Other gems which didn’t make the final cut included ‘Mustang And GTO’ (a Hookerization of fellow Southland-to-Detroit transplant Wilson Pickett’s then-recent hit ‘Mustang Sally’, a Wolfishly swinging uptempo take on the hoary Delta staple ‘Catfish Blues’, a rocking update of the 1961 Vee Jay number ‘Want Ad Blues’, where Bass and the band drag Hooker back for a reprise of the song despite his audible attempts to end it, and an intriguing revision of his hardy perennial ‘House Rent Boogie’, a serio-comic, ghetto-realist monologue tour de force worthy of pre-crossover Richard Pryor, based on his earliest Detroit experiences and first recorded in 1950.102
In its earlier rocking form of ‘House Rent Boogie’, the overall effect is essentially comedic. Like the master raconteur he is, Hooker shifts his emphasis from line to line according to character and circumstance. As ‘himself’, he wheedles, blusters, cajoles, expostulates; as the landlady, he exudes suspicion and exasperation when the protagonist hits hard times, and cooing, cloying conciliation when she thinks he’s back in employment. Reincarnated as ‘House Rent Blues’, however, the mood is modifed as profoundly as the pace; the hustling boogie of the original versions displaced by a plangent minor-key slow blues, drenched in pathos and foreboding. This version reminds you that, however clownish and weaselly the protagonist may be, he is nevertheless living on the edge of an abyss.
Hooker’s storytelling powers were placed at centre-stage once again in the album’s most durable new number, ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’. This was a typically audacious Hookerization of an early ’50s jump hit, by Amos Milburn, of almost the same title (Milburn preferred to take his Scotch before his Bourbon). Though he’d had hits with ‘Chicken Shack Boogie’ and ‘Bewildered’,103 Milburn specialised in drinking songs, notably ‘Bad Bad Whiskey’, ‘Good Good Whiskey’, ‘Vicious Vicious Vodka’, ‘Juice Juice Juice’ and ‘Rum And Coca-Cola’.104 The alcohol he sang about probably probably contributed as much to his eventual career decline as the alcohol he consumed: his increasingly specialised target audience were probably too far out of it to locate the nearest record store even if they still had enough cash in their stash to consider buying a record.
‘I knowed him, too,’ claims Hooker. ‘He was a good man, stayed drunk a-a-a-a-a-l-l the time. Nice gentleman, though. Very, very, very nice gentleman.’ What Hooker did with the ‘nice gentleman’’s song was to transform it – literally – into a vehicle for himself; to customise it as ruthlessly as any hotrodder about to chop a run-down vintage car into a personalised, one-off street machine.105 He kept Milburn’s chorus (altering only the order of the drinks), retained the storyline – guy in bar at closing time trying to get enough booze down his neck to forget that his girlfriend’s gone AWOL, harassing a tired, bored bartender who simply wants to close up and go home into serving just one more round – edited the verse down to its essentials, filled in the gaps with narrative and dialogue, and set the whole thing to a rocking cross between southside shuffle and signature boogie.106 The end result is something which, in Hooker’s own words, is something ‘completely different’ from Milburn’s original blueprint. ‘I wouldn’t do it just like he did it,’ Hooker maintains, and he didn’t. A certain kind of perverse pleasure can be derived from the confusion into which Hooker persists in throwing the band: making vocal entries halfway through four-bar phrases and launching into a chorus, whether the musicians are ready or not, more or less whenever he feels like it. Steady Eddie Burns picks up the cue instantly, responding to Hooker’s ‘one bourbon’ call with a two-note guitar lick – rang dang – leaving the rhythm section to chug away whilst trying to regain their bearings. Five months later, Hooker would recut the song, in concert in New York City, for a live album on which he was backed by no less eminent an ensemble than the Muddy Waters Band; Muddy’s hard-bitten, blueswise crew didn’t fare any better than Bass’s Chess sidemen.
