Boogie Man

  ‘Two of the best-known songs in the world – and I reached out and got ’em,’ he says with some satisfaction. ‘That’s an old song. I sing “send me the pillow you been cryin’ on”, I turned it around, like you miss me, you layin’ in bed at night cryin’ about me ’cause I ain’t around.’ His Hookerisation of ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’ as ‘Frisco Blues’ derived from his admiration for Tony Bennett. ‘I’m not ashamed to say I love his singing and his style, which is not my style, but I love his type of singing,’ he told Greg Drust. ‘I love ballads and he’s one out of all of them that I picked for my favourite, Tony Bennett. And I used to sit up and play that record and I would hear him sing it and it just go right through me and so I had to do it in my version. And I did it. What gave me the idea for doing it was I met this young lady in San Francisco a long time ago, and we would go out to dinner or she would come to see me play and she liked that song. I went to her house and she would just play that record by Tony Bennett. And she said, “I betcha you could do this.” I said, “Yes, but not like him . . . I’d do it in my version.”’ Hooker’s ‘version’ turned out to be a chugging medium shuffle, somewhat marred by the spectacularly out-of-tune lead guitar, which rhapsodises about foggy mornings and cable-cars in terms which would surely have delighted his future hometown’s Chamber of Commerce. The track attained cult status: Leon Russell found its incongruities so delightful that he once cut a rockabilly version of ‘Misty’ as a tribute.

  Joe Hunter and his Motown mercenaries were back the next time Hooker went into the studio, and this time they brought company. Hooker has always asserted, and most discographies have supported his claim, that ‘on my next recording session, I did it with the backing group Martha and the Vandellas. The name don’t appear on the record anyplace because at that time they was with Motown Records and I could not use the name.’ Martha Reeves had started out as a secretary at Motown before parlaying her vocal trio the Del-Phis (herself plus Rosalyn Ashford and Betty Kelley) into regular work as backing singers on Motown sessions. There are two differing accounts of the origin of the ‘Vandellas’ name: the mundane one suggests that it was a simple combination of Detroit’s Van Dyke Avenue with the first name of singer Della Reese, but for perverse personal reasons this writer has always preferred the other explanation: that Marvin Gaye bestowed the name on Reeves and her colleagues as a wordplay on ‘vandals’ after their high-energy back-up work nearly stole the show on his sessions for ‘Hitch Hike’ and ‘Stubborn Kind Of Fellow’. After paying their session dues, the re-named Del-Phis finally graduated to frontline status as featured artists in their own right, racking up an impressive string of hits commencing with 1963’s ‘Come And Get These Memories’.

  So Hooker cut with the Vandellas? It’s a great story, but external evidence suggests that it’s not true. What seems rather more likely is that Hooker simply mistook one Motown back-up vocal team for another. Additional light was cast on this particular Hooker session by Mary Wilson, of the original Supremes, in her autobiography, Dreamgirl: My Life As A Supreme.55 ‘One day,’ she wrote:

  Joe Hunter pulled me aside and said, ‘I can give you a hundred dollars to come with me to Chicago’. ‘Say no more!’ Compared to the lousy five or ten bucks we got for every song we recorded, a hundred dollars was a fortune. I went to Chicago with James Jamerson, Hank Crosby [sic], and anyone else Joe wanted to take along. Like many of the other [Motown] bandleaders, Joe was very generous about sharing his freelance work with others. Also with us were the Andantes, Motown’s in-house background vocal group – Jackie Hicks, Marlene Barrow and Louvain Demps . . . this was a session for Jerry Butler that Curtis Mayfield was producing for Vee Jay. We recorded a song called ‘A Teenie Weenie Bit Of Your Love’. I also worked on blues legend John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom Boom’ [sic].

  Pardon? Excuse me? ‘Boom Boom’? The female backing vocals on ‘Boom Boom’ are about as prominent as the French horns, the string quartet and John Coltrane’s five-minute soprano sax solo: in other words, they ain’t in there. On the other hand, one of the titles from the session which produced ‘Frisco Blues’ was ‘She Shot Me Down’, a listless, half-assed retread of ‘Boom Boom’ which rewrites the song in the passive voice, enabling Hooker to play a man who is ‘shot down’ and taken home. ‘She Shot Me Down’ does indeed feature female backing singers – presumably Wilson and the Andantes – chanting ‘Boom-boom, boom-boom’ in reply to Hooker’s lead.56 Unfortunately, the rest of that particular day’s work proved scarcely more productive.

