Boogie Man

  In Willie Dixon’s absence, the package’s bassist-in-residence was ‘Lonesome’ Jimmy Lee Robinson, a journeyman all-rounder willing and able to move between guitar, bass or drums, depending on what was required on the night. However, such was the warmth of the spontaneous rapport between Hooker and Guy that the latter ended up playing bass for Hooker’s portion of the proceedings. The show was recorded in Hamburg on 8 October; of the two Hooker numbers, accompanied only by Guy and Below, which surfaced on the resulting album, ‘Della Mae’ was little more than a retread of ‘Maudie’ sailing under marginally different colours. The other, ‘King Of The World’, was rather more intriguing: an idealistic, deeply-felt state-of-the-universe meditation in the tradition of ‘Crazy Mixed-Up World’, ornamented by a loping descending Guy bass-line which only occasionally collides with Hooker’s idiosyncratic metre.

  ‘King Of The World’ had been Hookerized from a source incongruous even by Hooker’s own catholic standards: it derived from ‘If I Ruled The World’, the Big Number from the stage musical Pickwick. Based on Charles Dickens’s novel The Pickwick Papers and, like most modern Dickens adaptations churned out by the British heritage industry, downplaying the darkness and pain in Dickens’ work in favour of warm, twinkly faux-Victorian sentimentality, Pickwick had been commissioned in 1961 and staged in 1963 as a vehicle for the mountainous Welsh singer/comedian Harry Secombe, co-conspirator with Peter Sellers and Spike Milligan in BBC Radio’s groundbreaking Goon Show. Composed by Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel, ‘If I Ruled The World’ had subsequently been revived by Hooker’s ballad-singing hero Tony Bennett, and it was Bennett’s version which had installed itself in the British Top Ten during Hooker’s May ’65 tour. ‘Eef I-I-I-I-I ruled the wuuuuurld,’ Secombe had shrilled in his manic tenor, ‘eff-ree day wood bee tha fi-i-i-i-irst day off spreeeeeeng . . .’, but Hooker had a different agenda. If he was the king of the world, his initially hushed baritone informs us with gradually intensifying passion, ‘there wouldn’t be no fightin’ . . . wouldn’t be no war.’ Furthermore, he tells his beloved, he’d make her his queen and put her on his throne. On Planet Hook, ‘there wouldn’t be no race riots . . . I’d make everybody equal . . . in the world . . . there wouldn’t be no sickness, wouldn’t be no death.’

  Hooker, certainly, considers the song to be nothing less than a personal credo. ‘I wrote one called “If I Was The King Of The World”,’ he says proudly. ‘Did you ever hear that one? If I was the king of the world, and my woman was the . . . I be the king, she be the queen. Wouldn’t be no fightin’, be love and peace everywhere if I were the ruler of the world. That’s that song. Roy Rogers heard that and he said, “That’s so true.”’ He breaks into song: ‘“If I were the king of the world, wouldn’t be no fightin’, everybody would get along/I’d make my woman queen of the world, and I’d be the king/Wouldn’t be no fightin’, wouldn’t be no racial, if I was king of the world.” The king rule everything, and people listen to that, people who fightin’ for peace, fightin’ for they rights, fightin’ to make everybody equal. This land is no man’s land. We just passin’ through, and that song tell all of that.’ In the Bricusse and Ornadel ‘original’, Secombe (and Bennett) call for little more than a perpetual Christmas party, where a beaming Mine Host provides perpetual roast beef and mulled wine for suitably grateful poor children. By contrast, Hooker – ‘talkin’ ’bout a new-born king’ – promises nothing less than heaven on earth and an immediate end to all human suffering.

