Lomax implied in his introduction that this was how low Newport had sunk, bringing an act like this onto the stage, and our manager, Albert Grossman, said, ‘How can you give these guys this kind of introduction? This is really out of line. You’re a real prick to do this.’ They got into a fistfight – these two elderly guys – right there in front of the stage, rolling in the dirt while we were playing, and I was screaming, ‘Kick his ass, Albert! Stomp ’im!’ There was bad blood rising, you could tell.
In the event, ‘bad blood’ notwithstanding, the electric guys won the argument. Or rather, both camps eventually realized what John Lee Hooker could have told them if anybody had bothered to ask him: that it was all blues and it was all legit.
BluesWay, however, left the white boys – however funky, street-legal and blues-approved they may have been – to the rock labels. The new imprint preferred to invest its budget in signing up the Real Guys and marketing them to the new audience. Their flagship act was already in place in the extremely substantial form of B.B. King, who’d been on ABC’s books since 1961; the Big B was therefore moved over to BluesWay and given the honour of providing the new label with its inaugural release. BluesWay BLS 6001 was Blues Is King, a superb live album easily comparable with, though less celebrated than, B.B.’s earlier classic Live At The Regal,109 but BluesWay BLS 6002 came from Thiele and Smith’s first fresh signing: John Lee Hooker. The decision to bring Hooker to BluesWay was highly logical, Captain Smith knew Hooker from the Vee Jay days, Thiele had worked with him successfully on It Serve You Right To Suffer for Impulse, and since the arrangement with Chess for The Real Folk Blues had been a one-shot deal, Hooker was then ‘at liberty’ (as opposed to ‘at Liberty’, which would happen later), and eager to sign a new contract with a solid, credible record company. Uncharacteristically, he’d stay (almost) faithful to the ABC group for several years. Equally uncharacteristically – given his legendary reluctance to say anything nice about any record company, ever – he appears to have been relatively happy with them, acknowledging that they displayed a greater degree of financial probity than his previous labels.
‘They was straighter than a company like Chess or Vee Jay, which was outright rip-offs,’ he allows, albeit a little grudgingly. ‘They was a lot more legitimate. I made some money with them. I wouldn’t say that I got all that was comin’ to me, but I got treated better. Chess and Vee Jay was just stone cut-throats, and they acted like they didn’t even care if you knowed it.’
The first fruits of the BluesWay liaison had sprouted in the form of Live At Cafe Au Go-Go, cut in concert on 30 August, 1966, at one of Greenwich Village’s premier venues: a Delta dream-team collaboration with Hooker’s old friend Muddy Waters and his band, including Chicago’s master pianist Otis Spann, Muddy himself, and no fewer than two other guitarists. In his liner note, Stanley Dance beautifully evokes the scene:
Backstage, John Lee had sat quietly, strumming on ‘his wife’, as he calls his six-string guitar. The younger men had joined him one by one, first [guitarist] Sammy Lawhorn, then [bassist] Mac Arnold, and then [guitarist Luther] ‘Georgia Boy’ Johnson. ‘Get it right, get it right!’ he muttered – a teacher with pupils – as they played along. After the Muddy Waters band had completed the first part of the set, Muddy introduced him with warm generosity, referring to him as ‘a killer’ and ‘the champ’. John Lee’s long, thin foot began to tap out the time, his guitar chords established his characteristic drop beat, and the band swung in behind him . . .
John Lee leaned at the mike, solemn, severe and a little stooped. Muddy Waters, Sammy Lawhorn, Luther Johnson and Mac Arnold stood in a row behind him, deadpan, bending with the beat. Otis Spann sat facing him at the piano, his back to the audience. Francis Clay was intent on the rhythmic foundation, and George Smith, who had previously worked with Muddy in 1955, had his mouth-harp ready to add keening cries and wailing embellishments as the opportunity offered. They were as informally dressed as their audience, and although they were ‘playing for the people’, it was without showmanship, almost as though they were playing for themselves . . .
