Boogie Man

  Still open-tuned, he moves deep – deep, deep, deep – into the eerie modalities of ‘When My First Wife Left Me’. ‘Give some time to change my keys [retune],’ he says, ‘and I’ll get “Boom Boom” for you.’ It’s a populist rather than aesthetic choice for set-closer, since the song doesn’t really happen without a band groove no matter how enthusiastically the audience clap time. For similar reasons, the encore of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ fares little better.

  The proceedings reopen for the second show with ‘Feel Good’, Hooker’s variation on Junior Parker’s variation on Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, and ‘Some People’, a homiletic monologue in the tradition of ‘The World Today’ or ‘This Land Is Nobody’s Land’. Next up: a fine, dramatic reading of ‘TB Blues’ and a slow, hushed saunter through a ‘Wednesday Evenin” variant (mistitled ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, and duly credited to Big Joe Williams, though it’s more an extended meditation on the lyrical themes of Lowell Fulson’s ‘Reconsider Baby’), which is as structurally loose as it is emotionally taut, and vice versa. An engaging canter through ‘Bottle Up And Go’ (which Hooker introduces as ‘Mama Killed A Chicken’) is marred only by the unmistakeable sound of a sparse audience clapping resolutely out of time in an echoey room; it briefly lightens the mood before a clenched, intense diptych of ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Ain’t Gonna be Your Doggie’, the latter incorporating an unscheduled harmonica intervention from the audience. ‘How deep and how low can you get,’ says Hooker through the applause. It isn’t a question.

  ‘Sometimes I get to singin’ these songs,’ he tells the audience as he tunes up, ‘and they reaches me so deep . . . because so many people are living in fear, in misery. They tortured. You see people on the street: you think they happy, but they not. Deep down inside, behind closed doors, you just don’t know what’s goin’ on. A lotta times, money don’t make you happy . . . if you don’t have peace of mind, you have nuthin’. If you have health and happiness and peace of mind, and a little money to get by – to survive, I should say – it’s a beautiful life. You cannot buy love, you cannot buy happiness . . . it’s got to flow into you.

  ‘If it ain’t down, it just ain’t down,’ he concludes. And he skips into a light, swinging, mellow-down-easy ‘Boogie Chillen’ (this time retitled ‘All Night Long’) with the audience clapping even further off the beat than before. The Phantom Harp Player returns for the closing, ultra-slow ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’. His interventions are not always totally appropriate.

  Alone is living-room intimate and back-porch meditative, occasionally to excess; by the same token, The Cream flows but sluggishly, though undeniably it has its moments. Backed by the September ’77 edition of the Coast To Coast Blues Band – John Garcia (lead guitar), Peter Karnes (harmonica), Ron Thompson (guitar),150 Mike Milwood (bass) and Larry Martin (drums), plus Charlie Musselwhite and Ken Swank sitting in to respectively spell151 Karnes and Martin on a tune or two – Hooker coast-to-coasts his way through the set, flying by the seat of his chair. The band seem less an integral part of his music (as were the bands of Howlin’ Wolf or Muddy Waters, let alone those of Duke Ellington or James Brown), as simply the backdrop against which Hooker’s music – wholly contained by and within him, rather than partially invested in his accompanists – exists.

  To ‘a really good friend of mine who have passed on’, the then recently-deceased Elvis Presley – ‘I hope that wherever he at, he restin’ at ease’ – Hooker dedicates a fine, measured ‘Tupelo’ (‘that was his home town’) followed, perhaps as a nod to Presley’s debut ‘That’s All Right Mama’, by the odd-one-out in a night concentrating mainly on slow blues tunes: a peppily uptempo rockabilly take on Little Walter’s ‘It Ain’t Right’. Other fare is rather more familiar – ‘TB Sheets’, ‘Sugar Mama’ round up the usual suspects – and, as deep as some of the performances are, it brings little to the party not already present in the songs’ previously recorded incarnations. If we’d been at the club the night The Cream was cut, we’d almost certainly have thought the show was fabulous. Since we weren’t, we’re left with the overwhelming impression of a past master marking time.

