Boogie Man

  Let’s put it this way: no-one who was fully represented by a manager of Albert Grossman’s formidable firepower would need to have his contracts read to him by a teenage daughter. Zakiya fondly remembers how much her father loved to have her read to him, but ask her exactly what he liked to have read to him and she replies, ‘His contracts!’

  ‘Read my contract! What’s this say? What do I get?’ he would enquire. ‘In my little mind,’ Zakiya says, ‘I didn’t realise what it was. I just knew he would say, “Tell me how much I’m makin’”, and I would look it out and say, “It says you’re makin’ this and this and this, and then there’s a certain percentage that goes to somebody else.” I would get through, and that was my first encounter with music. I was the one whom he would bring them to and say, “Read this and tell me what it is.”’ It may seem surprising that it was his daughter, rather than his wife, to whom Hooker would bring his paperwork, but that is, most emphatically, another story. ‘If he did [consult Maude], I didn’t know,’ Zakiya flatly insists. ‘He would bring them to me. I loved him to pieces, and I was glad he’d bring ’em to me to read.’

  Hooker is, however, adamant that his connection with Grossman helped to kick-start Bob Dylan’s career. ‘He was my manager, Albert was. He did some good things for me, you know. He was there [at Gerde’s], he come there every night, just about. “John,” he said, “this kid’s a hell of a folk singer. I think I’m going to sign him up.” And I told Bob what he says, and he goes, “Oh-oh-oh, he ain’t going to do that,” and I say, “He said he will.” Then he took Bob out for lunch or something – I wasn’t with them – and they got together and he signed him up . . . I was really happy for him. I still is.’

  For what it’s worth, there are several conflicting accounts of the origins of the Dylan/Grossman liaison. Robert Shelton recalls brokering what he then assumed was their initial contact by effecting an introduction at the Gaslight, where Grossman had dropped in to see Dylan perform during a week-long stint in June of 1961; while Paul Stookey of Peter, Paul & Mary, a Grossman client himself, made a pitch to the big guy on Dylan’s behalf at around the same time. Grossman didn’t manifest any formal presence as Dylan’s manager until after the release of Dylan’s eponymous first album – produced by the elder John Hammond, who’d signed him to Columbia Records against massive corporate opposition – in March 1962, but it is widely believed that he was working behind the scenes on Dylan’s behalf for quite some time prior to that. Apart from the fact that Hooker is the only person who specifically recalls Grossman hanging out at Gerde’s during that April ’61 stint, these various accounts are in no way mutually irreconcilable, as Grossman was notorious both for keeping his cards close to his massive chest, and for generally playing a very long game indeed. Plus it goes without saying that an endorsement from John Lee Hooker wouldn’t exactly have done Dylan’s chances with Grossman any harm. Still, we’ll leave the further ramifications of that stuff to the full-time Dylanologists, of whom there is no shortage.

  Meanwhile, Vee Jay continued their policy of separate targeting for Hooker’s albums and singles. The Folklore Of John Lee Hooker, his latest long-playing release, featured a garish oil-painting of a black guitarist, his face and body in shadow but his hands and instrument clearly depicted, performing to a rapt, and almost entirely white, audience. Pete Welding’s liner-note reiterated the now-familiar ‘itinerant’ myth, but Welding also proffered a nicely-observed first-hand memoir of Hooker’s folkie period. ‘When John Lee came to Philadelphia for a week’s engagement at the mid-town coffee-house and folk music centre the Second Fret,’ he wrote, ‘I welcomed the opportunity of spending considerable time with him. Watching him perform two sets a night, evening after evening, at after-hours parties, impromptu sessions in his hotel room, etc . . . I found myself amazed time and time again at the undiluted intensity, power and conviction which he brought to each number, often vesting material which would have seemed vapid or superficial in the hands of lesser artists with real significance, earthy vitality and effusive intention. This ability to create moving and meaningful blues which project his own emotional involvement, utterly absorbing the listener, is a considerable gift, one he has inherited from his Mississippi forebears. Hooker is but the latest spokesman of a strong, continuing and fructifying tradition.’