  On a somewhat less exalted level, Hooker’s main priority once back home in the USA was to kick-start his stalled recording career. A full year had elapsed since the ill-fated London session with the Groundhogs, Hooker’s only studio date since the demise of his relationship with Vee Jay. His next port of call was Impulse Records, the jazz subsidiary of ABC-Paramount Records, itself a division of one of America’s three principal television networks, who commissioned a day-long session in New York City on 23 November, 1965. A hipper, feistier label than one might have expected considering its heavy-duty corporate origins, ABC had started getting serious about African-American music in 1960, when the company just about broke the Ertegun brothers’ collective heart by seducing away Atlantic Records’ human crown jewel, Ray Charles. ABC subsequently followed up this coup by picking up the Impressions after Vee Jay fumbled Curtis Mayfield’s ball, and signing B.B. King away from Modern. The Impulse success story was founded partly on borrowing Brother Ray from the parent company to cut 1961’s epochal Genius + Soul = Jazz, and partly on the spoils of another corporate raid on the Erteguns, in which Impulse practically chased Atlantic out of the modern-jazz business. In 1962, Impulse acquired the services not only of John Coltrane (just as the tenor titan, whose previous important recordings as a leader had been made whilst still a member of the Miles Davis Quintet, was finally ready to break away from Miles and form his first working band) but also of the ‘controversial’ Ornette Coleman, the walking definition of avant-garde. The proud slogan ‘The New Wave of Jazz is on Impulse!’, an integral part of the orange-and-black Mondrian-inspired graphics which adorned the label’s sleeves, was therefore no idle boast.

  Impulse’s A&R chief, the late Bob Thiele, took personal charge of the Hooker project. His production strategy blended the aesthetics of the Vee Jay years and Riverside’s That’s My Story by recording eight sides rather than the usual ten (thereby allowing each performance to determine its own length, thus freeing Hooker from the need to compress the songs to the arbitrary length of a single), featuring Hooker on electric guitar rather than the folkish acoustic instrument, and teaming him up with veteran sidemen from the New York jazz world. Certainly, admirers of Lionel Hampton, Billie Holiday, Gil Evans and Coleman Hawkins would have been rather more familiar with the liner credits of bassist Milt Hinton and drummer David ‘Panama’ Francis than fans of Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed or Sonny Boy Williamson, but the match was nevertheless a good one. Guitarist Barry Galbraith was an electric folkie who’d recorded with Bob Dylan: he, Hinton and Francis may not have been ‘blues’ players in the most literal sense of the term, but they were keenly aware of the common heritage of jazz and blues, plus they had ears and knew how to use them. Furthermore, they were well accustomed to following musicians who were themselves following their noses. The pulsebeat supplied by Hinton and Francis was solid but sensitive: simultaneously firm enough for Hooker to sit on and sufficiently sparse and discreet to allow his improvisational instincts the freedom to wander wherever they might. Galbraith, for his part, provides subtle textures and colouration whilst adroitly staying out from under Hooker’s musical feet: since Hooker juxtaposed the conventional tuning he generally favours for ensemble pieces with the open-A ‘Spanish’ tuning of his early solo work, Galbraith, sensibly enough, sat out the open-tuned songs and performed only on the numbers in ‘straight’ tuning.

  The resulting album, It Serve You Right To Suffer, broke no significant new ground in terms of Hooker’s repertoire, revisiting as it did such staples as ‘Money’, ‘Bottle Up And Go’, ‘Decoration Day’, ‘Shake It Baby’ and the title song, a recasting of Hooker’s Percy Mayfield-derived ‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’. However, whatever the album may have lost in terms of fresh material it gained in increased emotional depth. The longer track-lengths gave Hooker the space to explore the sideroads of the songs rather than simply cruise along their main drags; thus the taut stomping groove customary for Hooker’s assorted variations on ‘Bottle Up And Go’ unwinds into an eerily incantatory modal shuffle, and Sonny Boy Williamson I’s ‘Decoration Day’ – which Hooker had first essayed back in 1950, during the Besman era – loses its formalised structure to become a free-form slow-blues meditation on the agonies of bereavement. The title song’s shift from first to second person represents a change in emphasis as opposed to attitude: rather than moving the song from ostensible self-accusation to vindictive Schadenfreude, Hooker is talking to, rather than about, himself. Of course, this change plays hell with
Mayfield’s rhyme-scheme, but Hooker was the last guy in the world to worry his head overmuch about that.

  It Serve You Right To Suffer was the first blues album to appear in the Impulse catalogue, and the last. Despite the record’s artistic and critical success, it was decided that Impulse was first and foremost a jazz label, and that nothing should be permitted to blur or dilute that identity. Eventually, It Serve You Right To Suffer turned out to be the prologue to a lengthy association between Hooker and the various ABC labels, but in the meantime he was once again ‘at liberty’. In the early summer of the following year, his path led him back to Chicago: this time to Chess Records.