  In fact, the most fascinating – and, with benefit of 20/20 hindsight, the most revealing – aspect of The Cream isn’t on the record at all: it’s on the cover. We see John Lee seated, suited, hatted, in a booth at some classic American retro diner complete with dinky plateside jukebox terminal; a half-smile on his face, his left eyelid adroop, contemplating what’s in front of him: a majorly calorific-looking vanilla ice-cream sundae topped by a cheekily erect cherry. In one hand he holds, not a cigarette, but a pipe: a token of the influence of his fourth wife, a serene young Canadian named Millie Strom, whom he’d met whilst working in Vancouver. She had encouraged Hooker to cut back on his drinking; and weaned him off cigarettes. Finally, the pipe went also, and Hooker was off tobacco for good.

  ‘I got married then to Millie,’ Hooker says fondly. ‘She got me off cigarettes, and the pipe . . . I would say she saved my life. I say I would’ve been smoking now. She never could stand the smoke, and she used to keep on about the smoke. I was [living] in Gilroy, and she took my pipes and give ’em to the guy next door. She was a big help to me, I admit that. She wasn’t a drinking woman and she wasn’t a smoking lady, but she helped me get off all this stuff, so I can appreciate what she did.’

  ‘She’s very quiet and soft-spoken,’ says Zakiya Hooker, who remains best friends with Millie Strom to this day. ‘John was playing up in Canada and he met her. She just appeared. She just came. She was just here! She tells you what she’s got to tell you, but in such a soft manner that some people may not take her seriously, and think they can just run over her. She was very good for my father, a very calming influence on him. Of course, she had to contend with the crazed family, because they have the tendency to go into his house and treat it like it was their house.’

  If some others close to Hooker are to be believed, this was something of an understatement: it is alleged that Maude was in the habit of bustling into the kitchen and rearranging things on the grounds that ‘they weren’t the way John likes them’, and Hooker seemed unwilling to remonstrate. The marriage didn’t last, but in its place emerged a warm, solid friendship which should be a source of inspiration to all divorced couples. Even now, asked by the Guardian where and when he was happiest, Hooker cites the years he spent with Millie.

  ‘[Millie] was real nice,’ says Charlie Musselwhite. ‘She and John had a good life together while it was happenin’. She really cared about him.’

  The Hookers had been living ‘down in Gilroy, which is a pretty good size, a little country town in California’, John Lee remembers, though he is spectacularly vague about exactly how long they were there. ‘Lived there about five or six years, four or five anyway, give or take three or four,’ he offers, with magnificent disdain. ‘I sold that house and . . . what did I do then? I sold that house and bought a house in San Carlos, next door to Redwood City.’

  ‘John and Millie lived out in San Carlos,’ recalls Zakiya. ‘They were together quite a while.’ However, it was in San Carlos that the marriage broke down.

  ‘We parted,’ says Hooker, ‘and got a divorce on friendly terms.’ With that, there is no disagreement. ‘[John and Millie] did [part friends],’ confirms Zakiya. ‘When he goes up to Vancouver he doesn’t get out without seeing Millie. Her son [Richard, from her previous marriage] stays at the Long Beach house and watches over it. Millie never remarried. The thing with my daddy is that once you’re in his life, you’re in his life. There’s a certain responsibility. We all have to be responsible for helping each other.’

  And another long loop in Hooker’s life was to close during these years, as presidents – Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan – came and went and Hooker made his living on the road. The church from which Hooker had walked away in his youth re-entered his life, through the unlikely agency of his younger son’s wife. ‘It was always on my mind about church,�
�� remembers the Rev. Robert Hooker, ‘but my wife was in church and I was still livin’ that wild life, man. And she told me, “It’s either Jesus or leave me alone.” Whoah!’ he laughs. ‘“Either Jesus or leave me alone”! So I chose Jesus.