  The album itself was a Frankensteinian patch-job derived from a variety of sources, but it made surprisingly cohesive listening. ‘Tupelo’ and ‘The Hobo’ (aka ‘Hobo Blues’), licensed from Vanguard Records, who’d recorded Hooker’s set from the previous year’s Newport Folk Festival, respectively led off the first and second sides; six more solo performances came from the aborted Prestige project; and the package was completed by four newish combo sides recorded in Chicago, reuniting Hooker with Vee Jay studio stalwarts Quinn Wilson (bass) and Earl Phillips (drums) alongside Lefty Bates returning on guitar, plus Jimmy Reed contributing a cameo guest-shot on harp. ‘I’m Going Upstairs’ paid tribute to Howlin’ Wolf by emphasising their common musical heritage; ‘I’m Mad Again’ represented yet another stage in the evolution of the ‘I’m Mad’/‘Gonna Use My Rod’ theme into ‘Jesse James’; ‘Wednesday Evening Blues’ and ‘When My First Wife Left Me’ re-ploughed familiar ground, and ‘Five Long Years’ was a relatively unadorned performance of a blues standard composed by Chicago pianist Eddie Boyd. ‘Want Ad Blues’, which began extremely promisingly before fizzling out, was the next single (though not, it must be said, a particularly successful one), and only ‘Take Me As I Am’ expanded Hooker’s range into new musical or lyrical territory. Performed solo in the key of C and using an entirely different set of chords from Hooker’s customary open-A and standard-tuning E settings, it was a plea for love, understanding and companionship from a different kind of woman to the big-legged strutters and mean mistreaters who populate so many of his other songs. Here he sings to a woman who don’t need no lipstick and powder, who ‘can cook and be a good housewife’, and who will, finally, accept him as he is. It should be utterly bathetic, but somehow it isn’t.

  (The Folklore sessions also included a remarkably ‘straight’ and un-Hookerised version of the ancient gospel standard ‘Will The Circle Be Unbroken’, with impeccably cavernous Pop Staples-styled trem-overb guitar performed by Pop Staples himself. Inexplicably, it stayed in the can until 1974, when it was included on the misleadingly-titled compilation In Person.)

  Hooker’s only other album release that year came from Chess, who compiled their remaining early-’50s Joe Von Battle masters as John Lee Hooker Plays And Sings The Blues, but whatever his contract may or may not have specified, Vee Jay no longer enjoyed any kind of monopoly on Hooker’s recording services. Hooker had most definitely reverted to his old tricks: wherever he went, he contrived to seize every opportunity to record ‘outside’ sessions. In Miami, he cut a fifteen-song marathon for Henry Stone, already sitting on a pile of ‘John Lee Booker’ sides dating back to 1953, some of which had been released as singles on the DeLuxe and Rockin’ labels. (Stone promptly sold the entire lot to Atlantic Records: the best of the bunch were released as the superb Don’t Turn Me From Your Door album in 1963, while the remainder surfaced on Stax in 1969 as That’s Where It’s At!) Booked for a date at the Auditorium in Newark, New Jersey, Hooker killed two birds with one stone: he recruited Eddie Kirkland to fulfil his traditional dual role as second guitarist and chauffeur, and arranged a session for Savoy Records with producer Fred Mendelsohn. ‘I went and made that session. Matter of fact, I drove him there,’ remembers Kirkland. ‘I brought him [back] to Detroit, turned around and went back to Newark myself to get with Savoy. I wasn’t able to get on Savoy, but I got on Prestige.’ And in California, he even spent a March day in Culver City, recording a solo session for none other than Bernard Besman, who leased some of these fresh ‘Hooker-Besman compositions’ to the Galaxy label. Demonstrating that his hand had lost none of its cunning since his ‘retirement’ from the music business, Besman subsequently assigned alternate title
s to several of his new masters and sold them on yet again.

  By this time, Hooker was firmly established in his ‘folk-blues’ incarnation. However, his next move not only reunited him – for what proved to be the last time – with the R&B mainstream, but gave him both his first nodding acquaintance with the pop (read = young white) audience, and the somewhat belated opportunity to complete his hat-trick of million-selling signature hits. As it happened, he already had a ready-made musical setting: the catchy stop-time call-and-response riff groove he’d used for ‘Run On’ during the previous year’s Travelin’ session. The next ingredient came his way when a bartender at one of his favourite hometown dives unwittingly provided him with the requisite lyrical theme.

