Boogie Man

  Vee Jay Records derived its name from the initials of its founders, Vivian Carter and James Bracken. Like Bernard Besman, Berry Gordy and not a few other hopeful music-biz entrepreneurs, Bracken and Carter started out as proprietors of a record store. However, after five years at the retail end of the business, they decided to graduate to the more challenging, but potentially more lucrative, realm of primary production. Their store was located in the ghetto of the blue-collar steel-town of Gary, Indiana, not too far away from where Delta-born drummer Albert Nelson – soon to change his name and instrument and transform himself into guitarist Albert King – was playing clubs and bars behind another transplanted Mississippi bluesman, Jimmy Reed; and from where Joe and Katherine Jackson were beginning to raise the family which Joe, an ex-boxer and part-time blues guitarist, would eventually mould into a reasonably successful vocal group.

  Before too long, Bracken and Carter shifted their base of operations and set up shop in the big city. Their initial productions – singles by Jimmy Reed (signed after Chess, glutted with downhome singers, turned him down), and doo-wop vocal group The Spaniels – were leased to Chance Records. In business since December 1950, Chance was a more established South Side indie with, among other things, a few John Lee Booker releases under its corporate belt, but by mid-’53, Vee Jay was up and running as a label in its own right. Bracken and Carter celebrated by getting married, and – after Chance’s collapse in 1954 – by inheriting two of Chance’s key employees: general manager Ewart Abner and producer Al Smith, the latter a Chicago blues lifer whose career went all the way back to the era of Lester Melrose and Bluebird Records. In tandem with Vivian’s brother Calvin Carter, Smith ended up supervising most of Vee Jay’s recording sessions.

  Vee Jay got off to a pretty healthy start, but they led with pop-friendly vocal groups rather than downhome blues. The Spaniels’ third release, ‘Goodnight Sweetheart’, and The El-Dora dos’ ‘At My Front Door’ didn’t quite match the achievements of Chess doo-woppers like the Moonglows and the Flamingoes, but they earned the label considerably more chart action than did blues sessions by Reed or Floyd Jones. Nevertheless, no Chicago-based label could afford to ignore the downhome scene completely. Though Vee Jay’s first two Jimmy Reed singles had bombed out and the Brackens had just about made up their minds to drop him, his last-chance third release, ‘You Don’t Have To Go’, an appositely entitled lazy shuffle left over from his inaugural Vee Jay session, suddenly grew major legs and entered the R&B charts in February 1955. It was the first of a string of fourteen R&B hits and eleven pop-chart entries, which made the unassuming Reed the biggest record-seller of all Chicago’s downhome bluesmen, easily outgrossing even the mighty Muddy Waters, the magisterial ‘Godfather Of Chicago Blues’ himself.

  Some eight years Hooker’s junior, Jimmy Reed was an amiable drunk from Dunleith, Mississippi. His sly, relaxed, easy-going music was utterly atypical of the standard Delta-to-Chicago style: there was nothing heavy or dramatic about Jimmy Reed. His records were all peas from the same instantly recognizable pod and they all shared the same characteristics: drily witty lyrics with an irresistible hook in every song; a lightly loping shuffle or boogie beat; Reed’s slurred, nasally drawled vocals (in which he seemed to be laughing quietly to himself at some unstated joke) and his squeaky, tootling mouth-harp, played in a wire rack he wore around his neck and blown in the first position (i.e. in the same key as the song), rather than in the ‘crossed-harp’ approach (using a harp tuned to the fourth of the song’s scale) featured by archetypal post-Delta Chicago stylists like Little Walter. Despite his immense recording success, he influenced few Chicago-based musicians; instead an entire crop of post-Reed bluesmen, including Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim and Lazy Lester, sprang up in the bayous of rural Louisiana, where his laid-back, wide-open-spaces approach seemed rather more appropriate to the scenery than the clamorous, gritty sound of the urban tenements and taverns exemplified by the post-Muddy Waters house style of Chess.

