Boogie Man

  Hooker’s first California album for ABC/Bluesway, cut the previous year, actually turned out to be his last: the parent label folded Bluesway the following year, switching Hooker and B.B. King to the main ABC imprint. If You Miss ’im . . . I Got ’im was a promising but ultimately misfired collaboration with his master-guitarist younger cousin Earl Hooker, already racked with TB and less than a year away from the end of his tragically short life. It was chiefly notable for its fine cover photo of John Lee and Earl, resplendent in cowboy drag, aboard a freight train: ‘Boom Boom’ reappeared as ‘Bang Bang Bang Bang’, and on the slower tunes Earl’s wah-wah slide guitar sparred uncomfortably for space with Jeff Carp’s amplified harp. Its undeniable highlights were the rocking ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ derivative ‘Baby Be Strong’ and two passionate free-form slow blues pieces, ‘If You Take Care Of Me, I’ll Take Care Of You’ and ‘I Wanna Be Your Puppy, Baby’.

  However, the next Great Leap Forward in Hooker’s career involved ABC neither as instigators nor direct beneficiaries.

  I sure like the way you boys boogie.

  John Lee Hooker to Canned Heat,

  quoted in liner notes to Hooker ’N Heat, 1971

  I saw two little white girls in a record shop recently and a John Lee Hooker record comes on. One looks at the other and says, ‘Listen to that. Somebody’s trying to sound like Canned Heat – doing a shitty job of it.’ I had to laugh but you know, it’s not funny.

  Johnny Otis interviewed in Rolling Stone

  by Pete Welding, December 1971

  Five years earlier, two Los Angeles blues buffs had formed a jugband. Both shy, moonfaced, introverted Alan ‘Blind Owl’ Wilson and boisterous, hirsute, sumo-scaled Bob ‘The Bear’ Hite were awesomely erudite country blues record collectors with a yen to perform the music they adored. Wilson was a scholarly multi-instrumentalist adept on guitar, harmonica and piano (he had been an active participant in the relaunch of Son House) and both sang: Hite in a rumbustious, barrel-chested, gravel-throated Charley Pattonesque mode and Wilson with a slithery, eerie falsetto reminiscent of Skip James at his most ectoplasmic. By 1967, the jugband had evolved, as mid-’60s jugbands were wont to do, into a full-on electric blues band. Their project was not so much to approximate the electric-downhome stylings of ’50s and ’60s Chicago blues as to go back to bedrock country blues sources and rock up their roots from scratch. The name of this band, derived from a 1928 Tommy Johnson record, was Canned Heat. Despite Bob Hite’s ludicrous pageboy haircut, they were one of the surprise minor hits of the Summer of Love’s Monterey Pop Festival. Overshadowed they may have been by Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, the Who and Janis Joplin’s startling debut with Big Brother and the Holding Company, but they nevertheless scored a deal with Liberty Records and had their first album in the stores by the end of the year.

  Canned Heat’s secret strength was that they were two bands in one. When Bob Hite sang, they were essentially a superior bar band, albeit one with deep blues roots: they were solid and earthy and they rocked. With Wilson up front, they conjured up a hallucinatory, ever-shifting blues dreamscape where nothing was quite what it seemed and everything flickered at the corner of the mind’s eye: they were eclectic and spooky and they insinuated. In the summer of 1968, the Al Wilson edition of Canned Heat enjoyed a massive and unlikely hit with ‘On the Road Again’: simultaneously as ‘psychedelic’ and as ‘authentic’ a whiteboy blues record as anything cut by anybody in the ’60s.

  But if it was Al Wilson who carried them onto pop radio and into the charts, it was Bob Hite’s jovial psychedelic populism – ‘Hi kids! This is the Bear!’ – which defined them onstage. That, and the boogie. Their second album, Boogie With Canned Heat, climaxed with ‘Fried Hockey Boogie’, a cut-down studio version of their protracted in-concert finale which took John Lee Hooker’s primal ‘Boogie Chillen’ riff, stuffed it full of steroids and hammered it into the ground with extended improv showcases for each member of the band and Hite as emcee. The follow-up, Livin’ The Blues, went further still: the double-album’s entire second disk was devoted to a live-in-concert ‘Refried Boogie’ which steamrollered along for a full forty minutes.141