With benefit of hindsight, one Real Folk Blues track in particular assumes a highly specific significance which could hardly have been apparent at the time. ‘I Put My Trust In You’ is an ominous free-form slow blues – so free-form that the musicians aren’t always able to agree about exactly where they are in the chord sequence or, indeed, whether there’s a chord sequence at all – which bitterly recounts the final stages in the disintegration of a relationship. ‘I just couldn’t believe,’ Hooker sings, voice racked and tremulous, ‘that you hurt me the way you did.’ He goes on:
My friends tried to tell me you didn’t mean me no good
I didn’t believe a word they said
I couldn’t believe it
I couldn’t believe you would let me down
I done lost everything I had, babe
I can’t believe you would let me down
You go downtown to the judge
You tell the judge
‘Everything you got, give it to me’
He looked at me:
‘Hit the road, Jack, and don’t come back no more’ . . .
I’m leavin’ now, baby
Done lost my home
’N my brand-new car, baby
I know another man gonna move in
But I can’t believe you gonna treat me
The way you did
Now, baby, look-a-here, baby
How could you treat me the way you did?
I couldn’t believe you would let me down
Good as I been to you, baby
I’m goin’ now, baby
All I got
All I got is on my back . . .
And then he abandons all explicit verbal content, moaning and groaning over his and Burns’s eloquent guitar colloquy. Eerily, it seemed as if Hooker had prophetically opened some psychic time-tunnel three years into the future. He’d tried so hard to keep the home-fires burning, even though they could only be kept alive through punishingly paradoxical means: the constant roadwork which kept him away from home. Soon those same home-fires would rage out of control, devastating the home which they were intended to nurture and warm; but not before a real rather than metaphorical Detroit was engulfed by flames both real and metaphorical.
Well, the Motor City is burning
Ain’t a thing in the world that I can do
Because you know the Big D is burnin’
Ain’t a thing in the world Johnny can do
My home town is burning down to the ground
Worster than Vietnam
Well, it started on Twelve an’ Clairmount that mornin’
I just don’t know what it’s all about . . .
Fire-wagon tip came in
Snipers just wouldn’t let ’em put it out
Firebombs bustin’ all around me
And soldiers was everywhere
Well, firebombs fallin’ all around me
And soldiers standin’ everywhere
I could hear the people screamin’
Sirens fill the air. . .
Al Smith (it says here) for John Lee Hooker,
‘Motor City Is Burning’, 1967
He laughed at accidental sirens
That broke the evening gloom
The police warned of repercussions
They followed none too soon
A trickle of strangers were all that was left alive
Panic in Detroit
David Bowie, ‘Panic In Detroit’, 1972
On 23 July 1967, smack in the middle of what white West Coast hippies persisted in claiming was the ‘Summer Of Love’, Detroit finally boiled over. Despite the election in 1961 of the young, liberal Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, who had marched with Dr Martin Luther King Jr in 1963, and who appointed a crusading, anti-racist police chief named George Edwards, the city’s racism remained deeply, endemically institutionalized. Racism in housing, racism in the job market, and – most crucially as far as Detroit’s black community was concerned – racism in the day-to-day policing of their neighbourhoods.
The city’s administration’s policies, however well-intentioned, proved as unab
le to eradicate these persistent manifestations of prejudice and social inequality as had most of the Civil Rights legislation enacted on a national level by the Kennedy and Johnson governments. Detroit was a tough, militant take-no-shit town – Elijah Mohammad’s Nation Of Islam had been founded in the city and still maintained its national base there – and the build-up of black anger and resentment should therefore have surprised no-one (even though, the previous year, Berry Gordy was still worrying about the insistence of his former child star, no-longer-so-Little Stevie Wonder, on recording a pop-soul version of Bob Dylan’s anti-war, anti-racist ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ in case it should prove too ‘controversial’ for the delicate sensibilities of Motown fans). Under the circumstances, it wouldn’t have taken much to send the city up in flames, and as things turned out, it didn’t.
