Boogie Man

  And yet, incomprehensibly, the audience is laughing. The threats are blood-curdling, the vocal delivery is chilling, yet clearly Hooker is visually undercutting the implied violence with body language: gestures and facial expressions apparent only to those in the room with him. The subtext, however, is utterly unambiguous: sometimes a tidal wave of grief can be held back only with a thick wall of anger. On ‘Dark Room’, that wall has crumbled: even the most lurid revenge fantasy must eventually pall, and the sufferer has no remaining option but to confront his pain. All barriers are down: nothing now stands between Hooker and his grief. Or between him and us. There is no irony, no ‘distance’. Nothing is in quotes.

  And, as if to emphasise that point, ‘Dark Room’ remains entirely free of any kind of formal structure. It has no pulsebeat, no lyrical organisation or rhyme scheme and – with the exception of the single allusion to the chord of B7 with which Hooker prefaces his vocal entry – no chord changes. It is as close as Hooker ever got to presenting the raw, unmediated stuff of his music, its heart, soul and spirit, without furniture or frame.

  ‘Dark Room’ begins with a series of exploratory runs – part meditation, part foreplay, part prologue – bristling with pull-offs and hammer-ons and played out of metre primarily on the treble strings. The piece is performed in regular tuning in the key of E, and the ominous, booming plunk of the open bass E string, to which each and every run eventually returns, provides it with its sole anchor. Right from the start, the mood is one of upheaval. The guitar blurts, stutters, interrupts itself. Phrases begin but don’t resolve; notes bump into each other, choke each other off. Finally the turmoil quiets. Hooker launches a slower, calmer lick upwards from the bass E. A moment of silence, and then – foot quietly tapping in the background – he quietly and reflectively plays a classic bass-string ‘turnaround’ of the kind which normally occurs at the end of a standard I-IV-V 12-bar chorus, ascending to B7 (the ‘V’ of an E blues) before returning to the root tonality.

  Another beat of silence, and then Hooker sets the scene. ‘I’m sittin’ here,’ he begins, almost to himself, ‘in my dark room, dark room . . .’ The guitar stabs twice for emphasis ‘. . . In my dark room cryin’ ’bout you.’ The voice is low, soft, meditative, burry with suppressed emotion, but the guitar gives the game away. Its roiling blurt permits no ambiguity concerning the nature of that ‘thinkin’’. This man hurts. He’s not quite ready to admit it to us, but the guitar keeps no secrets. As with all great blues singer/guitarists, from Robert Johnson to B.B. King to Robert Cray, the guitar tells us what the voice will not, or cannot. The voice is the ego, the guitar the conscience, the soul.

  Hooker repeats the scene-setting, sitting there in his dark room, adding one more piece of information: ‘on my bedside’, and the guitar underlines it. He starts to repeat: ‘on my bed . . .’ and now the guitar will let him go no further, interrupting, blurting out the pain the singer refuses to acknowledge. He’s striking the bass strings hard enough to distort both tone and pitch: one could describe it as a self-consciously ugly sound if there was anything whatsoever about this performance which was self-conscious at all. ‘I’m sitting on my bedside,’ he continues, undulating the final syllable through eight or nine notes – ‘on my bedside cryin’ . . . cryin’ about you.’ The guitar takes over again, always reaching up-and-out for the treble, always tumbling back down to the bass.

  ‘You know sometimes,’ Hooker confides . . . one single, jabbing interpolation from the guitar. Then a beat of silence. Then the interpolation, repeated. ‘I have friends around me.’ The guitar mutters, sceptically. ‘We be sittin’ down in the livin’ room talkin’’ – the guitar interrupts once again, and the voice breaks in bitter self-mockery – ‘me an’ my friends. ’ Huh says the guitar. ‘Havin’ a little nip together.’ The guitar says Yeah, sure. Hooker says, ‘I get to thinkin’ ’bout how she done treated me so bad . . .’ and then it changes. The guitar stops talking back and just tolls, like a church bell. Once. Twice. An E octave: the open bass E string and the D string at the second fret, the open E thumbed so hard that it rings sharp – BAAAAAongg – under the pressure. A quick bass run and then back to the awful, tolling E; the remorseless low E from which there is no escape: not in this piece, anyway.

