Boogie Man

  And then, of course, there was Bonnie Raitt: ‘My baby!’ as Hooker affectionately dubs her. In a lengthy career more fraught with ups and downs than most, the former Boston folkie, Delta blues maven, Mellow Mafia singer-songwriter and virtuoso slide-slinger has been platinum and she’s been nowhere, and along the way she’s been everywhere in between. When she and Hooker cut ‘I’m In The Mood’, she was definitely ‘in between’. She was in-between record deals: dumped by Warner Bros, who’d been her home base since 1971, but not yet picked up by Capitol, with whom she confounded the conventional wisdom of the music business by scoring the biggest successes of her career.

  ‘Bonnie had been doin’ it herself on her shows, which I didn’t know until she told me, and she had it down so pat. She said, “I’m gonna do that’n with you, ‘I’m In The Mood’. If I ain’t gonna do ‘I’m In The Mood’ I ain’t gonna do nothin’.” I said, “Okay Bonnie, you do it.” She said, “Yeah, I do it all the time.” So we didn’t change anything. We just sat down. It was just tremendous, is all I can tell you. She’s such a beautiful person, and I love her like I don’t know what.’

  ‘It was love at first sight,’ says Raitt of her first encounter with Hooker, back in the early ’70s. ‘I never really played with him until we did the duet, because we weren’t really in a situation where it was possible. There wasn’t a lot of jamming at blues festivals, and I always admired him so much it would have been intimidating.’ This time, she wasn’t intimidated at all. The basic quartet – Hooker, Raitt, Rogers and Matthews, no bass player – didn’t quite get it in one take, but, as Raitt says, it was ‘pretty close. We just went over the structure of the song, and we really didn’t know what it was going to come out like.

  ‘It was really one of the most erotically charged afternoons of my life. He just wore me out. The lights were low and we were just looking at each other and neither of us knew how to end it. We just got into it. He had his sunglasses on and I was just staring at him, head to head, sitting on chairs. At the end of it I just said, “I need a towel!”

  ‘It was incredible. If I was still smoking I would have had a cigarette afterwards.’

  In the song’s video, Raitt makes an entry worthy of Clint Eastwood. The first you see of her is a pair of cowboy-booted, bejeaned legs striding purposefully through the dust: a Blueswoman With No Name toting a Stratocaster, rather than a Winchester, swinging at her side. The way the album is sequenced, ‘I’m In The Mood’ segues in straight from Santana’s tranced-out dreamscape: the second half of a classic one-two punch. Hooker’s guitar sets the tone: grinding, strident, jagged, almost deliberately jarring the listener out of the memory of Santana’s rhapsodic groove. Then Matthews’ drums kick in, Rogers’ guitar starts to chugging and Hooker begins to sing, paced at every line by Raitt’s lean, mean slide. By the end of the track, with Hooker and Raitt calling each others’ love down across that steady groove, we just about all need a towel. It’s not surprising that the pair of them won a ‘Best Blues Recording’ Grammy for that one.

  April ’88 was hot. Just three weeks after the session with Raitt, Hooker went to Sausalito to meet up with Santana and cut ‘The Healer’ itself, the song after which the entire project would be titled. With that in the can, the album was done. And then the fun began.

  I have no idea where my life began,

  But I am a mighty Iron Man

  John Lee Hooker in the title role of

  Pete Townshend’s Iron Man

  ‘I can remember when I heard [“The Healer”],’ says Taj Mahal. ‘That blew my mind! Santana brought that Latin thing to it, and it didn’t take everybody away from the feel. I thought it was just tremendous. I read this article where Carlos was talkin’ about how he was tryin’ to approach the music, and then he saw [the great bluesmen] and they played their inside out, as opposed to their outside in. He watched B.B. King, Albert King, Albert Collins, Freddy King and John Lee Hooker . . . the great musicians played this emotional stuff that he wanted to commit to his music, and when you hear Carlos you know that he’s a totally emotional player. That record was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened. I couldn’t hear nothin’ for weeks because of that record . . .’

