Next up: ‘You Talk Too Much’, a bootstomping uptempo piece which does little more than enable Hooker and Wilson to refine their partnership by checking out each others’ boogie chops. Grouchy, ill-tempered and misogynistic, it counterpoints the bin-done-wrong tenor of much of the session repertoire by suggesting that however flawed his spouse, and their relationship, may or may not have been, Hooker himself was possibly not always the easiest guy to live with.
‘You got about ten [songs] now,’ Hooker informs Hite and Taylor, ‘I told you, it don’t take me no three days to make no album.’ ‘It’s a triple album,’ ripostes a voice from the control room. ‘Well,’ Hooker replies, ‘you go for a triple album, you gotta go for triple money.’ And everybody breaks up laughing, Hooker loudest of all. ‘Lots of money!’ cajoles the producer. ‘This is a hit album. Don’t worry about that money, just keep rollin’.’ And it was, and they do. ‘Nothin’ but the best,’ says Hooker, rolling out one of his favourite catchphrases, ‘and later for the garbage.’ He then pays tribute to his studious, self-effacing new sidekick. ‘I dig this kid’s harmonica, you know. I don’t know how he follow me, but he do.’ Then, directly to Wilson, ‘You must’ve listened to my records all of your life. I just can’t lose you.’
What follows – after some brief verbal byplay concerning the legendarily awful cooking of the Grateful Dead’s PigPen – is a resounding endorsement of all of the above assertions, Hooker’s and the producers’ alike: nothing less than the definitive take of one of the key songs in Hooker’s repertoire. ‘Burnin’ Hell’ was also one of the earliest: Hooker had recorded it as a duet with Eddie Burns at one of his first United Sound sessions with Bernard Besman, and revisited it a decade or so later – at the same studio, as it happened – as an acoustic ‘folk-blues’ exercise for Riverside. The original ’49 take is clangy and clamorous; Burns’s harp and Hooker’s voice and guitar distorted and compressed, high-pitched and urgent, hopped-up and bursting with callow young-blood energy, a torrential outpouring of riffs and images. But there’s an aura of real danger to it: in terms of the Baptist codes in which both Hooker and Burns were raised, ‘Burnin’ Hell”s central assertion – ‘Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell/ where you go when you die, nobody can tell’ – is profoundly transgressive and challenging. (Interestingly enough, Son House, from whose epic ‘My Black Mama’ Hooker borrowed the lines, was both a deeply religious and a deeply bitter man who took lengthy sabbaticals from his blues life in order to preach the very gospel which the song claims to disdain.)
The Riverside take, cut ten years later, is more measured, but also more muted: Hooker’s acoustic guitar – and Bill Grauer’s dry, earnest folkie production – simply lacks the sheer wham of the electric instrument, and Hooker seems inhibited by the absence of an instrumental foil or a partner in crime. However, his voice has grown in richness and weight, the song seems ‘sorted-out’ in terms of both its musical structure and lyrical content, and experience has given Hooker audibly increased confidence in both his artistry and his message. Nevertheless, it’s the Hooker ’N Heat version which brings the song all the way home. Wilson’s performance is simply astonishing. It could be said that, whereas Eddie Burns had to create his original harp part on the fly, Wilson had the advantage of having studied Burns’s performance on the ’49 take over and over again, not only learning the basics of the part but the ability to improvise and elaborate on it; and thus only seems tall because he was standing on his predecessor’s shoulders. Even so, he – you should pardon the expression – burns all the way through. If, in movie terms, Hooker’s voice is the protagonist and his guitar and footstomp the location, then Wilson provides the lighting and the entire supporting cast.
And he drives Hooker into one of the landmark performances of his career. This particular ‘Burnin’ Hell’ is a blazing exposition of his core belief: a joyfully seamless reconciliation of religious faith and secular humanism. When he shouts ‘Ain’t no hell! Ain’t no hell!’ with guitar and foot pounding remorselessly and tirelessly, and Wilson’s harp strutting proudly by his side at the song’s raging climax, it is a whoop of celebration, a celebration of our ultimate victory as a species and a culture: our collective liberation from dread.
