He talked about his then-current plans and activities: ‘What I’m doin’ now is . . . I haven’t been with a record company in a long, long time; but I just recorded a brand-new album. What we goin’ to do is find a company to lease the master to. It’s a really good album. We planned it really good, all new stuff on there. My partner, he’s in Vancouver, Canada – you probably heard’a Vancouver . . . and he sent out a lotta letters to a lotta companies an’ he gotta lotta respond. We lookin’ to unload this album on some company, and it shouldn’t be hard to do. Everybody know who John Lee Hooker is: everybody know what I do. It’s the same kind of thing, but it’s uptempo. It’s a modern sound . . .’
He described his musical tastes: ‘Awwww . . . soul I even hate to talk about, y’know? I don’t put it down but it ain’t my kind of music, but if kids like it that’s okay with me. I listen to mainly blues and I like some of the hard good rock. I likes solid rock, sump’n with a good beat to it. I like the uptempo stuff, but it got to have a feelin’, ain’t got to be just a bunch of noise. And I likes some good jazz . . . but the blues is my bag. That’s the only music that I love.’
And he announced, in plain but eloquent language, his personal credo: ‘Others have changed. Me. No. I ain’t changed. I don’t wanna change. I could change. I could go into disco . . . I can play it, but I don’t wanna play it. I don’t feel it. I got one cut on the new record where I did it just to try it out, called ‘I’m Jealous’. It’s got a disco beat to it. I did it ’cause we finished recording an’ we run out of things to do on it and so we just jammed it out. Maybe it could be somethin’ big, y’know, but I’m so into the blues. I don’t care who change, I don’t care who go for the big money, I’m gonna do what I like an’ what I feel. I feel what I do.
‘An’ I’m doin’ really good. I ain’t hurtin’ for money. I got that. A lot. I done invest my money in real estate, I got about five homes in the States. I could retire and never do it no more, but I love it too much. This is my life, y’know . . . Things I like to do when I’m not workin’: I love baseball, that’s my hobby, and cars are my hobby. I just got me the new Mercedes. You know the 360SL? I got a new one for ’82, it’s one of the best cars made. That’s what I like in life: cars, baseball and I like ladies,’ he chuckled loudly, ‘but I guess everybody do.’
Your correspondent’s piece153 concluded, ‘The phone rings. Hooker is informed that he is about to be photographed and hops spryly out of bed. He zips up his pants, buttons his shirt, claps his hat onto his head. He says his health is real good these days, it’s just that he gets awful tired sometimes.’
As it happened, that Vancouver-cut album with the ‘disco’ tune didn’t get ‘a lotta respond’ from the major record companies. Jealous wasn’t released for another four years, and then only by the tiny-verging-on-invisible Pausa label.154 A richly hued portrait of Hooker, painted by Donna Cline from a photo by Millie Strom, glared from the cover. Inside, Hooker and a Coast To Coast line-up, by then including Mike Osborn and Deacon Jones, worked out on nine tunes, garnished with an extra track, the churchy ‘We’ll Meet Again’, recorded near Hooker’s new home in Redwood City by a later edition of the band which omitted Osborn but included bassist Jim Guyett and drummer Bowen Brown.
Produced by Hooker himself in a rare foray into the studio control room, Jealous was an impressive stab at contemporizing and updating the fundamental Hooker sound without excessive dilution or compromise, backburnering concessions to the hard-rock audience in favour of steeping his signature deep blues and rocking boogies in simmering vats of thick, steamy funk de luxe. ‘Boogie Woman’ is one of the grooviest variations extant on the staple Hooker motif, with Deacon Jones and Mike Osborn jamming prototype versions of some of the organ and guitar licks which later became part of the textbook finale to Hooker’s live shows. ‘I Didn’t Know’, credited to Chester ‘Howlin’ Wolf’ Burnett, is primo Vee Jay-style shuffleware played with funk accents. The sensuous simmer of Jones’s Hammond lends the slow blues items, especially the deeply moody update of ‘When My First Wife Left Me’, a richly satisfying ambience, somewhere between a nightclub and a church. The two versions of ‘Ninety Days’ definitely fall, albeit with catlike agility, into the hard-core boogaloo bag. And that title track turned out to be not so much ‘disco’ as ‘Got My Mojo Workin” reincarnated as hustling, hard-charging double-time funk, driven by a steel-thumbed bass riff, supercharged with blasting brass, and generally dead on the double-bump.