  ‘I don’t want my friends to see me cryin’’ – the word ‘cry’ melismatically stretched across half-a-dozen notes, the guitar keening into a hurtful trebly blizzard – ‘I say, “’Scuse me, people . . .”’ – another treble storm, this time ending on an A, the fourth of the E blues scale, implying a continuation – ‘‘. . . I got to step into my room.”’ Another treble blurt. ‘And then I sit down, sit down, sit down, sit down’ – the guitar tries to get a few notes in edgeways but now Hooker will be interrupted no further. ‘I sit down on my bedside’ – and now it is the turn of the voice to interrupt the guitar. ‘You know tears come down my face,’ he sings, and the guitar follows. Instrument and voice are no longer in opposition, but in harmony: the public and private faces and voices have now fused. The guitar simply marks time for a beat and then – all anger burned away, leaving nothing behind but a bottomless pit of melancholy, a vale of tears stretching to each and every faraway horizon – it begins to sound the ominous slow bass-string riff from ‘Tupelo’, that tale of an external, rather than internal, flood which subsumes all before it.

  ‘I don’t want the people,’ Hooker murmurs, guitar still restating ‘Tupelo’ beneath his voice, ‘to see me cryin’ ’bout you.’ Now his voice strengthens, becoming both deeper and sharper as well as richer and louder, anger flooding back: ‘you know she did me so bad, so bad’ – that shift from second to third person as ‘you’ becomes ‘she’. He says it again: ‘you know she did me so bad, so bad’ – a hit on the bass E – ‘you know she did me’ – a giddying swirl of melismae on the last word, and now his rage has become a tidal wave, towering, irresistible, and those savage treble runs return – ‘Whoah Lord she did me so bad’ – back to the bass, jabbing down furiously with his thumb until you feel that the string just has to break, or that something must break – ‘that every time I think about it’ – voice softening and lowering again, guitar muttering indistinctly – ‘you know I can’t keep from cryin’. ’

  Another moment of silence, and then he starts to hum, mmm-hmmm, guitar and voice united, blending in seamless union. It almost sounds as if he’s ‘violining’ – an electric guitarist’s technique in which the volume is turned off as each note is struck and then turned back up as it rings, so that you have a note that fades in from nowhere, with no attack at its leading edge – so soft and sweet is the sound. And then he moans, ‘awwwww-hawwwww ohhhhhh-ohhhh’. It is literally awwwww-ful: the pure, unalloyed sound of human grief, not a sound made for an audience, but simply soul and body trying to make itself feel better, to handle the pain any way it can.

  And then he sings once more ‘And then the tears come down my face’, and it is just the most extraordinary moment. You see the tears, you see the face. Hooker’s voice is, most frequently, smooth and mellifluous: nothing further from the stereotypical Delta bluesman’s rasp – and the ersatz constricted-throat gravel employed by so many white wannabe bluesers – can possibly be imagined. But on the word ‘tears’ a deep, leathery grain colours his voice, supernaturally evocative of the lines on a face no longer young as the tears which can no longer be withheld trickle down, gathering in seams of weathered skin; of the texture and fabric of a life of much pain endured, with no end to that pain in sight.

  He moans once again and strikes one sharp chord – bap! – on the guitar, and it’s over, and we’re into something else. But the moment, and the feeling of the moment, remain: the specific moment in a human life which a song evokes, and the moment in which it is performed. No other artist could have delivered that particular performance; Hooker himself could not (would not?) replicate it precisely no matter how much money you offered him to do so. What it is, right there in five minutes (minus applause time): the purest esse
nce of the blues. Not only of John Lee Hooker’s blues, but all blues. It’s what the wood looks like when you learn to stop looking at the trees.

  Of course, for some there is no wood: only trees. According to Bernard Besman, what Hooker does isn’t the blues at all. As Besman wrote in the liner note to a compilation of Hooker outtakes:124

  Hooker, though he has since come to be regarded as a blues artist, in my opinion is not. Blues is a form of music characterized by a rigid 12-bar structure, and a repetition of words and themes. John Lee Hooker never followed a set pattern; his songs might have 12 bars but they’d be just as likely to ramble from 11 in one verse to 18 in the next . . . another thing about John Lee Hooker, he never sings a song the same way twice. There are certain themes that he often returns to, but his music is so spontaneous that each rendition becomes almost a completely new song. So you see, his music is not really ‘blues’, but rather a form of music all his own, which I have chosen to call ‘early Americana’ . . .

