Boogie Man

  However, the most significant addition to Hooker’s repertoire to emerge from these sessions was ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, a radical Hookerisation of a Tin Pan Alley ballad already more than three decades old. Composed in 1933 by Johnny Green and Edward Heyman as, according to Donald Clarke,95 ‘a promotional song for a film of a novel of the same name’,96 the song was initially popularized by society orchestras like those led by Joe Haynes and Eddie Duchin. Louis Armstrong recorded it almost immediately, and it was soon taken to the hearts of Broadway and supper-club crooners, later entering the repertoires of Frank Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme and Jo Stafford, to name but a few. Like Green and Heyman’s other enduring classic ‘Body And Soul’, it subsequently became a standard vehicle for jazz improvisation. ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ was a perennial favourite of Billie Holiday’s – Lady Day recorded versions of the song in 1941, 1944, 1945, 1948, 1949, 1951 and 1954 – and its plangent melody also endeared it to Charlie Parker, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Django Rheinhardt, Art Tatum and the Prez himself, Lester Young. As sung by Holiday, or by Sarah Vaughan, ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ is an archetypal torch song in the grand manner, languorously, sexily melancholic. As played by Parker, it is a ballad both pensive and playful, with the great man simultaneously respectful of the moodiness of Johnny Green’s melody, and getting off on the sheer heady delight of the agile, graceful arabesques he spins around it.

  By contrast, Hooker dumps not only Green’s music but virtually all of Edward Heyman’s lyric, retaining only the title and the storyline – that of an abandoned lover waiting patiently by the dockside for the Adored One’s vessel to appear on the horizon – incorporating elements of his own Detroit-era ‘Down At The Landing’. Ships arrive, passengers disembark, everyone else’s loved one but Hooker’s shows up for joyful reunions, he hangs in there, alone and palely loitering. A young girl approaches him, attempts to entice him away, but he opts to remain, steadfastly waiting for his baby. However, Hooker’s version has, unlike Heyman’s, a happy ending. Long after everybody else has left, he spots a distant ship emerging from the fog, and she’s on board: his faith and dedication are rewarded after all. Uncharacteristically, he casts the song in the key of C rather than his preferred E, using ‘normal’ first-position chords of C, F and G7, as a sort-of-slow-blues. The Groundhogs patter along behind him, with Parker sounding exposed and uncomfortable playing organ rather than piano; Hooker’s tone is hushed and undemonstrative, apart from the vibrato and growl with which he emphasizes the first person singular.

  Artistically, the sessions were a moderate success; as a career move, the project turned out to be a complete bust-out. Calvin Carter did indeed record a Groundhogs single, comprising ‘Shake It’ (a revibe of ‘Shake It On Down’ most frequently associated with ‘Bukka’ White, but which had also been a staple of Tony Hollins’s repertoire) and ‘Rockin”, but neither its US release on Vee Jay nor the European issue on Interphon generated any noticeable impact, and the leaders of the British Invasion remained unchallenged. Hooker’s album fared little better, not even receiving the courtesy of a UK release until 1971, when it snuck out on a budget label. In the States, Verve-Folkways rapidly deleted . . . And Seven Nights, and the tapes have been ignominiously bounced around from label to label ever since: sometimes under the near-fraudulent billing of John Lee Hooker With John Mayall And The Groundhogs, sometimes – as on the 1969 Wand album On The Waterfront – with several tracks retitled and an actually-not-bad horn section overdubbed at some later date by a person or persons unknown. In the summer of ’65, former Kinks and Who producer Shel Talmy acquired two tracks, ‘Mai Lee’ – Hooker is actually singing ‘Mary Lee’ and, to Brit ears at least, pronouncing it ‘Ma’y Lee’ – and ‘Don’t Be Messing With My Bread’, for British single release on his short-lived Planet label. However, Planet’s star act, The Creation,97 failed to make a major chart breakthrough, the label went pear-shaped, Talmy released no further Hooker/’Hogs material, and the whole adventure didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this particular crazy mixed-up world.