Jealous was a very cool record indeed, and its release created few waves whatsoever beyond the precincts of Planet Blues, whose denizens duly acknowledged its merits with a W.C. Handy Award and a Best Traditional Blues Grammy nomination. If it had been distributed, marketed and promoted by a major record company (or even a savvier indie), and if the late-’80s blues-power wave headed by Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray had already attained critical mass, Jealous would have had a more than fair chance to reach the outside world. However, neither of those conditions were in place. No matter how ready the record was, Hooker’s business operation, the state of the market and the mindset of the music business were nowhere near prepared. Nevertheless, the future was just around the bend.
The principal pointers to that future were concealed in the small print on the cover. The ‘Tour Direction’ credit line for the Rosebud Agency was a testament to the steady growth in strength and closeness that had, over the years, taken place in the relationship between Hooker and Mike Kappus.
‘When I started the Rosebud Agency,’ Kappus recalls, ‘John was one of the first people I called on, or actually, Sandy Getz, who was acting as his manager at the time. I made a deal to represent John for east of Colorado where she handled west of Colorado directly herself. I’m not sure if it was her or him or whatever, but there were a few problems with John Lee and his manager cancelling dates. I turned in my resignation, which evolved into him firing his manager and hiring me exclusively as his agent. I made it very clear that in order to keep his reputation strong, that couldn’t happen. Once he made a commitment . . . he could make any number of commitments he wants to, one every five years or two hundred a year, as long as they were kept. While we handled many management tasks for John over the years I didn’t [then] see a need for him to hire formal management, and declined a few times when offered. His publishing problems were being looked after by a lawyer he trusted completely, and he had no real active label deal or interest in one.’
‘Mr Kappus have did more for me than any agent I ever had, and I had quite a few of ’em,’ says Hooker. ‘I never had a lot of managers. I had one, maybe two, but they weren’t strong as this man. He is a very strong young man. He don’t back down. Maybe him being that strong, a lot of people don’t like him because they can’t tear down that fence around him, tear down that fence around his acts. So there’s a lot of people don’t like Mike. You can understand that, because Mike don’t let them intimidate him. They learn that when they come to me, I’ll send ’em to him ’cause I know that if he say yes, it’s gon’ be something on my behalf that’s going to help me. He not gon’ be intimidated by them. A lot of [managers] would intimidate they artist, double-cross they artist, to get something from the artist that he don’t know about, to get a few extra bucks in they pocket. He didn’t do that. I got full confidence in him. Full, complete confidence. I got everything right in his lap, and I can sleep at night. Me and him have a little disagreement sometimes, but we gets that worked out. He have worked so hard for me, more than any other agent or manager have. I took [Rosebud] as family, the whole shootin’ match. They takes care of the artist. I was with Mike when I was scufflin’: we stuck by each other. He was scufflin’, I was scufflin’. We got poor together, now we just about got rich together.’
And Jealous also carried a warm, eloquent liner note written by a fellow-resident of the Bay Area and stalwart pillar of the local music scene: a long-term fan turned new personal friend. It read: ‘John Lee Hooker is a supreme force in American popu
lar music. Listen to Jimi Hendrix’s “Blues Child” [sic],155 listen to Van Morrison’s phrasing, listen to nature’s beat: it’s keeping time with John’s heart, foot and fingers. Boogie within and boogie without, but boogie till you shake off all your worries. John Lee is an ocean of inspiration.’
It was signed, ‘Carlos Santana, March 17, 1986.’
Tijuana-born, blues-marinated and Bay Area-based, Carlos Santana had been playing – and, most important, thinking and feeling in terms of – World Music way before the term was codified, let alone banalized. His eponymous groups, showcasing his rich, sweet, sustain-drenched lead guitar, had been fusing urban blues, percussion-heavy salsa and transcendently modal jazz since the late ’60s, and had gone national – and international – with a bravura performance which had been a major highlight of the Woodstock festival and resultant movie. And he was a John Lee Hooker fan, big time: a devout admirer of man and music.