Plus it rocks. That is to say: it rocks like hell and it feels like heaven. Not surprisingly, Hooker often expressed an interest in re-recording it, and a fresh version, featuring Charlie Musselwhite on harp and postmodern slidemeister Ben Harper, turned up on 1998’s The Best Of Friends. This is how he himself unpacks the song: ‘The way I look at it, your heaven is here, and your hell is here. I feel like I’m in my heaven. A lotta people love me, I got a few dollars, a place to live . . . that’s my heaven. And lovin’ people, that’s heaven to me. But people that’s sufferin’, hungry, sleepin’ in the streets, don’t know where they next meal is comin’ from, out in the cold . . . they livin’ in hell. For a long time, my parents had me believin’ that there was a burnin’ hell and there was a heaven, but it has come to me in myself as I grew older and knowledge grew in me that if there is a God then he was an unjust God for burnin’ you for ever an’ ever, stickin’ fire to you. If God was a heavenly father, a good God, then he wouldn’t torture you and burn you. He wouldn’t do that. He wouldn’t see you burn.
‘But, in a way, he tortures you if you got nothin’ to eat and hungry, don’t know where you gonna get your next meal, don’t know where you gonna sleep at, half sick, can’t work, driftin’ from door to door . . . that’s your hell. But you’re not bein’ tortured with fire, where you get down in this hole being tortured with flames, with fire for ever. No. So you not gonna fly outta there with wings in the sky like an angel to milk and honey, as I was taught if you go to heaven. You not gonna do that. There’s nothin’ up there but sky. The only heaven is up there in the big jets and airplanes, with the beautiful ladies walkin’ in the aisles. That’s your heaven.’
Mmmm. Only if you’re in first class, John.
Hooker laughs at that. ‘Yeah, first class. That’s your heaven. You’ll never get it through to people, be cause the church has got ’em brainwashed to death, the ministers, the preachers. I believe in a Supreme Being, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t believe that there’s a hell that you’re gonna be tortured in. I believed in all of that, then I grew up and realized, and I wrote the song: “Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell, where you go when you die, nobody can tell.” Nobody knows. Nobody come back and tell you, “Hey, it’s all right, c’mon down.”’ He laughs again. ‘It ain’t all right. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m wrong.’
There was no way to top the intensity of ‘Burnin’ Hell’, so Hooker and Wilson very sensibly didn’t try. Instead, Hooker bounces through a light, playful but majorly groovelicious account of his perennial favourite, ‘Bottle Up And Go’, with Wilson vamping unobtrusively on piano. Then it’s back to business: with Wilson staying at the keyboard to sketch a few simple but majestic chords around him, Hooker delivers his 1970 State Of The Nation address, ‘The World Today’, in the hushed but firm tones of a man stating, as clearly and simply as he knows how, his personal credo. Wilson supports Hooker, but stays out of his way. I hear you, says his piano, yes I know. And that’s all he has to say. It’s all he needs to say.
‘Me and Alan gonna do this thing,’ says Hooker, by way of preamble. ‘It’s a slow-growin’ thing . . . it’s about what happenin’ today, and about what will be happenin’ maybe four or five years from today ’til things get down mellow’ – guitar lick alert – ‘all over the world. I want you to listen to this.’ And the foot starts pounding again, but now it’s slow, doomy, ominous. Looking around him, Hooker sees a world, and a nation, riven by ideological and tribal war. In the face of conflict, chaos and despair, with the Kent State shootings still a raw, bleeding wound in the fabric of the American psyche, Hooker reaffirms his faith both in the fundamental decency and goodwill of humanity, and in the ability of the young to learn from their elders’ mistakes.
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. . . I see so many young people
They fightin’ in every town . . . on campus
I don’t know what they right or wrong
But they tryin’ to fight for they rights
The old people
Leave the young kids alone
Let them run they own life . . .
