Boogie Man

  The mighty oak that was The Healer sprouted from a very small acorn indeed. Or – to scratch-mix the metaphors – it arose, in a sort of phoenix-ish manner, from the ashes of the debacle that was the launch of Jealous: a fine album that, essentially, went nowhere. ‘The Healer project originated with John Lee mentioning to me that Van Morrison was interested in producing a record on him,’ states Mike Kappus. ‘I met with Van and I think Van was caught a little offguard about it and at the time just said, “I don’t want to speak about it; I have other people that do my business for me.” He was just very nervous. It was at a show, but he was clearly uncomfortable with talking business at the time. It just didn’t work out from a scheduling standpoint, but luckily, it did later on with Mr Lucky. In the meantime, Carlos Santana had been showing up at a lot of John’s shows and playing with John and [he] just loved being around John, and he called up and said, “I just want to tell you that if John Lee’s going to be doing any recording in the near future, I’d really like to be a part of it.”

  ‘And George Thorogood, who’d been a friend of John’s for a long time and who was a client of mine at the time, had put a John Lee Hooker song on basically every record, and he called up and mentioned also that if there was any project for John Lee, he’d really like to be a part of it. With this in mind, with several of his disciples saying that they’d like to be part of a project, I thought that we should go ahead and make a record, work with these people who’d offered their services, maybe check with a few other likely subjects, people who’d been friends of John’s. I’d been around and I’d seen their affection for John, [so] I got the idea for an album consisting of tracks with these and other friends as well as tracks featuring John in a more natural setting than he’d been heard in for many years. I thought, “Let’s not just line up a bunch of stars, but do a record that pays tribute from the people that have been influenced by him and who are good friends. And let’s combine that with some of the more acoustic-oriented music that the purists had not heard for years, and produce it in a straightforward manner that wasn’t going after any particular trend.”’

  Like the guy in the baseball movie said, if you build it they will come. Kappus built it. And they came: a loving pilgrimage wearing down the sidewalk outside the Russian Hill studio in San Francisco. ‘Everybody wanted to be part of John Lee Hooker. I didn’t know that I was that big, or that important. I really didn’t. Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, George Thorogood, Keith Richards,’ Hooker reels off their names with affection and pride, ‘all the people who loves me. But I was doin’ my thing whether they come to my rescue or not. I was still on the move, on the rise, and they wanted to be there, part of me. They wanted to be part of me. Not for the money, but the love they had for me. They knew I was a real person and a real bluesman. They didn’t need money, they wanted my love. They wanted to work with me, and that’s why we teamed up.’

  Let us take for granted that none of the guests needed any convincing. To a man – and, in one extremely important case – to a woman, they were volunteers all, and all that was required was a compatible itinerary: no posting master-tapes back and forth for these guys. The only person who needed to be talked into anything was Hooker himself. ‘I said, “Hey, I’ll just hang out, go out and play and come back home, but I won’t make no records”,’ Hooker says, ‘so [Mike Kappus] talked me into going into the studio, recording with all these different stars like Carlos and Bonnie Raitt, you know. Mike got these people lined up and we went in the studio, and I had no faith in none of it. I thought [the idea] was a bunch of baloney, but it took off like wildfire. I was all over the place, and my price went sky-high. Forty, fifty, a hundred thousand dollars a night. “The Healer” and “I’m In The Mood” started that fire. Then I seen the light at the tunnel. And I had [Mike] to thank for it. I was just gonna go round, play . . . I had some money in the bank, I admit, a few houses I could survive on, sell if I wanted to sell, some pretty nice cars . . . but nothin’ like I got now. Nothin’. But that Healer set the world on fire, “In The Mood” come back strong . . . it just go on and on, y’know? So I say, “Oh gosh, somebody be happy on this, y’know?” And we got some good money.’

  Mr Morrison having left the building, Kappus was faced with the task of finding an appropriate substitute producer. Said individual turned out to be just around the metaphorical corner. ‘Needing a likeminded helper who knew music better, could be trusted by John Lee and who shared my concepts,’ Kappus recalls succinctly, ‘I got John Lee’s permission to hire Roy Rogers as producer.’

