Boogie Man

  Valerie Wilmer was, at that time, just beginning to make the transition from eager fan to professional photojournalist; and she frequently found herself adopting the role of tour guide and interpreter to visiting African-American jazz and blues musicians. The potential for mutual misunderstanding was massive, and her formidable diplomatic skills were frequently tested to the full. ‘I used to find myself having to help people out: where to get different kinds of food, where to get drinks after hours, where the off-licences were . . . There’s a story which will illustrate the strange gap between American and British ways: you know that in the States there’s nearly always toilets in any kind of restaurant, and it’s the law that they have to have them and they have to let you use them? Well, Wimpy Bars had just started here; the first hamburger places in Britain. Curtis Jones, the piano player, was here, and we went out to have a hamburger after a show, and he wanted to use the bath room. He asked could he use the bathroom and they said no. What they meant was that they don’t have one for the public, and you couldn’t use theirs. He thought it was racial, and being a deeply sensitive person, he was deeply hurt. He was actually in tears. That would have been in 1963. I had to explain it to him. Things like that were difficult.

  ‘[Pianist] Roosevelt Sykes – who I was also very friendly with; I used to stay with him in New Orleans; a wonderful man, a real philosopher – he and I went out somewhere one day, and he said he wanted chicken and chips and apple pie and ice cream; and he wanted them all on the same plate. This was in some cheapo chicken-and-chips type place, and of course they were . . . you know. And I had my own culture shock when I went to the South and was in people’s homes: there was only one plate because they either only had one plate or simply didn’t want to bother with it. You did have it all on the same plate. Now Roosevelt had been away from that kind of life for years, but it was his sort of thing and I wonder now if he did it just out of devilment, or to say, ‘I’m down home.’ Another thing about food here was that, among people of my generation, chicken was not very common. You only had chicken at Christmas and Easter, maybe. The Marble Arch barbecue was the first place they had chicken on a spit, that horrible stuff which I [now] refuse to eat, but at the time we thought it was wonderful. It had only just been introduced at the time when those guys came over here, so it was kind of unusual to have chicken and chips. It was not a regular thing to eat here. Those people were really deprived of food. They had the adulation of the fans, and all those people who asked them about records they were in on back when God was a boy, and yet they didn’t have the food they wanted, and there was always a very ambivalent attitude to wards them and their women.’

  Ah yes, women. Both the African-American musicians and their European female fans were enmeshed in all the complexities of mutual precepts and notions of ‘otherness’ and ‘exoticism’; each, as far as the other was concened, had the sweet tang of fruit forbidden in theory but accessible in practice. For many of the bluesmen, born and raised amidst the sexual claustrophobia of the South, the readily available company of friendly white girls soon became one of the recognised bonuses of European touring. ‘When Muddy [Waters] and Otis [Spann] first came here,’ remembers Wilmer, ‘it was in ’58 – that was when I first met them – and then there was the show that Hooker was on that we didn’t get to see, and then there was the big blues package show in ’63. Memphis Slim was a very intelligent man and very skilled in the ways of the world, and he was actually very nice, but he had a very unfortunate habit of telling tales on everybody. This could be kind of funny, but then you know that he’s going to be talking about you when you go out the room. He would always tell everybody that when Muddy and Otis first came here, they got a couple of prostitutes and took them back. I know that men always laugh at other men who go with hookers – unfortunate word, that – but the finger was always pointed at them because they were the guys who went with the hookers, rather than the nice girls.’

  Few, if any, of their peers were to make that mistake again. It was on this and subsequent tours of Britain that Hooker first acquired his formidable ladies’-man reputation amongst white blues-rockers: it is virtually impossible to mention his name to any of the British musicians with whom he worked during the ’60s without receiving a metaphorical dig in the ribs and an anecdote beginning with something along the lines of, ‘I remember John Lee and this girl . . .’ For the hardened, dedicated blues buffs Hooker may well have been a legendary hero with fifteen years of classic recordings behind him, but for pop fans he was simply a guy with a danceable record in the charts. And you know what happens to guys with danceable records in the charts.

