Boogie Man

  In the world of hip-hop, so despised by those members of the blues community – including Hooker himself – we once again find the old pressed into service as an essential ingredient in the process of the creation of the new. Sly & the Family Stone’s ‘Everyday People’ becomes the core of Arrested Development’s ‘People Everyday’. The Detroit Spinners’ ‘It’s A Shame’ signposts Monie Love’s ‘Mi Sista’. The Gap Band’s ‘Ooops Upside Your Head’ – the spontaneously adapted source of any number of English football chants – does double duty as the foundation stone of Snoop Doggy Dogg’s ‘Snoop’s Upside Your Head’. Buffalo Springfield’s summer-of-love protest anthem ‘For What It’s Worth’ rises from the tomb as Public Enemy’s ‘He’s Got Game’. It was inevitable that some form of legal framework for dealing with this stuff would ultimately have to be developed, if only to accommodate hip-hoppers’ wholesale pillaging of the works of James Brown and George Clinton. Only a Polygram lawyer could tell us how many records have shoplifted Brown’s legendary ‘Funky Drummer’ break (played by the Great Clyde Stubblefield), and during a few lean years in his four-decade career, Clinton’s principal income was derived from sampling royalties.

  Even in rock and roll, where ‘originality’ is more highly prized and copyrights more valuable, the same pick-it-up-and-kick-it principle applies. The Beach Boys’ first big hit, ‘Surfin’ USA’, was built on the chassis of Chuck Berry’s ‘Sweet Little Sixteen’ (signature guitar licks and all) to the extent that Berry ended up sharing the songwriting credit and royalties with Brian Wilson, ‘Surfin’ USA’’s ‘actual’ composer. The Sex Pistols’ ‘Holidays In The Sun’ replays the principal riff of the Jam’s ‘In The City’. And Noel Gallagher, mastermind-in-residence of that truly postmodern band Oasis, publicly and repeatedly boasts of the riffs and techniques he’s lifted from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Mott the Hoople, David Bowie and countless others. We are, he tells us, supposed to spot them. Our appreciation of West Side Story is diminished if we don’t know that it’s Romeo And Juliet; of Forbidden Planet if we’re unaware that it’s The Tempest; of Kurosawa’s Ran if we can’t connect it to King Lear. By the same token, in Tim Burton’s Batman Returns, we’re supposed to notice when he riffs on the celebrated opening shot of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane. If we don’t, we’re excluded from part of the fun. And, if we have no idea of whence the artist started out, how are we supposed to recognise how far (s)he’s come?

  Quote, sample, allusion, homage. When you get down to it, it’s all the same game: that of making art out of other art, and out of whatever we happen to find around us. Thus entire bodies of literature – ranging from Dumas to Conan Doyle to E.R. Doctorow – wherein historical characters mingle freely with the author’s own creations; and other bodies still where these ‘real’ but reinvented people meet not only the creations of the presiding author but those of earlier authors. J.G. Ballard’s epochal coining of the term ‘media landscape’ provides us with a vital clue: the traditional notion of a landscape is something which is simply there, and the artist’s job is, equally simply, to depict it. Our contemporary landscape is constructed, and any reflection or depiction of it, or even passage through it, thereby forces us to engage with things which have been constructed, previously, by others; and with the notions embedded, overtly or covertly, within those constructions. And thus Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup-can – regarded at the time by traditionalist critics and commentators as the absolute epitome of charlatanry – becomes a still life for the industrial era, the age of mass-production. The fact that Warhol mass-produced the work itself is both a logical completion of the process and a simultaneous comment upon it.

  In quick succession, then: a brace of caveats, an analogy and a conclusion. Firstly, though it would be tempting to indulge in an act of critical mischief and declare Hooker to be a premature and instinctive (if unwitting) postmodernist, there are more ramifications to postmodernist theory, in its formal academic applications, than the loose, pop-culch journalistic sense in which it is used here.128 And secondly, Hooker has no more moved into its sphere than he has moved into anything else: rather, it is a matter of the shared influence of common roots between this most complex and arcane body of theory and the instinctive process by which we navigate through our culture.

