some sandwiches. We done talked and talked. She said, “Oohh Mr Hooker, I love your music, you is so popular.” They got ’em trained, but she really liked me. After a while, he came out of the office and said, “I know you hungry, but I got something gonna give you a good appetite, make you eat more.” So we sat in the car, him and his driver. I don’t know where his driver had went, because he wasn’t in the office. Probably watching the back door, make sure they didn’t run out! He said, “I’m gonna put the biggest cheque in your hand you ever seen in your life.” I was breathless. I was scared to ask how much. “Uh-huh.” “Ain’t you gonna ask?” “Uh-huh.” “Stop that uh-huh! How much you think it is?” “I dunno, about a thousand?” “Oh Lord. It’s ten thousand dollars.” I like to fell out the car. I don’t know what he did to get it, but it was the first and last money I got from them.’

  In April 1954, Hooker signed a standard one-year contract with Specialty Records, another established LA-based R&B independent. Characteristically, though, he cut several sessions for Modern35 before the Bihari connection was finally severed. Specialty’s founder Art Rupe had opened for business in 1945, right at the onset of the postwar jump boom, and sophisticated artists like Roy Milton, Percy Mayfield and the brothers Joe and Jimmy Liggins were both to his taste and highly profitable. Furthermore, their well drilled, highly professional, thoroughly rehearsed approach to recording made for the kind of smooth, organized sessions he preferred to run. Nevertheless, Rupe covered his bets by dabbling in sessions featuring more downhome bluesmen like Frankie Lee Sims or New Orleans’ Eddie ‘Guitar Slim’ Jones, whose epochal 1953 hit ‘Things I Used To Do’ gave a blind Georgian pianist named Ray Charles his first break as an arranger and musical director, and a proven hitmaker like Hooker must have seemed like an attractive addition to his roster. So the following month Rupe dispatched Johnny Vincent, one of his staff producers, to Detroit to helm Hooker’s inaugural Specialty session. Hooker brought in Tom Whitehead, Boogie Woogie Red and saxophonist Otis Finch, and over two studio days they cut nine sides – some with the full band, some with just Whitehead – under Vincent’s supervision, using Esquire Studios rather than Hooker’s traditional home-from-home at United Sound. However, once the results were shipped back to LA, Rupe was unimpressed, and only one Specialty single – the menacing monologue ‘I’m Mad’, backed with ‘Everybody’s Blue’, a free-form, one-chord slow blues propelled by Whitehead’s bump-and-grind drumming – was issued before the contract was allowed to lapse the following year. Indeed, in 1954 Hooker did more studio work for Modern, to whom he was no longer contracted and whom he heartily distrusted, than he did for Specialty, nominally his current label. Modern released four Hooker singles that year – though some of the tracks had been cut as far back as 1952 – to Specialty’s one, while ‘John Lee Booker’ had two singles out on Deluxe, and Chess finally got around to releasing ‘It’s My Own Fault’, which Hooker had recorded two years earlier for Fortune.

  Meanwhile, the landscape was shifting under Hooker’s feet, in more ways than one. In ’54 and ’55, what Dave Marsh has called ‘the age of rock and soul’ was just beginning. The kind of electric downhome blues championed and epitomized by Hooker in Detroit and Muddy Waters in Chicago was challenged in its listeners’ affections by two spectacular new offshoots. Ray Charles, the pianist who’d masterminded Guitar Slim’s hit, was cutting for the New York-based Atlantic label, grafting elements of jazz and gospel onto the blues with a series of shattering singles commencing with ‘I Got A Woman’ to lay the foundations of what would soon become soul music; he would soon be joined by a pugnacious Macon-based vocalist named James Brown, whose galvanic ‘Please Please Please’, released by Syd Nathan’s King Records out of Cincinnati, even outdid Charle
s for sheer intensity. Simultaneously, a bunch of greasy-haired white boys, led by Elvis Presley, who’d been hanging around Sam Phillips’s Sun studios in Memphis, were sour-mashing up hillbilly music and the blues they’d picked up from the likes of Howlin’ Wolf, Ike Turner, Junior Parker and B.B. King into an intoxicating new brew which would eventually become known as rock and roll. Before too long, along came Chuck Berry, a sharp-dressing, duck-walking, motor-mouthed singer/guitarist/songwriter from St Louis who’d arrived in a very similar place by starting out from the opposite direction, fusing hillbilly rhythms and teen-oriented topics with the blues and jump he and his piano-pumping partner Johnnie Johnson had been playing for years in their hometown clubs. And an ex-boxer and aspiring songwriter named Berry Gordy Jr was about to see his ghetto record store go out of business because he persisted in stocking bebop records rather than the Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker records his customers actually wanted.

  The bluesmen were faced with some uncomfortable choices. They could attempt to adapt and risk alienating their core audience without gaining a new one, or else they could stand their ground and risk atrophying. Hooker chose an each-way bet: in 1955, he shifted his artistic base to Chicago. He signed yet another recording contract, not with the mighty Chess – who already had the cream of the city’s downhome bluesmen under contract, as well as Chuck Berry and his foil Bo Diddley – but with Vee Jay Records, a small but ambitious 1953 start-up already challenging Chess’s dominance by scoring hit after hit with Jimmy Reed, a sly, laconic, laid-back Mississippi transplant who was to enjoy more chart success in the ’50s than either Muddy Waters or Hooker himself.