  Needless to say, the paths of Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker inevitably crossed: even before Hooker relocated to California, students and master had met on the circuit. Hooker and the whimsically nicknamed Heatsters – as well as the Bear and the Blind Owl, there were ‘Sunflower’ (lead guitarist Henry Vestine), ‘Mole’ (bassist Larry Taylor) and ‘Fito’ (drummer Adolfo De La Parra) – became fast friends, but Al Wilson became more than that: an instant soul-mate. ‘I met him in LA,’ Hooker fondly recalls. ‘He was livin’ out there and they [Canned Heat] was playin’ someplace. They had my music down. They was playing someplace and I come down, and I met ’em all at the same time, the Bear, and little Wilson. We just hung out together, and I got to know him. We got together, started to get to know each other, and they was into me so, and they really wanted to play with me, they really wanted to do it. My agent and my manager got together and got us together, and we did this album, and it was so big.’

  In April of 1970, negotiations were complete, and ABC permitted Hooker a one-album holiday from his contract so that he and Canned Heat could team up. ‘This album’ was Hooker ’N’ Heat, cut at Liberty’s LA studio over three days the following month with Bob Hite and Canned Heat’s manager/producer Skip Taylor in the control room. It turned out to be a major landmark in Hooker’s recording career: an artistic and commercial triumph of resounding proportions which not only recaptured and recreated the authentic early Hooker sound of the Bernard Besman era, but managed to hit No. 73 in the pop album charts. There was only one cloud in the sunny skies over this seemingly blessed project, but it was a massive and lowering one: before the album had even been mixed, Alan Wilson was dead. A devoted ecologist and outdoorsman long before such preoccupations became fashionable, he was found in his sleeping bag, overdosed on barbiturates, in a national park in Torrance, California, surrounded by his beloved redwood trees. He had reportedly become extremely depressed after breaking up with his girlfriend. Hooker and the band were devastated, and the album appeared with a sombre cover photograph depicting John Lee and the surviving members slumped in a grungy, dimly lit hotel room. Behind them, a black-framed photograph of Wilson hangs on the wall.

  Suggest to Hooker that Hooker ’N Heat was one of the best records he made between the great early ones at the outset of his career and the autumnal renaissance which commenced with The Healer, and he will reply that it was absolutely ‘the best’. Opine that Al Wilson was the most gifted and creative of the White Blues Guys of the ’60s, and his response is equally uncompromising and unambiguous.

  ‘I say that man was a genius. You hit it on the button. You hit it just right. Alan Wilson was such a genius. The young man . . . he passed so young. We never know how he passed; some say he OD’ed, some say he committed suicide. I know one thing: he didn’t like sleepin’ in beds, he would stay out in the jungle outside. Not in the real heavy jungle, but in parks. He had a van with a camper on it, you know. He could sleep in there. He liked doin’ that. Places like Central Park, but not Central Park, places down LA. And practise his music, and write. He was a really, really nice person. A little strange, but he had things that he wanted to do. If you didn’t know him, you couldn’t get right into him. You didn’t know how to get into that frame he had around him. Inside him, that was beautiful. Beautiful. He studied his music so hard all the time that he just kept his mind on this music. He was a nice person, but . . . that’s why you thought he was really hard to talk to and get to, but he really wasn’t. He was just into his music. When I got with him, he had me down, my music down like you know your ABCs. He could follow me. Ain’t no way in the world I could lose him when I’m playing. He was just right on me. Alan Wilson you couldn’t lose. You know what he did before I knowed him and after I knowed him? He be study my music. Listenin’ to it while I’m sleepin’, I didn’t kno
w where he were. He had me down even before I knowed him. He say, “I just sit up listen to your music, man, listen to the way you play it. Sometimes you play it with direct changes, sometimes you wouldn’t.” He say he just got used to playin’ like that. Just listen to the records he playin’ with me: you can tell how good he followed me.’

  He certainly did. The primary reason for the extraordinarily high quality of Hooker ’N Heat is that Taylor and the band, displaying a blend of erudition and self-effacement unsurpassed amongst the plethora of blues legend/rockstar acolyte collaborations of the time, were determined to cut a John Lee Hooker album featuring Canned Heat rather than a Canned Heat album featuring John Lee Hooker. In deference to the band’s chart-riding status, the record was officially credited to ‘Canned Heat & John Lee Hooker’, but there’s absolutely no doubt about whose record it really is. Nor, for that matter, whose session it was. There is a highly engaging, involving live-in-the-studio semi-documentary vibe to Hooker ’N Heat: the studio chatter, Hooker’s warm-up guitar runs and the homiletic preambles which stitch the songs together create a genuine sense of occasion, a real feel of the atmosphere in the room as the record is being made. Hooker ’N Heat sounds as if it took little longer to record than it does to play.