  ‘You have to realise, see . . . it’s deep. It’s very deep. Take me, for example. When I was out there, into the drugs and the liquor and all that, it was like that because I didn’t have no power. You know why that was? Because Adam, that first man Adam who disobeyed God – see? – God told him and commanded him don’t do something and he did it. God told him the day you do it you gon’ die, you gon’ surely die, don’t even touch it. Awright? And Adam disobeyed God, and because he disobeyed God, that’s why you got . . . see, a whole lotta people don’t understand this. This is why we have all the sin in the world, because of Adam, he disobeyed God. And by him disobeying God, he let the devil have power. And the devil is a wicked spirit, and he’s living in men. Living in womens, boys, girls, makin’ ’em do wrong. This is why Jesus said, in St John the third chapter, “You must be born again.” See, when you repent and be baptisedinthenameJesusChrist-befilledwithholyghost . . . you be born again. And then you got power. See, you got power, man, you got power over the devil. You could be the worst dope fiend in the world, but when you receive the Holy Ghost, man, they can stand right in front of you and just shoot all they want to. Won’t make you do it. See, I’m a witness, man. I used to . . . I just couldn’t leave that stuff alone, man. Man, I started . . . whoo, I started at . . . you know what? I started at the age of fifteen years old. That was my first experience. I was into dope all the way up to the age of twenty-four years old. I mean, I couldn’t stop. I tried! Little spells I tried and I stopped, you know, but I had to go right back to it, because I didn’t have no Holy Ghost power. See? I went to clinics: that didn’t help me. Wasn’t until I found the Lord, man, back in 1977. That’s what helped me. It wasn’t me!’ He laughs again. ‘It’s not me doin’ it. It’s beautiful, man.’

  And where Robert went, Maude soon followed.

  ‘Well, she was living in California then. I got into the church in Detroit. She was fightin’ it awhile. One time I came out to California, man, and I was talkin’ to my mother and my sister Zakiya and they went to church with me that night, and both of them got baptised, man. Zakiya, she’s into the singin’ right now, but my mother, she just kept right on. She’s a changed lady, man. Changed lady. No bad language no more – all right? – she changed, man. She can tell you ’bout the church experience, man, how good it make you feel . . . [singing secular] that’s her [Zakiya’s] thing, if that’s what she wanna do, then amen. But me in my house, I’m gonna serve the Lord. Like as far as the dope world . . . I’m not gonna go out there and go back to shootin’ dope with him [John Junior]. Or drinkin’ my Mohawk vodka and JV scotch and my wine, I’m not goin’ back to that. It’s a different world. I’m in a different place now.’

  ‘You know,’ says Maude, ‘[Robert] said that one day he was sittin’ down and he saw that him and his wife wasn’t gettin’ along too good, and he figured that something had to be done. So that he went out that Sunday morning, him and his two kids, and he went to one church, and he didn’t like that. He said he went to several churches before he really decided which one he wanted to go to, and when he found the right church, then the Lord put it in his mind that that was the true church, and that’s where he’s been ever since. After he got in it, he started on everybody, you know. “Come go to church”, you know, “Mother, come go to church.” And truly I didn’t get into church until I came here. I wasn’t religious and Johnny wasn’t. So [Maude’s parents] went to church every now and then, Sunday school, we went to church together sometimes. Diane and Vera used to sing in choir, but it was Baptist choir, John used to have a brother, William, who was a preacher. One father taught him to go to church and the next father taught him how to play the blues. He used to sing Jubilee, what you call a group. I guess everybody breaks away from something that they do, one way or another. John Junior was a minister also. He was out there in the world and then he came in and he joined church too.’

  Zakiya remembers Maude’s conversion in slightly less glowing terms. ‘Life is like a cycle,’ she says, ‘and it must have been a weak cycle for her. [Robert] came out one year. He convinced her, found a church, took her to the church, and the next thing we knew she was hellfire and brimstone.’ But Zakiya was baptised also. ‘Mm-hm.’ So clearly it didn’t take. ‘It took. Probably took better with me than it did with them, but in their eyes it certainly didn’t take. That’s a thing that never ceases to amaze me: how religion can dictate what you should and shouldn’t do. I can’t imagine God being a vengeful God that’s gonna, when you die, burn you for ever and ever in some pit fire.’

  Which is pretty much the way John Lee Hooker sometimes puts it himself. He has his own sceptical takes on Maude’s religious fervour. ‘Now she’s a church lady, sanctified and saved. Call herself “saved” now; she ain’t saved. Well, you know, the money I give her, that’s devil money. She don’t want my records in the house, she shouldn’t want the money in her house. That come from bars: people knockin’ out windows, kickin’ down doors, gettin’ drunk. That’s where that money come from.’

