Boogie Man

Much of Free Beer And Chicken finds Hooker delving into the funk. The opening ‘Make It Funky’ heists its groove from James Brown and features Hooker exhorting the object of his affections to ‘walk funky’; ‘713 Blues’ and ‘714 Blues’ – a single performance inexplicably listed as two titles – is a danceable jam into which Hooker delays his entry for a full three-and-a-half minutes, at which point his unmistakeable guitar elbows authoritatively into the mix; and ‘Homework’, derived lyrically from a ’60s Otis Rush tune and groovalistically from The Meters’ New Orleans bump ’n’ grind and The Pointer Sisters’ then-recent polyrhythm orgy ‘How Long (Bet You Got A Chick On The Side)’. Hooker sounds totally at home with the funk, and in many ways it represented a far more constructive contemporary direction for him than the previous ABC albums’ hackneyed hard-rock post-blues. One simply wishes that Michel had given these tracks a funk, rather than rock, mix: in other words: more bass and drums, less rhythm guitar.

  On the blues side of the fence, there’s a stolid, workmanlike ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’, sung dutifully rather than enthusiastically by Hooker and featuring a highly incongruous synthesizer boinging along with the guitars; a fabulous ‘Bluebird’ which is the most committed performance of the entire album, pitting Hooker’s impassioned vocal against Robert Hooker’s gorgeous electric piano, Luther Tucker’s stinging, economical B.B.-alike guitar, and a restrained but eloquent horn-section overdub which gives the track the scale and drama of ABC’s Bobby Bland records of the same period. And then there’s the frankly bizarre stuff: Hooker’s highly traditional reading of the Delta staple ‘Sitting On Top Of The World’, performed with his guitar in modal tuning, is gradually overlaid with African percussion, kalimba and Sugarcane Harris in an intriguing experiment that gradually gets totally out of hand.

  ‘Five Long Years’ features thunderous, rolling Mark Naftalin piano and a guest vocal from Joe Cocker. At least, Hooker is singing ‘Five Long Years’; Cocker is singing something else entirely. He doesn’t so much sound as if he’s on a different session as a different planet. When he sings, ‘Everything she does is so premeditated/I get down and be sick’, you believe him. The album winds up with something called ‘(You’ll Never Amount To Anything If You Don’t Go To) Collage (A Fortuitous Concatenation Of Events)’, and if you believe that John Lee Hooker would invent a title like that himself, then maybe we’d better have us a talk. Stitched together from three distinct fragments linked by a capella horns, it’s a strange, parallel-(blues-) world equivalent of the ‘long medley’ which climaxed the Beatles’ Abbey Road. Both works used adroit studio tricknology to rescue from the bin pieces which could never have stood alone; both served as the closing cuts for the albums on which they appeared; and both served as the finales for the respective artists’ careers: or, at least, for specific phases of those careers. The Beatles, after all, carried on as four solo artists, and Hooker . . . well, we shall see.

  ‘Collage’ begins with ‘I Know How To Rock’, a brief variation on ‘Rock Me Baby’ – prefaced by Hooker accusing Michel of turning him into a rock singer – shifts into ‘Nothing But The Best’, which sounds like the final moments of a ‘Boogie With The Hook’ outtake, and winds up with a lengthy slow blues entitled ‘The Scratch’, sung by and credited to ‘J. Cocker’, who declaims, ‘I couldn’t care less if it rains in the studio’. At one point you hear him asking Michel, ‘Who’s paying for the [studio] time?’: one sympathises. Then Hooker sings a single, magisterial verse from ‘Sally Mae’, and it’s over.

  As was Hooker’s stint with ABC and, indeed, his relationship with the mainstream of the music industry. Ed Michel did indeed record Hooker again, albeit in the highly uncharacteristic role of backup guest star, alongside Cliff Coulter, Jesse Ed Davis, Mel Brown and other stalwarts, on a May ’72 Lightnin’ Hopkins session cut in LA for an indie-label start-up which never quite got off the ground. Ominously, the tapes for the resulting album, It’s A Sin To Be Rich, languished unmixed in the can,144 which was pretty much par for Hooker’s ’70s-and-early-’80s course. For the next decade and a half, John Lee Hooker was sighted only slightly more frequently than Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster.

  CSM: I know you weren’t happy in the ’70s and the early ’80s, because it’s like pulling teeth trying to get you to talk about it, man.

