Boogie Man

  ‘He said, “If you need me, call me.” If I hadn’t had called him, I would’ve gone all the way to Vancouver. [Maude] used to be wild, man. I don’t like to say it, but she’s a hypocrite, a big hypocrite. She use the church for a shield, but her children know how she is: Zakiya, Diane. They know what she were. Mm-hm. You can’t hide in the church for what you done did. And I was telling Karen, my youngest daughter – she was over here the other day – I said, “Honey, you wasn’t here, but you was on the way.” Diane had told her, “Mama was a rollin’ stone, used to run around.” I said “Yeah, she did, drink . . .” They know she in the church as a shield. They know what she did to me. She wanted the divorce, she told you a lie and said I wanted it. She a liar! I never sent her no papers! She applied for the divorce, she got the divorce. After she got the divorce, she kicked me out of the house. I give her the house. She said, “It’s my house now. You give me the house, so you can’t stay here.” I was staying in some little place, a motel or something, while we got the divorce. I got my clothes, put ’em in the motel, got the car and hit the road, all the way along that 61 high way. I drove all the way [to California] by myself. She told me, “I got the house, and you don’t live here no more.” She lyin’ through her teeth. If she be a church-woman, why she a liar?

  ‘She the one got the divorce, she the one kicked me out. She was gonna take all the money, but . . . did I tell you about the girl called me to the bank? [Maude] had put in for the stop on the money, but I had a good friend at the bank, she worked there as a teller. Me and her were really good friends; she was a big fan of mine. When she got the stop note, she called me before they processed it, about one o’clock. “Mr Hooker? Come down and get your money, because tomorrow it’s gonna be tied up.” I said, “Why?” “Because there’s a note commanding that tomorrow your money be tied up.” I said, “What about now?” She said, “No, not now. Get down here.” I got down there, took most of half the money. I left her a little. She got mad, told her lawyer I got the money hid in some other bank. The lawyer said, “Well, he can’t do that.” But I was gone . . . She did some terrible things, things that I wouldn’t even attempt to tell you. I wouldn’t put in the book some of the things she did to me, I wouldn’t even tell you. She raked me over the coals, but right now she got a lotta regrets. She never knew I’m’a get this big.’

  And, in all fairness, neither did anybody else. After all, there was John Lee Hooker, past fifty years of age, heading west into the unknown with nothing to his name but that name itself. He had a car, a few clothes, two guitars, an amplifier and a little over $12,000 in cash. He was leaving behind thirty years of personal history in Detroit, twenty-three years of marriage, five children, and a sixth on the way.

  If we were doing this as a movie, we could show Hooker, fuelled only by coffee, adrenalin and a few ‘bennies’, driving wearily west into the blood-red sunset with all that was left of his life piled into his car. Right then, it would have seemed like the starry-eyed height of optimistic romanticism for anybody to have suggested just how high that California sun might one day rise for him.

  Let alone that it could take twenty years.

  12

  INTERLUDE – DARK ROOM

  And listening to the music was exactly like being back in my own life, like the blues are supposed to be. The blues don’t make you think – they make you remember. If you’ve got no memories, you can’t have the blues.

  Andrew Vachss, Flood (Pan Books, 1985)

  . . . He had this sound which was unlike any other sound. You couldn’t hear any influence; this guy sounded only like himself . . . You put on a John Lee Hooker record, or you hear him in person, and it’s just like a good movie or a good book. It keeps lingering, and you can’t get it out of your system. It stays with you. You don’t forget about it. . . . After all these years of knowing John, and knowing him as well as I have, I’m still in awe of him when I’m around him. I just have so much respect for him. I can never look at him or think of him as just a buddy. He’s just a great human being, you know, who plays the deepest blues that ever was. No deeper was ever played.