  ‘“Boom Boom”, you heard that?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Bi-i-i-i-ig hit. I used to go to this bar – I tell people this, it’s true – I played the Apex Bar on Russell and Oak Street in Detroit, on the north side. I played there ’bout a year in that one bar, and it was packed every night I played there. I always would come in there late, y’know. I was drinkin’ then, I always had a bottle of Scotch by my seat or in the car. The band would be on the bandstand by the time I’d get there. I run in there, put my coat up, and this young lady behind the bar, name of Willow – like a willow tree – every night she would say, “Boom-boom, you late again.” Every night, she say, “Boom-boom, y’all is late”, and it came to me: that’s a song. She kept say in’ that, and I said, “Willow, you gave me a song.” She said, “What?” I say, “Boom Boom.” She say, “Oh yeah.” And she kept sayin’ it. I come in there one night an’ I got it together, the lyrics, rehearsed it, and I played it at the place, and people went wild. She gave it to me with the words she was sayin’: “Boom-boom”.’

  Then finally – boom boom – he lucked into just the right band. Scratch that: the perfect band.

  The catalyst turned out to be right on Hooker’s own Detroit doorstep: his old buddy Joe Hunter, the dazzling pianist who’d worked with him on the city’s club and bar circuit, as well as playing on his successful cover of ‘I Love You Honey’ back in 1958. Hunter had gone on to become one of the cornerstones of Berry Gordy’s original Motown studio band, but though Motown had enjoyed a few solid hits by late ’61 – notably Barrett Strong’s ‘Money’. Marv Johnson’s ‘Come To Me’ and the Miracles’ ‘Shop Around’ – the company was still a good many classic smashes away from becoming the ‘Hitsville USA’ pop-soul empire of Gordy’s dreams. As a result, the house band, who were making rather less than a living wage from playing what were then comparatively few-and-far-between Motown sessions, were eager to supplement their income with whatever outside work happened to be available. As well as taking on as many non-Motown studio dates as he could arrange, Hunter kidnapped what was virtually Motown’s entire A-team and carted them off on tour with Jackie Wilson. This potentially lucrative excursion turned out to be something of a disappointment for the cash-starved musicians: the New York-based Wilson, at that time recovering from a gunshot wound inflicted by an ‘admirer’, was still on the frail side and therefore under doctors’ orders not to perform his highly strenuous stage act more than three times a week. This meant that he couldn’t afford to pay each member of the band more than $75 per week. New York City, then as now, was an expensive place to hang out in on a low wage, and since accommodation and expenses came to around $60 per, the musicians weren’t making enough of a profit to take home any noticeable bacon. The band ended up back in Detroit with their collective tail between their collective legs, so when the opportunity arose to play some Brunswick and Vee Jay sessions in Chicago for higher wages than the still-impoverished Gordy was then able to pay, they naturally jumped at it.

  Thus it was that Hooker found himself cutting his next album, Burnin’, with what turned out to be one of the hottest hit-making studio crews of the ’60s. The band Hunter brought with him included the classic Motown rhythm section of James Jamerson and Benny Benjamin, the powerhouse bass-and-drums team behind virtually all of the legendary Motown hits of the next decade. Also along for the ride and the view were guitarist Larry Veeder, baritone saxophonist Mike Terry and, blowing tenor sax, none other than Hank Cosby, later best-known to his bank manager as co-writer and/or producer of several of Stevie Wonder’s biggest hits, of which ‘Uptight (Everything’s Alright)’, ‘Fingertips’ and ‘I Was Made To Love Her’ are merely the most significant. ‘Boom Boom’, indeed.54

  While that song failed to hit the R&B charts quite as hard as ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘I’m In The Mood’ had done a decade earlier – released at the end of 1961, its stately progress up the charts eventually peaked in mid-June of 1962 at No. 16 – it nevertheless turned out to be Hooker’s most enduring staple, and deservedly so. ‘Boom Boom’ is, if nothing else, the greatest pop tune he ever wrote, not to mention the first to break him into the pop charts: its comparatively modest placing at No. 60 fails to convey the magnitude of his achievement in getting there at all. It was also the most memorable, the most instantly appealing, and the one which has proved the most adaptable to the needs of other performers.

  So what’s so great about ‘Boom Boom’? For a start, it has just about the tightest musical structure of any Hooker composition: its verses sedulously adhere to the twelve-bar format over which Hooker generally rides so roughshod, albeit with a neat bar-for-bar call-and-response. ‘Boom boom, boom boom,’ sings Hooker; bam-bam, bam-bam reply the band. The tension is released in the breaks: ‘Who-o-o-ah!’ calls Hooker, and the band rock out for twenty-four boogying bars, swinging irresistibly along until the verse returns.

