Boogie Man

  Of the two important new songs, ‘TB Is Killin’ Me’ borrowed a line or two from St Louis Jimmy Oden’s standard ‘Goin’ Down Slow’, but it had an ominous undertow of impending doom which was all its own, while ‘No Man’s Land’ was one of his most important songs of the ’60s. Essentially an answer to Woody Guthrie’s anthem ‘This Land Is Your Land’, it stated precisely the opposite case: that the land belongs to nobody, and that we, as human beings, are doing no more than simply passing through. This was what the Native Americans believed, which was why they were prepared to ‘sell’ the land to European traders for beads and blankets: according to their philosophical lights, anyone who believed that land could be bought, sold or owned was plainly deluded and should therefore simply be humoured. Hooker’s take on this clash of values is as stark and poetic as anything he ever wrote or sang.

  You may have money

  Fine clothes and everything

  But one day you got to die

  And leave it all behind

  This land, this land is no man’s land

  You oughtta be ashamed, you oughtta be ashamed

  Fightin’ over your buryin’ ground

  His next Vee Jay studio date, early in 1963, represented a headlong retreat from the botched experiment of the Big Soul sessions. This time Hooker performed with only drums for support, though his guitar sound was so full and rich, the (unnamed) drummer so tight and sympathetic, that the absence of a bass or second guitar scarcely proved to be any kind of problem. ‘My Grindin’ Mill’ revisited the ‘Grinder Man’ he’d cut for Henry Stone in Miami; the venerable ‘Bottle Up And Go’ harked back to his original Detroit house-party repertoire, and ‘I Want To Ramble’ Hookerised Junior Parker’s 1953 Sun recording of ‘Feelin’ Good’, which itself had been a reworking of ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘Sadie Mae’ was a virtual ‘answer record’ to ‘Process’: this time Hooker requests Miss Sadie Mae to ‘curl my baby’s hair for me’ so that he can see her ‘long curly hair hangin’ down’: after all, he tells his listeners, Miss Sadie Mae ‘can curl hair better’n anybody else ever hit this town’. Best of all, however, was the exuberantly lascivious ‘This Is Hip’, with its loose-limbed shuffle beat and memorable refrain, ‘I messed around an’-uh . . . fell in love.’ Inexplicably, the song stayed in the can for almost twenty years, surfacing only in 1981 as the title track of a British compilation, but it proved popular enough to be revived, at a delightfully rowdy and rockin’ session with Ry Cooder and the rhythm section from his short-lived ‘roots supergroup’ Little Village, for 1991’s Mr Lucky.

  Next time around, though, it was back to the big-band format with the Motown moonlighters’ last Hooker hoorah. ‘I Want To Shout’ was full-blown jump – deviating only from the archetype with Hooker’s resolutely irregular timing and the enthusiastic shooby-doobies (or maybe it’s ‘Shout, baby, shout’) from the Andantes (or maybe this time it actually was the Vandellas) – as was ‘I Want To Hug You’, the debut of a boogying staple-in-the-making sounding rather less confident than it would do in subsequent incarnations. ‘Love Is A Burning Thing’ borrows its chord changes from Jimmy Reed’s ‘Honest I Do’, its lyrical core from Johnny Cash’s ‘Ring Of Fire’ and its ambience from the post-gospel big-balladry of Ray Charles, Solomon Burke and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland. The moving gospelly-ballad ‘Don’t Look Back’, later covered by Van Morrison and Them and revived yet again as a Hooker/Morrison duet, had been attempted at an earlier session, but this version was the clincher. The lyrics steadfastly denounce those who are ‘living in the past’, but the weary, regretful tones which cloud Hooker’s voice undercut them by saying something rather different. The words tell us that we must be resolute and forward-looking: the voice tells us that things are never quite that simple, and that moving on can be painful even when you know that there is no real alternative.