It’s a brand new world today
Lookahere now
You find some of the old people
They’re not hip to the modern days
They want they kids to live like they live
But no
Them days are gone
It’s a brand new world
One way to solve they problem
It takes time
The old coots die
And leave it to the kids
It’ll be a beautiful world
Then there won’t be no fightin’ on campus any more
’Cause my kids and your kids
When they grow up
They’ll understand
All the old coots are gone in they grave
But as long as they live
There’s gonna be fightin’ in every town . . . and every campus
The young kids, they walkin’ out
The old folks, when they gone
It gonna be a better world to live in
’Cause the young kids
Are the world today.
And he stills stands by every word of that.
‘“The World Today”, I was paintin’ a picture when I sung that song,’ Hooker proudly proclaims. ‘And I had my reasons for doing that. It’s true. It’s a young folks’ world. The old folks should leave the young folks alone. The old coots, they tell they kids what to do, who to talk to, who to be with, who to associate with . . . when the old coots are dead, they can leave it to the young folks and they be able to get along. When the old coots dead and in they grave, then there’ll be peace. But [some people] teach they kids to be mean and rude and racial. They bring ’em up like that. It’s entered a lotta youngsters. They just came out with it: prejudice, hate. That’s on both sides, white and black kids. Hate and prejudice, fightin’ with each other. “I’m more than you, you more than me . . .” It’s not. You take a bunch of cattle, get together two-three hundred cattle, two-three hundred thousand, whatever you want to say. All colours of cattle, they gets along. They don’t look at it as white cattle, black cattle, yellow cattle: they all are cattles. They flock together. They gets along. When you put a lot of people together, like all nationalities, they don’t get along. Pretty soon, they wants to start fighting with each other. Like animals? Animals gets along better together than human beings.
‘I wrote that tune because of Kent State, and people fightin’ all over the world. I can write some of the heavy stuff, the meaningful stuff about what the world need. The world need peace. Need love.’ Again not surprisingly, he’s considering re-recording this piece, too. ‘I’m thinkin’ about it. I don’t want no band. I just want a piano. Just sittin’ there, like me and Alan Wilson. The piano’s so beautiful.’
Again, something completely different: ‘I Got My Eyes On You’, with Wilson switching instrument yet again, this time expertly shadowing Hooker on rhythm guitar, is ‘Dimples’ in all but name. And then the band arrive. With Wilson back on harp, they lollop through the Vee Jay-era ‘Whiskey And Wimmen’: Hooker clearly enjoying the opportunity to concentrate his energies on his singing and let the rhythm section take care of all the strenuous work in the engine-room. Significantly, it’s the first number on the album to require the studio get-out of a fade, as opposed to ‘live’, ending. On the slow blues, ‘Just Me And You’, Henry Vestine’s jagged, jittery lead guitar – something like Buddy Guy with a severe migraine – is somewhat at odds with the mellow, seductive mood Hooker seems to be trying to create, and ‘Let’s Make It’ is little more than an excuse for all concerned to have themselves some fun cantering around that old ‘Boom Boom’ corral. But – following a quick fadeout and fadein – it all comes good for ‘Peavine Special’, the ancient Charley Patton tune which was one of the first pieces Will Moore had taught his pre-adolescent stepson so many years before and so many miles away. Here Canned Heat’s familiarity and ease with the greater and lesser arcana of Delta blues – and their grasp of how to rock it up Memphis, as opposed to Chicago, style – is immaculately showcased: Wilson, back on guitar, playing open-tuned in his unique pianistic style. It sounds exactly the way you’d expect a bunch of guys would feel if they happened to be drinking moonshine in the back of a hay truck, on the most beautiful summer day in history, with all work done and money in their pockets. The greatest compliment we can pay Canned Heat is to say that were it not for the clarity of the track’s production values, they’d sound just like the band on a Howlin’ Wolf record: one made with Sam Phillips or Ike Turner in Memphis, rather than with Leonard Chess or Willie Dixon in Chicago.