  And then there are those lyrics. As freely unrhymed as the music is tightly disciplined, they represent probably the purest – and least sexist or patronising – expression of sheer lust in all of popular music. The eroticism of Hooker’s music takes many forms: some of his slower, sexier blues, like ‘Solid Sender’, ‘I’m In The Mood’ or the duet version of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ he performed live with Vala Cupp literally shiver with passion; others give free reign to volatile blends of lust and anger, desire and hostility. But ‘Boom Boom’ simply and perfectly encapsulates those moments familiar to anyone with a functioning libido – male or female, straight or gay – who has ever caught sight of a member of whichever gender they find attractive, and has simply gone, ‘Wow. ’ Or – in Hooker’s case – ‘How-how-how-how.’ When he sings, voice thickened with passion, ‘You knocks me out/right offa my feet’, he evokes the memory of every beautiful stranger any of his listeners has ever seen.

  ‘All the ladies like that,’ Hooker says of that song, and of ‘Dimples’. ‘I say things that cater to women and men. Women can think the same ways: shoot those guys down, boom boom, come home with me. So the words make sense. So many songs say the same old things: ‘my woman, my baby’, every blues singer says that. I try to say something different. They hit you something like that – like ‘Dimples’, ‘you got dimples in your jaw’, you know. Women like that, men with dimples, you know. Things like that just catch on.’

  Which ‘Boom Boom’ certainly did. It was unquestionably the pick of the Burnin’ litter, but the rest of the session certainly had its moments. Hunter, Cosby, Jamerson, Benjamin and their colleagues are unquestionably best-known for the versatility and virtuosity with which they implemented Gordy’s vision of a new black pop which was simultaneously sweet enough for the suburbs and soulful enough for the projects, but they’d learned their stuff in the Detroit bars and they surely had not forgotten how to play the blues, albeit with a sophistication unprecedented in the Hooker oeuvre. All that prevents Burnin’ from being a quintessential ‘modern’ blues recording for the time is the absence of the then-ubiquitous B.B. King-style lead guitar. ‘Process’ was a slow-rocking blues, with darkly riffing horns, in which Hooker inveighs against hair-straightening: not for ideological or æsthetic reasons, but because the fashion induces women to take all their housekeeping money down to the hairdresser’s rather than the grocery store. Elsewhere,
‘Thelma’ revisits the musical and lyrical turf of ‘Maudie’, while ‘What Do You Say’ reveals that Hooker was keeping a close ear on his competitors: it opens with a guitar riff similar to some of Bo Diddley’s before erupting into a variation on Howlin’ Wolf staples like ‘Howlin’ For My Baby’ or ‘Moanin’ In The Moonlight’.

  Most outré, however, is ‘Keep Your Hands To Yourself’, based on the rocking, mock-Latino ‘Tequila’, a huge hit for The Champs back in 1958. The band steam through ‘Tequila”s four-bar riff, driven by Benjamin’s lashing cymbals and abrupt tom-tom fills while Hooker warns a male interloper of the potentially dire consequences of taking liberties with his woman. What gives the record its tension is that Hooker makes his vocal entry on bar three of the four-bar sequence, half-way through the riff, creating a jarring, disorienting effect which doesn’t resolve itself until he realigns with the band.

  Not surprisingly, the Motown ‘experiment’ was judged a success – Vee Jay even rushed out a hasty Best Of John Lee Hooker in the wake of ‘Boom Boom”s success – and Hunter, Cosby and company were recommissioned in the latter half of 1962 for two more sessions from which Hooker’s next Vee Jay album, The Big Soul Of John Lee Hooker, released in early ’63, was assembled. The first was a ‘quickie’ which produced a mere four sides in the same horn-riffing, piano-tinkling, easy-rocking vein. ‘Old Time Shimmy’ found Hooker announcing for the first, if not the last, time that ‘the twist ain’t nothin’ but the old-time shimmy’, but ‘Onions’ picked up where ‘Keep Your Hands To Yourself’ left off as a vocal ‘Hookerisation’ of a recent instrumental hit. As the title might suggest, the piece was based on Booker T & The MGs’ then-current hit ‘Green Onions’, with its starkly memorable principal riff transferred from slinky Hammond organ to abrasive saxes and the beat stomped rather than shuffled, as Hooker demands that his baby bring him her onions, not to mention black-eyed peas, chicken and other delicacies. ‘You Know I Love You’ and ‘Send Me Your Pillow’ respectively Hookerised Barbara Lynn’s ‘You’ll Lose A Good Thing’ (a recent R&B No. 1 which also cracked the pop Top Ten) and the sentimental ’40s ballad ‘Send Me The Pillow You Dream On’. Hooker was to repeat the latter trick at his next studio date, when he audaciously Hookerised no less a standard than ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’.