  ‘Birmingham Blues’ paraphrases the classic opening line of Tommy Johnson’s 1928 ‘Big Road Blues’ as ‘I ain’t going down to Birmingham by myself’, by way of reference to the Civil Rights marches which Dr Martin Luther King Jr was leading on Birmingham, Alabama, in April and May of 1963, and then follows it with as uncompromising and passionate an expression of pure, cold rage as you’ll find in any African-American music of its decade. ‘Get me a plane,’ he sings, ‘and fly over Birmingham/drop me a bomb, keep on flyin’ on.’ Soon he’s junked the structure (what little there is of it) and begun to preach. He returns to the theme of ‘No Man’s Land’ – ‘GOD made this land, this land, and he made it for no one man!’ he cries. ‘GOD made everybody equal! Equal! EQUAL!’ – but it is now blended with the politics of ‘Democrat Man’, as Hooker begins to praise not Dr King, but President John F. Kennedy, for his support of the Civil Rights movement. ‘One thing I do know,’ he says. ‘Our President . . . he are doin’ all he can . . . for every man . . . equal rights.’ On the fade, he recites a list of the Southern states soon to be visited by those prepared to go down the big road together. Some commentators never tire of pointing out the apparent lack of overt social comment in the blues, but even they would have to concede that ‘Birmingham Blues’ goes an awful long way towards redressing that particular balance.

  And ‘I’m Leaving’ simply rocked. There’s a certain kind of Hooker song that’s really nothing more than a band playing a single riff in a certain groove over and over again while Hooker free-associates on two or three key lines: but when it’s the right band playing the right riff in the right groove and Hooker’s doing his stuff with the right two or three lines, then the effect is nothing less than magical. ‘I’m Leaving’ is one of those.

  The fruits of these sessions were combined on The Big Soul Of John Lee Hooker’s successor, John Lee Hooker On Campus. To a greater extent than anything that had come before, it epitomised the increasing schizophrenia of Hooker’s career and of Vee Jay’s approach to it. The cover depicted a charcoal drawing of someone clearly intended to represent Hooker, though the white-haired, benevolently smiling, grandfatherly figure shown strumming his acoustic guitar into a pair of microphones bore a rather greater resemblance to Leadbelly in his last years than to Hooker in his mid-forties. Anybody who concluded from the packaging that what they were getting was a live recording of Hooker playing solo to a college audience would have been somewhat nonplussed by the record itself, which juxtaposed selections from both the down-homey drummer-only session and the uptownish big-band date.

  On Campus, which turned out to be Hooker’s last studio album for Vee Jay, arrived complete with a loftily condescending liner-note finely calculated to appeal to the most patronising instincts of white readers, and equally likely to offend just about any African-American unfortunate enough to read it, let alone Hooker himself. ‘John Lee Hooker is one of the few authentic blues artists left in this country today,’ begins the anonymous author, not unreasonably. However, he (it’s bound to be a ‘he’) then goes on to assert:

  The truth of the matter is that the authentic blues of the John Lee Hooker type was spawned and nurtured in the misery, ignorance and destitution of the Negro in a particular American society. As the plight of the American Negro improved and he became better educated, he developed other methods of expression and sang of his troubles less and less. He became a voter in most states and instead of singing dejectedly about his problems, he went to school and to the polls and learned to do something about them. All the while, the authentic blues was dying out. The American art blues was taking its place. Blues is now sung by artists who enjoy the best of luxurious living. Off-stage, their speech is clipped and articulate. Their wives and children often attend the best colleges and universities . . . only the John Lee Hookers of the profession remain to remind us from whence {sic} all this came – raw, unbridled, painful misery . . .

  In other words: Roll up! Roll up! Getcha ‘raw, unbridled, painful’ ‘misery, ignorance and destitution’ right here! This guy doesn’t ‘enjoy the best of luxurious living’! His family don’t ‘attend the best colleges and universi
ties’! His speech is not ‘clipped and articulate’! He’s still ‘singing dejectedly about his problems’!

  With supporters like this, who needs backbiters and syndicators?

  10

  . . . BLUES BOOM

  Does anybody really think it’s weird that all these English ‘pop’ groups are making large doses of loot? It’s pretty simple, actually. They take the style (energy construct, general form, etc.) of black blues, country or city, and combine it with the visual image of white American non-conformity, i.e. the beatnik, and score very heavily. Plus the fact that these English boys are literally ‘hipper’ than their white counterparts in the US, hipper because as it is readily seen, they have actually made a contemporary form, unlike most white US ‘folk singers’ who are content to imitate ‘ancient’ blues forms and older singers, arriving at a kind of popular song (at its most hideous in groups like Peter, Paul & Mary, etc.), which has little to do with black reality, which would have been its strength, anyway – that reference to a deeper emotional experience. As one young poet said, ‘At least the Rolling Stones come on like English crooks’.

  Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka as now is), downbeat, 196561

  You know, the English can say ‘marvellous’ pretty good. They can’t say ‘raunchy’ so good, though.

  Bob Dylan, in his celebrated Playboy interview

  with Nat Hentoff, March 196662

  And lo, in the third year, the Newport Festivals arose from the dead. In July 1963, after two years in exile by way of penance for the 1960 riots, both the Jazz and Folk Festivals returned, suitably chastened, to Freebody Park. Not surprisingly, John Lee Hooker received a return booking to the Folk Festival. Playing in standard tuning on the acoustic guitar in which, by now, he was plainly losing inter est, he performed two sets: on 26 July he appeared solo, and on 28 July, he was backed by an unnamed acoustic bassist – possibly the unfortunate Bill Lee – with whom he seemed to have little musical rapport. Opening with a Hookerisation of Otis Rush’s 1956 blues hit ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ (composed by Willie Dixon), he re-presented ‘Hobo Blues’ (retitled ‘Freight Train To My Friend’) and ‘Tupelo’ (plus its near-identical twin, ‘Mighty Fire’), reworked Blind Lemon Jefferson’s ‘Matchbox’ as ‘Bus Station Blues’, and demonstrated that a single under-miked acoustic guitar couldn’t provide enough juice to enable him to do justice to the rocking likes of ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Let’s Make It’. Most memorably, he introduced the feverish ‘Stop Baby Don’t Hold Me’, which finds him attempting to fend off a woman who seems to know his desires better than he does, and the affecting ‘Sometime Baby You Make Me Feel So Bad’, some of the lyrics of which seem almost like a personal credo:

  I still love you

  Old time love

  I don’t have that kind of love, baby

  That modern love

  I have that love

  That old time love

  In my heart for you

  My love.

  ‘Me and Brownie and Sonny and all the folk-singers,’ Hooker tells the audience at one point, ‘we are here paying our dues to the natural facts. We have come a long way – the entertainers – trying to reach you, to bring you the message of the blues. Sometimes we are travelling late at night, trying to make it to you . . . sometimes you tired when you reach your destination, but you payin’ your dues to the facts. We are tryin’ to please you the best that we know, and we hope you accept it.’

  Making his Newport debut that year was young John Hammond. ‘I first met and played with John Lee in 1963, at the Newport Folk Festival,’ he says, though – as we’ve seen – he’s placed their first meeting elsewhere and elsewhen in other interviews. ‘It was one of my first big shows ever, and that was just about at the height of the blues revival of the early ’60s. I was on the same stage with John Lee and [Reverend] Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and Dave Van Ronk, and I was trembling, to say the least. John Lee played acoustic guitar, solo, and mesmerised the whole audience. It was just staggering. He was unbelievable. He did “Texas Flood”’ – Hammond presumably refers to ‘Tupelo’: right natural disaster, wrong song – ‘and it was just unforgettable. I had been a fan of his since I was about fourteen, and had just about everything that he’d recorded up to that point, so it was beyond my imagination to actually be on the bandstand with him four years later.’

  The Festival was taped, as were its predecessors in 1959 and 1960, by Vanguard Records. Extracts from Hooker’s performance were included on one of the resulting albums, Blues At Newport ’63, which provided a life-changing experience for at least one listener: a fourteen-year-old girl named Bonnie Raitt, who cited it, some thirty-odd years later, as ‘the record that turned me around’.63

  ‘It still keeps my taste anchored to the more modal and raw Delta blues as opposed to the slicker, urban sound,’ she continued. ‘Mississippi John Hurt was singing ‘Candy Man’, John Lee Hooker was on there, and Dave Van Ronk and John Hammond, who were young white blues guys. I’d never imagined that white guys could sing the blues authentically – let alone white women. At fourteen, I sat there trying to figure out all those songs, till my fingers literally bled. There was a mournful quality, a dark night of the soul, an aching loneliness that, as a teenager, you feel intensely personally – whether you’re not getting on with your parents, or feel nobody understands you. There was all that, plus humour and bite and everything else I love about the Delta blues, on that one record.’

