Boogie Man

  ‘The first people I spoke to were Vee Jay,’ claimed Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager, in his (ghosted) autobiography A Cellarful Of Noise,67 ‘. . . because they had done a very good job with Frank Ifield, who was a successful young British star.68 But of course Ifield had only limited success in America, like every other British artiste since the war.’ Contrariwise, Beatles biographer Philip Norman states69 that it was the Beatles’ producer George Martin, rather than Epstein, who cut the Vee Jay deal, and that Vee Jay was by no means Martin’s first call after receiving the knock-back from Capitol. The Fab Four’s in-house blues fans, Ringo Starr70 and John Lennon, were thrilled to be on the same label as cult heroes like John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed: the Beatles’ first-ever recording session, cut in Germany in the spring of ’62, had actually included an attempt at cutting a version of Reed’s ‘Take Out Some Insurance’. However, their delight was scarcely reciprocated. Neither ‘Please Please Me’ nor ‘From Me To You’ made any significant impact on the US charts, and the album Introducing The Beatles fared no better. When the Beatles’ third British No. One, ‘She Loves You’ also failed to impress the hardnoses at Capitol, it was offered to Vee Jay, who rejected it in their turn. The single ended up with the Philadelphia-based Swan label, a company so tiny that its most notable act was Dickie Doo And The Don’ts.

  But Cinderella finally did get to go to the ball: Capitol finally, grudgingly, swung behind the Beatles after ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ gave them their fourth UK No. One. In January 1964, the record broke out like wildfire when a DJ on a small Washington DC station began playing it to death – his copy had come not from Capitol, but from his air-stewardess girlfriend who’d picked it up in London – and by the time the Beatles arrived in the US to play The Ed Sullivan Show the following month, everything with ‘Beatles’ written on it was sprinting out of the stores like it had stolen something. Vee Jay’s licensing deal with EMI had given them a mere one-year lease on their Beatles material, and said lease was about to expire, so they speedily re-released all the Beatles stuff they had before the deal ran out and the rights reverted back to Capitol. Next thing anyone knew, the Beatles were occupying the entire Top 5 with singles on three different labels. Two of them were on Vee Jay.

  A steadier and more efficiently run company could have used the income and the prestige garnered by those Four Seasons and Beatles hits to pole-vault itself into the big leagues. (Imagine, if you will, how pop-culture history might have been altered had Epstein and Martin assigned the Beatles’ pre-Capitol US rights to Berry Gordy.) Instead, the sudden huge demand for Beatles product actually helped to sink Vee Jay completely. A big hit breaking out suddenly and unexpectedly means that records need to be pressed and distributed immediately: like, yesterday. Pressing plants demand to be paid cash on the barrelhead; distributors pay up sometime in the future. A company which needs to lay out cash in front to a pressing plant against cash real soon now from its distributors needs a strong, steady cash-flow and solid financial reserves, or else a runaway hit can literally destroy it. Steady cash-flow and solid financial reserves were exactly what Vee Jay didn’t have.

  A variety of factors contributed to the company’s ignominious demise. One such was undoubtedly white-owned distributors’ resentment of a black label which seemed to be growing too big for the boots assigned to it by the industry, but ultimately the other factors all shared a single common root: the company’s deadly combination of financial ineptitude and sheer greed. We’ve already heard, from Bob Crewe, of Ewart Abner’s profligacy at the gaming tables; and as Nelson George drily points out in The Death of Rhythm & Blues, ‘Vee Jay is remembered as being extravagant and wasteful even by some black deejays, a group never known to pass up an expensive good time.’ In his definitive account of the Motown heyday, Where Did Our Love Go, George goes into rather more detail:

  One case in point is the free junket to Las Vegas that Vee Jay sponsored for twelve influential R&B deejays in the early ’60s. One participant remembers, ‘They asked us what we wanted. The guys didn’t want free poker chips or liquor. They wanted women.’ So Vee Jay flew in twelve tall blondes from Oslo, Norway, via the North Pole to Los Angeles to Las Vegas, for a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday of fun. The deejays left for work happy on Monday morning. ‘They could have been bigger than Motown, but,’ the participant concluded, ‘they needed a bookkeeper.’