  By such criteria, whiskey served in a champagne flute rather than a shot glass or highball tumbler would be whiskey no longer. A performance like ‘Dark Room’ is certainly not a blues in the purely descriptive sense, i.e. form – in other words, it’s not a twelve-bar, doesn’t have a regular beat or adhere to either a three-chord harmonic structure or an A-A-B lyrical pattern – but in function and content, it is the blues.

  Reminiscing about his travels during the early part of the twentieth century, Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax, ‘There wasn’t any decent music around [Houston, Texas], only jews-harps, harmonicas, mandolins, guitars and fellows singing the spasmodic blues – sing awhile and pick awhile till they thought of another word to say.’125 In other words, the kind of music Hooker still plays – the blues. The original, undiluted, uncut blues.

  The deepest blues there is.

  The ‘grain’ is the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs.

  Roland Barthes, ‘The Grain Of The Voice’, 1972126

  To say that it is all a matter of feeling is at once to explain everything and nothing. All artists have feelings: hell, everybody has feelings. Even lawyers have feelings. Rather, it is about a particular relationship, or set of relationships, to feeling. And feeling was something of which that young, untried Hooker of the late ’40s and early ’50s had no shortage. Into that basic gallery of vessels – the traditional slow blues, the free-form slow blues, the boogie, the ‘Bottle Up And Go’, ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ and ‘Catfish’ templates – he poured the stuff of his life, his observations of his day-to-day world, fragments of things he’d heard on jukeboxes, snatches of blues or gospel songs or romantic ballads he’d heard as a child. And each time the red light went on, these elements would be combined and recombined into something new and unrepeatable.

  Sometimes a slow blues would start out with standard changes and then loosen into free-form. Sometimes he’d supercharge a ‘Bottle Up’, ‘Catfish’ or ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ sequence with his boogie groove. Sometimes he’d play what was usually a fast song slow, or a slow one fast. Sometimes a piece he normally played solo would be transformed into something different by performing it with drums, sax and piano. And sometimes a song ‘Hookerized’, or adapted from another source – Roscoe Gordon’s ‘No More Doggin’,’ or the celebrated ‘Driftin’ Blues’ originated by Charles Brown when he was with Johnny Moore’s Three Blazes – would settle into Hooker’s repertoire and become an archetype in its own right, capable of being spun off in turn into a galaxy of further variations. ‘Driftin’ Blues’, for example, became Hooker’s own ‘Wanderin’ Blues’, and each time it was performed it drifted – or wandered – further from its original source. Brown had depicted himself driftin’ ‘like a ship out on the sea’; Hooker, by contrast, wandered ‘like a sheep out on the farm’. Sometimes – thanks to various producers’ mistranscriptions of Hooker’s Mississippi accent – the two images combined to create the surreal vision of ‘a sheep out on the foam’. Brown’s song had been thoroughly ‘Hookerized’.

  The process of Hookerization – a central facet and primary tool of Hooker’s creative method, a form of ‘organic sampling’ by which Hooker annexes, adapts, customises and ultimately transforms devices and motifs derived from traditional and contemporary material from both within and without the blues canon – is simultaneously ancient and modern, African and European. It is as old as the folk process itself: which is to say that it is a fundamental of human communication, older than either language or music. And in contemporary incarnations like sampling or postmodernist intertextuality, that same process is at the very heart of millennial art, wherein the century is, so to speak, tipped on its side, and all of the cultural debris of the twentieth century tumbles from its original context to roll up against the millennial barrier in new and startling juxtapositions amongst which we can wander, scavenge and rearrange.

  The folk process, the mechanisms of which are deeply embedded in human consciousness, traditionally worked with the materials in the immediate vicinity of an individual or community: the tales and songs of a specific place and time, cross-fertilized with those introduced by travellers passing through. The mobile arts – first printed, then electric, currently digital – have broadened that catchment area to take in all of known space and time. As a species, we’re doing what we’ve always done, except that – in the late twentieth century – we’re doing it with samplers and computers rather than simply with memory and flesh. Learn a song, rearrange it for your own instrument, write some new words about something that happened round the corner, play it to your friends and neighbours. Download an image or a chunk of text, mess with it, upload it again. It’s all the same stuff. It’s all ‘Hookerization’.