  Charlie Musselwhite, interview with the author, 1991

  The principal difference between artists and everybody else is that civilians believe that a viable distinction can be made between ‘art’ and ‘life’.111 By the same token, the essence of the art of John Lee Hooker is the art of being John Lee Hooker, which in turn means that John Lee Hooker is not simply, as Pete Welding called him in the liner notes to a recent reissue compilation,112 ‘everyone’s favourite blues singer’, but the sole practitioner of a one-man art form. This book has, thus far, dealt primarily with the ‘who’, the ‘when’ and the ‘where’ of the career of John Lee Hooker, and now seems like as good a time as any to take a long look at the ‘what’, the ‘how’ and maybe even the ‘why’ of ‘the art of John Lee Hooker’, and why it is so much more than the circumstances of that career, and the astonishing late-blooming success that climaxed it, which renders the man and the music unique.

  As an hors d’oeuvre: an anecdote which regrettably requires the author to shift himself out of the protective third person. Once upon a time (to be a little more precise, sometime in very early 1980), I ejected a jazz fan from my flat. The guy was then a few-doors-down near-neighbour of mine and, once a few casual conversational encounters on the stairs had established that we both loved music, I invited him round one evening for a few drinks and a few records. During the course of the evening it became apparent that while, in my capacity as an admirer of Miles, Trane, Duke, Mingus and Monk, I was prepared to follow him some considerable distance into his preferred musical territory, he was unwilling to travel even a fraction of a millimetre into mine. Serious ructions commenced when I played him a couple of Clash tunes: he be gan to foam at the mouth and assert that the only rock musicians whom he considered to be musicians at all were Blood Sweat & Tears (because ‘they could really play their instruments’). Finally, I kicked something by John Lee Hooker onto the stereo and awaited his reaction.

  ‘Why are you making me listen to this?’ he inquired. ‘This man can barely play the guitar.’

  It was at this point that I hauled myself to my feet, flung open the door and suggested, in the atrically profane terms, that he depart the premises before I hurt him. This was, in fact, an utterly empty threat – I haven’t had a fight since I was thirteen, and I lost that one – but he did indeed take his leave, muttering into his beard. We never spoke again, and shortly he moved out of the block, taking with him two albums (Duke Ellington’s Afro-Bossa and a rather nice Jimmy Witherspoon compilation) which I had previously been thought less enough to loan him. It took a long time to replace those records, but the light was worth the candle simply to be rid of his smugly smirking presence. What I’d found most offensive about his remarks was not so much that he’d dissed my taste in my home (this is, after all an occupational hazard when something as important as music is being discussed), but that he had revealed the shallowness of his understanding of the underlying roots, the central core, of his own choice of music. Yes, of course Charlie Parker and John Coltrane were virtuoso players of as tonishing fluency, and yes, of course, their music wouldn’t have been remotely possible without the ability to apply – virtually instantaneously – an intimidating de gree of musical theory, physical dexterity, and instrumental technique. Nevertheless, if that had been all that they were doing, their work would be lit tle more than a historical curio. As it is, the music of Charles Parker and John Coltrane lives and breathes and continues to inspire suc cessive generations of musicians; not simply because of their technical facility or their theoretical grasp, but because of the soulfulness and spiritual content of their music.113

  And that is it. That is the whole deal. Music stands or falls by what it makes its listeners feel, and everything else is simply furniture. My unfortunate neighbour had fallen in love with the technical means by which his heroes had chosen to achieve their creative ends, an
d had com pletely ignored the ends themselves.

  Of course, on one level he was completely right. If – say – you were looking to hire a guitarist to play in the pit band for a Broadway musical, or to sight-read a complex part for a big-band jazz or commercial rock session, and John Lee Hooker had somehow been persuaded to come along and audition, you might well conclude that he could ‘barely play the guitar’. On the other hand, if you were looking for someone to play John Lee Hooker-style guitar and Hooker himself was unavailable or unaffordable, you’d be in deep, deep trouble, since very few people can even pastiche his style convincingly, let alone create freely within it. Hooker’s style is one of those which is so utterly deceptive in its apparent simplicity that it seems, to those who worship ostentatious displays of technique and theory, to be almost insultingly easy: literally artless. Then you try to do it yourself, or you hear someone else attempting to reproduce it, and then you realise that it’s virtually impossible. Reviewing Michael Caine’s performance in Lewis Gilbert’s movie of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, Pauline Kael wrote:

