Boogie Man

  ‘They send him on a lot of guilt trips,’ says Zakiya. ‘Horrific guilt trips. I always say to him, “You shouldn’t ever be guilty about anything. You’ve done more than anybody else would have done.” The more he gives, the more they want, and it’s not like they’re doing some thing constructive with it. It’s just I-want-I-want-I-want. He’s bought my mom maybe three or four [cars], and Diane I don’t know how many. Her first house . . . she lost it; it caught fire and she took the insurance money and didn’t do anything with it, and they foreclosed on the house, so he went and bought her another house. When I moved into this house [in Oakland], he had originally bought this house for my mom, and so she decided that she was gonna go back to Detroit and get married. So she moved out of the house and I moved in. At that time I was still looking for a job, I had gotten on welfare. That’s when I got the job with the police department, and I was finally able to get off welfare, thank God. There was trouble keeping the house, be cause it was just me. There was nobody else; but I’m the only one who’s managed to keep anything that he’s ever given them. My mom, he bought her this house. She didn’t want this one, so when she came back he bought her another house.’

  ‘Soon she lost the house,’ says Hooker. ‘After a couple, two or three years, she lost the house. That be the partyin’ goin’ on with the money she had. When I left her, you know, she was a partyin’ woman. Blew that right away, couldn’t keep up the payments. You know when you got money, everybody around you; they knowed she had a little money then. All her so-called-to-be friends; they ain’t no friends.’ He laughs. ‘They cleaned her out – voom!’

  It cannot be repeated too often that whilst these shenanigans were going on, Hooker was spending most of his time on the road, earning the money to finance all this mess the hard way: one piece at a time. To be precise, he was spending most of his time on the blues circuit. In a 1974 interview with Neff and Connor, Howlin’ Wolf’s former saxophonist Eddie Shaw provided as crisp and evocative a thumbnail sketch of the way things were blueswise at that time as anyone could possibly desire:

  A club-owner can tell you. It’s not that many travelling blues musicians to go around. You got fifteen to twenty good blues artists that got groups working on the road. Freddie King. Albert King. B.B. King. Muddy Waters. Howlin’ Wolf. Junior Wells and Buddy Guy. James Cotton. Bo Diddley. John Lee Hooker. Hound Dog Taylor. Willie Dixon, who’s just started out travelling again. Luther Allison that’s doing fair now. Otis Rush. Jimmy Dawkins. Mighty Joe Young that teams up with Koko Taylor. Jimmy Reed, who’s in and out. Johnny Littlejohn. This girl from California – Big Mama Thornton got a pretty big band now. Charlie Musselwhite. Paul Butterfield and his blues band. Shakey Horton’s getting him a band together and doing a few gigs now. Lowell Fulson is doing a few things. That’s about all I can recall. So from a club-owner’s point of view, there’s not enough good artists to fill fifty-two weeks – to bring in a winner every week. So clubs use the same artists three or four times a year.

  Which, essentially, meant that a blues star with a solid ‘name’ and a capacity for hard work could make some kind of a living without having to cater to fleeting commercial whims or compete with rock superstars to court the mass-market dollar. The blues circuit was there whether or not there was any kind of ‘blues boom’ going on in the mainstream, which was just as well, because in the mid-’70s there definitely wasn’t. By the time Muddy Waters left Chess in 1977 to sign with Columbia via its Blue Sky subsidiary – an upheaval equivalent, in blues terms, to the Eiffel Tower deciding that it was bored with Paris and fancied a spell in Rome instead – you didn’t even have to be the six-fingered Hound Dog Taylor to count the number of legit blues guys with major-label record deals on one hand. Muddy was with Columbia; B.B. King and Bobby Bland were still with ABC; Albert King was still on Stax (technically an indie rather than a major label, but regarded as a major for its impressive chart performance and impeccable musical cred) and . . . that was it.

  The blues circuit was like some kind of weird parallel universe; or one of those dimensions, a heartbeat away from our own, in which Captain Kirk would get trapped on Star Trek,146 leaving him invisible, inaudible and intangible to his colleagues on the Enterprise. A whole community of musicians, many of whom were well-known – at least by name and Greatest Hits – to a large number of rock fans, existing just around a cultural corner which may as well have been a galaxy away.