  Hooker would certainly second that last remark. ‘They was all crooked!’ he asserts. ‘The whole shootin’ match was crooked! Al Smith, he was cheatin’ Jimmy Bracken, and Bracken didn’t know it, and he was a crook! The company went under, and I never did see a royalty cheque. Mm-mm! Got nothin’. I never will forget that, either. That will always go with me, what they did. Now I’m doin’ so well, and the company went down. They were cheatin’ the government. They weren’t even payin’ tax! They got busted, they got an order on them.’

  However, by the time Vee Jay began proceedings to file for bankruptcy, Hooker wasn’t even in the country. He’d cut one last session for them during early 1964, leaving ten tracks for what would have been his next Vee Jay studio album. Surviving session logs don’t name the guitarist, bassist and drummer who backed him that time, though the trio in question didn’t sound terribly dissimilar from the Lefty Bates/Sylvester Hickman/Jimmy Turner combo which had accompanied him on the Travelin’ session in 1960. In terms of repertoire, it was definitely a mixed bag. Revisiting ‘Wednesday Evenin” and ‘Sally Mae’, Hooker nostalgically returned to the programme of his very first session with Bernard Besman almost fifteen years before. The bouncily lascivious ‘Big Legs, Tight Skirt’ and the rather more romantic ‘Flowers On The Hour’ shot for the jukeboxes and the elusive crossover market; while the icily unforgiving ‘Ain’t No Big Thing, Baby’ – in which Hooker threatens to send his woman, whom he brought from the Delta and kitted out with nice clothes, back down South if she doesn’t mend her ways – showed him in a considerably more ruthless light.

  The session’s most significant addition to Hooker’s permanent repertoire, though, was ‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’, an agonised slow blues which he has continued to sing ever since. ‘Some things it do serve you right to suffer,’ he says, ‘when you shouldn’t have did it, when it hurt someone down the line. Things that you did, when you shouldn’t’ve did it, but you just can’t change it.’ Hooker cites it as the saddest song in his catalogue, and performing it remains a gruelling emotional experience. That, he says, is why he took to wearing sunglasses on stage. ‘To keep from crying, yeah. Blues goes so deep. My songs sound so good. I’m not praising myself, not patting myself on the back, but when I hear my own voice, it’s so beautiful. The soul sounds so sad, and the words, the lyrics that I’m saying, just hits me. Sad, loving lyrics. I feel teardrops in my eyes, and I put on my sunglasses to keep from people seeing me crying, with tears running down my face.

  ‘But I never know when they’re going to hit me. When I’m just singing the tempo stuff, like “Boom Boom” and the boogie, it don’t. But the slow groove – so, so sad, and so deep – I have to cry, and I’m the one singing it.’

  ‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’ stretches the concept of ‘Hookerisation’ about as far as it can go. It would be something of an understatement simply to say that the song is ‘derived from’ Percy Mayfield’s ‘Memory Pain’: Hooker’s ‘version’ of Mayfield’s song is not so much a personal adaptation as a straight-up heist. One of the quintessential urbane-blues crooners, a formidable composer and a virtual contemporary of Hooker’s (not to mention being no known relation to Curtis), Percy Mayfield was the author of a glittering fistful of classics including ‘River’s Invitation’, ‘Hit The Road, Jack’ and ‘Please Send Me Someone To Love’. ‘Memory Pain’ had been recorded at his 1953 comeback session, following a year-long lay-off necessitated by the near-fatal car smash which robbed him of both his matinee-idol good looks and his sense of self-worth. Creatively if not physically, his path had crossed Hooker’s before, when both men
had been simultaneously contracted to Art Rupe’s Specialty label; and when a line from Mayfield’s composition ‘Two Years Of Torture’ had provided the stimulus for Hooker’s own ‘Backbiters And Syndicators’.