  ‘The British,’ Joe Gore once wrote in Guitar Player magazine, ‘discard their heroes as of ten as they brush their teeth – practically every week.’ That observation was as true, if not even truer, back in 1965 as it was when Gore wrote it some thirty years later. Many of the bands who’d initially launched themselves on their strength of their affinity for the blues were moving on to pastures new; some drew fresh inspiration from contemporary soul music rather than older blues, and others, in the spirit of furious modernism which became the engine which powered the next wave of British rock, explored the frontier territories of experimental pop opened up by the Beatles. Dispirited, the Groundhogs would attempt to reincarnate themselves as a soul band, and then temporarily dissolve. The Rolling Stones were covering Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding rather than Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley whilst Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were cutting their songwriting teeth; Eric Burdon and the Animals borrowed from Nina Simone and Ray Charles as opposed to Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker; the Kinks, never that comfortable as a blues band in the first place, ploughed their own unique fur row as Ray Davies settled into his compositional stride. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, the Who – partway through the sessions for their first album – scrapped much of the blues repertoire they’d already recorded and replaced it with more Pete Townshend originals and a James Brown cover. One of the numbers the Who dumped was Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightnin”, a rave-up version of which had been a highlight of their early stage act. However, the song had by that time already appeared on albums by the Yardbirds, Manfred Mann and the Graham Bond Organisation (featuring Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in the rhythm section), and was well on its way to becoming a cliché. And for a new group to seem to be selling clichés was instant death. And in the excitement of the British Invasion and the pop-art avant-garde, the bluesmen themselves were beginning to seem like clichés. Even the likes of Pete Townshend became increasingly blasé about their former heroes. ‘The irony was,’ he once told the present author,98 ‘that they all seemed so pathetic, John Lee Hooker in his checkered jacket, doing his cabaret . . . somehow, they weren’t able to attend to the quantum jump that we’d made.’

  The caravan of screamagers and cutting-edge artists thus moved on, but a solid hardcore of blues fans nevertheless remained loyal to the true faith. In a fierce reaction to changing trends, Eric Clapton, the high card in the Yardbirds’ musical hand, quit the group as a protest against their switch from R&B to Progressive Pop. They replaced him with Telecaster terrorist Jeff Beck, a guitarist much better suited to their new approach, but Clapton’s decision to join John Mayall in the summer of ’65 effectively sited Mayall’s BluesBreakers at the centre of what remained of the blues scene. As far as Hooker was concerned, his enviable Britpop status had evaporated as suddenly as it had originally appeared. Mere months earlier, he’d been riding a small but respectable hit, appearing on the hippest pop TV shows, and receiving respectful notices from the music press. Now he had a brand-new made-in-England album in the can, and couldn’t even get it released in the UK. There would always be work for Hooker in Britain and the rest of Europe – just as there would always be work for him back home in folk clubs, colleges and festivals – but there would be little further glory and even less money.

  ‘I went back and come back,’ recalls Hooker. ‘I was [in the UK] about a year and a half.’ Well, yes and no. During the ‘year and a half’ to which Hooker alludes – the period between the summer of 1964 and the late autumn of 1965 – he was not resident in the UK, but made four transatlantic trips, each lasting approximately a month. For his summer ’65 tour, there were a few changes made. For one thing, the immediately pre-Clapton edition of John Mayall’s BluesBreakers stepped in as back-up combo in place of the temporarily disbanded Groundhogs. And since Don Arden was now out of the picture, this next tour was booked by another agency, that of the brothers Rik and John Gunne
l, who managed Mayall’s band and the more soulful and cosmopolitan Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames. (Their roster also included clubland favourite Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, and Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band, led by an expat American ex-GI whose brassy, all-action soul revue, jampacked with Stax, Motown and Atlantic cover versions, made him a figurehead for those unreconstructed mods who hadn’t switched their loyalties to nouveau pop.) The Gunnels’ mini-empire also included the Flamingo and a string of lesser venues like the Bag O’Nails in the West End of London, and a chain of Ricky-Tick Clubs throughout the south-east.