  One small example: when a liner-note writer described Hooker as ‘a guitarist with fine jazz qualities’129 and other major jazz critics concurred, Bernard Besman was appalled. ‘Leonard Feather considers him a jazz musician and wrote several articles,’ he snorted. ‘I don’t know where jazz comes in. People who play bebop are skilled, very good, trained musicians. They have to read the music . . . here you take Hooker, who can’t read a goddam note, plays “zap” and doesn’t imitate anybody. Sonny Stitt, who I loved, now there was a real schooled musician.’ As ever, Besman is simultaneously right and wrong: ‘right’ in that Hooker is certainly not a jazz musician in any strict formal sense, but ‘wrong’ in that after the complexities of bebop attained critical mass, many ‘skilled, very good, trained’ jazz musicians, in the wake of Miles Davis’s epochal performance of ‘Walkin’’ at the 1955 Newport Jazz Festival, discarded the constrictions imposed by those complexities and set off in search of the free-blowing space they found in the simpler and more open structures of blues and gospel themes. These explorations led populists towards ‘soul jazz’, and intellectuals towards what later became known as ‘free’ (unstructured) jazz; both fields capable of learning from what an artist like Hooker had known and practised all along. Thus the circle closed: the beboppers had to absorb all the theory there was before they could get to that space where they could afford to dump it.

  Similarly, postmodernism in its ‘pop’ sense refers primarily to ‘intertextuality’, a term coined by Julia Kristeva to assert that no ‘text’ – be it a song, a movie, a book, a painting, an advertisement, whatever – is a closed universe existing in a vacuum. The way in which it is constructed, perceived and interpreted depends on what is already known. Popular culture in general is instinctively intertextual, and nowhere more so than in popular music; in popular music nowhere more so than in the blues; and in the blues nowhere more so than in the music of John Lee Hooker. The bottom line is this:

  Where ‘intertextuality’ and the folk process meet: in the assumption of a mutual familiarity with a shared body of culture and experience which can be freely referred to and drawn upon. Where they part company: with the notion of distance, detachment and irony implicit in all postmodern phenomena. With the folk process in general, and in Hooker’s work in particular, nothing is in italics. Neither artist nor audience are insulated or detached, from themselves or each other, by protective layers of quotes. Everything is ‘meant’, and no built-in escape-hatch is provided. You either deal, or you leave.

  Q: What comes after ‘postmodern’?

  A: Relief. Clarity. Faith in the future.

  Designer Tibor Kalman, interviewed

  in Wired, December 1996

  John Lee Hooker’s career – all fifty years of it – has been but patchily documented or analysed. The inquisitive reader will find very little substantial discussion of Hooker’s work in the standard classics of blues literature.130 This is not to suggest that his work has been underrated per se – quite the reverse: his oeuvre is universally admired – but rather that the critics and historians of the blues establishments have traditionally preferred a sociologically-based methodology, and therefore concentrated primarily on identifiable schools and groupings of artists, sorting and classifying (analysing and assessing) musicians according to era, style or region. The effect of this particular critical approach on a maverick loner like Hooker has been to drop him into the cracks between categories. Let’s take a quick peep at the contents of some of the more prominent boxes into which Hooker doesn’t quite fit.

  Firstly, let’s gracefully acknowledge that he is indeed loosely categorizable as a ‘traditional’ Southern bluesman with a penchant for absolute freedom of mus
ical, lyrical, rhythmic and – most important of all – structural improvisation. Contrariwise, most of the front rank of performers in this particular branch of the idiom were (at least) a generation his senior; cut their definitive recordings and earned their reps prior to World War II; lived and worked primarily in the rural South; and fulfilled all the criteria necessary to identify them formally as acoustic ‘folk’ musicians, one and all. If Hooker had been even ten or fifteen years older and had chosen to remain in the South rather than head off to the big city whilst still in his teens, his links to the likes of Booker T. Washington ‘Bukka’ White, Robert Pete Williams or Big Joe Williams (and – a trifle more remotely – to his Texan contemporary Lightnin’ Hopkins, a fellow compulsive-improviser whose musical and sociological ties to ‘folk blues’ remained far tighter and more consistent than Hooker’s despite occasional electric dabblings of his own) would have been more than simply artistic; he might well have had a similar kind of career. Moreover, Hooker would have been relatively easy to classify as ‘that’ sort of bluesman if he hadn’t persisted in recording with rock, soul and jazz musicians (as well as fellow blues guys), and performing in a range of contexts reaching from solo acoustic to the soulful side of the uptown street. Not to mention deriving his material from a wide-screen continuum of sources slung between show tunes and Broadway ballads; between contemporary R&B and pop, and folk elements so fundamental that they practically constitute the very DNA of contemporary popular music. Plus every once in a while he racked up a serious hit single: this, Captain, is not logical. So was he then a ‘Chicago bluesman’? Well, he was . . . and he wasn’t.