  JLH: There’s a lot of misery, hatred, disappointment . . . all that. I hate to talk about it . . . but it’s there. There’s a space in there . . . a lot of them were rough years.

  Conversation, 1994

  On the face of it, things had been looking good. ‘After [Hooker] moved to California, as far as his career went, that was one of the best things he ever did,’ says Robert Hooker. ‘He just got more popular, more popular, more popular.’ Paul Mathis agrees: ‘He was gettin’ bigger’n’ bigger’n’ bigger. His records was in the shops, records all over the place.’

  That much is certainly true. By the early ’70s, the ‘John Lee Hooker’ racks in the record stores were filled to bursting point. In addition to Hooker ’N Heat and the ABC stuff, there were a whole slew of Besman reissues from a variety of labels, drawing on both the original Modern and Sensation masters and the out-takes and alternates from the sessions which produced them; plus compilations, released by Chess, Atlantic and others, of moonlight sessions from the same era, and various Vee Jay and Riverside albums. Plus Hooker’s material remained current in the repertoires of other artists: Jim Morrison performed ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ on the Doors’ LA Woman, and J. Geils Band were making a showstopper out of ‘Serve Me Right To Suffer’, as documented on their live album Full House. However, it was at this point that Hooker opted for life without a recording contract.

  ‘ABC was my last label that I was on, until I come to this label that I’m on now,’ says Hooker. ‘I had give up recording on one condition. The record companies was so crooked . . . they all was. They weren’t as crooked as Chess and Vee Jay, but they all was takin’ the blues singers . . . by storm. You know you made ’em money, but you didn’t get nothin’, just little giblets here and there. No statement. They would never send out a record statement so you know like how much you earned and stuff, y’know? And I give it up. I said, “Heck, I don’t want to do this.” That’s the way I was then. You wanted to live, to survive, you couldn’t depend on no record company. You couldn’t depend on record sales. Six months come without proper accounting, you wouldn’t get nothin’. They say they hadn’t sold this, didn’t do that, and you knowed better. That turned you plumb ’gainst all record companies. I just quit. ’

  And although Hooker may have learned to love Free Beer And Chicken in retrospect, he certainly didn’t like it at the time. ‘ABC and the rest of ’em was trying to turn me into something that I wasn’t. I did it, but that wasn’t like John Lee Hooker’s hard old stuff, you know. You knew it was me, but with all the other stuff built around it: chorus girls, horns . . .’

  ‘Well,’ says Charlie Musselwhite, ‘John’s attitude was probably “If they wan’ give me some money to make this record, I’m gonna take it.”’

  Abandoning his record deal and declining to seek another one left Hooker no option bar earning all his money on the road, which – then as now – is a singularly hard way to live. ‘There was a gap in there where I wasn’t doin’ nothin’. I depended on that because I was sick of record companies. I said, “Hey, I’m just gonna tour.” I got a name, everybody know me, I can make some money, but there’s just a certain amount of money I can make, you know? I couldn’t make the big, big bucks, but everybody know John Lee Hooker. I could go out there and get booked and bring home some bacon that pay bills and a few dollars to put in the bank.’

  And barring the odd live album, guest appearance and special project – it was this era which created the legend that, as Robert Christgau put it some years later when reviewing The Healer, ‘Hook will . . . walk anybody into the studio for cash up front’ – that was how it remained until the dusk of the ’80s. And it didn’t in
volve living large. Whilst Led Zeppelin, the Who, the Rolling Stones and other rock superstars of the time were travelling in private jets, throwing TV sets out of the windows of some of the finest hotels in America and snorting cocaine from groupies’ navels, John Lee Hooker led a rather more modest working lifestyle. In November 1972, Melody Maker published a snapshot, by the Montreal-based journalist Bill Mann, of a somewhat different existence.

  You really wouldn’t expect John Lee Hooker to stay in the best hotels, and he doesn’t. He’s in Montreal for the second time in as many months, and the 55-year-old blues master is ensconced in a seven-pound-a-night room in a hotel which sits next to several plusher, more expensive inns. Hooker is taking pills for blood pressure. A month ago, he had to cancel the second week of a highly successful engagement here on doctor’s orders and fly back to Oakland. ‘I got the flu now,’ he says, ‘I feel just lousy.’