And finally, there’s the boogie. Wilson kicks it in on harp: a boogie(-woogie) bugle-call if you ever did hear one. Puckishly enough, the assembled company named this particular episode in the decades-long boogie saga ‘Boogie Chillen No. 2’, but in fact it’s ‘Boogie Chillen Classic’ as per Hooker’s 1949 hit, Hastings Street, Henry’s Swing Club ’n’ all. The master is sittin’ in with the students, so the groove is a hybrid: more or less Canned Heat’s standard take on the boogie as (over)exposed on their ‘Fried Hockey’ and ‘Refried’ excusions, but with little darting jabs from Hooker’s guitar to steer them a little further his way, the shepherd keeping his flock to the correct path. But of course ‘Boogie Chillen’ didn’t last eleven and a half minutes in 1949, so we get some fairly hefty chunks of soloing in between the verses – Hooker caps Vestine’s characteristically angular and abrasive first eruption by asking the listeners, ‘Do you hear that cat on the harmonica?’ – and most of the song’s most celebrated constituent parts are out of the way after four-or-so minutes. Which leaves a lot of jamming, honours going inevitably to Wilson’s slippery, funky, fat-toned harp, and the reciprocal empathy with which Hooker goads him during the second half of his solo.
‘Boogie Chillen No. 2’ was the only track on Hooker ’N Heat on which Canned Heat appeared ‘as themselves’; though their trademarked boogie was essentially Hooker-derived and they were literally licking their chops at the opportunity to ‘boogie with The Hook’, Canned Heat’s boogie persona was deeply familiar to, and beloved by, fans of their live shows and albums (though not necessarily those whose acquanitance with the band was limited to their radio hits). The album was a moderate hit, peaking at No. 73 on the album charts in February of 1971. Not a fabulous result in terms of Canned Heat’s track record, but a superb score for what was basically a classicist’s John Lee Hooker album which made zero concessions to the fashions of the contemporary rock’n’soul mainstream.
One of Al Wilson’s final acts before his untimely death had been to contribute an erudite, affectionate liner-note for the first full-scale reissue of the cream of Bernard Besman’s Modern and Sensation masters. Alone, which brought the original versions of ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘Burnin’ Hell’, amongst others, back into the stores for the first time in many years, appeared on Specialty Records, but the real collectors’ thrill came when Besman cleaned out his vaults and leased a massive pile of outtakes and alternates from those same early years to United Artists. UA were thus able to ‘follow up’ Hooker ’N Heat with Coast To Coast Blues Band and, in 1973, a three-album set called John Lee Hooker’s Detroit.142 Besman’s interpretation of these events is not uncharacteristic.
‘Hooker, at that time, had kinda faded out,’ he claims. ‘He didn’t get revitalised until I leased the records to United Artists and he made some sessions with Canned Heat. That’s what revitalised him, Canned Heat. He made “Boogie Chillen” again with them, called it “Boogie Chillen No. 2”.’ Guitarist Freddie King also had his own take on things. He told Robert Neff and Anthony Connor:
Now the average recording compan
y, when they get ready to record a cat like . . . John Lee Hooker, they will get some cat about nineteen or twenty years old to produce it. He don’t know what the hell he’s doing; he just started playing yesterday. He don’t know what the guy wants. Like this Canned Heat produced this thing on John Lee. Good album! Really, I dug it. But it just don’t sound like John Lee. Only thing you need with John Lee is give him his guitar, and a piano player, and a drum, and a bass. And mostly just let him have it himself. Not too much psychedelic stuff . . .143
Two things: the first is that ABC didn’t consider that Hooker had ‘kinda faded out’. As far as they were concerned, the success of Hooker ’N Heat meant that he was hot – or, at any rate, hottish. And the second is that Skip Taylor, Bob Hite, Alan Wilson and the rest of the Canned Heat posse had worked their collective asses off precisely to give Hooker the kind of sympathetic setting which would allow him to present his music in as pure, uncut and untampered-with a state as possible. One wonders if you, I, John Lee and Freddie King have all been listening to the same record. Sadly, Freddie isn’t around any more and so we can’t ask him, but whilst his remarks seem inexplicable in the context of Hooker ’N Heat, they ring far truer in the context of the records Hooker made in its wake when he returned to the corporate bosom of ABC.
Boogie Man Page 53