  ‘Memory Pain’ is a masterpiece of the blues songsmith’s art. The lyrics are simple and laconic, but epigrammatically taut and evocative, with an emotional complexity which lies barely concealed just beneath the surface. Ostensibly penitent and self-exculpatory, the song is in fact loaded with resentment and bitterness towards the departed woman: the more the singer proclaims the justice of his unhappy fate, the more he’s actually playing to the gallery and attempting to arouse his listeners’ sympathy for himself. No wonder it appealed to Hooker, who must have known the moment he heard it that it was virtually custom-built for him. Mayfield cut the song twice, with the verses sung in different orders, during the first half of 1953, but the version which directly inspired ‘It Serve Me Right To Suffer’ – not to mention a 1969 cover by Johnny Winter – appears to have stayed in the can until it was included on a 1971 Mayfield compilation. Possibly Hooker heard the first version during his year with Specialty, or maybe he heard Mayfield sing it that way live. Smokily crooning over lightly swinging rhythm and a soupy horn section led by tenorist Maxwell Davis, Mayfield sings a total of four verses. Hooker retains the first two virtually intact; drops the third to make room for a dark, clawing guitar solo full of skittering runs, percussive scratching and viciously bent notes; and puckishly replaces the doubled-up first line of Mayfield’s final verse – ‘I don’t see well, I’m absent-minded, I hardly sleep at all/My past put me on a habit of nicotine and alcohol’ – with a personalised full verse of his own: ‘My doctor put me on milk, cream and alcohol/He said, “Johnny, your nerves is so bad, so bad, Johnny, until you just can’t sleep at all,”’ thus enabling him to bring the song to a powerful completion with a full restatement of the first verse.

  Hooker sings the song much ‘straighter’ – adhering much more closely to orthodox ‘direct time’ – than he does in most of his slow blues performances, hardly ever yielding to the temptation of ‘gaining’ a bar by jumping ahead of the band, as is his customary practice. It is said that mediocre artists borrow and great artists steal – as when Otis Redding acknowledged that Aretha Franklin had ‘stolen’ ‘Respect’ from him; though she had left him with his composer credit and publishing royalties intact, the song now ‘belonged’ to her – and by this definition, Hooker’s annexation of Mayfield’s song undoubtedly certifies him as a great artist. His version overpowers Mayfield’s; his personalised lyric change puts the stamp of ‘Hookerisation’ upon it; and ultimately he demonstrates his ownership by ‘inhabiting’ the song more completely than did its author. Copyright law doesn’t work this way – if it did, no songwriter could ever be able to make any kind of a living – but the blues’ unique melding of oral tradition and pop process certainly does.

  Meanwhile, way over in England, a blues boom was raging. EMI’s Stateside label had issued Hooker’s eight-year-old ‘Dimples’ as a single, and it was starting to climb the charts. A year and a half after he’d touched down in Manchester with the American Folk Blues Festival, Hooker was flying back to England for his first-ever headlining foreign tour. He was about to re-invade the British Invasion and become a rock and roll star.

  It may seem corny to you, but this is true: the groups from England really started the blues rolling and getting bigger among the kids – the white kids. At one time . . . the blues was just among the blacks – the older black people. And this uprise started in England by the Beatles, Animals, Rolling Stones, it started everybody to digging the blues. It got real big over there, and then people in the States started to catch on. The last eight or ten years, I really been making it big.

  John Lee Hooker to Robert Neff &

  Anthony Connor, Blues, 1975

  ‘You ever hear’a Newcastle?’ demands John Lee Hooker of a British acquaintance. The acquaintance fruitlessly racks his brain, mentally scrolling through a headful of half-forgot ten fragments of Delta lore. ‘Newcastle, Mississippi?’ he enquires eventually.

  Apparently not. ‘You ever been to Newcastle?’ Hooker asks again, somewhat impatiently this time. ‘Newcastle in Britain. Newcastle . . . boy, that was rough. There was a bar I played every night. It was rough.’

  ‘Was that the Club-A-Go-Go?’ the acquaintance asks, recalling a notorious dive founded in that fair city during the early ’60s – with decor designed by Eric Burdon, vocalist for the club’s original house band, the Animals – by Mike Jeffery, subsequently manager of the Animals and Jimi Hendrix. Hooker nods: yes.

  ‘Fighting outside, ooohhhh! And inside. “Oh,” I said, “that’s it. I ain’t gonna play here no more.” They were fighting like dogs! Little kids carryin’ knives an’ all the rest of it . . . shit. Oh boy, it was rough. Everybody say, “Hey man, this ain’t nothin’, they fight here all the time.” I say, “Yes, ’n I be in the middle of it!”’