‘I met [Hooker] a long time ago, in ’69 in New Jersey, at the Capitol Theater,’ Santana recalled in a 1991 interview.156 ‘I didn’t get to meet him again until ’84, when he invited me to play with him at the Blues Festival in San Francisco, and we actually jammed together. From then on he started calling a lot, and when he’d be in town I’d go to see him, or he’d come to see me.
‘I admire him. He’s another calibre, another standard. He’s one of a kind. He’s very original. He doesn’t sound like anybody. The only person who sounds like him is Ali Farka Toure, or Jimi Hendrix when he did “Voodoo Chile” . . . John Lee is more earthy. He definitely fits in the category of Supreme Universal Music, ’cause when he moans, everybody understands what he’s talking about. You don’t have to understand English. A Buddhist monk, or people in Jerusalem or Russia, can understand what he means.
‘He made me realise I have to feel absolutely and completely what I feel before I play it. Some people, like Ornette Coleman, would say, “If I hear something I won’t play that, I’ll play anything but.” That works for some musicians, but for me I have to feel it completely before I play it. With John Lee you hear the note before he hits it on the guitar. It’s like you can hear his hand before it actually hits the note. Jimi Hendrix was like that, but I think it’s ’cause he learned it from John Lee. Some people, the emotions are so strong . . . he doesn’t play loud, but it’s loud when it comes out. It disarms you, it gives you chills . . . he’s a very raw, naked person. There’s no bullshit, nothing fancy, no fancy chords. It’s just as raw as you can be.
‘That’s why he always has young girls around, he’s got a young beautiful woman next to him, and they’re always grabbing his hands and rubbing them and feeding him candy . . .
‘He invited me to his house, and I brought him one of my guitars, and I had this cassette and I said, “John, I have this song . . .”’
Around the time Hooker was releasing Jealous, Santana had taken a movie gig, accepting a commission to compose the incidental music for La Bamba, film-maker Taylor Hackford’s biopic of Ritchie Valens, the legendary Chicano rocker of the ’50s. Not surprisingly, Santana’s score was somewhat overshadowed by the uncanny re-creations of Valens’s classic records, performed by Los Lobos, to which the movie’s star, Lou Diamond Phillips, mimed so energetically; and by the exuberance and fidelity to detail with which Eddie Cochran, Buddy Holly and Jackie Wilson were impersonated by, respectively, Brian Setzer (formerly of the Stray Cats), Marshall Crenshaw and Howard Huntsberry. These performances, plus Bo Diddley’s thunderous remake of his epochal ‘Who Do You Love’, produced by Willie Dixon himself, dominated La Bamba’s big-selling soundtrack album, and Santana’s original score didn’t get a look-in. Nevertheless, there was one piece of music composed for the movie which was to have a second and far more spectacular lease of life. It came from a scene in La Bamba where Ritchie, played by Phillips, and his macho blowhard elder brother (Esai Morales) take a trip to Tijuana and visit a shaman.
‘It was called “Carandero”,’ continues Carlos Santana. ‘I sneaked it in there when Ritchie Valens goes to Tijuana to see this healer. And I played it for [Hooker] and he started singing it right on the spot. He said, “Yeah, blues is the healer”, and he started singing it as soon as I played the tape.
‘And I said, “Man, I think we should record this.”’
14
HEY, YOU JUST GOTTA MAKE THE CHANGE: IRON JOHN AND THE HEALING GAME
Well, the blues is a healer, you know. When you’re feeling down and out and low, when your friends, your woman, your wife, have kind of leaned from you, put on some good blues and take that off your mind. Listen to it. It heals. Blues heals all the world. The music heals the world, and keeps the world going.
John Lee Hooker, 1993
‘Me and Carlos got together,’ remembers John Lee Hooker. ‘He’s a man who say, “You heal a lot of people.” I say, “What d’you mean?” He say, “Yeah man, you heal ’em with your voice, and your music, man, is so deep. Well, I got a bunch of music, and it’s got no fancy chords, but it’s so beautiful.” I say, “Yeah?” He say, “We gonna do this thing. What do you think about we name this ‘The Healer’?” I say, “What?” He say, “We name this thing ‘The Healer’.” “That sound good,” I said, “but why?” He say, “Because you do heal a lot of people, all over the world. People sit there, they listen to you, you soothe they mind, you takes they trouble away from ’em. You says things in your lyrics that really heal they problems. We’ll name this ‘The Healer’. The blues have healed you, it’ll heal me.” I say, “Yeah, that’s a good idea.” We worked on it, me and him and Roy Rogers, my producer . . . I said, “Carlos?” He said, “What?” I said, “Man, I feel a groove. Let’s do this.”