  The echt blues-circuit club was and is Antone’s, in Austin, Texas. The joint is way better-known than its competitors elsewhere in the US, though, because in the late ’70s it became the hub of a thriving regional blues scene which nurtured the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan and his elder brother Jimmie, lead guitarist of the Fabulous Thunderbirds, and which enabled the club to draw on a pool of extraordinarily talented local musicians for its house band. Its founder-proprietor, Cliff Antone, recalls, ‘In 1975, I was downstairs in my club, and someone told me, “Hey, phone for you,” and I said, “Who is it?” and they said, “John Lee Hooker.” Went upstairs and he said, “Wuh-wuh-wuh-Antone, I heard you have a nice club down there and man, I really want to come play.” I said, “Well look, John Lee, you’re welcome any time you want. You got a home long as I got one.” So he came down. I had Luther Tucker, one of the few people who really know how to back him up. There’s only one person who knew how to better, and that was Eddie Taylor. That’s the missing link. Eddie Taylor, man. Vee Jay Records, man. That was the stuff, man. And John Lee’ll tell you, Eddie Taylor was the greatest musician who ever lived. Those were the greatest records John Lee ever made, with Eddie Taylor behind him. Anyhow, the first time I had him up we had Luther Tucker playing with him, and Jimmie Vaughan and all those guys . . . the second time I had Big Walter Horton, the harmonica man who had played with John Lee many times before, Eddie Taylor, and Hubert Sumlin, the Howlin’ Wolf guitarist. I got ’em all, and I recorded it all on a mobile unit and I still have the tapes. I’ve never released ’em yet, but John Lee gave me permission to release ’em. That was ’75, ’76, those years. Then he would call and say, “I wanna come to Austin, just visit, take a vacation here”, because we were that good of friends, you know? He would come and just spend the week with us. He has lots of friends in Austin, lots of people that really like him. To hear him play the lead guitar with one finger like he does is one of the most awesome things I ever heard in my life, man.’ For the next thirteen years, Hooker was a regular visitor to Antone’s.

  Economic pressures brought the blues community even closer together. The performers’ paths would cross and recross on club, college and festival gigs, and, not surprisingly, they would hang out together off the bandstand. Despite cutting four albums for BluesWay, Jimmy Reed had fumbled his chance for a ’60s comeback, but he was still hanging in there. Hooker has fond, if acerbic, memories of the heavy-drinking Reed, who eventually quit the bottle before dying in his sleep, in Oakland, in 1976.

  ‘He was such a gentleman,’ Hooker recalls affectionately. ‘He had a drinking problem, like so many people does, musicians ’specially. It wasn’t no disgrace and shame, but he did. So many people strung out on alcohol, dope and everything else. I had bought this car, a brand new Buick. We was workin’ out of LA, me and Eddie Taylor, before [Reed] passed in the early ’70s. Might have been ’72 or ’3. Anyway, we was on the freeway, and it was a long way between bathrooms. Eddie Taylor was driving, and Jimmy said,’ – Hooker mimics Reed’s squawky speaking voice – ‘“Pull over, Eddie, pull over! I gotta pee! I gotta pee!” Eddie said, “Well Jimmy, ain’t got no place to pull over. I can’t just stop in the middle of the road, I can’t do that.”’ As Reed: ‘“Now J” – he always called me J – “you better tell Eddie to pull over ’cause I got to pee.” I say, “Jimmy, when he get a chance he gonna pull over. All these cars right behind us, you can’t pull over when there’s no place to pull over.”’ As Reed – “All right y’all.” He was in the back, me and Eddie was in the front. Nice new car. Eddie did found a place to
pull over. “All right, Jimmy, I’m pullin’ over.”’ As Reed: ‘“It too late now, I done peed.” I say, “What?!”’ As Reed: ‘“I done pissed in the car!”’

  Hooker laughs. ‘I say, “Oh, Lord! In my new car?! You pissed all over the back of the car?!”’ As Reed: ‘“Yeah, I told y’all to pull over, and Eddie wouldn’t pull over, he hard headed. An’ you kept on tellin’ Eddie to go! I just pissed in the car!” He was drunk! Oh, I got mad, and Eddie got mad. Well, we got to the place, and the next day Eddie took the car to the carwash. They washed it and cleaned it in the back . . . he pissed in the car!’ He laughs again. ‘He cleaned it up, but that was somethin’ else!’