Beyond pointing out that George Smith’s ‘keening cries and wailing embellishments’ are nowhere to be heard on the record as issued, the most salient point to be made about Live At Cafe Au Go-Go is that it provides a fascinating glimpse of what might have been if Hooker had invested as much effort into forming and maintaining a first-class full-time band as Waters so evidently had. True, the performance is far from utterly unflawed – the opening seconds of the curtain-raising ‘I’m Bad Like Jesse James’ find drummer Francis Clay anticipating a different song entirely and therefore crashing in with a very different beat; there are sour little pitching discrepancies between the tunings of the four guitarists’ instruments (with Hooker himself, unfortunately, the prime culprit); and the rumbustious version of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch And One Beer’ is, if anything, even more chaotic than the Chess studio cut recorded the previous spring – but the overall tone of the music is dark, slow, swampy-deep, and the degree of emotional rapport between Hooker and the band (particularly the astonishing Spann) nothing less than extraordinary.
The evening’s programme broke little new ground. ‘Jesse James’ (aka ‘I’m Mad’, ‘I’m Mad Again’ or ‘Gonna Use My Rod’) was a hardy Hooker perennial, premiered in 1954, to which he returned again and again throughout his career. The powerful statement of artistic intent ‘Heartaches And Misery’ reworks 1954’s ‘Everybody’s Blues’; ‘She’s Long, She’s Tall (She Weeps Just Like A Willow Tree)’ dates from the Besman era; whilst the Tony Hollins-derived ‘When My First Wife Left Me’ goes back further still, to Hooker’s earliest demo sessions in Elmer Barbee’s back room. Others were of rather more recent vintage: ‘I Don’t Want No Trouble’ is simply a retitling of ‘Peace Loving Man’ from The Real Folk Blues; and ‘Seven Days’ had enjoyed its first outing during the November ’64 London session with the Groundhogs. The occasion did, however, introduce one important new song, ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’, which would remain in Hooker’s repertoire for the remainder of his career. Its theme – ‘man’s inevitable fate’, as Dance aptly chooses to phrase it – and title are distantly derived from ‘I’ll Never Get Out Of This World Alive’, a doomy, prophetic song by country titan Hank Williams, who died barely two months after its release in November 1952: Hooker’s substitution of ‘these blues’ for ‘this world’ speaks volumes about the similarity, and the differences, between the two men’s respective outlooks. The Williams record is fiddle-driven, faux-jaunty, mock-rueful, tightly-rhymed catch-in-the-throat country with a neat, snappy pedal-steel solo; Hooker’s is a deep, meditative free-form blues set to a reflective, slowed-down variation of B.B. King’s ‘Rock Me Baby’ riff, with the band telepathically responding to Hooker’s cues by shifting back and forth between conventional blues changes and one-chord mode.
On its uppermost surface level, ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’ is about a man whose woman has left him – what a surprise, a bluesman singing a song about a woman who done left – and as a result he can’t sleep, he chainsmokes, he slugs down black coffee, and he can’t envisage the day when he will no longer be unhappy. One layer further down, it’s one of the purest examples in Hooker’s catalogue of the archetypal blues response to sorrow and despair: the process of dealing with your situation by first acknowledging it. It represents the exact opposite of the state known in contemporary therapy-speak as ‘denial’. The bluesman but rarely ‘denies’, and even on those occasions when he does, the listener is not intended to be fooled: the ‘denial’ is a bluff which exists solely so that it can be called.
What could emphatically not be denied was the overwhelming need for a massive readjustment of the blues economy: a shift from producing and marketing singles for a black ghetto market to albums designed to appeal to white youth. The denizens of Planet Blues were accordingly divided into those judged to be potentially hippie-friendly, and those who weren’t. Blues guys de
emed appropriate for the new market received new boots and contracts, whilst those who weren’t were left to wither on the vine and fend for themselves in a rapidly contracting commercial environment. Thus the second half of the ’60s saw Vanguard Records add Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, James Cotton and Charlie Musselwhite to the country blues already in their primarily folk-based catalogue; Atlantic recording Otis Rush and Freddie King for their Cotillion subsidiary; Chess retaining the services of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf but – at the behest of Leonard Chess’s son Marshall, entrusted with the mission of retooling the label’s Old Masters for the Next Generation – decking them out in highly unsuitable psychedelic drag. By contrast, Columbia preferred to invest in new-jack blues talent like Johnny Winter and Taj Mahal. For their part, BluesWay expanded their roster by signing up Jimmy Reed – already severely past his sell-by date – and T-Bone Walker. The latter’s 1968 BluesWay excursion, Funky Town, was a sad affair: the brave new world of post-Stax grooves and heav-ee guitar sounds suited T-Bone about as well as a pair of paisley satin bell-bottoms. Writer Ed Ward recalls seeing a late-’60s T-Bone gig where members of his young, aggressively Afro’ed and dashiki’ed band – who’d probably have rather been playing behind James Brown – were mocking the founding father of electric blues guitar behind his back every time he took a solo.