  ‘He was 4587 at that time,’ says Roy Fisher, ‘and again this was something which was surprising, in a way, because he had the hit record, so therefore when we went to the concerts, he had a mass of young people, male and female, in adulation, because that’s the way they respect someone that’s in the charts. This was something he really was not used to, had never really had before, because he wasn’t regarded in the same way in America, and even with the blues [festival] concerts you get a very sedate . . . ed elderly audience that would just sit there and politely clap at the end of each number, but not exactly get too aroused, whereas these kids were screaming and yupping and wanted to know about him. As far as the audience were concerned, he was someone that had a single in the charts, therefore they were in awe of him, and he got the adulation that went with that, and all the rest of it. The kids who came to see him after “Dimples” and “Boom Boom” were unaware of his status as a blues singer, they didn’t know about that. Some of the hard-core blues fans would come along too, and they were in total disgust of what was going on at that time, from what I know about blues enthusiasts and jazz enthusiasts. He handled it very, very well, but it was something which was obviously totally different for him.

  ‘Undoubtedly he has an interest in ladies, period, and at this time, the thought of all these young ladies wishing to know him and wanting to get close to him was very interesting, but that was fine until an occasion which happened soon after we started touring, where I came back into the dressing room at one particular point and he was in a very, very upset state. He was stuttering away and it was obvious that he was upset and I was trying to work out what it was that had upset him, and it was because he had found out that one young lady who had been particularly forceful and had got through to him . . . he had found out about ten minutes later that she was only fifteen.’ As Hooker must have been keenly aware, back in Mississippi that would have been the cue for a lynching. ‘He realized very, very fast and got very upset about it. I saw this particular lady, and no way did she look fifteen. She looked eighteen, nineteen because of the make-up and all the rest of it, but she was only fifteen, and that had only come out because he’d asked her how old she was . . . which he did most times. After that he always asked how old they were before he even got involved. He knew the ramifications of America; over here they would have been pretty bad, but not as bad as he thought they would be. She had got very very upset, because I’d come back as she was leaving, and she was a very pissed young lady because he’d told her to go. He was at least sensible about that, and after that he always made a point of finding out how old they were first.’

  Quiet, well-dressed, polite and unassuming when offstage, and an utterly compelling presence when on, Hooker was as personally attractive to his newfound young fans as any pouting, long-haired teen idol half his age could have been. One such admirer, whom we will call ‘Sally’ because it is not her name, fondly recalls, ‘I remember going to have a meal with him, and then going back to the hotel and going to bed with him . . . he was quite gentle and everything. He’s quite gentlemanly in his way. Even though he was shy, he was very charismatic because he’s got this voice, and I thought he was very attractive in that . . . how can I explain it? People like that are often much more attractive than people who are very handsome and sort of putting it about a bit more. He definitely didn’t have any trouble
with women. He had lots of women, just by being shy. You know how men score in that way.’

  Under such circumstances, Roy Fisher remembers, Hooker was understandably reticent about discussing his wife and family back in Detroit. ‘I, because of the nature of the person I am, would tend to ask questions like that when we had quiet moments here and there. He would answer and say, “Yes, I’m married; yes, I’ve got some kids”, but he wasn’t that outgoing about it, and I kind of think it was a problem to him. I think the family were a problem and he was going through problems with that, so it was something that he didn’t really want to get into.’

  So by the end of his first headlining British tour, Hooker had formed certain lasting impressions about the UK. He liked the fans (particularly the comelier female ones), the respect, the star status and the Groundhogs; he didn’t like the food, the weather and Don Arden. Even today, if you say Don Arden’s name to him, he responds as if he’d just been stabbed. ‘Oh! Old Don Arden. They run him outta town. He was a crook, beat me outta lotta money. Boy, he messed up with me, I’ll tell you that. I come home with a cheque from when I was over there . . . he give me a cheque for $9,000. Put it in the bank. It stayed there about a week, and then a woman called me up from the bank, said the cheque ain’t worth the paper it were written on. I was sick with hurt. $9,000: took me about two, three months to make that money. I was hurt. I called, but I could never get the man on the phone. Well, they know who was callin’, and they know the cheque weren’t no good. I couldn’t sue: I’m here and he there. He was just a natural crook, and none of the artists like him.’