  Roy Rogers was no stranger: anything but. The hobbitesque Bay Area slidemeister had recently completed a four-year term with the Coast To Coast Blues Band, serving as featured soloist, musical director and general right-hand-man, even collecting the money at the end of the night’s work. He also had a début solo album, Chops Not Chaps, under his studded belt, bearing a brief but cordial liner note above Hooker’s shaky signature. It read: ‘When he’s not working on his own he’s in my band. When I hear Roy play his slide guitar – he makes me feel good. He’s got it . . . and it’s got to come out!’

  ‘John is not open to drastic change,’ Kappus observes, ‘and it is hard for him to trust other people, having been through as many problems as he had. I felt that Roy, even though he had no production experience that I knew of, could be somebody that John could trust, and he understood the concept of the record.’ As it happened, the guitarist had produced Chops Not Chaps himself, cutting it at Russian Hill, and was therefore familiar with the studio and its personnel. But most of all: he knew and loved Hooker, and was known and loved by Hooker, and he knew the music inside out, both as a scholar and as a player. ‘He’s a very easy-going person,’ Hooker says of Rogers, ‘and he knows how to work with me. He knows I don’t wanna be pushed. He lays back and lets me do things my way. I’m the kind of person, you start to push and I get kinda frantic. You let me do it my way and it come out right every time. Roy know that.’ The fact that Rogers wasn’t an auteurist superstar producer with an attitude problem was another bonus: he was under no illusions about whose session it was, or who the star was. He knew that he was there to make a John Lee Hooker record, not a Roy Rogers record with John Lee Hooker on vocals. Bottom line: he was a fan.

  Guess who controls your destiny? Fans.

  — Ice-T wising up sucker MCs,

  ‘You Played Yourself’

  Ultimately, what paid off for Hooker was precisely that: his destiny was controlled by fans. However, in this context, that meant fans of the calibre of Rogers and Kappus. They both shared one central premise: that Hooker was not simply a musical ingredient to be tossed into somebody else’s pot as part of somebody else’s dish; but that Hooker’s music, served up au naturel, was a more than adequate main course in its own right. To this end, the triumvirate of Hooker, Kappus and Rogers formed Blue Rose, an independent production company. Kappus brought the business experience, the overall vision, the muscle and the hustle: Rogers the hands-on musical expertise. And Hooker, quite simply, brought Hooker. From now on, Hooker would no longer be at the mercy of the whims and vagaries of record companies. Blue Rose would make Hooker’s records and sell them on to the labels as completed packages.

  The strategy was straightforward, purposeful and impeccably laid back. Every few months, whenever any of the bonded collaborators swung within grabbing distance of San Francisco, Blue Rose would book an afternoon at Russian Hill. Guests were canvassed as to what song(s) they would like to cut with Hooker. Each session would concentrate on just a few songs, occasionally freshly written but mostly culled from Hooker’s capacious back catalogue; the backup musicians would be hand-picked to suit the guest, and the songs. And no session would run over three hours. Drummer Scott Matthews, who played several sessions for The Healer and its immediate successors, summarised Hooker’s recording method as going into the studio, asking, ‘Where the food?’, eating, announcing, ‘I’m tired, let’s do this quick and get out’, doing three take
s, and going home. Hooker doesn’t dispute this.

  ‘Yeah, I’m nervous,’ he admits. ‘I ain’t just sayin’ that. The studio make me nervous. I go in there an’ do what I’m gon’ do an’ get out. I don’t wanna sit around there goin’ over an’ over this an’ over an’ over that. I have my boys down, I go in there, get me a little sandwich, eat it and say, “Let’s go to it.” The more you do it, the weaker your voice will get, you know. I do it when my voice is strong. I get in there, get the guys together and say, “Hey, y’all, let’s do it.” Two takes and I got it. I do two, maybe three songs, that’s the most. Pack up and get outta there.’

  Roy Rogers didn’t have a problem with any of that. ‘It seemed like a natural thing,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have any trepidation about doing it. I was so close to John and always kept a very close friendship with John, so it really was the three of us that put our heads together: Mike Kappus as executive producer and me being producer in the studio with the music. It was a question of putting together the right song and the appropriate person, and that decision was never made from a commercial standpoint. It was always: what’s gonna work? What’s gonna be fun? Who is John comfortable with?

  ‘My work is in setting it up: the pre-production is really the thing. You don’t want to work too hard when you’re in there, not with John Lee; otherwise you might as well shoot yourself in the foot. You want to make it as comfortable [as possible], then either the magic happens, or it doesn’t. We go for that magic, you know. All along I said, “Boss, if you’re happy, I’m happy.”’ Clearly, the days of locking Hooker into a studio with a bunch of musicians for hours or days on end, and not letting him out before there was a double-album’s worth of material in the can, were long gone. This was record-making at a pace which suited Hooker. And, bit by bit, the reels of tape mounted up on Kappus’ shelf.