  As an eight-year veteran of Vee Jay and an honorary member in excellent standing of the Chicago blues elite, Hooker had no illusions whatsoever concerning the Chess brothers’ operation, but he urgently needed to make another record. The terms ‘Chess Sound’ and ‘Chicago blues’ were almost synonymous, but during that uneasy lull between the decline of interest in electric downhome blues amongst the Delta diaspora and the subsequent arrival of a well-heeled white audience for the music, the label – anxious to diversify into more lucrative sub-genres – was contracting, rather than expanding, its blues roster. Nevertheless, Hooker was no untried newcomer, but a top name in his field whom the company had never before had the opportunity to record for itself, and was therefore a more than worthwhile investment.

  In a sense, Hooker had been there before. Some of his most powerful and memorable early ’50s sides, cut by Joe Von Battle for local start-ups like Gone and Chance, had ended up being issued on Chess. During his Vee Jay years he’d literally worked opposite Chess: at one time, Vee Jay had based itself at 1449 South Michigan Avenue, just a few blocks up from the famous Chess storefront studio/office building – as immortalized in the title of a Rolling Stones instrumental recorded there in 1964 – at 2120 South Michigan Avenue. ‘They was on the same street,’ snorts Hooker, ‘and they was just as crooked. They were stone cut-throats. I never did get no money out of them, neither.’

  If any individual associated with Chess qualified as the label’s in-house auteur, it would probably have to be Willie Dixon, whose contributions as house arranger and producer, songwriter-in-residence, studio bassist and talent scout were the pre-eminent influence which shaped Chess’s blues output during the 1950s. However, Dixon wasn’t around much any more by the time Hooker showed up for a marathon day-long session in May 1965. There were a variety of reasons for this. The company was cutting fewer and fewer blues sessions, and the need to move with the sonic times had dictated that Dixon’s instrument, the stand-up bass, was replaced on the sessions they did cut by electric bass, which he refused to play; plus Dixon’s tolerance of Len Chess’s smoke-and-mirrors approach to accounting, variable at best, was at one of its lower ebbs.100 The Hooker session was therefore handled by Ralph Bass, a white guy then in his mid-’50s who’d been picking up Dixon’s Chess slack since 1960. Bass had come to Chess via Los Angeles with formidable R&B and jazz credentials: he’d recorded the likes of T-Bone Walker, Lena Horne, Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Dizzy Gillespie, Johnny Otis, Billy Ward & The Dominoes, Hank Ballard & The Midnighters, and The Platters for labels including Black & White and Savoy. However, his greatest claim to influencing the cultural history of twentieth-century America derived from his ’50s sojourn with King Records of Cincinnati, where he persuaded the company’s irascible boss Syd Nathan into continuing to record James Brown despite a string of flops, thereby enabling the ex-con from Georgia to stay in the game long enough to commence the process of transforming himself into the Godfather of Soul.

  In his liner note, Bass took pains to make it clear that he understood exactly where this particular client was coming from. ‘The blues ain’t nothin’ but what you feel,’ he wrote,

  Don’t count no bars, don’t get ‘teck’, just listen to what the man says. I remember recording a blues singer who had the musicians upset because he couldn’t sing in metre.101 One of the musicians came to the recording date higher than a kite and played from pure instinct, making the fills in the wrong places. Technically, he was correct, but because the blues singer was out of metre, nothing gelled. I finally told him to make the fills only when I pressed his arm. It was important that he had to listen to what the man had to say.

  A blues singer has to stretch out. Each time he sings a particular blues, he may change lyrics, or stretch out differently. The important thing is – listen to what the man has to say . . . such a blues singer is John Lee Hooker . . . The modern impressionists, the disciples of the ‘freedom movement’ in jazz, like John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman, have discarded set structural norms and chord progressions – playing out of metre in telling their story. It’s not new. John Lee Hooker has been doing it all his life. He will go down in the annals of music as one of the ‘GIANTS’.

  Listen to what he has to say.

  Suiting the action to the word, Bass booked in some veteran backup guys of Hooker’s own generation: Lafayette Leake was the pianist Chess called whenever Otis Spann was out on the road with Muddy Waters or otherwise unavailable, whilst drummer Fred Below had put his propulsive sense of swing to work behind Little Walter’s dazzling harp on ‘Juke’ back in 1952 and had rarely been out of work since. (The Chess studio was never renowned for keeping the most precise of session logs so, to this day, nobody seems quite sure who played bass on this particular occasion, but the usual suspects for the label’s sessions of that era included Leroy Stewart, Jack Meyer and Phil Upchurch.)