  In a canny example of music-biz horse-trading, Vee Jay licensed two of Hooker’s Newport performances to Vanguard Records for inclusion on their album in exchange for the right to release his complete show on their own label as John Lee Hooker At Newport, which appeared the following year. However, both Vee and Jay – not to mention Ewart Abner, Calvin Carter and Al Smith – had rather more on their minds than the vicissitudes of John Lee Hooker’s career. At the time, it must have seemed as if Vee Jay was riding high but with benefit of hind sight, it would be truer to say that the company was riding for a serious fall.

  In 1962, Vee Jay had scored a massive pop hit – a chart-topper, no less – with Gene Chandler’s surreal post-doowop masterpiece ‘Duke Of Earl’. Jerry Butler was doing well, as were Betty Everett, Dee Clark – the latter described by Charlie Gillett as ‘a singer contracted by the company because of his ability to sound like either Little Richard or Clyde McPhatter’64 – and Jimmy Reed, then enjoying the tail end of his extraordinary string of a dozen Hot 100 hits. None of this was doing much for Hooker, though. ‘There were several other big artists that they had at that time, Jimmy Reed, Dee Clark, Jerry Butler. He treated them all better than he did me and Jimmy,’ he grumbles. ‘They got some money out of it. [Vee Jay] did me really in, me and Jimmy Reed. You go down there to borrow money, you sit there all day just to get . . . they didn’t want to give us advances or nothin’. And we made ’em tons of money. Dee Clark and Jerry Butler, they got clothes, a new car, money – with my money and Jimmy Reed’s money that we’d been making for them.’

  The company had also started fooling around with white boys. Thanks to a steer from the ubiquitous Henry Stone, Vee Jay had acquired the services of the Four Seasons, a New Jersey vocal group whose principal assets were the dentists’-drill falsetto of their front man Frankie Valli, and the formidable in-house songwriting machine of independent producer Bob Crewe and former Royal Teen Bob Gaudio, the latter the Seasons’ equivalent of the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson. Crewe had cut several tracks on the Seasons at his own expense before schlepping the masters down to a DJs’ convention in Miami and playing them to Stone, who – in his own inimitable manner – started a buzz which had label reps swarming like flies. ‘We wound up making a deal with Ewart Abner at Vee Jay,’ Crewe told Joe Smith.65 ‘On paper, it was one of the largest deals that had ever been made on a record. Later down the line, I realised that we probably should have made a deal with CBS for five cents a record, because maybe we would have gotten a better count. There were times when E
wart could be found in Las Vegas, blowing a quarter of a million bucks a night at the crap table.’

  The Seasons gave Vee Jay three No. One hits in 1963, with ‘Sherry’, ‘Big Girls Don’t Cry’ and ‘Walk Like A Man’. According to Frankie Valli,66 ‘there was very little money, maybe an accumulation of $30,000. Later on, we found out that there was a lot more money, but we never saw any of it.’ So they quit Vee Jay and signed with Mercury.

  Vee Jay’s other experiment that year was to take on something extremely unlikely: a British rock band. For some years, their British outlet had been via the giant Electrical and Musical Industries combine, better known as EMI, who’d licensed Vee Jay sides for release first on their Top Rank label (originally an offshoot of the Rank Organisation cinema chain), and later on Stateside, a catch-all label for product from a variety of smaller US companies, including Imperial, Sue, United Artists and Berry Gordy’s Tamla and Motown labels. EMI’s principal transatlantic subsidiary was Capitol Records, which they’d bought out in 1956, and it was Capitol to whom US rights in EMI product were traditionally offered. Despite being owned by EMI, Capitol was fiercely protective of its editorial independence, and the company remained perennially reluctant to take up the option of getting involved with any of EMI’s traditionally unsalable ‘current English sensations’. The parent company was, therefore, often humiliatingly reduced to peddling their wares to the smaller and more adventurous enterprises who were more frequently accustomed to coming, caps – and masters – in hand, to them. Thus it was that Vee Jay acquired, almost by accident, the rights to the first two UK chart-toppers by the Beatles.