  To most Brits, weaned on lurid horror stories of American inner-city violence, there is something almost ludicrous in the notion that someone who had survived in the Detroit ghetto, more or less unscathed, for a quarter-century or so, could possibly be taken aback by a bunch of beered-up teenage Geordies. Nevertheless, what’s familiar is often reassuring, even if it may seem scary to outsiders. And what’s unfamiliar is often what catches you unawares.

  This is neither the time nor the place for an in-depth account of the birth-pangs of British R&B: the early chapters of any competent biography of Eric Clapton or the Rolling Stones71 will recount that story in far greater detail than is either necessary or desirable in this particular context. However, in order to understand the peculiar nature of the madhouse in which Hooker was about to find himself – not to mention the differences between the young white blues audiences in the British Isles and the US – we need a word, or a couple of thousand, about the pre-history of the British Blues Boom.

  Like – but also unlike – other Europeans, Britons had loved African-American music, in both its ‘traditional’ and ‘commercial’ forms, for decades; but it was a rarely consummated love affair, conducted from afar via records and the occasional visit from a genuine American bluesman. ‘For me,’ wrote George Melly, the British singer, critic, author and raconteur,72 describing his emotions en route to Big Bill Broonzy’s first British concert in 1951, ‘the idea of hearing an American Negro singing the blues was almost unbearably exciting.’ Melly had heard his first Bessie Smith record during his childhood in the ’30s, and had carried a torch for ‘classic’ blues and New Orleans jazz for almost twenty years without ever experiencing a performance by a ranking exponent of the art. In the US, the carriers of that blues torch were fans and musicians whose primary concern was ‘folk’ music, for the excellent reason that since the blues is a cornerstone of America’s folk heritage, no valid exploration of the folk roots of American music could legitimately exclude it. The British folk musicians and collectors, on the other hand, devoted themselves primarily to exploring and renewing their own folk music; songs from the native Anglo-Celtic traditions. Such musicians were encouraged to perform music from their own home communities: Euan McColl, the scene’s patriarch, even frowned on the idea of a Londoner performing a Scottish ballad, let alone a Mississippi blues piece, in his Singers’ Club. In the United Kingdom, therefore, listeners of Melly’s generation primarily collected and appreciated the blues as a member of the musical family ruled by that other great African-American creation: jazz.

  The generation fifteen or twenty years younger than Melly and his contemporaries heard the blues in a somewhat different context. Some came to the music via Britain’s mid-’50s fascination with ‘trad’: home-grown variations on New Orleans jazz. Both Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones and Pete Townshend of The Who began their performing careers as banjoists in ‘trad’ bands,73 and Wunderkind polymath Stevie Winwood was playing piano in a trad band led by his bass-playing elder brother Muff befo
re he was out of short pants. Some arrived via ‘skiffle’, a home-made, low-budget grab-bag of assorted American folk musics drawing heavily on the Leadbelly repertoire: John Lennon’s first instrument was banjo and his first group a skiffle band. Others still had been simultaneously exposed to radio broadcasts by Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and Josh White – the latter an ersatz bluesman who had, uniquely, started out as a real one – and to the first wave of the rock and roll explosion of the ’50s. The likes of Keith Richards and Eric Clapton literally heard Big Bill Broonzy with one ear and Chuck Berry with the other.

  ‘On one hand,’ affirmed Richards,74 ‘I was playing all that folk stuff on the guitar. The other half of me was listenin’ to all that rock and roll.’ And it was in the rough, rumbustious energies of Chicago blues that the two streams converged, with the vestiges of the ‘trad’ boom providing the infrastructure. British traditional jazzers had ranged from the most commercial and popsploitative to the most austere and puritanical – in their musical tastes rather than their personal lives, as Melly’s Owning Up makes hilariously clear. The real ayatollahs, like the legendary Ken Colyer, considered that Louis Armstrong had ruined jazz by introducing the concept of ‘soloing’, and that the music had been in artistic decline ever since 1926. Others, like the enormously influential Chris Barber, had taken a broader view, exploring a variety of opportunities to expand the range and definition of his band. Britain’s first skiffle group had been formed within Barber’s band and featured Barber’s banjoist, Tony Donegan, as its front man: following a surprise hit with a version of Leadbelly’s ‘Rock Island Line’, Donegan changed his first name to ‘Lonnie’ (in homage to Lonnie Johnson) and launched his own group.