  ‘Of course they were of the same type as Don Arden,’ Roy Fisher opines, but Hooker remembers them rather more fondly than that. ‘They was pretty good by me,’ he says. ‘They knowed what I had been through with Don Arden, and they were straight with me. They said, “We know what Don Arden did to you. We not gonna do this to you, we gonna be straight up front with you.” And they were.’

  The tour itself was certainly no bed of roses. Arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport on Monday, 10 May, according to a report by Tony Lennane in Blues Unlimited’s July/August issue, Hooker was whisked straight off to Newport. Not his familiar stamping ground of Newport, Rhode Island, but Newport in south Wales: as the car flies, 159 miles due west of Heathrow, in the county of Monmouthshire. With a mere four hours’ sleep under his belt, he then found himself onstage at Newport’s Majestic Cinema, sans rehearsal, banging out the likes of ‘Boom Boom’, ‘Dimples’, ‘Maudie’, ‘Shake It Baby’ and ‘I’m Leaving’ to the extemporised accompaniment of Cops ’N’ Robbers, a local combo described by Lennane as ‘Newport’s own brand of codswallop’.

  ‘Despite the local “hood” section jackassing their way through the evening on each others’ shoulders,’ Lennane wrote, ‘charging through the crow, gyrating in front of [Hooker], using as much abusive language as their tiny minds allowed and generally disrupting – this was a night I shan’t forget.’ Lennane and Hooker hung out after the show, chatting in the bar. ‘As we talked some of his records spun and he was anxious all present listened to his Big Soul LP, letting us know that the Vandellas backed him. He was full of stories of his later recordings, ignoring the classics on Modern, Sensation and even earlier Vee Jay; ah well.’ Presumably Hooker didn’t repeat to Lennane what he’d said about the Big Soul sessions, a few months earlier, to another Blues Unlimited contributor, Simon Napier: ‘I don’t particularly like ’em, but . . . say! the bread’s good.’ BU’s previous issue had, incidentally, carried a scathing report of a gig which had actually taken place a few days later at the Ricky-Tick club in Guildford, Surrey. The splenetic John J. Broven excelled himself:

  John Lee Hooker has embarked upon his third tour (and fourth visit) of England. The very thought of having Hooker here would have aroused frantic, delirious orgasms of rapture as little as two years ago. Now he is taken for granted, to the extent of complete apathy and utter disinterestedness. To all blues observers this must cause alarm, for Hooker is unquestionably a major figure in the postwar blues. On the surface there is an abundance of ammunition for those defeatists who claim that the blues is losing its glamour – I use ‘glamour’ freely, for although the blues is scarcely ‘glamorised’ there can be no disputing that it has been highly, too highly, romanticised but a visit to one of Hooker’s performances will reveal the real reason for this apparent negligence. Gone is Hooker, the bluesman of immense stature, whose qualities are known to all; in his place is a pathetically small character, singing a flood of uptempo numbers whose sole mark of distinction is in the lyrics – which were inaudible anyway; totally devoid of expression or – important – enthusiasm, contenting himself merely to strum a few chords on his guitar in rhythm accompaniment.

  On his first tour we were prepared to (and did) make excuses, primarily at the expense of his backing groups; on his second tour one was still surprised that he didn’t make more concessions to the blues fan – his show following on the lines of the first, was still aimed at satisfying the fastidious and uninterested teenage audiences. And on this his third tour? I, for one, have now exhausted all patience. Excuses can still be made – the group, the audience, the promoters – but why should they be? Hooker has had his chance, three times, and each time he has churned out the same rubbish. The onus must now fall on his shoulders. He has not only let himself down – he has failed the Blues.99