Illegal drinking clubs are, for some reason, known in Detroit as ‘blind pigs’. One such, held at the premises of an organisation called the United Civic League For Community Action, had permitted a party which started on the night of Saturday, 22 July, to rave on well into the following Sunday morning. In what could conceivably be described as something of an over-reaction to this admittedly shocking breach of laws designed only to maintain the city’s legendary peace and tranquility, the police smashed the doors down with sledgehammers, and hauled eighty-odd customers off to the hoosegow. Someone then chucked a bottle through the back window of a police car, and the Detroit Riot was off and running. Things didn’t calm down until the following Thursday, by which time snipers and police had shot it out in running gun battles, the National Guard had been called in, thousands had been rendered homeless after being burned out of their dwellings, and over forty people – including a National Guardsman wasted by so-called ‘friendly fire’ and a shopkeeper battered to death by rioters for attempting to protect his store – were dead.
John Lee Hooker is not, by nature, a street-fighting man, and therefore did not participate in the proceedings. However, he understood its causes full well. It is wholly unsurprising that he felt a great affinity for Dr King: they did, after all, have in common a Southern upbringing, a Baptist background, and a firm belief in peaceful reconciliation. ‘This man did a lot of great, great, great things, but now he’s gone: Martin Luther King. Boy, he changed the world. Too bad he ain’t here now. People like that got so much power to do so much, sometimes they ain’t expectin’ to stay alive. They ain’t lookin’ to get through this. They say, “I’m gonna die tryin’. I’m gonna fight this battle. I’m not gonna back up. I’m not gonna let ’em scare me. I’m gonna keep goin’ with this.” But before he left, he changed things.’ Nevertheless, he was also an admirer of Malcolm X. ‘I know that speech he did. You knew they wasn’t going to let him live. He was so powerful! That man was the powerfullest man you ever seen. He carried a lot of power. People like that, they don’t let ’em live. I guess you noticed that. John F. Kennedy, he was for the right, and they didn’t let him live. And his brother Bobby? He was going to be for the right, and he didn’t even get to first base. People like [then-President George] Bush, they just do what they want to do.’
As it happened, Hooker enjoyed – if that is indeed the appropriate term – a ringside view of the proceedings from his home on Jameson Street.
‘I know what they were fightin’ for,’ he says. ‘Maybe they didn’t have to do that, but they hoped to bring out the anger, straighten out a lot of the segregation. I feel bitter about that. A big city like Detroit . . . you know, racial like that. It wasn’t like Mississippi, but . . . you know, they hide it under the cover there. In Mississippi they didn’t hide it, they just come out with it, and that’s the only difference. We all could go together in Detroit, everybody the same: white, black, Chinese, everybody go to the same places. It was racial, but they kinda tried to smother it, you know what I mean? It finally got so hot, people got so fed up, that the riot broke out, with all the burnin’ and the shootin’, the killin’. I could just look at the fire from my porch or my window, outside in my yard . . . I could see places goin’ up in flame, hear guns shootin’, robbin’ stores, runnin’ the business people out of they stores. There was a lotta lootin’ goin’ on, y’know . . . the po-lice was even lootin’. They was gettin’ them some stuff. There was an old jewellery store . . . oh, it was big. He run out in the street . . . I felt bad about that, me’n a lotta other people. We felt it was nonsense, that it shouldn’t’a hap pen. We didn’t know who started it, but once it started it just kept up. Boy, it burned down. They like to have burned the whole city down. Throwin’ bombs, lootin’ . . . a kid brought me a brand new git-tar, a Gibson twelve-string. Cost about $1,500, boy . . . I got it for five dollars. The kid didn’t know what he had!’ Hooker laughs in memory of the kid’s naïvety. ‘“You wanna buy this?” “Oh yeah!” “You got five dollars?” I say, “Yeah!”