  Ludicrous as it may seem in retrospect, launching The Healer turned out to be a hard sell. Mike Kappus had to pull out all the stops to cut a halfway decent deal and get the album into the stores. ‘I wanted to finish the album first and then sell it to a company,’ he says, ‘because John Lee didn’t really have a high profile at all with record companies. He’d sold very small numbers here and there [and] there wasn’t a market for John Lee Hooker. I wanted to make a package that represented something special first, because if I went in [cold] with John Lee Hooker, there wouldn’t be anything there for him. There was such a prejudice about how many records John Lee Hooker could sell, or how many records a seventy-year-old man singing the blues could sell, regardless of who the guests were.

  ‘At the time there were [specialist] blues labels that would have been interested in signing John, but the money would be small and the promotional budget wouldn’t be there, and I really had a belief that this record could make a major impact. As it turned out, even with Robert Cray, Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt and Los Lobos, record companies were still reluctant to part with any real monies for this, and it took a year to get anybody to sign a deal for a reasonable fee.’

  It’s an attitude with which Taj Mahal, for one, is rather too familiar. ‘It’s like managers in the music business who get this idea that there’s only so many people who’re gonna buy the records based on their inability to make sure that everybody gets to hear it, right? They go, “Blues equals 25,000 copies.” No, no, no. There’s a bigger audience than that in the world. I know this myself ’cause I seen ’em. There’s a huge audience, but they won’t do anything ’cause it’s gonna cost ’em something. How can you have a music that comes from the results of people dealing with coming to the West and trying to make this thing work, and it’s all over the place, but you want to limit it to 25,000 people? Yet you’ll spend a whole lotta money on some people playing an odd and weird and crazy version of that stuff that doesn’t make any sense, that doesn’t pull any energy, that doesn’t complete any circles, that doesn’t make people’s lives better, that doesn’t give them any kind of high-level connection to the universe as it exists? To me, it’s crazy. Given an opportunity, given tools . . . you have to use them.’

  In the case of The Healer, synchronicity once again ended up playing a part. A small label named Chameleon Records had recently acquired the wandering Vee Jay catalogue and already had a full-scale reissue programme of all of Hooker’s Vee Jay albums – plus a best-of compilation drawn therefrom – in the works. The acquisition of the US rights for Hooker’s all-star new album – for what Kappus describes as ‘still a very, very low fee’ – therefore seemed like a fairly sensible investment, though the label passed on the deal the first time Kappus approached them. At a time when the financial break-even threshold for a conventional blues album was deemed to be approximately 10,000 copies, a deal like the one with Chameleon – predicated on potential sales of 50,000 – was indeed a pretty good one by Planet Blues standards. Outside the US, the brass ring was grabbed by Silvertone, a feisty startup masterminded by Andrew Lauder, a visionary A&R guy previously associated with the UK wing of United Artists in their ’70s heyday, and subsequently with the ranking UK indie Demon Records, though they preferred not to release the album in the US, because it would have been their first product and Lauder didn’t want Silvertone typecast as a blues label.

  ‘The record took off and started doing very well in England,’ says Kappus. VH-1, MTV’s ‘adult’ subsidiary, was playing the hell out of Hooker and Santana’s video for ‘The Healer’ single, but Chameleon were still not working the record to Kappus’s satisfaction. ‘We ended up doing a great deal of the work out of [Rosebud’s] offices, contacting the major record stores and seeing if they had the product, if they k
new about the product, and so on. They didn’t realise that Carlos Santana and Los Lobos and Bonie Raitt and Robert Cray were on it, and when they did and they started playing the record in the stores, it became one of the top records for in-store play. More and more people started picking up on this, and we’d stay on top of the record stores and found out that they were running out of stock, remind the record company that they were running out of stock and getting them re-orders. Otherwise it could have been completely forgotten. It could have been passed over.

  ‘But we stayed on the case, and we got over 50,000 record sales in America, and once again we were contacting all the record stores and finding out that they were selling out. We contacted the record company, and they were wary of printing any more records, because by that point they had recouped their investment. They were wary of printing up a bunch of records that wouldn’t sell.’