  Fairly extravagant language with which to denounce a hard-working man thousands of miles from home attempting to put on a decent show with a borrowed band. Back in London, Hooker had organised himself at least a simulacrum of the comforts of home. ‘I was living with a girl called Shirley,’ he says. ‘She had a nice apartment on Oxford Street. Big main street, lotta all kinda clothes shops on that street. I was living over a clothing store.’ Roy Fisher corroborates: ‘I remember Shirley. She was just someone whom he tagged onto or tagged onto him. He was quite enamoured with Shirley at the time, but then there were many like that.’ A liaison of a different nature – and of considerably greater long-term significance – commenced on one of his late-night ventures into London’s club scene, when he encountered one of his most devoted admirers: Van Morrison, the stocky, belligerent lead vocalist of an Irish band named Them, recently arrived in the Top 10 with an artfully arranged rock rave-up of the staple ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ primarily derived from Hooker’s own version. ‘I know Van [Morrison] about twenty-seven years,’ he remembered in 1992. ‘I can’t recall when I met Van, but it was in London, I think so. At some club called the Cue Club [a primarily West Indian-patronised club in Paddington], and then another place called the Bag O’Nails.’

  John Broven’s purist temper tantrum notwithstanding, Hooker’s increasing British familiarity had bred, if not contempt, then at least a degree of indifference. For his second European tour of 1965, he retreated back into the safety-in-numbers of that year’s edition of Lippmann & Rau’s American Folk Blues Festival revue. By this time, the package’s traditions were established solidly enough not to require the personal attendance of its original mastermind, Willie Dixon; and the rhythm section was anchored by a Chess studio stalwart, master drummer Freddie Below. The line-up featured such notables as Mississippi Fred McDowell, Big Mama Thornton, Eddie Boyd, Roosevelt Sykes, J.B. Lenoir, harpmeister Big Walter Horton, and, making his first-ever excursion outside the USA, a wide-eyed young guitarist named Buddy Guy.

  ‘My first trip in Europe in 1965, American Folk Blues Festival,’ Buddy remembers. ‘First time I met him, and Big Mama Thornton. I had come over to play the festival with them, and it was at least seven o’clock in the morning. He was drinkin’ at that time, Big Mama was drinkin’, they had a guy on the show named Doctor Ross, Roosevelt Sykes, Eddie Boyd . . . everybody was drinkin’. Straight whiskey, and hot. I drinks a few drinks, but at that time I didn’t. I couldn’t keep up with them because I thought you drink sociably, but when I met Little Walter, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy and them, I didn’t know you drink like fish. But anyway, I was upstairs that morning, and all the commotion was downstairs. They had the whole restaurant in this particular hotel in Baden-Baden, Germany. When I walked down, didn’t nobody know me, and I didn’t know anybody. They was round a table and I heard this guy stutter, ‘B-b-b-b-b-b-b-b’, and I thought, “Well, I know that’s not John Lee.” So I picked up an acoustic guitar and sat over in a corner and went to playin’ “Boogie Chillen” and somebody came over and grabbed me then. “T-t-t-t-t-t-t-uhh . . . who are you?” I said, “Ohh, I don’t bother wit’ you.” It was like ten minutes axin’ me, “Who are you?” before he told me who he was, and he didn’t say, “John Lee” then. He said, “T-t-t-t-t-I’m Johnny”, and I thought it was somebody else on the show named Johnny – I’ve got to meet everybody sooner or later, somebody come introduce me to everybody.

  ‘And finally he kept messin’ with me so much, in a jokin’ manner, and he said, “T-t-t-t-t-t-who taught you how to play like J-J-Johnny?” And I’m thinkin’, does John Lee stutter like
this? Finally I said something like that, and he just fell out, went to laugh. “T-t-t-t-t-you don’t know me?” I said, “No, I don’t know you.” “Th-th-th-th-that’s my shit you playin’.” I say, “You John Lee?” And ever since then we been the best of friends. He kept me laughin’ from that day until this one. When I see him now, if I got a concert to do, I try to tell ’em to keep him away from my dressing room, because he keep me laughin’. He got so many stories he can tell about him, Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, the times he didn’t get paid, and the time they got throwed out of the hotel for tryin’ to cook with the electric skillet under the bed . . . ohh, man! They got so many stories.’