  The secondary reason was that Hooker himself was then at the absolute peak of his powers: simultaneously still youthful and energetic enough to pump out the boogie with an awe-inspiringly tireless ferocity; and sufficiently tempered by age and bitter experience to bring to the music a depth and richness to which the comparatively young and callow Hooker of twenty years earlier could never have aspired. At 53 years of age and still emotionally raw and spiritually bleeding from the traumatic collapse of his marriage, the disintegration of his family and his enforced exile from the Motor City, Hooker was not only more than ready to boogie, but prepared to bring the full powers of his art to bear on the bluesman’s most pressing priority: the healing of the self by the self and, by extension, the healing of others.

  The liner notes – pseudonymously attributed to ‘Boogie Chillen’ but most likely composed by Taylor and Hite – provide an illuminating background to the sessions:

  [Hooker] arrived for the session wearing a plaid cap, leather jacket, black satin shirt and some old dress slacks and carrying the old Epiphone guitar which had been round the world more than once. Once at the studio, we tried out about eight really ancient amps before finding the one that had that real ‘Hooker’ sound – one we hadn’t heard on John’s records for a long, long time. We built a plywood platform for John to sit on while he played. An old Silver-tone amp rested a few feet away. One mike on the amp, one for his voice, and one to pick up John’s stompin’ – he never quits stompin’! Never far away, a bottle of Chivas Regal and a cup of water to smooth it down.

  The format for the album was relatively straightforward. Hooker would kick off the proceedings on his own, harking back to his vintage Detroit years by performing a few solo tunes in his classic style. Then Wilson would join him for a fistful of duets, playing harp, guitar or piano as required. Finally, the rest of the band would pile in for a set of full-tilt ensemble performances climaxing with – what else? – a marathon boogie. Canned Heat’s line-up had been going through the early stages of what was to become an almost permanent state of turmoil and upheaval. Henry Vestine was freshly back in the fold after a temporary absence during which his lead-guitar chair had been occupied by Harvey Mandel, a former Chicago running buddy of Charlie Musselwhite’s who’d stuck around long enough to appear with the band at Woodstock, participate in a European tour and play on their third hit single, ‘Let’s Work Together’. Vestine had quit after a falling-out with Larry Taylor, and the return of ‘Sunflower’ possibly had something to do with Taylor’s eventual departure and subsequent replacement by Antonio De La Barreda.

  Hite and Taylor’s preparations paid off, big time. The elderly pawnshop amplifier gave Old Blondie, Hooker’s trusty six-string companion, that sublime combination of power, sweetness, clank and grime which constitutes blues guitar Tone Heaven. The miked-up footstomp – a time-honoured Besman trick recycled by many subsequent Hooker producers, including Bob Thiele on It Serve Me Right To Suffer – put a solidly percussive four-to-the-bar thunk into each and every groove. And Hooker’s mature voice was as strong and flexible as even his most demanding admirer could possibly desire: his command of timbral resource and vocal nuance never greater.

  ‘Gotta get myself together here,’ murmurs Hooker before he kicks into his opening number, but from the first pounding boot and bass-string riff, it was utterly apparent just how ‘together’ he was. He sounded huge: the biggest one-man-band in the world. ‘Messin’ With The Hook’ drew into Hooker’s repertoire one of Chicago harpist Junior Wells’s signature songs: a tight, riffy, danceable piece which (unusually in the Chicago blues canon) emphasised the singer’s youth in the lyric. Muddy Waters, rarely averse to borrowing songs from juniors and Juniors alike – he’d heisted Bo Diddley’s 1955 ‘I’m A Man’ almost immediately on its release – emphasised his own patriarchal status when he reworked it as ‘Messin’ With The Man’, but Hooker went further, personalising it completely. In fact, he Hookerised and deconstructed it so thoroughly that by the time he was done with the song, it bore about as much resemblance to the Wells original as Peking Duck does to a duck.

  ‘The Feelin’ Is Gone’ borrows its title and its agenda, though not much else, from the same 1951 Roy Hawkins tune upon which B.B. King had based ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, his breakthrough hit of the previous year. Hooker seems tentative at the start of this free-form slow blues: he’s so worried, babe, he don’t know what to do, babe. But soon, via a lyrical allusion to Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Killing Floor’, the ambiguity disappears, swept away by the same tidal waves of grief and anger above which Hooker is struggling to keep his head, and his heart. ‘I done got over it, babe,’ he defiantly declaims: like Fox Mulder in The X-Files, he wants to believe. And we want to believe him. But he’s not quite convinced. And neither are we.