  It’s funnier now than it was at the time. Hooker’s still laughing now. ‘Yeah, boy . . . that could happen to anybody. You wanna go so bad and you can only hold it so long. He was drinking all the time, he stay drunk and he could only hold it so long. Even me or you or anybody, you drink that much, you gotta go. But Jimmy: “I done pissed in the car, now y’all can keep goin’ now.” Oh, I got so mad, I started cussin’. I said, “God damn this shit.” I said, “Shit, he done pissed in my damn car.”’

  As ever, the irrepressible Buddy Guy has a story to cap that one. ‘He’s like that about his car, but he was in Junior [Wells]’s car and got a bucket of chicken, and I wish you could’a seen what he did to Junior’s car. I told Junior, “Don’t say nothin’ because he don’t know.” A year later we goes out to Oakland, and he picks us up, and he tells Junior when we gets to the car, “T-t-t-t-take your shoes off.” Junior says, “Do you hear that, Buddy?” I said, “Hold it, be quiet. He don’t know that he was puttin’ all them chicken bones and grease in your car.” He says, “Yes I did, too”, and I saw that expression on his face . . .’

  But whilst Hooker might – albeit gently – tease juniors like Junior or Buddy, he would be profoundly supportive of those to whom he, in his turn, looked up. In Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story,147 Helen Oakley Dance provides an intensely affecting snapshot of Hooker’s sensitivity and concern towards his ailing mentor when both men were double-billed at a Pittsburgh gig in the summer of 1974. T-Bone was to die the following year and he was in considerably less than great shape, but Hooker did his best to take the old master under his wing, placing the Coast To Coast Blues Band at Walker’s disposal, encouraging, advising. ‘John Lee lay propped up on pillows,’ Dance wrote, ‘watching baseball on TV. “This is how I take care of things, Bone,” he explained. “Plenty, plenty rest. Kenny [Swank]’s in charge of my group and knows what to do. They’ll help you, man. Everything will be cool.”’

  As things turned out, everything was not cool: much of Walker’s stagecraft and stamina had deserted him, though his fierce pride had not. In defiance of both Lowell Fulson and Helen Oakley Dance advising him to ‘do like Hooker and use a chair onstage’, T-Bone gave the show his best shot . . . and blew it. Dance describes him attempting to placate the audience by promising to do better next time, despite Hooker standing in the wings muttering, ‘Don’t apologise, man. Don’t open your mouth.’

  Hooker’s professional life at this time was quiet but steady: clubs, colleges, festivals, occasional TV gigs and regular swings through Europe. Which was just as well, because he didn’t exactly have the smoothest-running machine in the music business behind him, being booked into different parts of the US by different agents, and his drinking didn’t help. It was within this context that Hooker launched, somewhat inauspiciously, one of the key professional relationships of his career: with a fledgling agent booking jazz and blues artists into clubs in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The young agent’s name was Mike Kappus, and to suggest that things began poorly between them would be a major understatement.

  ‘My first experience with John Lee was in the early ’70s,’ says Kappus, ‘booking him in a club in Milwaukee that I brought national talent into, ranging from rock to jazz – John Hiatt, Cheap Trick, Roger McGuinn, to Eddie Harris, George Benson, Les McCann, Mose Allison, Grover Washington, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, Horace Silver and many more, to Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Freddie King, John Hammond, John Lee Hooker, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee – basically anyone currently touring in the blues world at the time. I booked John Lee for a date and called up the day beforehand to see about his travel and how he was coming in. John was completely unaware that he was booked here.’

  ‘I said,’ recalls Hooker, shifting into querulous, mock-pathetic tones, ‘“Aw Mike, I just been to the dentist. I’m sorry.” He said, “Huh?” I said, “I just been to the dentist. I can’t come to Milwaukee.”’

  ‘So that was my first experience of John: him cancelling a date on one day’s notice,’ Kappus continues. ‘But things did improve after that.

  ‘One of the problems he was having at the time was that there was several people doing business with him and sometimes handling different parts of the country, and they would offer him different jobs, sometimes in conflict with each other, and I’m not sure if anybody was really taking care of coordinating it, and so there was a problem. When we first started working with John on a more full-time basis, there were people who didn’t want to work with him because he had a chequered past with problems with drinking and not showing up for gigs, which was probably just a matter of this lack of coordination. But he stopped drinking: there wasn’t any of that kind of problem when I started working with him.’