  The agenda for the Big Soul sessions was obviously to shift Hooker’s music about as far away from the world of campuses, coffee-houses and the Newport Folk Festival as it could possibly go. If the object of the exercise was to reposition him squarely at the heart of the R&B market, and reintroduce him to black audiences as a contemporary performer in the tradition of Ray Charles or Bobby Bland, it was an almost unqualified disaster. The earlier, deeply funky, ‘Onions’ session had worked out fine, but this one ranged from the almost-quite-good – the audacious ‘Frisco Blues’ – to the frankly embarrassing. He doesn’t even sing on the title track: ‘Big Soul’ is a chugging, organ-led ‘Night Train’-style instrumental with the backing singers oo-wahing away for all they’re worth and Hooker’s guitar riffing darkly away somewhere in the background murk. The session’s nadir came with the frankly surreal ‘No-one Told Me’, in which Hooker and his accompanists seemingly attempt to improvise a bossa-nova ballad, supper-club-in-hell style, and succeed only in proving that the style is not one which lends itself gracefully to improvisation.

  Still, better was to come. By the time Hooker next recorded for Vee Jay, he had joined the steadily-growing number of blues artists who were opening a second front for their music in Europe, thereby establishing the vital new beach-head for the blues which, as things turned out, was to ensure its ultimate survival – not to mention his own.

  Europe . . . fills a big gap in the American blues market, and many a bluesman has found to his surprise that his biggest market is in France or England . . . One month Hooker can be found working around joints and bins in Detroit; then he may move to a ‘folk’ nightclub in New York, where he entertains the college set; then on to the Newport Jazz Festival or a European tour; and he occasionally records a tune that becomes a hit rock-and-roll item among teenagers, like his potent ‘Boom Boom’. From one record or personal appearance to the next, Hooker has at least four different audiences to choose from – and choose he does, going around the circle from one group to another, modifying his style and material slightly to suit the tastes of his listeners.

  Charles Keil, Urban Blues, 1966

  Like not a few other things, the American Folk Blues Festival was the brainchild of Willie Dixon, the gargantuan bassist/songwriter/producer/session fixer who’d served as Chess Records’ ramrod and all-round éminence grise since 1954. Dixon and the pianist Memphis Slim had toured Israel in 1960 and had a lot of fun, but made so little money that they’d had to gig their way through Europe in order to finance their trip home. Along the way, the German jazz critic Joachim Berendt had put Dixon in touch with Horst Lippmann and Fritz Rau, two German jazz fans turned promoters. Together, they hatched the idea of bringing a package tour of blues artists to Europe under the auspices of Lippmann and Rau’s Concert Bureau agency, with Concert Bureau organizing the shows and Dixon coordinating the talent. Hooker was hired to participate, alongside his old hero T-Bone Walker, Dixon’s sidekick Memphis Slim, folk-blues veterans Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, harpist Shakey Jake, and singer Helen Humes, who’d ‘answered’ Hooker’s ‘I’m In The Mood’ with her own ‘I Ain’t In The Mood’ back in 1951. Bringing up the rear as the house rhythm section were drummer Jump Jackson and, behind his much-travelled bull fiddle, Dixon himself.

  Singularly fertile ground awaited the seeds sown by the American Folk Blues Festival. ‘Authentic’ African-American music was highly prized in Europe amongst a small but influential coterie of buffs an
d intellectuals, and even in generally racist countries, visiting African-American musicians received the kind of treatment appropriate to distinguished foreign artists rather than, say, impoverished students from Senegal or Zaire. The bluesmen played in the most prestigious concert halls, stayed in the best hotels, and were, at least by the standards to which they had become accustomed at home, extremely well paid. By any standards, it was a serious culture shock for all concerned.