  The hotel has a nice restaurant, but John Lee is eating out of a grocery bag. He opens a briefcase and meticulously pulls some silverware out of it and sets it on a lamp table. Out of the bag comes a half-loaf of bread and some packaged sandwich meat. His son Robert is watching something on TV across the room. ‘Don’t need to eat out on the town,’ says John Lee. ‘This here’s plenty good enough for dinner.’ . . .

  Clearly, there was more to the notion of ‘living the blues’ than simply using the phrase as an album title.

  As Bill Mann indicates, Hooker had by this point found himself a Bay Area base of operations. ‘When I first come out [to California] in 1970, I lived on 13th Street about two years, maybe longer, and then from there I bought a house in Oakland, on Buenaventura. Charlie Musselwhite stayed with me while I was there. He lived with me there for a while, and he would go backwards and forwards. He had this wife and sometimes they didn’t get along too good, you know. And he being a really good friend of mine, he would come stay with me whenever they have a falling out. Then he’d go back. I lived there for a few years, might’ve been five years, I don’t know.’

  Hooker didn’t just ‘live’ in Oakland: he was an active member of the community. In 1973, Bobby Seale, co-founder with Huey P. Newton of the Black Panther Party For Self-Defence, ran for Mayor of Oakland, and Hooker played a benefit concert for his campaign, which yielded a highly respectable showing of over 42,000 votes. Elaine Brown, also a former Chair of the Panthers, was running for the city council on the same ticket: she remembers Hooker’s ‘tremendous sense of humour [and] his commitment to our struggle’.145

  On and off, Robert and Junior stayed with their father in Oakland. It is a period which none of the principals are happy to discuss in any significant detail. ‘I don’t wanna talk about it,’ Hooker says flatly. ‘It was concerning the drugs, annuhruh . . . no comment. Let’s talk about the good stuff.’

  Charlie Musselwhite is a little more forthcoming, but not much more. ‘I know Junior pretty well . . . probably I shouldn’t get into that,’ he says. ‘He’s a good guy, though. John used to drink a bit. I don’t think he drinks much at all any more, maybe a little beer. But he used to drink’ – he laughs – ‘and I did too, but not any more. John remembers me when I was drinkin’. In fact, John used to put me up. I didn’t have no place to go, I could stay at his house in Oakland. First he had an apartment in Oakland – and I remember that first place he moved to – and then I think the next move was to a home in Oakland, and Robert and Junior were living there too. And I was living there . . . and we were just having a party.’ He laughs again. ‘I think he’d been cutting down [on booze] by that point, and I was not showin’ any inclination to cut down. I never saw a bad side to John, but I can imagine that if somebody pushed him, he’d push back. He wouldn’t take anything from anybody. He always just wanted to enjoy himself. He liked the ladies and . . . I’ve heard stories, but they’re only hearsay, so I won’t go into those. And John’s seen me in some predicaments he probably wouldn’t tell you about.’

  ‘Old Charlie Musselwhite!’ chuckles Robert Hooker. ‘He still playin’ the blues?’ Answered in the affirmative and informed that Musselwhite had said the equivalent of ‘A lotta stuff went down in that house, and I ain’t gonna tell you about it’, he laughs even harder. ‘Oh yeah, man. Yeah. Whoo-oo. Mm-hm. Yeah, it did, man. Yup. I stayed with my daddy at the house on Buenaventura for maybe about three years. Then I went back to Detroit, Michigan. I wasn’t as bad out with my dad as I was later on back in Detroit. Detroit was really, really my downfall. I was bad in California, but Detroit was . . . that wicked city, Detroit, Michigan.’

  Like his brother, Robert had gotten strung out on drugs. Ultimately, Robert found his way out through the church. Junior’s been through the church, too; as well as the music business and an entrepreneurial stint running Brother John’s Tree Service, but he’s still searching. ‘He’s in San Quentin. San Quentin jail, man. He still in that wild life, man. He used to play with my daddy. He made an album . . . life is just too much for him. Yeah. Man, I ain’t seen him . . . mm, boy, been a long time since I seen him. See, last time I was out here [in California], about two-three years ago, he was suppose to come out and see me, but he never show up. He was probably ’shamed, you know what I mean? Too ’shamed to come out and see me, you know? See, I tell you, he used to be in church, so it was a letdown. That’s probably what it was. But it still got a hold on him. He’s strong.