  Michael Caine is the least pyrotechnic, the least show-offy of actors. He has prodigious ease on the screen; it’s only afterward that you realise how difficult what he was doing is . . . The goal of Caine’s technique seems to be to dissolve all vestiges of ‘technique’. He lets nothing get between you and the character he plays. You don’t observe his acting; you just experience the character’s emotions . . .114

  The qualities which Kael detects in Caine’s acting – transparency, purity, authenticity – are precisely those we find in Hooker’s blues. It is the art which conceals itself: it takes you to the heart of the matter almost instantly, placing the minimum of obstacles or filters between the experience of artist and audient.

  To play like John Lee Hooker, you have to be John Lee Hooker, and this is because the style is the man. The two are inseparable and indivisible: one cannot discuss the music without discussing the man, and vice versa. Let us say it once again: John Lee Hooker do not do, he be. His music is the way it is because the man is who he is. What is more, he knows exactly who he is and, over long, hard, painful years, he has refined that knowledge and placed it all at the service of his art. The unique character of the blues depends on one central fact: that the music is impossible to perform convincingly unless the performer knows him- (or her-)self inside out and is prepared to place that self on the line, to occupy the spiritual and emotional centre of each and every song. Blues performed without self-knowledge and self-expression is merely a set of gestures and conventions: it can rock your body but it can’t rock your soul. As Julio Finn put it in The Bluesman:115

  . . . the blues performance is a rite, in which the musician assumes the role of the ‘elder’ and the audience that of the ‘initiate’ . . . the performers’ aim is to conjure – in the same sense that the preacher or the Root Doctor conjures – their audience . . . the ‘true’ instrument played in blues cult houses (jook joints) is the audience. The audience, as instrument, produces the spirit which shapes and develops the song. From belonging to the performer it becomes the property of the community; these individual statements are transformed into the testimony of the group . . . the effectiveness of this depends upon how deeply he or she can tap the sleeping roots of the listeners’ subconscious. A blues performer can only achieve this when his or her own ‘soul’ is intact.116

  This, of course, should not be taken as a suggestion that a blues performer needs to be content, or settled, in order to play the blues. This notion would turn reality on its head; it would be a complete and utter contradiction of the social, cultural, historical, economic and psychological realities which underpin the music. What Finn is telling us is that in order to fulfil the music’s function, the bluesman needs the ability to face, to understand, and – please pardon the Star Trek infinitive – to fully accept the emotion of the moment, be it sorrow or anger, joy or regret; and to incorporate that emotion, without let or hindrance or inhibition of any kind, into that performance which is so much more than a performance.

  The blues is an art; the blues is an entertainment; the blues is a commodity; the blues is cultural history; the blues is any number of things to any number of people. But, above all, the blues is an eminently practical and functional set of methods and processes for dealing with the most painful aspects of life. Like meditation or yoga in Buddhist or Hindu societies, it is a discipline, a structure, for the focusing of self.

  Using the blues as a means of achieving this end is not only the highest priority of Hooker’s art: it is almost the only priority. In order to do so, he has evolved a style which is unlike any other: it is, simultaneously, utterly unique and personal to him; and a grand archetype which can sound as if it is the fundamental blues on which all other blues, even music recorded before Hooker himself ever even picked up a guitar, let alone walked into a recording studio, is based. Let us therefore look a little more closely at the mechanics of Hooker’s music, the materials from which it is constructed, and the processes by which it is made. Hooker himself, as it happens, heartily despises all things theoretical or intellectual . . .