  ‘The only time that I really saw John get angry during that period,’ says Roy Fisher, ‘was when he was referring to Don Arden and the fact that he didn’t get his cash on time or that they were trying to rip him off or whatever. That was some time after the tour when he found out that Don Arden hadn’t been paying the taxes and he was getting tax demands in America, and yet his contract was that Don Arden would pay the taxes.’

  Another difficulty was, according to Fisher, ‘that there was a lot of people, which he wasn’t used to, and he’d get nervous when he had to go on stage if he had to push through a crowd. Sometimes there were minders and people around who would make that easier, but not always. I don’t think Don Arden cared about estimating how popular he would be on that tour, and really he needed a minder: someone bigger than I or Patrick Meehan, if Meehan had continued to chauffeur him around. They weren’t really interested; it was just shove ’em out, make the money, and that’s it. While I was at the agency working out some dealings with John, I met Little Richard there, and he was due to go out and tour very soon after that, and I’m sure they treated him very much the same way as they treated John. As far as Don Arden was concerned, John was just another artist to make money out of.’

  In his Starmakers & Svengalis: The History of British Pop Management,88 Johnny Rogan describes Arden as ‘the most feared manager in British pop history’, an epithet which Arden, who was fond of calling himself ‘the Al Capone of pop’, would undoubtedly consider highly flattering. Instrumental in helping Mike Jeffery break the Animals into the London club scene, he took on the management of the Nashville Teens (who, needless to say, were neither teens nor from Nashville) later in 1964 and the rather more successful Small Faces the following year. Subsequently involved with the likes of Black Sabbath and ELO, his standard managerial tactics combined elaborate legal manoeuvres with the threat (and occasionally the use) of extreme violence. Despite his fearsome reputation, it’s worth remembering that he has never been convicted of any offence in any court of law. Arden’s assistant at that time was a mountainous ex-wrestler named Peter Grant – in fact, it was Grant who had, on Arden’s behalf, announced Hooker’s tour dates to Melody Maker – and it’s a safe bet that if Arden had assigned Grant as Hooker’s ‘minder’, there would have been zero difficulty escorting the slender bluesman through the throngs blocking his path to the stage. As his subsequent triumph as helmsman for Led Zeppelin’s career was to demonstrate, Grant learned several important lessons from his tenure with Arden. Some were based on what Arden did: always get the money, trust in the power of intimidation – what Grant called ‘verbal violence’ – to get results, drive the hardest possible bargain; and some on what Arden didn’t do: treat the talent with respect, earn and maintain their loyalty, defend them with your life. Grant would – and, nannying the Yardbirds on their final US tour, actually did – stare into the barrel of a gun whilst facing down a promoter trying to shark the band out of a $1,000 gig fee.

  Hooker’s next British tour was already arranged: he would return in three months’ time for more TV and club dates in October and November, and this time the Groundhogs were signed up well in advance. In the meantime, though, he barely had time to drop off his suitcase and electric guitar in Detroit before heading off, acoustic guitar in hand, for his annual slot at the Newport Folk Festival. No more jarring contrast could possibly be imagined. One moment Hooker was in Olde England, slick-suited and rockin’, with a record in the charts and hot-to-trot teenage girls screaming over him: the next he was sequestered in New England with the earnest folkies and the antiquarians. Not surprisingly, hardy perennials like Hooker and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee found themselves somewhat upstaged that year, because the 1964 festival wasn’t just any old Newport show. Instead, it was the year that the ancient gods came back to walk, albeit gingerly, amongst mortals. For years, Skip James and Son House were merely spectral voices on scratched old records treasured as holy relics by collectors. Now, they emerged from the mists of myth, legends magically made flesh.