  The process began, unassumingly enough, as soon as the debris of New Years Day 1987 had been cleared away from the streets of San Francisco. On 2 January, Hooker and Rogers, plus Hooker’s longtime friend Charlie Musselwhite and his bag of harps, checked into Russian Hill to cut with Canned Heat. Their personnel had been unstable since the death of Bob ‘the Bear’ Hite some years before, and sometimes they’d resembled a drummer with a revolving door more than a band, but the trio who made the date were authentic enough: the Canned Heat credentials of guitarist Henry Vestine, bassist Larry Taylor and drummer Fito De La Parra – all of whom had been on the team for the epochal Boogie With Canned Heat album back in 1968 – were second to none.

  They cut four tracks that day: three for the shelf and one for The Healer. The track that mattered was ‘Cuttin’ Out’ which, as ‘I’m Leavin”, dated back to the Vee Jay days. With Hooker, Vestine and Rogers all rocking on guitars and Musselwhite blowing his brains out on harp, it ought to have been cookin’, and it was. Five weeks later Hooker and Rogers were back for a solo acoustic session which yielded no fewer than eight tracks. Two of these, ‘No Substitute’ and ‘Rockin’ Chair’, ended up on The Healer; two more, ‘Deep Blue Sea’ and a severely Hookerised country song, ‘Hittin’ The Bottle’, the latter uncharacteristically performed in the key of C, remained in storage, when they were included, respectively, on Chill Out and Boom Boom. In April, they cut again: this time with Charlie Musselwhite and a rhythm section including Scott Mathews on drums. This session generated four tracks: ‘That’s Alright’ appeared on The Healer, another, the slow blues ‘Thought I Heard’ was slipped into Boom Boom. But the track which actually sparked the session – a remake of ‘Burnin’ Hell’, previously cut in the early Detroit days with Eddie Burns and on the Hooker ’N Heat session with Alan Wilson, remains unissued to this day.

  So how was it for Musselwhite to cut with Hooker? ‘Well, I’d get a call, and it would be like no rehearsal. Just into the studio and “what key is this?” and then John would just start everybody off. Listen and follow. For The Healer, which Roy Rogers was producing, he said, “Listen, we’re gonna do ‘Burnin’ Hell”’, and he sent me a copy of the original version that John did, and we get in the studio and I remember thinkin’, “John’s really gonna do this tune, huh? Just like this? On the record?”’ He laughs. ‘So I listened to the original recording with Eddie Burns playin’ and we cut it, but it weren’t no relation to the original at all.’ Not surprising: it was actually a different tune, ‘Heaven And Hell’, which, according to Mike Kappus, ‘has the same groove as “Burnin’ Hell” but with different lyrics’. ‘There was another tune that John and I did together,’ continues Musselwhite, ‘just the two of us, that was really deep, but according to Roy it was just too heavy, so they didn’t want to put it on the record, but it might get released some other time. After all these years of knowing John, and knowing him as well as I have, I’m still in awe of him when I’m around him. I just have so much respect for him. I can never look at him or think of him as just a buddy. He’s just a great human being, you know, who plays the deepest blues that ever was. No deeper was ever played.’

  And so it went, through the rest of 1987 and into 1988. Rosebud’s star client Robert Cray came in bringing his bass player Richard Cousins – with Mathews back behind the drum kit – to recut ‘Baby Lee’, with its tricky-funky stop-start backbeat. ‘“Baby Lee”? I told Robert I wanted to do it just like the old one,’ says Hooker. ‘He listened to the record, the old one, before we did it. And we went in and what a job he did on it.’ A richly soulful singer and a sparkling guitarist, Cray was an army brat, born in Georgia but raised on the move in various bits of Europe and the US, who’d cut his musical teeth on a classic ’60s mix of Beatles, Hendrix and soul, leavened by the fertile loam of blues-rich family record collections. He’d launched the first baby-band edition of the Robert Cray Band in the Pacific Northwest during the ’70s, working his butt off around the club and college circuit, and by the second half of the ’80s he’d even become a pop star, scaling the upper reaches of the album charts with Strong Persuader and getting his handsome mug onto the cover of Rolling Stone.