  ‘The first time I went to Europe was 1962,’ says Hooker, ‘and bo-o-o-oy, it was just like the President or Jesus comin’ in. All you could hear was John Lee Hooker. Every night was a sell-out. Standing room only, no matter how big the place was. I stayed over there a long time. I went over there for Horst Lippman, and then I went back and back and back again. It was just fantastic. I was the biggest thing they ever had over there at that time. I got more bigger over there than I did in the USA, much bigger. My impressions was that it was a lot different [in Europe] in every way. I had to get adjusted to it, gettin’ used to the food, adjusted that you couldn’t go out any time of night and find somethin’ to eat, you couldn’t get up in the morning and get yourself a good American breakfast. You couldn’t go to restaurants all through the day; they’d eat and close down. A lotta things I couldn’t get adjusted to.’

  One aspect of the Euro-experience was, however, just like old times: Hooker got himself a hit record from that tour, and he didn’t get paid. ‘You remember a record I did in Europe that was so big, number one? “Shake It Baby”? I did that for Horst Lippmann: never got a dime.’ In all fairness to Lippman, he claims not to have gotten paid either. ‘No record company wanted to record the blues festival at first,’ he told Don Snowden.57 ‘The very first [live album] we produced on our own and it was released on Brunswick, Deutsche Grammophon, Polydor. We paid for all this and actually got nothing for it. We thought it was a good investment because it’s part of history to document it on record. Two songs out of this recording got very popular in France – one was John Lee Hooker’s “Shake It Baby”. Because of the impact of this record, Phonogram came in and for the next years up until 1967, all the festivals have been released by Philips/Mercury in America.’

  ‘We had a ball, start to finish,’ reminisced T-Bone Walker to his biographer, Helen Oakley Dance,58 ‘and couldn’t believe the kind of audiences we had. People over there listen. You’ve got to be a showman back here [in the US]. Over there, the first time I did the splits the fans booed! That was hard to credit, but it was all right with me. They came to hear the music. From there on, I played wherever we were.’ During October of 1962, the tour stormed through France, Italy, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland: amazingly enough – considering the knock-on impact of the blues on British rock, and post-R&B Brit-rock on multinational pop – no UK concerts had been booked. However, thanks to sponsorship from the British jazz weekly Melody Maker, a single show at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall – billed as ‘Cavalcade Of Blues’ – was added at the next-to-last minute. The souvenir album, however, wasn’t recorded at any of the actual concerts, but on 18 October in Deutsche Grammophon’s Hamburg studio. Immediately after that night’s concert at Hamburg University’s Auditorium Maximum, the entire cast, shifted lock, stock and the proverbial barrel to the DG studio and, between midnight and 5 a.m., they performed their show all over again, this time for an audience which was not so much an ‘invited’ crowd as one which, according to Dance, ‘materialised like magic’. Nonetheless, they were at least as ‘live’ as any imaginable bunch of paying customers could have been expected to be.

  Peter ‘Memphis Slim’ Chatman was one of the greatest blues pianists of a generation wondrously endowed with great blues pianists. It would take a brave man to volunteer to spell Memphis Slim at the 88s, and a doubly brave one to do so if piano was merely his second instrument, and if his primary renown was as a guitarist (not to mention as a vocalist, an acrobat, and a seriously snappy dresser). Several thousand miles away from his Southwestern stomping grounds, T-Bone Walker took the opportunity to let his metaphorical hair down and have some fun as a temporary sideman by unveiling his unexpectedly deft and sparkling piano style. On this European jaunt, he played behind Sonny Terry (though not behind Brownie McGhee) and, more significantly, behind Hooker. Actually, on ‘Shake It Baby’ – the irresistible instant boogie which turned out to be ‘a big hit all over Europe . . . the party record’59 – alongside Hooker would be more accurate. For a whole heap of reasons – the bond of mutual respect between the two men, the joyful explosion of ideas T-Bone unleashes so exuberantly from the piano, the vociferous acclaim of the small but enthusiastic audience – the pair of them simply caught fire.

  The song, seemingly conjured from thin air, is little more than a Hookerised extemporisation on the same ‘shake it one time for me’ monologue which links ‘Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie’ with ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’, with Dixon and Jackson putting some real pump into one of Hooker’s favourite backbeats. What makes it happen big-time is the real human electricity that crackles back and forth between Hooker and Walker, as pianist and singer/guitarist urge each other on and on in wave upon successive wave of diminuendo and crescendo. The performance ran a little over four minutes: relatively concise by the standards of the modern single, but decidedly de trop for 1962. ‘Shake It Baby’ was therefore split, à la James Brown, into two two-minute chunks, one on each side of a 45. Considering its success as a dance record, party-goers all over Europe were probably injured in the stampedes to flip the record over before the dancers lost the groove.