  Though their paths had never crossed before Newport, Nehemiah ‘Skip’ James and Eddie ‘Son’ House were almost exact contemporaries. They had been born within a few months of each other in 1902, in small Mississippi hamlets within a few miles of each other. They made their classic early recordings a mere year apart (House in 1930, James in 1931) for the same company (Paramount), and in the same location (Grafton, Wisconsin). Both had subsequently abandoned professional music-making, though House had recorded a series of Library of Congress sessions for Alan Lomax in 1941 and ’42. Oddly enough, they were ‘rediscovered’ within a few days of each other by two cliques of the same informal network of scholars and aficionados – House working as a school janitor in upstate New York, and James recuperating from surgery in a veterans’ hospital in Mississippi – and were reintroduced to live performance at the same Newport festival: House on the main stage, and James at what Samuel Charters has described89 as a ‘blues workshop on a cold and damp Saturday afternoon.’90

  Beyond that, they were as different as any two Mississippian singer/guitarists could possibly be. Son House was virtually a founding father of Delta blues: he had learned from, and travelled with, Charley Patton himself, and had in his turn mentored and tutored both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Hammered out on a steel-bodied National guitar and sung in racked, grainy chest tones, House’s music was muscular and overwhelmingly physical, as solidly rooted in the soil and stone of his home state as a mountain or a tree. James, by contrast, was utterly sui generis and represented no significant school, movement or tradition: similar musical devices were indeed used by other bluesmen in and around his native Bentonia, but in terms of artistic achievement or critical acclaim, they hardly represented a peer group. Uniquely unsettling and evocative, he sang in a spooky, brooding falsetto and picked a minor-tuned guitar: his music was as ectoplasmic and eerie as wind through branches. Both men had influenced Robert Johnson – House through direct contact, James through his records – and their twinned legacies embody the mesmerising conflict at the heart of Johnson’s music. With two such men on board, it should have come as no surprise, that year, that Vanguard didn’t even bother to record Hooker – or, for that matter, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.

  Nevertheless, some of the participants in those two great ‘rediscoveries’ were to play a considerable part in Hooker’s future. The posse
which tracked down Skip James included a young Californian guitarist named Henry Vestine; in the same car was John Fahey, a guitarist/musicologist with proven credentials in that area since, in 1963, he’d helped find Booker T. Washington White, another ‘missing’ Delta great of the ’30s who just happened to be B.B. King’s uncle, and was better-known – to his lasting annoyance – as ‘Bukka’ White. Among Fahey’s circle was one Alan Wilson, a Boston-born prodigy working simultaneously on a university degree in music and on developing a formidable theoretical and practical mastery of country blues guitar and harmonica. Pudgy, moonfaced and myopic as he was, Al Wilson was certainly no glamour-boy, but he ended up coaching Son House for his return to public performance. Like most elder bluesmen who create – and recreate – their music afresh each and every time they pick up their instruments, House had paid little attention to the precise details of his each and every recorded performance; and since he had not played for decades, he was incredibly rusty. Like most young white blues devotees, Wilson was intimately familiar with each and every nuance of House’s classic recordings but, unlike most of his contemporaries, Wilson possessed the musical skills necessary to reproduce those nuances himself. In The History of the Blues,91 Francis Davis quotes Dick Waterman’s exploration of the resulting paradox:

  [Wilson] sat down with Son, knee to knee, guitar to guitar, and said, ‘Okay, this is the figure that, in 1930, you called “My Black Mama”’, and played it for him. And Son said, ‘Yeah, yeah, that’s me, I played that.’ And then Al said, ‘Now about a dozen years later, when Mr Lomax came around, you changed the name to “My Black Woman”, and you did it this way.’ And Son would say, ‘Yeah, yeah, I got my recollection now, I got my recollection now.’ And he would start to play, and the two of them played together. Then Al would remind him of how he changed tunings, and played his own ‘Pony Blues’ for him. There would not have been a rediscovery of Son House . . . without Al Wilson. Really. Al Wilson taught Son House how to play Son House.