‘And the first take was it.’
The renaissance of John Lee Hooker’s career was essentially launched with a single song. ‘The Healer’, Hooker’s epochal collaboration with Carlos Santana, begins quietly, almost tentatively. Santana’s rhythm guitar sketches in eight bars’ worth of a couple of minor chords topped with a decidedly Hookeresque bass-string run. Then the rest of the band enter, like a cooooool breeze on a hot night, with a rhapsodic rhumba beguilingly blending organic and synthetic instrumentation: the distinction not so much collapsed as artfully blurred. The effect is not unlike viewing a tropical sunset under the influence of psychedelics, or scanning a panoramic snapshot thereof which has been subtly colour-enhanced in PhotoShop. It is a well-nigh perfect fusion of the ‘real’ and the ‘imagined’.
Apart from Hooker and Santana themselves, the musicians who showed up on 25 April 1988 for that date at the Record Plant in Sausalito – the studio walls no doubt still juddering from the psychic aftershock of the sessions for Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours – included some of Santana’s most treasured associates. Armando Peraza, a much-decorated veteran of Latin music not significantly younger than Hooker himself, manned the congas. Ndugu Chancler was behind the drum kit, keeping things anchored but simmering. Chepito Areas played the galvanic, metallic timbales fills which – rakka-takka-takka-takka-tang! – slash through the song every time the ambient temperature needs raising a notch, providing ‘The Healer’ with what is effectively – after Hooker’s vocal and Carlos Santana’s lead guitar – the song’s third voice. And the date’s secret hero was keyboard guy Chester Thompson: not only responsible for the shimmering, limpid pools of virtual Fender-Rhodes electric piano which define the song’s tonal areas but, through the wonders of MIDI synth technology, also supplying the ‘bass’ and the ‘flute’.
The mood builds through three choruses, Santana’s guitar probing further and deeper as the tension mounts, Hooker foreshadowing his vocal entry with a subterranean moan which suggests that this tranquil landscape is about to erupt. On the fourth, he delivers the message: ‘blues is the healer, all over the world’. In a series of simple, declamatory lines – ‘my woman left me, the blues healed me/healed me, it can heal you’ – extended and recombined through his most mesmerising incantatory repetitions, he lays out the text of his sermon
of redemption and forgiveness. Then he commands ‘Carlos! Heal me!’ and the fire-storm of Santana’s guitar, no longer dreamy and euphoric and sultry but volume-cranked and textured with a wah-wah pedal, sizzles across the skies of the soundscape like the most majestic and terrible forces of nature unleashed: awesome and beautiful, searing and cauterising.
In a voice which rolls and rumbles like thunder, the shaman is calling down the lightning.
As fire from heaven crackles around him, the healer is going to work. His wounds bear witness to his ability to heal ours.
Way back, John, you said ‘Blues is the healer’. The bluesman’s job is to take other people’s pain on his shoulders and make them feel better.
That’s what I been doin’. That’s what The Healer do. I take your pain, and I put it on my shoulders, and I carry it along.
Then who heals The Healer, John? Who carries your pain?
Who heal The Healer? God Jehovah. That man heal your faith in him. God.
Extraordinary as it may seem, ‘The Healer’ was cut in one single live take, with nothing overdubbed but Hooker’s moan in the third chorus. ‘When I did “The Healer”, the first take was it,’ Hooker insists proudly. ‘Live with the band. We did two, but we decided that the first take was the best one.’ Santana remembers it slightly differently: they started a second take but partway through someone said something along the lines of, ‘Nahhhh, why bother?’ They figured they already had it nailed. They were right.
Even the video for ‘The Healer’ maintained the same philosophy of combining simplicity, spontaneity, elegance and economy of both expression and expenditure. Shot in ominous sepia, it depicted Hooker and Santana miming the song in a small room draped with hessian backdrops, climaxing in slo-mo footage of Hooker ending a performance with the Coast To Coast Blues Band in his newly-trademarked pose of arms raised in benediction over his wildly-applauding audience.
Boogie Man Page 58