  Which brings us to the second Hooker anomaly: he was sufficiently negligent of the particular requirements of critics and historians to have declined to base himself in Chicago. The postwar electrification of the primal Delta materials is principally associated with Chicago and generically referred to as ‘Chicago blues’, but whilst the bulk of Hooker’s important recordings made during the decade between the mid-’50s and the mid-’60s were indeed cut in Chicago for the city’s two leading blues indies, Vee Jay and Chess, his home scene was the Motor City rather than the Windy City, and he thus remained a visiting fireman, albeit a welcome and honoured one, in the South Side’s retroactively legendary taverns and bars. The near-mythic status afforded to the Chicago scene by outsiders, particularly Europeans, during the ’60s didn’t just benefit the scene’s big fish, but also less exalted players: being a ‘Chicago bluesman’ was by definition a stamp of authority and authenticity. By contrast, the Detroit scene carried with it no such on-board kudos: much to the irritation of hometown cheerleaders like Famous Coachman, local stalwarts Eddie Burns, Eddie Kirkland, Boogie Woogie Red, Baby Boy Warren, Little Sonny and Mr Bo carried relatively little clout, except amongst the most erudite blues aficionados, outside their home territories. As far as the outside world was concerned, Detroit blues had little or no distinctive identity and only one major figurehead; indeed, it seemingly began and ended with Hooker himself. And as far as a strict definition of Chicago blues is concerned, Hooker therefore isn’t ‘that’ kind of bluesman, either.

  Furthermore, there is a vital musical distinction to be made between Hooker on the one hand and, on the other, Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf – the twin Deep-South-to-South-Side titans of the golden decade of Chicago blues, and the artists most directly comparable to Hooker in sociological terms. Chicago blues is, first and foremost, an ensemble music: the talent, personality and charisma of the leader serve to provide focus and purpose, but the art itself is essentially a collective one. Both Muddy and Wolf were bandleaders par excellence; forming, leading and nurturing ensembles whose sonic trademark was an inseparable part of (and contribution to) their distinctive musical identities. And whilst Chess Records wasn’t noted for the integrity of its accounting procedures, it was a relatively tight-knit operation which cross-promoted its artists and – primarily through the unique combination of talents stuffed into Willie Dixon’s gargantuan frame – supplemented their own creativity with bespoke commercial songs tailored to their talents if they weren’t coming up with the goods themselves; and produced their records with one ear on the needs and values of the traditional blues audience, and the other on the wider marketplace outside. Muddy and Wolf thereby worked and created both within the community in which they lived their daily lives; and an artistic community which reinforced and participated in their creativity.

  Hooker, on the other hand, has utilised the skills of many superb musicians – from the early days of Kirkland and Burns through the Vee Jay years with Eddie Taylor et al and the Motown moonlighters via the epochal Canned Heat sessions with Alan Wilson, right up to his ’90s collaborations with Carlos Santana, Robert Cray, Van Morrison and others – but at no time was he dependent on any of them for any aspect of his signature sound. There has never been anyone at any stage of his musical life who performed an equivalent function to those fulfilled by Hubert Sumlin or Willie Johnson in the Howlin’ Wolf bands, let alone the key-sideman roles played, in various editions of the great Muddy Waters combo, by the likes of Otis Spann, Jimmy Rogers, James Cotton or Little Walter. Muddy and the Wolf were leaders, not loners: Muddy was rather more gracious than the Wolf about utilizing and acknowledging the contributions of others, especially those of Willie Dixon. Hooker, by contrast, never had Willie Dixon, or any real equivalent, in his corner. Bernard Besman goaded him, Burns and Kirkland (literally) accompanied him, and more recently Roy Rogers rode exemplary shotgun, but Hooker has never, even for brief periods, served as anybody else’s mouthpiece. Every other bluesman who’s gotten even within hollering distance of Hooker’s status has done so with way more back-up than Hooker has ever enjoyed . . . or sought, or even tolerated. In this respect, as in so many others, Hooker has always been a cat who walked by himself.