Other veterans developed different strategies for coping with changing times. The more sophisticated Junior Parker, Little Milton and Bobby Bland had already reached an accommodation with the soul era by de-emphasizing the more overtly downhome aspects of their music (Parker had, seemingly, left his harps back in Memphis), and retained the allegiance of the black community by ostentatiously eschewing anything which could possibly be interpreted as pandering to funny-looking white kids. The decidedly downhome Albert King had lucked out by signing in 1966 to Stax Records, the pride of Memphis. The company’s stellar studio crew – Booker T & The MGs, Isaac Hayes and the Memphis Horns, backed Albert’s big fat croon and mean, slicing guitar with funky dance grooves easily as hot as those on their massively successful Otis Redding and Sam & Dave hits, which appealed to black and white listeners alike. And B.B. King cruised imperturbably onwards, pulling off the improbable stunt of being all things to all men whilst remaining no-one but his own sweet self. He provided BluesWay with its only hit singles, climaxing in 1970 with the Top Twenty pop triumph of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’.
Many of the same forces which led young whites to accept and cherish the blues had long since driven their black contemporaries away: classic ’50s-style citified Delta blues was about to succumb to the same fate which had once overtaken its direct musical ancestor, the country blues. Part of this can simply be attributed to the cyclical nature of the pop process and its inevitable generational shifts in taste, style and fashion: black youth didn’t listen to the same music as their parents (or grandparents) any more than did the white youth for whom blues was an exciting novelty. But there was much more to it than that: the blues is, essentially, a stoic music which celebrates endurance. For blacks in the ’60s, in the era of Black Power, Black Pride and Black Panthers, stoicism and endurance were no longer enough. It was time to move on up, to say it loud, to demand R-E-S-P-E-C-T, to overcome not in an unspecified future ‘some day’ but right now. ‘I’ve been down so long,’ Albert King used to sing, as did J.B. Lenoir before him, and Ishman Bracey before him, ‘that down don’t bother me’. Down definitely did bother African America’s Next Generation, and the blues was definitely considered to be all about ‘down’. As B.B. put it in interviews at that time, ‘A lot of the younger Negroes don’t want to be associated with the blues. [They] are trying very hard to raise [their] standards . . . and when they’re approached with the blues, [they] figure in a lot of cases, this downs them . . . they don’t even know about it, and when they do hear about it they think, “Well, that’s old mom and dad’s music.”’ For his part, Hooker concurred: ‘A lot of them don’t want to accept [the blues], will not accept it. They think it’s a hangover.’ The emergent new consciousness was thus a mixed blessing for many bluesmen: after decades of being an authentic voice of their communities, they were finding themselves regarded as jokes, Toms or sell-outs by the younger generation within those communities, and increasingly dependent on the whims of whites.
As far as John Lee Hooker was concerned, there was more than an element of unfairness in this new dilemma. ‘Old-fashioned’ and ‘down-home’ his music may have been, but with songs of the calibre and content of ‘Birmingham Blues,’ ‘Democrat Man’ and ‘This Land Is Nobody’s Land’ in his catalogue, he was amongst the most politically forthright and engaged of the front-rank bluesmen. Nevertheless, he was still vulnerable to both political and generational shifts, and nowhere more so than in his own home town. As Michael Haralambos relates in Right On: From Blues To Soul In Black America,110 ‘John Lee Hooker, in Detroit for a couple of weeks in the summer of 1968 to appear at a rally in support of Senator Eugene McCarthy’s bid for the presidency, appeared only once at a black venue, the Rapa House, during his stay. Although the Rapa House is hardly a suitable place for a large blues audience – a coffee house run by blacks and patronised mainly by a theatrical and show business crowd – Hooker’s appearance, despite advertising in the black press, drew fewer than twenty blacks . . . a young black modern jazz quartet preceded [his] act. As John performs his four numbers, singing intensely and stomping his foot, the young musicians shout mock encouragement and slap their thighs in amusement as they crack jokes about the old blues singer. After the show, John Lee Hooker expresses annoyance . . .’ As well he might. ‘The whites, they really appreciates the blues,’ he told Haralambos, obviously still simmering from the humiliation received at these young brothers’ hands. ‘They really gets with it, y’know, they really sincere, it’s no come-on, it’s no gimme, it’s no put-on, they for real, y’know, and it can make you feel real good. I can’t believe they dig it so deep.’