  In addition to the ingratiating voice and distinctive harp which trademark-stamped each and every one of his records, Reed had two major secret weapons up his sleeve. One was his loyal and long-suffering wife, Mary Lee ‘Mama’ Reed, who not only co-wrote many of his lyrics but served as his prompter in the studio, whispering the words he couldn’t read (or was too drunk to remember) into his ear instants before it was time for him to sing them. The other was guitarist Eddie Taylor, an old Delta buddy of Reed’s who played the finger-picked signature shuffle-boogie rhythms and bass lines which framed the songs with such seemingly-effortless perfection. Taylor – born in Benoit, Mississippi, in 1925 – had tutored Reed back down home before they met up again in Chicago and joined forces: in fact, he was the senior partner when they started out together. Like those other two steady Eddies, Burns and Kirkland, Taylor subordinated himself to a charismatic auteur, hiding his light under Reed’s bushel, providing the structure and support which enabled the insouciant frontman to shine. And like Burns and Kirkland, he paid a heavy price for his generosity and lack of musical ego: despite a couple of decent-selling singles as an artist in his own right, he remained a footnote to Reed right up until his death on Christmas Day, 1985. The Jimmy Reed package all added up to one of the major postwar blues repertoires, contributing songs like ‘Big Boss Man’, ‘Bright Lights Big City’, ‘Honest I Do’, ‘You Got Me Dizzy’ and ‘Shame Shame Shame’ to the blues canon.

  Vee Jay’s decision to sign up John Lee Hooker was thus a by-product of their success with Jimmy Reed. As the flood of releases with which he’d saturated the market in the years since ‘Boogie Chillen’ had proved, Hooker was by no means a guaranteed hit maker, and virtually every label in the R&B business had a stash of unreleased Hooker masters in their vaults.36 In addition, he had a not altogether undeserved reputation for contract-breaking and general unreliability. Nevertheless, he’d also demonstrated that he was capable of whipping out a million-seller every so often, and that was incentive enough for the Brackens and their crew. ‘Ewart Abner and Calvin Carter, they drove to Detroit and picked me up when I first got on their label,’ recalled Hooker in an interview with Living Blues. ‘When my [Specialty] contract expired, Abner called me. He said, “Well, look, we’re coming to get you. We ain’t gonna depend on you comin’ on your own ’cause you may not get here. We’re gonna drive there and pick you up.”’

  On 19 October, 1955, Hooker arrived in Chicago for his first Vee Jay studio date, with the faithful Tom Whitehead at the wheel. Calvin Carter had decided that the company would play safe by fielding their A-team – Jimmy Reed’s alter ego Eddie Taylor on second guitar and Reed himself sitting in on harp, with bassist George Washington filling out the sonic picture – for their new client’s first session, but since Hooker was recording on unfamiliar turf with unfamiliar sidemen, he wanted at least one musician on board who was already conversant with the intricacies of his personal style. ‘I was with him when he started with the Vee Jay recording company,’ remembers Whitehead. ‘I was with him at United Sound and other places, but I remember distinctly about Vee Jay because we didn’t get paid until we got a cheque, and I was wonderin’ about it. But fortunately when I came back to Detroit and took it to one of the record distributors, they cashed it just like that, no problem. Uh-huh. That’s where I met all those other guys. Through John Lee Hooker I met Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed – Jimmy Reed was on a few of John Lee Hooker’s recordings too, and I met him. I also met B.B. King through John Lee Hooker. I met a lot of the blues fellas after I started playing with him. At that time I got pretty popular around; the guys liked the way I played. Sometime with Vee Jay, other people too. Mostly with Hooker and Jimmy Reed.’

  Abner described Hooker as ‘one of the best country blues singers’ in a Cashbox magazine trade announcement of his signing to the label but, perhaps mindful of the all-too-recent glut of potentially competitive Hooker releases already in the marketplace, Vee Jay cut a mere four sides at that particular date. One single was rel
eased early in the New Year – ‘Mambo Chillen’, which reworked Hooker’s signature song against a then-fashionable Latin groove, backed with a deeply cool slow blues, ‘Time Is Marching’ – but Vee Jay sat on the other two titles and didn’t commission another session until the following March, when the same musicians, minus Reed, reassembled to cut a further half-dozen tracks. That first single sold acceptably without achieving palpable hit status, but it laid the foundations for what was to be become the dominant sound of Hooker’s next few years’ worth of studio recordings: meatier and more muscular than Vee Jay’s Jimmy Reed recordings, but airier, lighter and looser than the densely-textured, sometimes-lumbering Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf Chess tracks, and cleaner and clearer than the latter-day Modern combo sides Hooker had been cutting at United Sound in Detroit. Businesswise, Hooker was a wholly reformed character. According to Les Fancourt’s discographical bible, Hooker adhered faithfully to the terms of his Vee Jay contract, respecting to the letter the ‘exclusivity’ clause of his deal, and cutting no outside sessions whatsoever for the next three years. Vee Jay, for their part, made sure that Hooker wasn’t over-recorded: in fact, they only cut ten titles on him in 1956, releasing a mere two singles that year, but the second of these – ‘Dimples’, coupled with ‘Baby Lee’ – featured two permanent additions to the upper echelons of Hooker’s repertoire. However, like many of Hooker’s tales, there is more than one version of the origin story of ‘Dimples’. ‘You get these things mostly from women,’ he told writer Greg Drust.37 ‘You see them, the beautiful ladies like that. The way she walk and the way she talk and she wiggle. And the girl, Mary, you know, she had beautiful dimples. She was married to a friend of mine and I told her, “You got beautiful dimples.” She said, “Oh, write a song about me”, and that’s the way I wrote that. Her husband said, “I can’t get along with my wife now – she thinks she’s a big star.”’