  Nevertheless, the ‘problem’ had been an acute one while it lasted. In 1975, various members of Dr Feelgood – the definitive British R&B band of the era – had been out on the loose in Los Angeles with Nick Lowe (then on a paid vacation as their roadie, but subsequently to become their producer), and had decided to go check out Hooker, a longtime hero whose ‘Boom Boom’ they had cut on their first album, on stage at the Starwood Hotel. As Tony Moon, the band’s biographer, described the occasion:148

  At the time, Hooker wasn’t exactly the revitalised act he was later to become and, having had a few drinks, turned in a desultory show with a third-rate backing band. So bad, in fact, that he sacked two hapless drummers off the stage during the course of the shambolic set . . . the Feelgood entourage left early, feeling disappointed as a much regarded icon bit the dust . . .

  Lowe and the Feelgoods subsequently transformed their memories of that night at the Starwood into a British hit single, ‘Milk And Alcohol’, the title of which referred back to the remedy prescribed to Hooker by another doctor entirely in ‘It Serve You Right To Suffer’, Over a pitiless neo-boogie riff, singer Lee Brilleaux gritted out the lyric Lowe had hastily scribbled on the inside of a cigarette packet:

  White boy in town,

  Big black blues sound

  Night club, I paid in,

  Got a stamp on my skin,

  Main attraction was dead on his feet,

  Black man rhythm with a white boy beat,

  They got him on milk and alcohol . . .

  Stayed put, I wanna go,

  Hard work, bad show,

  More liquor, don’t help.

  He’s gonna die, it breaks my heart . . .

  As it happened, it was Lee Brilleaux who predeceased Hooker – passing away from lymphoma in April 1994 – but not before cutting a hair-raising version of ‘Mad Man Blues’ which will for ever stand in the front rank of whiteboy Hooker covers.

  More flattering snapshots of Hooker’s in-concert work around this time are provided by a couple of late-’70s live albums released by the since-collapsed Tomato indie. Alone,149 recorded in 1976, presents in their entirety two forty-minute solo sets performed for a New York college audience, whilst The Cream, cut the following year, finds him working out for a California club crowd with that year’s edition of the Coast To Coast Blues Band.

  Maybe Hooker was tired when he gave the performance preserved on Alone. Maybe he was simply in a particularly reflective mood that night. Or maybe his advancing years were beginning to tell on him, draining him of the ferocious energy displayed only a few years before on the Hooker �
��N Heat sessions but providing, by way of compensation, a mastery of emotional nuance and detail dwarfing even the startling degree of empathy already displayed in his previous work. Whatever the reasons may or may not have been, the boogies and uptempo pieces – what Peter Green would call the ‘rock and roll’ numbers – seemed oddly undercranked and perfunctory, whereas the slower and more meditative end of Hooker’s repertoire blossomed as rarely before.

  That repertoire was certainly a familiar one: simultaneously as comfortable as a pair of old shoes and as elegant as a vintage Savile Row suit. Relaxed, chatty and discursive, Hooker opened with an abbreviated ‘Maudie’ (here retitled ‘I Miss You So’), slipping expertly out of the groove into freeform guitar and back before moving through the exquisite back-to-back renditions of ‘Jesse James’ and ‘Dark Room’ we checked out earlier, to a scarifyingly intense and heartfelt ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’: brooding and monumental, the sound of the soul speaking to itself, an internal dialogue rendered audible. The audience applauds, Hooker snaps the guitar into his open-A tuning, and he launches into ‘a little thing call’ “Boogie Chillen”’.

  When Hooker first cut ‘Boogie Chillen’ for Bernard Besman back in late ’48, it was an account of what was happening in that particular ‘now’: indeed, the events in the song seemed to be unfolding before him even as he sang. Here at Hunter College, he seems to be singing in sepia, looking back on a very long time ago, into the vanished world of Henry’s Swing Club and Hastings Street – ‘That’s in Detroit,’ he deadpans – with a mellow nostalgia which ripens and diffuses the buzzsaw immediacy of olden days from the harsh, urgent house-rocking of a young hotshot with stuff to prove into the indulgent playfulness of a doting patriarch bouncing grandchildren on his knee.