  ‘The first time I heard John Lee Hooker must have been in the mid-’60s,’ says Cray. ‘My aunt was a big blues fan: she had Jimmy Reed and John Lee Hooker . . . what really amazed me was the deepness of his voice and his style. It wasn’t until later on that I really started to understand and listen properly, ’cause that first time I was around twelve years old. Then later on when I was seventeen I started listening some more, and the thing I really liked about John Lee Hooker was how many bars he played – like 13, 14, 15 bars! It was a type of music where there aren’t any rules – the man is saying what he wants to say, and I enjoy that to this day. When he’s playing with other musicians he always tries never to do the same thing twice, so you got to stay on your toes. You got to be listening to him all the time. He’ll change the words, he’ll change the bars: he’ll play 13, 14, 15 bars! So when he makes a change you really got to be on your toes, otherwise you’ll be left behind.

  ‘The first time I worked with John was probably in the late ’70s [with] a younger version of the Robert Cray Band that was playing at the University of Montana. We’d never met John Lee before, but we were booked together and we had to be his backing band on the spur of the moment. He joined us on the bandstand and sat on a chair and he just started playing. We didn’t know what songs he was gonna play, and we didn’t know what key anything was in, we didn’t know what or where the changes were, so it was quite a challenge. The whole band was just thoroughly confused and disappointed and were going, “Who the hell is this guy and what is he doing?” I just laughed and said, “This is one of the greats, the original guys.” And he was so friendly, so nice afterwards. We said, “John, how many bars are there in your songs?” And he said, “Hey, you just gotta make the change . . .”

  ‘When you record with John, the thing that I notice the most is that you won’t spend a lot of time in the studio. You follow John in what he does. And you’re gonna get it in one or two takes and that’s about it. John’s gonna get up,
put his hat on, and go, “Thank you, fellas.”’

  Like Cray, George Thorogood was a circuit veteran who’d taken his bareknuckle boogie and bullyboy slide – a four-alarm chilli concocted from freshly-minced chunks of Hound Dog Taylor, Elmore James, Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley and not a little John Lee Hooker – from Delaware bars to the satellite stage of Live Aid, where he brought on Albert Collins to play to half of the planet as his guest. Thorogood’s first, eponymous album, released by Rounder Records in 1977, carried an amusing period-piece liner-note in which the label formally apologises for sullying its folkie purity with such a vulgar release, and featured a masterstroke conflation of Hooker’s ‘House Rent Boogie’ and ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ into a single narrative. ‘He told me he was gonna do that,’ recalls Hooker, ‘and I said, “Okay, go ahead.”’ Thorogood’s commercial breakthrough album, 1982’s Bad To The Bone, had included an insanely speeded-up ‘New Boogie Chillen’; a copy of the gold-album award hangs on Hooker’s wall. Factor in his band’s agency deal with Rosebud, and it should therefore come as no great surprise that Thorogood contributed to The Healer, weighing in for a duo session remaking the venerable ‘Sally Mae’, the B-side of ‘Boogie Chillen’, originally cut for Hooker’s very first session with Bernard Besman in Detroit at the dawn of Hooker’s recording career, from before Thorogood was born.

  Most of the guest participants in The Healer were friends of Hooker’s before the sessions. After the sessions, they all were. ‘I’ve known Carlos Santana a long time, Bonnie Raitt a real long time,’ Hooker mused, ‘I didn’t know Los Lobos,157 but they sure know my music.’ That they did. Having led a double life as a traditional acoustic band playing Mexican folk music in restaurants and parties – if you got married in east LA between the mid-’70s and the early ’80s, Los Lobos probably played your wedding – and taking their hard-edged, lyrical electric roots-rock into Hollywood’s post-punk club scene, they found themselves as incongruous chart-toppers with the uncanny recreations of Richie Valens’ music which they cut for Taylor Hackford’s Valens biopic La Bamba – the movie for which Carlos Santana had created the score which generated the musical background for ‘The Healer’; wheels within wheels, synchronicity-a-go-go. Their showcase was ‘Think Twice Before You Go’, still unfortunately credited to Al Smith, which had originally seen the light of day on Hooker’s debut ABC release, 1967’s Urban Blues. Hooker sang live with the guitars and rhythm section; Rogers overdubbing Steve Berlin’s rumbling baritone sax and David Hidalgo’s exuberant accordion immediately afterwards.