  But then he convinces himself, and us. ‘The feelin’ is gone from me, babe,’ he hollers, over and over again: the process of catharsis enacting itself before our very ears. This achieved, he quietens down, secure in his newfound certainty. ‘I done got over it, babe,’ he tells us once more, before – whammp! – one final chord, like a mulekick to the spine, slams the song to a close.

  ‘[Play something] a little funky,’ suggests Taylor. ‘A little boogie?’ offers Hooker. ‘A little funky,’ repeats the producer. ‘Okay,’ says Hooker, and launches into ‘Send Me Your Pillow’, from the 1962 Big Soul sessions. By now he’s moved up a gear or six into total overdrive: voice, guitar and foot-stomp locked into perfect sync and locomoting with an irresistible surge of pure power. If Hooker’s credentials as a grandmaster of groove needed any confirmation, this is where you’d go to get it: no solo performer has ever rocked harder. The propulsive force behind this astonishing performance is raw need: loneliness and desire calling out, crying out, reaching out into the void.

  By way of decompression, it is succeeded by ‘Sittin’ Here Thinkin”, a meditative slow blues in the ‘Wednesday Evenin” mode with Hooker’s brooding, abstracted footstomp and vocal offset by eloquent, quicksilver guitar flurries, which Hooker had first cut (as ‘Sittin’ And Thinkin”) for Joe Von Battle back at the very dawn of his career. Then it’s back to the boogie for ‘Meet Me In The Bottom’, a traditional Delta piece best-known via Howlin’ Wolf’s 1961 interpretation ‘Down In The Bottom’: in characteristic Hooker fashion, the intensity deepens and the pulse accelerates even as the structure unravels.

  The next number concerned a topic clearly at the forefront of Hooker’s mind, if not exactly close to his heart. Garnished with stormy guitar rumbles and flashes, ‘Alimonia Blues’ looks musically back to the same ‘Wednesday Evenin” template he had used a little earlier on ‘Sittin’ Here Thinkin”, and forward lyrically to the epic ‘Stripped Me Naked’ he would re
cord more than twenty years later with Carlos Santana. In terse, sparse lyrical strokes, Hooker sketches a scenario in which he’s hauled before a judge to debate alimony, child support and similar painful stuff. It’s the last of the session’s solo pieces.

  ‘We’re gonna bring Alan out now, John,’ announces a voice from the control room. ‘You wanna take a little breather?’ But it’s straight into ‘Drifter’, a distant scion of the extended slow-blues song-family Hooker derived from Charles Brown’s ‘Driftin’ Blues’ with the Blind Owl’s reverb-soaked amplified harmonica illuminating Hooker’s desolate blues-scape like neon lights through dockside fog. If Wilson’s entry seems tentative, it’s because he’s listening: not just with his ears, but seemingly with his entire nervous system. His acute sensitivity and empathy with Hooker’s celebrated idiosyncrasies are nothing short of astounding: it’s as if he’s extending temporal antennae into the immediate future to predict exactly where Hooker is about to go. Seemingly, he was capable of anticipating not only whether or not Hooker is about to leave a space, but whether that space is one which should be left empty or filled by a harp intervention.

  Furthermore, Wilson’s harp sound is utterly extraordinary: talky and squawky but never thin or flimsy; huge and rich but never flabby or cloying. Every timbral and stylistic resource in the blues-harp tradition seems to be literally at the tip of his tongue, to be alluded to or utilised at will, and yet he seems free of the need to plagiarise, to ape or mimic the major stylists he has evidently studied so assiduously. Whether delicately simmering like a muted Hammond organ or brassily blasting like a trombone from hell, he is utterly his own man.

  When Hooker works with accompaniment from others, a variety of things can happen. If the accompaniment is insensitive and overbearing, it can trample him underfoot like a herd of elephants rampaging through a rose garden. If it’s sympathetic and solid and supportive – like The Coast To Coast Blues Band, for example – he’ll sit on it as if it was a comfortable, reliable chair. But if it’s empathic and inspired, genuine sparks will fly, and he’ll respond and engage: ‘Drifter’ ends with an electrifying call-and-response between Hooker’s voice and Wilson’s harp which creates real anticipation for what is about to follow. They even hit the final chord in perfect unison: Hooker’s guitar slams and Wilson’s harp sizzles out of the sustain.