‘You could see the fire burnin’. You could see the bombs, the smoke goin’ up, buildin’s goin’ up. You see the people runnin’ out the stores, the business people leavin’ everythin’ in there. They was throwin’ firebombs in the stores. Run ’em outta there. And they run outta there. A Chinese guy, couldn’t speak English . . .’ laughing, he breaks into mock-Chinese babble ‘“Black-man-burn-down! Help! Black-man-burn-down-store!” He laughs again, not altogether humorously. ‘It was layin’ in the streets, man. Clothes, brand-new shoes, just layin’ there. Couldn’t tell no-one not to pick it up, and some people did pick it up. Went to jail for stealin’ stuff. Two policemen . . . four or five of ’em, they found a whole lotta stuff that they done took. They suspended them, and put them in jail. Everybody was lootin’. The white, the black . . .’
‘You know, Detroit never was like down South: you couldn’t go here, you couldn’t go there. You go anywhere you want to go: some places you could feel it that they didn’t want you there, but they couldn’t make you leave. Down South, stores you couldn’t go in there, or you’d have to come in the back door, stuff like that. You couldn’t drink out the same faucet. It wasn’t like that there, up North. See, down South they let you know how they felt. Here, they shake your hand, stab you in the back. You go any place you wanted to go, and we was all in there together, but it still was there. They’d throw a brick, hide it in they hand. You could feel it in the air. I can’t forget how all that started. It was pretty bad. And after that, the whole country went. Watts got burned down. A lotta other places got burned down. Like a cancer. You hear everybody say, “Burn, baby, burn.” That’s what they said. “We gon’ burn, baby, burn.” They burned down a lotta stuff. Big apartment buildings . . . they run ’em outta there. People be in they shop, and they come outta there in droves, throwin’ firebombs, burnin’ up the clothes, you know, comin’ in there takin’ the stuff . . . I was livin’ on Jameson, over Charlevoix Avenue. They was burnin’ three or four blocks over, but they never come down to where I was.
‘And after that I wrote that song called “Motor City Is Burnin’”.’
That, however, is not what the song’s stated composer credit claims. Both Hooker’s original 1967 recording of ‘Motor City Is Burning’ – cut barely two months after the events it describes – and its 1968 cover by rabble-rousing Detroit anarchopunk pioneers MC5107 are officially attributed to former Vee Jay executive Al Smith; and thereby hangs a tale, if not several. Smith had landed on his feet following Vee Jay’s demise, working with Bob Thiele at ABC on the launch of BluesWay Records, a blues-dedicated sister subsidiary for Impulse. The inauguration of BluesWay was the first acknowledgement by any of the major corporate labels of the existence of a new American phenomenon: a significant white audience for electric blues. This audience was the baby of a new coalition: kids whose interest in the music had been stimulated by the early British bluesrockers – even though most of those bands, plus the bulk of their domestic clientele, had themselves subsequently moved on to proto-psychedelia, nascent heavy rock, or first-generation Britpop of varying degrees of artiness – and former folkies who had found that the music
enabled them to reconcile the conflict between ‘real’ (i.e. acoustic rural) blues and danceable, hi-decibel electric sounds. The principal standard-bearers of new-generation, rock-friendly, white-boy blues had been Chicago’s Paul Butterfield Blues Band featuring – or, as far as much of their audience was concerned, starring – Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar; and the Blues Project from New York City, whose original ranks included organist Al Kooper and guitarist Steve Katz.
These matters had come to a head at the turbulent Newport Folk Festival of 1965. That particular Newport is best-known in rock lore for the stormy encounter between the traditionalist audience and management, and the new-look Bob Dylan, backed for the occasion by an ensemble including Al Kooper and several members of the Butterfield band; Kooper and Mike Bloomfield had played behind Dylan on the historic sessions for ‘Like A Rolling Stone’ and what became the Highway 61 Revisited album. Less notorious but in its way equally significant, was the extraordinary prelude to the Butterfield band’s own performance, earlier that same day, at an afternoon blues workshop away from the main stage. The MC for the workshop was Alan Lomax, visibly and audibly miffed to have the purity of his show polluted by young white guys with amplified guitars. Accordingly, he made no attempt to conceal his feelings when it came time for him to introduce the band. In an interview with Tom Yates,108 Mike Bloomfield described, not without a degree of relish, the resulting melee:
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