It’s not hard to comprehend, nor to empathise with, Hooker’s transparent bitterness: his sense of betrayal and resentment. Out on the road, he was a hero or, at the very least, a welcome visitor, but on his own home turf, he was not so much a prophet without honour as a prophet without profit. In the wake of the Real Folk Blues sessions, Eddie Burns rejoined Hooker’s road band – at least for the kind of work Burns describes as ‘close around, like Chicago or Cleveland or somewhere like that’. However, in Sweet Home Detroit itself the boot was firmly on the other foot. ‘Over the years I became lead guitar player for him, and then I played with him quite a bit,’ says Burns. ‘And then in the ’60s, he played with me, because when the Motown and the Memphis sound came, the blues was takin’ a hell of a beatin’ back then. So I went to rizzum’n’blues, because you couldn’t make no money playin’ blues. A lot of blues guys had to hang it up, because they couldn’t get no action. He was playing with me, but he was playing the blues with me. I was playin’ the rhythm-and-blues, because I had that kind of group. I was more or less givin’ him work with me. It didn’t make no difference whether he was goin’ over big and strong or whatever: it was more or less like givin’ him some work or whatever. By him bein’ John and being with my group and everything . . . see, he played all blues at that time, and I didn’t. So it was a thing like we featured him. The blues set, he had it. And I was playin’ like rhythm and blues: “Honky Tonk”, Wilson Pickett and that kind of stuff. That’s what I was doin’. It worked well: we was workin’ something like five nights a week. That was when he was workin’ with me, ’66, ’67, ’68, somewhere in there.’
Hooker’s first BluesWay album, Urban Blues, was pretty much a continuation of Vee Jay by other means, albeit with a higher budget and slightly more care. Produced by Al Smith and recorded in Chicago over two days (albeit two days a month apart) in the autumn of 1967, it reunited Hooker with drummer Al Duncan as well as with Eddie Taylor, who played bass on the first session and guitar on the second. In addition to remakes of VeeJay-era chestnuts like �
��Boom Boom’ and ‘Want Ad Blues’, the first session yielded Hooker’s recording of the song inspired by the apocalyptic events of the previous summer: ‘Motor City Is Burning’. On (anonymous) lead guitar was a relatively recent acquaintance newly flitted from Chess Records and now ‘exclusively’ signed elsewhere: Buddy Guy.
‘I left my day job in August of 1967, my first album with Vanguard,’ Buddy recalls. ‘I was playing locally at night in the clubs in Chicago, and goin’ to my job every mornin’. The only thing I ever did with John was “Motor City”, and that was done in late ’66 [sic]. I axed him about that, you know, I never really heard it. I don’t know how did I sound or what. I normally done heard everything I ever helped anybody or was involved with, hear a playback, but I never got that, I never heard that played back.’ However, he remembers, ‘I had fun with that.’
‘Motor City’ was by no means the only Urban Blues cut attributed to Smith. Out of a dozen tracks, ten were credited or co-credited to Smith; Hooker received solo credit on only two, and those were the remakes of ‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Want Ad Blues’. Hooker and Smith ‘shared’ one of the new songs, ‘Mr Lucky’. Even ‘Backbiters And Syndicators’, with a complex genealogy dating back as far as the Besman years, had somehow become an Al Smith composition. To add insult to injury, Smith was, in his capacity as Hooker’s ‘manager’, quoted more extensively in the liner notes than was Hooker himself.
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