  The other two Hooker selections which made it onto the album were rather less auspicious. ‘Let’s Make It Baby’ is an undistinguished ‘Boom Boom’-alike during which Hooker’s idiosyncratic timing consistently wrong-foots his accompanists: as the piece winds down, Hooker can be heard proudly announcing, ‘My 88 man, T-Bone Walker!’60 ‘The Right Time’ is a leisurely stroll around the perimeters of an old Nappy Brown hit which had been revived to considerable effect by Ray Charles during his barnstorming show at the 1958 Newport Jazz Festival: Walker, Jackson and Dixon recover with considerable poise from Hooker’s decision to start singing the first verse in the tenth bar of a twelve-bar intro.

  By November, Hooker had returned to the States, back to the same old grind. Nevertheless, the European tour had proved to be something of an eye-opener: Hooker’s horizons, both artistic and financial, had broadened considerably. A bluesman, he now knew, could travel overseas and get the kind of respect – and make the kind of money – which he was denied at home. He could play the finest concert halls, stay in the best hotels, be treated like an artist, and get paid accordingly. Like General MacArthur and Arnold Schwarzenegger, he would be back.

  ‘I remember him doing his first big European tour when I was around twelve, something like that. I remember him getting ready to go to Europe,’ says Zakiya. ‘But when he was working around the United States, we still got to see him pretty regular. When he [subsequently] toured Europe we wouldn’t see him for maybe six [months] . . . long spans of time. We was always excited when he’d come back because he’d always bring gifts. I look back on it now, and I really admire him because he stuck to what he wanted to do and he didn’t let anybody take that dream. He did it. He was just so pleased to be doing his music that he didn’t really concern himself a lot with the money. As long as he had enough to take care of his family, and have the things that he needed, he was pretty much satisfied. I’m sure that he knew that somebody was cheatin’ – you know? – but he just wanted to do his music.’

  Meanwhile, Hooker was marking time: touring the folk clubs and coffee-houses while preparing for his next Vee Jay session, not to mention enjoying being back in the bosom of his family. ‘I was playing a gig at a club in Toronto called the Penny Farthing,’ says John Hammond, recalling his first meeting with Hooker, ‘and I was on the show with John Lee – I’m sure he doesn’t remember it, but I do – and he had just gotten off the bus from Detroit, an
d he didn’t know where he was staying yet. He’d been to Toronto before – this was in the area called Yorkville, which was the Village of Toronto – and this was a coffeehouse, and not a great one. I admired him right away. He was just himself, you know, he got himself to his gigs and he played his ass off. I worked on a lot of gigs with him in the early ’60s, when I started playing, when he just played acoustic guitar, in Toronto and Detroit and in New York at Gerde’s Folk City . . . I’ve seen him play gigs where he just played electric guitar solo.’

  A live recording, cut during two successive weekends at San Francisco’s Sugar Hill club in early November of 1962, provides some indication of the kind of shows Hooker was performing at that time. Playing solo on electric guitar rather than acoustic – as he preferred to do by this time at all but the most rigidly purist venues – he performed standards associated with other artists, and re-presented or reinvented his older repertoire as well as working up some powerful new material. ‘I Was Standing By The Wayside’ was loosely derived from the same sources as Robert Johnson’s celebrated ‘Crossroads’, while ‘My Babe’ (the Little Walter hit which Willie Dixon had created by secularising the gospel standard ‘This Train’) and ‘Key To The Highway’ (a Big Bill Broonzy composition most frequently associated with Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee) find Hooker singing the original melodies but junking the chord progressions in favour of his own patented riffs. ‘Dimples’ reappears as ‘I Like To See You Walkin”, and ‘Every Night’ as ‘It’s You I Love, Baby’ alongside an incarnation of ‘Run On’ which bore little resemblance to its original appearance as a precursor to ‘Boom Boom’. An oddly perfunctory ‘Boogie Chillen’ is offset by a moody, deeply-grained ‘Driftin’ Blues’ and a bouncy, rocking ‘I Need Some Money’.