  Typically, Hooker wasn’t prepared to walk alone into this particular lion’s den, so he recruited one of his staunchest buddies to watch his musical back, liaise with the locals and – equally typically – handle the driving. ‘We cut some stuff for Chess in 1966 together,’ Eddie Burns recalls proudly. ‘“Let’s Go Out Tonight”, that’s me playin’ lead on that. I cut with him quite a bit.’ In this case, ‘quite a bit’ meant a whopping eighteen sides: a highly impressive tally for a single day’s work, and enough material for two albums, though the second album’s-worth remained in the can, not to see the light of day for another quarter-century. The album which did come out was entitled, more than somewhat misleadingly, The Real Folk Blues. As the Bass liner note implies, this rowdy, rocking, rumbustious date had dropped beats and odd-numbered bars flying all over the place, with all the participants sounding like they were having way too good a time to give a damn. The music was heated to a higher temperature than on the rather more laid-back Vee Jay sides which its style and format superficially resembled, with Hooker, in notably more extrovert vocal form than was his custom, garnishing the more intense and uptempo performances with throat-ripping growls and screams, and Hooker and Burns striking guitar sparks off each other just the way you’d expect from guys who’d been playing together for years. Throughout, Burns found himself cast in the role of musical mediator, applying his fluent, piercing guitar to the task of bridging the inevitable gaps between Hooker’s cavalier approach to metre and a rhythm section audibly accustomed to more orthodox bluesmen.

  For a thrown-together, one-day jam-in-all-but-name, the Real Folk Blues session covered a remarkably wide swathe of musical and emotional terrain; from rocking, party-down boogies and shuffles to solo meditations; from the broadly comedic showcases for Hooker’s raconteurial skills to the rawest, most nakedly self-revelatory confessionals. ‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’, to which Burns alludes above, kicked the album off, though the first track actually cut on the day was the lazy, easy-rocking shuffle ‘Stella Mae’. ‘Let’s Go Out Tonight’ was the single Chess eventually pulled off the album, albeit in edited form: it Hookerized one of Howlin’ Wolf’s earliest recordings, ‘Riding In The Moonlight’, with which it shares little more than half a riff (the other half coming from Jimmy Reed’s ‘Big Boss Man’ via Tommy Tucker’s ‘Hi Heel Sneakers’), a theme of sexual cajoling, and the title-rhyming punch-line ‘While the moon is shining bright’. Storming along for over six minutes in all its f
ull-length glory, it’s simultaneously sexy and funny: he’s outside her house, she’s leaning out of her window, he wants to take her walking in the park, to hug her, kiss her and make love to her, but she’s up there, he’s down here and by fade-out time, as he and the musicians finally run out of steam, she’s still up there and he’s still down here.

  Wasting not and – presumably – wanting not, Hooker seized the opportunity to revisit previously recorded material from which the maximum advantage had possibly not already been squeezed. He had unveiled his own solo acoustic version of Otis Rush’s ‘I Can’t Quit You Baby’ as ‘I Can’t Quit You Now Blues’ during his 1963 Newport set; now he cut it again for Chess, this time with the electric ensemble, under its original title, and with Willie Dixon’s composer credit firmly reattached: no way would John Lee be permitted to Hookerize a Dixon song on the big bassman’s own home turf. ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, salvaged from the London session of a year and a half before, was performed solo, in a hushed intimate rendition which emphasised, to an almost unbearable extent, the poignancy of its insistence on the triumph of hope over experience, and faith over fear. ‘This Land Is Nobody’s Land’, premiered during the folk years at the 1962 Sugar Hill club recording as ‘This World (No Man’s Land)’, now gained the added dimension of a none-too-veiled commentary on the Vietnam War. Hooker was by no means the only bluesman to bring a politicised edge to his work – both Johnny Shines and J.B. Lenoir had refused to hide that particular ray of their creative light under anybody’s studio bushel, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee had stood shoulder-to-shoulder with Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie at any number of barricades – but the forthright political engagement he displayed was certainly unique amongst blues performers of his rank and peer group. ‘This Land Is Nobody’s Land’ was passed over for inclusion on The Real Folk Blues – one of several intriguing items jilted, as it happened, in favour of assorted routine shuffles and a pleasant but inconsequential remake of ‘I’m In The Mood’ – and scheduled for that stillborn ‘second’ Folk Blues album.