  Elsewhere, the big screen was beckoning – well, after a fashion. Comics John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd had been working up their ‘Blues Brothers’ R&B pastiche as part of the top-ranking Saturday Night Live TV show and, in cahoots with director John Landis, were in the process of parlaying a series of TV skits into a feature-length movie. They’d already roped in Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles, Cab Calloway and James Brown when John Lee Hooker came on board. ‘John [Belushi] and his partner Dan Aykroyd was really into the blues,’ says Hooker. ‘This woman who was managing me then, Sandy Getz, she contacted them, and I knowed ’em pretty good. I met John in New York; we was playin’ there and he came down. I didn’t know who he was, but he come up on stage and he was singin’, and I said, “Is that one of the Muppets?” but they said no, that was John Belushi. I said, “Oh yeah?” All of the band, they was lookin’ at him, givin’ him a dirty look because we didn’t know who he were. They said, “That’s John Belushi.” Didn’t have on no suit, just old raggedy pants and stuff like that. He didn’t look like no movie star or famous person. That’s how I met him, and I met Dan while we was doin’ the movie together in Chicago. I been knowin’ him ever since.’

  In the movie, Hooker appears as ‘Street Slim’, immaculate in tan leather jacket and dashingly scarved white safari hat, performing ‘Boom Boom’ on Maxwell Street with various members of Muddy Waters’ band as Belushi and Aykroyd track down Matt Murphy at Aretha Franklin’s ghetto diner, the Soul Food Cafe. ‘At that time [being in the movie] helped my career. More people had seen me. They still show that. It sells really well. They got a cassette of that, a video. It was shown all over the world, so that was good, good publicity for me. I knowed all those people, too.’

  Hooker remained in occasional contact with Aykroyd ‘for a good while’ after the movie was made, but he had no idea of just how much dope Belushi was hoovering up behind the scenes. ‘I really wasn’t aware of it until it really happened. He kept it kinda private. He was really gettin’ up high, too. His success came so easy and so quick. Mine came hard and it’s gonna go hard, ’cause I ain’t gonna let go of it.’

  Scoring Hooker’s appearance in the Blues Brothers movie was a coup for Sandy Getz, especially since her client is heard again later in the movie: Hooker’s Vee Jay remake of ‘Boogie Chillen’ plays in the background as the Blues Brothers Band rolls up for its ill-fated gig at Bob’s Country Bunker. However, she missed one important bet: the movie’s soundtrack album ended up selling millions, but while most of the movie’s major musical set-pieces were featured, both of Hooker’s tunes were omitted.152

  Hooker’s next movie experience came five years later, and it was another mixed blessing. This time, he performed with the great harp guy Sonny Terry, plus pia
nist Bobby Scott and guitarists Roy Gaines and Paul Jackson Jr on ‘Don’t Make Me No Never Mind (Slow Drag)’, a number composed by Gaines, James Ingram and Quincy Jones for the soundtrack of Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, of which Jones was a co-producer. The tune is heard in the scene depicting the Grand Opening of Harpo’s jook joint – you know, the bit where Oprah Winfrey punches Rae Dawn Chong practically into the next county – and it’s sufficiently compelling for the viewer to end up concentrating more closely on Hooker’s magisterial vocal than on the dialogue spouted by the actors in the foreground. However, not only do the musicians remain invisible throughout the scene, but the names of the singers and musicians, including Hooker’s, are omitted from the lengthy end credits. That rankled.

  ‘I was heard but I wasn’t seen and then they didn’t have my name up,’ Hooker fumes. ‘That was cold. I felt I was as important as was anybody in the movie. Why couldn’t [producer and musical director Quincy Jones] have put my name up there? I thought I was as big a star as any of them in there. People knowed me when they heard my voice. [Steven Spielberg] did a good job. I likeded that movie, but it was kinda sad. That was the first time I knowed Whoopi Goldberg. She’s in everything now: Star Trek, she’s in all sorts of things. The Blues Brothers, I’m on the screen, I got credits, that’s cool. But this movie, they didn’t even have my name up there, nothin’. I was kinda let down. That was kinda disgusting to me.’

  Between the making of The Blues Brothers and The Color Purple, your correspondent met Hooker for the first time. The great man was in London during the summer of ’82 to play a dream-ticket triple-bill show, with B.B. King and Bobby Bland, at what was then the Hammersmith Odeon. On a dull, overcast Hammersmith noon, Hooker was propped up in a hotel bed wearing a black satin shirt over a sky-blue undershirt. He paid tribute once more to Alan Wilson: ‘He was the man. He was the person. He could play anything, and after he dropped out that band never was the same. He knowed my music like a book. He were really outstanding.’