  Which brings us to the all-important issue of patronage. The ability of any blues or R&B performer to hit that all-important affluent young white market was directly linked in the ’60s to the degree of sponsorship and endorsement which that performer received from big-name rock stars. Thus Chuck Berry’s career was effectively reignited by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who recorded several of his songs and introduced him and his repertoire to a new generation of listeners. The Beatles’ imprimatur also proved invaluable to the launch of the Tamla-Motown acts into the British charts, whilst the Stones (and their early-’60s understudies like the Yardbirds and the Pretty Things) also performed a similar function for Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley and Jimmy Reed (though Reed had sunk too far into alcoholism to capitalise significantly on this new-found opportunity). Subsequently, the Stones also gave Howlin’ Wolf his first domestic mass-audience exposure by insisting that he co-star with them on US TV’s top pop programme Shindig, and by employing Waters, Diddley, B.B. King and Buddy Guy & Junior Wells as on-tour opening acts.131 The final years of Muddy’s career also benefited from the four superb albums, commencing with 1977’s Hard Again, custom-tailored for him by Johnny Winter, even though Winter was at that time well past his sell-by date as a major arena-rocker.

  The 1968 ‘arrival’ of B.B. King as a frontline crossover attraction was heralded by a concert at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium where B.B. was introduced to the audience by local hero Mike Bloomfield, receiving a two-minute standing ovation from the hippies before he’d even played a note. Albert King’s funky Stax singles enabled him to get over more or less under his own steam, but the enthusiastic endorsements of Eric Clapton (who quoted an A. King solo verbatim on Cream’s ‘Strange Brew’ and covered his signature song ‘Born Under A Bad Sign’ on the following year’s Wheels Of Fire) and Jimi Hendrix certainly didn’t hurt. Albert’s first Fillmore appearance was on a bill with Hendrix, who praised him to Rolling Stone and knew the big guy’s stuff well enough to sing his solos note-for-note, either by himself or in unison with his pal Buddy Miles. For his part, Clapton also occupied the lead-guitar chair on The Howlin’ Wolf London Sessions, played
on and co-produced an entertaining but patchy album for Guy and Wells, and ‘adopted’ his teenage idol Freddie King, carrying him on several early-’70s tours, scoring him a new record deal and working with him in the studio. And in the 1970s Texas-to-Chicago-to-San Francisco transplant Steve Miller did his level best to transform Muddy Waters’ rotund harp alumnus James Cotton into a Beloved Entertainer on the Louis Armstrong model.

  So did Hooker enjoy patronage on the same exalted scale? Not really. Well, ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’ were beat-group staples – as acknowledged even by Spinal Tap, whose ‘Gimme Some Money’ (recorded in their early incarnation as the Thamesmen) is a thinly disguised ‘Boom Boom’ rip – with the Animals, Van Morrison’s Them and the Spencer Davis Group in the vanguard. Detroit’s MC5 featured ‘Motor City Is Burning’ (not surprisingly), The Doors borrowed ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ (ditto), and the J. Geils Band made a four-course meal out of ‘It Serves Me Right To Suffer’. And then, of course, there was Canned Heat, with whom we’ll deal elsewhere, pausing only to point out that during their commercial heyday, they also attempted to do the right thing by the late Texan guitar giant Albert Collins, ‘The Master Of The Telecaster’. However, Collins’ flawed Heat-sponsored recordings bombed in the marketplace and failed to ignite his career. As a result Collins ‘got disgusted’ with the music business and spent most of the ’70s in semi-retirement.