  Bearing Hooker’s background in mind, it should therefore not be particularly surprising that first-stage Hookerization would bear as strong a resemblance as it does to the way a preacher works with a biblical text. Leaving aside – for the moment only – the outright plagiarism of Percy Mayfield’s ‘Memory Pain’ (the latter aka ‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’ in the Hooker canon), we find exercises like ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, ‘Frisco Blues’ (derived from ‘I Left My Heart In San Francisco’), ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch And One Beer’ (derived from Amos Milburn’s ‘One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer’) or ‘Messin’ With The Hook’ (a Hookerization of Junior Wells’ ‘Messin’ With The Kid’, itself also transformed by the highly unkiddish Muddy Waters into ‘Messin’ With The Man’). In all of these Hooker uses bits of the original piece – a chorus, a lyrical fragment, an opening couplet or even simply a title – as ‘text’ and then moves on to ‘preach’ his own ‘sermon’. And it is his own: Hooker’s ‘One Bourbon’ is no more Amos Milburn’s than, in a vastly different context, Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations is Charles Dickens’s. No one would call a preacher a plagiarist because the springboard for his sermon is a chunk of the Bible: it is understood both that a preacher is supposed to quote the Bible, and also that the most fundamental essence of the preacherly art lies in the preacher’s ability to create an original, affecting and relevant sermon around the theme of the biblical extract he has chosen.

  Similarly, if we look at the origins of bebop, we find that the ‘head’ of a tune – its principal melodic motif – also serves as the pegs on which to hang the improvisations which are the real meat in the musical sandwich. Way back at the music’s primal roots – the marathon ’40s jam sessions at Teddy Minton’s club in Harlem during which Charlie Christian, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke and others hewed the basic tenets of the form from the living rockface of earlier musics – the musicians often deliberately chose to deploy quite banal 32-bar pop tunes (‘Tea For Two’, ‘I Got Rhythm’ and the like) alongside blues themes as springboards for their improvs. Or – to be more precise – as scaffolding for their constructions. The original melody or chord sequence is of little or no intrinsic value or importance: it’s simply there to facilitate the creati
on of the final artefact, and once that ‘building’ has been completed, the scaffolding becomes utterly superfluous. Despite the similarity of method, this is conceptually a very different vessel of seafood from the aural firestorms into which John Coltrane and Jimi Hendrix transformed, respectively, Rodgers & Hammerstein’s ‘My Favourite Things’ and Frances Scott Keyes’ ‘Star-Spangled Banner’, wherein recognition and familiarity with not only the original melody, but the context in which it first appeared and the emotional and cultural luggage it carries, are an intrinsic and essential part of the experience which the performers are attempting to deliver.

  Whilst the original tunes unquestionably ‘belong’ to their original composers, the final results are the exclusive property of Coltrane and Hendrix. Nevertheless, while it’s certainly possible for a listener unfamiliar with the original melodies to enjoy the performances and even to be ‘reached’ and transported by the sheer emotional power and musical prowess displayed by Jimi and Trane, the full impact and resonance of the finished work are lost on anyone who doesn’t know the tune, or who lacks a highly specific awareness both of the significance of the ‘original’ (a cute song about furry animals, snowballs et al, or the American national anthem) and the distance which the improviser has travelled from the tune’s point of origin – or rather, the distance which the improviser has forcibly dragged the tune and, by extension, the listener.

  In other words: the listener is required to bring something of his or her own to the party. You’re supposed to know the tune. If you don’t, you’re welcome to gatecrash, but please be aware that you weren’t actually invited. Most modern listeners, for example, aren’t ‘invited’ to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: its ominous four-note intro motif is one of the most famous and instantly recognizable licks in European concert music, but it wasn’t original to Beethoven, and would have not been perceived as such by hipper nineteenth-century listeners. The iconic ta-ta-ta-tummmmm was one of a group of themes ‘sampled’ by ‘lovely lovely Ludwig Van’ (as Anthony Burgess so affectionately nicknamed him in A Clockwork Orange) from the works of a group of revolutionary French composers, including Rouget de Lisle, who wrote ‘The Marseillaise’. Beethoven’s allusions to their work were designed to be decoded by the cognoscenti as specific, but nevertheless ultimately deniable, indications of potentially incriminating revolutionary sympathies.127