  ‘I was goin’ with this girl called Mattie Lou,’ Hooker reminisced more recently, ‘and she had beautiful dimples. I said, “I’m gonna write a song about your beautiful dimples.” She had a nice body, she walk nice, and so I wrote the song “you got dimples in you jaw”. That come to be a hit.’ ‘Dimples’ come to be more than just a hit, albeit one which skimmed the lower reaches of the R&B charts and even nudged its way into the pop listings on its original release in August 1956; it was the first authentic masterpiece of Hooker’s Vee Jay sojourn. Lyrically, it wasn’t that profound – he love the way she walk, he love the way she talk, she got dimples in her jaw, he got his eyes on her, and that’s about it – but it’s about as close to pop perfection in two minutes and nine seconds as any ’50s bluesman ever got, Jimmy Reed not excluded. Launched off a stolidly menacing guitar riff, Hooker’s guitar line, like the dub-plate reggae celebrated by the Clash in ‘White Man In Hammersmith Palais’, has bombs in the bass and knives in the treble. Tom Whitehead plays lightly swinging drums dominated by a remorselessly swishing hi-hat, George Washington locks in with a firm but subdued bass-line, and the self-effacing Eddie Taylor provides a rhythm guitar part which glues everything together while staying out of the leader’s way. Hooker’s guitar remains in the home key of E throughout whilst the band rock their way around the old twelve-bar corral, but somehow everything hangs together and it all works beautifully. Just how sublimely well it worked can be judged by the fact that the first two latter-day attempts to recut the song – once with Eddie Kirkland in 1992 during the Boom Boom sessions, and again the following year, this time with an ensemble including Van Morrison and Elvin Bishop on guitar, for the album which eventually became Chill Out – have remained in the can, though Hooker finally nailed a happening remake when he teamed up with Los Lobos.

  ‘When he plays with another band,’ comments Bernie Besman, ‘then he plays the blues, like twelve-bar, because they don’t know any different, and he follows them. That’s where Vee Jay made the big mistake, and Chess and all the rest of them, because they sound like Lightnin’ Hopkins or anybody else playing the blues. If he’d done [‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’] alone, they would probably have been bigger hits. I recorded him rarely with a group, and that’s where it’s 12 bars. Because he follows them, and they can’t play 13, 14 bars. And so he plays with them.’ Unconsciously echoing Besman, Calvin Carter has subsequently recounted his experiences running Hooker’s recording sessions thus: ‘He was a guy who never rhymed, you know he just didn’t have the usual rhyme lines . . . we only ever did one take on everything he did; he’d never do it the same way. Of course you know he didn’t read music, but nobody could play with him either.’ Carter is severely maligning both Hooker and the hand-picked combination of Chi-town studio musicians and Detroit homeboys who worked on Hooker’s Vee Jay sessions: despite the occasional musical hiccup, they not only could play with Hooker, but they did.

  ‘Most of that band was my band,’ Hooker explains. ‘Otis Finch and Evans Johnson, the horn players; Joe Hunter, the piano player; the drummer . . . all them were my original band. Some others fit in, like [Martha and] the Vandellas38 and some other stuff I had in there with my band, but all that down through there was the guys workin’ with me. We was just workin’ around town and on the road, and they worked with me regular. That’s the reason it sounded so tight. I always lived in Detroit, but Vee Jay was in Chicago, the company was on Michigan Avenue. I would go there with me and my band, so I didn’t have to do no lot of rehearsin’, because they did know just what I was gonna do. They would rehearse it with the guys they gonna bring in, let them know how I play and show them how it went, and then we’d go into the studio. We didn’t stay in there that long; we’d ’bout do a whole session in a day. Two days and we through. I never stay in no studio three and four weeks, oh no. I go in there for half a day and I got an album. I don’t know nobody else can do that.’