  ‘My brother, he let [John Lee Senior] down, man. He let him down. He was in a different religion to me, but he was in [the church] three-four years, and my daddy was proud of him, man. He changed his life, he was workin’, got his own business, man, you know? And he just . . . pssheew. He let my daddy down, man. Lost his job, his business went under, went back into that old raggedy life . . . and that’ll hurt a father, man. I’m glad I’m able to stand, and I’m still standin’. He got one son he can really look to and say I’m proud of, and he can continue sayin’ that, because I’m gonna keep on livin’ for Jesus, brother, I’m gonna keep on standin’. Man, my brother, he started messin’ up probably about the age of fourteen years old. Thirteen, fourteen, somethin’ like that. Temptations was there. He just couldn’t handle it.’

  Maude Hooker is rather more indulgent towards her errant eldest son. ‘Both of the boys used to go out with him every once in a while,’ she says. ‘Robert’s a good piano player, and he can play organ. He used to play in the basement. Bought him an organ, piano, and put it in the basement. He used to play it, and he learned hmself. Nobody taught him anything, he just learned. John Junior was a minister also. He was out there in the world and then he came in and he joined church too. He was really good, too. He could play the guitar and the piano, drums, and he could sing. He could do it all. Bless his heart . . .’

  As if looking after two wild young sons whilst making a living on the road wasn’t enough, John Lee Hooker had taken on an even more daunting task. Even after all that had happened during his marriage and the rancorous divorce which terminated it, he reassembled his shattered Detroit family out on the West Coast, flying Maude out to join him and the boys in California. ‘He sent for all of us to come out here, really, truly,’ says Maude. ‘He sent for me and the kids and so we came out here and we just packed up and left Detroit, first myself and the three smaller kids, because Robert and Junior, they was already here. He called and asked did we want to come out here. We came out here and stayed for awhile, and then we went back home, packed everything and moved on out here. Then Zakiya, then Diane, so we all moved except Robert. He’s still back East with his family.’

  It was an act of emotional – as well as financial – generosity which staggered observers and participants alike. ‘That just boggled my mind,’ remembers Zakiya Hooker. ‘That’s how I realized that he is such a good person. I stayed [in Detroit] for a little while, but my marriage got into dire straits because my husband got strung out on drugs and just couldn’t handle himself, so my father told me to come out here. Maude was already here. I’ve never understood why. I think it’s because my f
ather just doesn’t hold grudges.’

  Robert Hooker agrees, big time. ‘Show you how good of a man he is, how many mens is you gonna find – all right? – that the wife and the husband get divorced, and the man still look out for the divorced wife, like she still his wife? Huh? You see what I’m talkin’ about? Bought her a car, and he just looks out for her . . . you ain’t gonna find too many men like that. I’m tellin’ you, man. That’s how good of a man he is. Down-to-earth. Good man. Mm-hm. Yeah.’

  Not everybody thinks that this was ultimately a great idea. Sometimes Hooker himself regrets his decision, but – as with all the decisions he has taken in his life – he nevertheless stands by it. Paul Mathis is, at best, ambivalent. ‘He’s got this firm belief that charity begins at home,’ says Hooker’s former brother-in-law. ‘I would go so far as to say that he is a bit too generous. Like an old friend of mine told me one time, I was the type of guy go buy a case of wine and a couple bottles of whiskey: ‘Have a drink, have a drink, have a drink.’ This old fella told me, “One thing about you, Mathis . . .” I said, “What’s that, my man?” He said, “You too generous to your friends.” And I thought about that. And then the friends come around: “Hey, you got anything?” “No, I ain’t got nothing, man. Ain’t got no more liquor.” And then there were no more friends. No more affection. You cannot buy love. You cannot manufacture it. And that’s what bothers me now. Too much love is given out. It’s paid for, but it never comes back. But then, you know, that’s John Lee for you, you see. Most people are taking John for granted. It happens, and it bothers me.’

  Mathis freely acknowledges that not many people would split up with their wife, move 3,000 miles away, and then fly her out and get her a house. ‘Never, but that’s what he done. I think he’s kinda seein’ that that was a mistake. I think he’s finally beginning to see that he shouldn’t’a done that. Should’a left ’em stay where they were. He’s payin’ for love he’s not gettin’, and that is a fact.’