  ‘No matter how much education I didn’t have,’ he will insist, ‘book education didn’t have what was in here’ – tapping his chest – ‘and in here’ – tapping his head. ‘I could’ve been a professor, but I repeat myself to you and to whoever read this book after I’m gone: you cannot get what I got, out of a book. You got to have a talent. There is no-one I heard yet can go into a studio like John Lee Hooker and just produce something right on the spot. I can go into a studio with nothin’ and come out with one of the beautfullest songs, because I’m very wise up here. People say, “How can you do that?” I say, “It’s a gif’ from God, if there’s a God – a Supreme Being.” I have written more songs than any other blues singer – I think so – and they wasn’t written on a piece of paper. Here’s my paper’ – and he taps his head once more. ‘You can’t find a feelin’ on a piece of paper. I don’t believe in no paper. Take your paper, stick a match to it. My paper’s right in here, and in here.’

  . . . but we’re going to need some theory – musical and cultural – even if Hooker doesn’t. Especially because he doesn’t.

  If we look at Hooker’s first and most prolific years as a recording artist, we find that whilst he didn’t precisely ‘go into a studio with nothin’’, he went in with what may objectively seem like very little. He had mastered two keys, each with its own tuning; a very few basic song structures, and even fewer beats.

  Keys first: Hooker’s music was – and is – mainly performed in one or other of two basic modes. The first is in the standard ‘concert’ guitar tuning of E-A-D-G-B-E, low to high, and almost invariably in the key of E. The second is in an ‘open’ tuning – i.e. one in which strumming the unfretted strings produces a full chord – which mimics the characteristic sound of a first-position chord of A major, in which the second, third and fourth strings are held down at the second fret. Depending on whether those strings are tuned up a full tone or the first, fifth and sixth strings are slackened by the equivalent interval, this tuning (known to traditional guitarists as ‘Spanish’, after the nineteenth-century parlour-guitar standard ‘Spanish Fandango’, which introduced the tuning to the American musical vocabulary) produces either a chord of G (D-G-D-G-B-D) or A (E-A-E-A-C#-E). Most country blues men preferred, as do the majority of contemporary musicians who perform in this style, to tune down (which places less strain on precious, hard-to-replace strings), but the higher ten sion of the A-tuning imparts a correspondingly greater sharpness and urgency to the sound. This tuning is also frequently used on the banjo and the Hawaiian guitar: ‘Once I figured out how to put the banjo G to the guitar,’ Ry Cooder told Guitar Player magazine,117 ‘all of a sudden there were all of John Lee Hooker’s chords.’

  ‘I get the feel that I want,’ Hooker says of the ‘Spanish’ tuning. ‘It’s a different sound. Different tuning, different sound. Playing open, yo
u’re not playing chords. It’s picking, it’s a different sound altogether, different feelin’ from A to E. A-tuning is a real blues funky key. You play slow, not fast – not countin’ the boogie, you gotta play that fast. But the slow stuff, you really get the feelin’. It’s a deeper feelin’ I do in open A than I do in regular tuning. It’s a little deeper . . . real funky. E is deep but A . . . there’s just something about it. It’s a really blues key.’

  Then there’s picking and strumming: the right-hand stuff. Hooker plays strictly fingerstyle: striking downwards with the thumb on the bass strings and plucking upwards with his index finger on the trebles. Sometimes, for fast chord strumming, he will use his middle or ring finger, but most of his playing depends on the interaction between that downstroking thumb and upswinging index. The first time he saw Hooker live and close up, Pete Townshend was awestruck. ‘His . . . rhythm playing totally stunned me . . . he appeared to achieve this simply by flailing at the strings aimlessly with his huge hands, but the results were precise . . . Hooker’s chord work convinced me that pinning down a precise and solid chordal structure was far more important for me than learning by rote the solos of virtuosos like B.B. King and Buddy Guy.’

  The bulk of the hundreds of songs Hooker recorded in those early years were constructed around a mere handful of basic templates; a small number of bottles into which to pour an infinite ocean of wine. First and foremost amongst these was ‘the boogie’, the signature groove he learned from his stepfather Will Moore; but though Moore’s is the primary influence most frequently cited by Hooker, his big sister’s one-time suitor Tony Hollins, who was the first bluesman Hooker ever heard, comes an extremely close second. And it was Hollins who introduced Hooker to the fundamental themes which were the building blocks, the DNA, of Delta blues.