  Inevitably, the shifting of Hooker’s recording base to Chicago meant that he became an honorary associate member of the Southside blues scene. ‘I played Chicago a lot, played a lot of blues clubs. The money was a little better than it was in the South, but things was a little more expensive, so it equal out. I had never met Muddy and the Wolf before. You know how it was. You was in Chicago and they was real popular and you had to see ’em. They was playin’ all over Chicago in all the bars, and I would go to the bars where they was playin’ and meet ’em. I stayed at Muddy’s house when I go there. Wolf, I met him and Little Walter, and Jimmy Rogers from the same place I’m from in Mississippi.’ So was Walter as wild and mean as his reputation might suggest? ‘Wild? Oh yeah. He carry a gun everywhere. Mean? He didn’t take no stuff off of nobody.’ Then there was another Vance expat, though Andrew Luandrew – pounding his electric piano under his South Side soubriquet of Sunnyland Slim – was an older man who’d left Vance before the Hooker family even moved there. It was on a Sunnyland Slim session that Muddy Waters received his first recording break. ‘I didn’t know him down there, that’s for sure, but I knowed him from Chicago. Old Sunnyland Slim; I admired him so. He was the talk of the town.’

  Hooker’s Chicago sojourn also meant a reunion with a long-lost relative, thirteen years his junior, whom he hadn’t seen since Clarksdale days: the slide-guitar virtuoso Earl Hooker. ‘Earl Hooker, he was in Chicago. He was my dad’s brother’s son, my first cousin. There was a big gap between me and him: I met him later in Chicago. I knew of him, like I knew of Archie, my nephew. A music-inclined family, but none of ’em keep a career goin’ way deep but me or Earl. He never got real famous, but he got famous. He was a really good musician, too.’ Earl Hooker was one of the great lost princes of Chicago blues, an innovator, a musicians’ musician par excellence. Unlike the older, more traditional Delta-trained slidemen, he played in standard, rather than open, tuning, and his crisp, melodic, endlessly inventive playing exhausted the superlatives of all who heard him. If his singing had been anywhere near the equal of his guitar work, he would have been a star: he was using a slide and wah-wah pedal in combination even before Jeff Beck. Mu
ddy Waters’ ‘You Need Love’ – the blueprint for Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ – was simply a Waters vocal overdubbed onto an Earl Hooker instrumental, ‘Blue Guitar’, after Chess acquired the tape and decided to use it as a backing track. ‘Earl Hooker is the only man I ever saw break a string, hold a note on his guitar while he change the string, keep on playin’, never miss a note,’ recalled Junior Wells to Andrew M. Robble in Guitar Player magazine. ‘I’ll put it this way: Earl Hooker could do more with a guitar than a monkey could do with a coconut.’ In conversation with Jas Obrecht in the same magazine, Buddy Guy remembered Earl slightly differently, but equally fondly.

  ‘As a blues guitarist,’ Buddy told Obrecht, ‘I’ve never seen anybody could play the way he played it, and especially the slide guitar . . . Earl wouldn’t hardly never sing that much, but everything would come out with the slide. He would play the melody and it would sound like someone singing.’

  ‘He used,’ says John Lee, ‘to be kinda wild.’ That’s something of an understatement. According to Buddy, Earl ‘stole the long cord that I learned from Guitar Slim out of New Orleans. Earl Hooker would steal his tubes [valves] right out of my amplifier. If we’d leave our amplifiers in the clubs ’cause we be back here tomorrow night to jam again, he would go down there again in the mid-day and you’d think he’s over there messin’ with his guitar, but he would change the speakers out of your amp if you sounded good to him. Then somebody that’d seen him there would say, “Well, Hooker been over there.” And I would just go by his mother’s house and say, “Open the door, man. Give me my speakers and my cord back.” And he would give ’em back. He stammered a lot, kind of like John Lee: “You-you-you-you sounded so good, I wanted to see what you had that I didn’t have” . . . from the first time I met him, I never did see him drink or do nothin’. He had no bad habits other than stealing your stuff.’