  So, in his own unique manner, Kappus started leaning on Chameleon. ‘He did!’ laughs Hooker. ‘Yeah! He had to force ’em! They weren’t goin’ to re-order because they was too tight with money! The record was like a house afire, was burnin’, and he had to force ’em, [or] else they wouldn’t’a did that. People came by, couldn’t get it. He forced ’em to do that. He is a good businessman.’

  Kappus himself puts it rather more prosaically. ‘I convinced158 them that if they don’t sell this month, they will sell next month, or the month after. Get ’em out there and they will sell. It sold well over 500,000 sales in America, but all the way down the line, even as the label were selling the records, they still didn’t have faith that this was a valuable, viable project.’

  ‘I knew that someday, the public . . . the blues is gonna wake them up,’ says Hooker. ‘They gonna have to put the blues on TV and pop stations, because the people is hungry for the blues, all over the world. They want to see it on TV, they want to hear it on radio, but they haven’t been doin’ it. I’m kinda surprised, but I’m not surprised. I figured it was comin’, but I figured I’d never be here to see it, but now it’s happenin’. The time was right. The public was ready. I opened the door for a lot of blues singers. I brought the blues back. I really jumped it up sky high. I broke the barrier. Buddy Guy’s career took off right after that. I opened the door for a lot of blues singers . . . or so they tell me. I didn’t say that.’

  Well yes he did, but Hooker can be forgiven a little faux-modest coyness. After all, as Kappus points out, ‘The Healer was a great success, and of course after the first album many companies were not only open to the prospect of signing John Lee, but to the prospect of signing other blues artists. The Healer had a major impact on the entire genre of roots music. The door had been cracking open for years for roots music with George Thorogood and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Robert Cray, but here was an older artist, one of the originators, actually having success on the level of a contemporary rock star.’

  The lesson was not lost on the music industry. Silvertone signed up Buddy Guy, who’d been kicking around the business without a decent record deal for almost as long as Hooker had, and Damn Right I Got The Blues, the first album under the new deal, complete with guest appearances by the likes of Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler, became a palpable hit. Virgin Records snapped up the US rights to Hooker’s next album (though European rights remained with Silvertone for one more album before the Virgin deal went worldwide) and inaugurated a dedicated blues-n-roots label called PointBlank, the roster of which included Albert Collins, John Hammond, Pop Staples and – by the time of 1992’s Boom Boom – Hooker himself.

  And lo, he looked about him and saw that it was good. Hooker will still deliver, at the drop of a decorated homburg, his standard diatribes concerning record companies and the terrible things they do to artists in general and John Lee Hooker in particular, but at least now he has something to cite as a contrast. ‘Record companies do [cheat]. They’ll do that. They’re crooked, record companies. Virgin don’t do that. [PointBlank boss] John Wooler ain’t got his name on nothin’, but he don’t need to. I ain’t sayin’ they ain’t crooked, but they pretty good with me. They very honest with me. I gets lots and lots of money from Virgin Records. I got good management, [and] good people work for Virgin. They do’s it legal, that’s what I like about ’em. They ain’t got a bad reputation as a cut-throat. Most record companies now have just about got to go straight now, because the artists have got wise and smart. They don’t deal with that stuff any more. They used to do the blues singers in really bad when they first started up, but now? It’s pretty well hip now. Pretty well straight. You don’t get as much of that now as you did back then in the ’50s and ’60s. There’s still some of that goin’ on, don’t get me wrong, but they were more out with it then. Now everybody wised up and smarter. We got lawyers, we got managers, which we didn’t have then, accountants, we got good everything. We got all of this which I didn’t have when I was young and didn’t know how to do all of this. It’s good for them too, so the record companies won’t get a bad reputation, you know?’

  The prelude to the success of The Healer had included a couple more fortuitous concatenations of events.159 One was a guest appearance with the Rolling Stones at the Atlantic City show on the 1989 tour: Hooker took stage front – standing up for once – for a furious, storming assault on ‘Boogie Chillen’, whilst Keith Richards, Ron Wood, Bill Wyman and fellow-guest Eric Clapton lurked back by the amps with their guitars and let him get on with it. The other was rather more elaborate, somewhat more significant, and set another jewel into the crown of Hooker’s hat: slotting into place one more jigsaw-piece of the modern-day Hooker mythology.

  During the mid-’80s, Pete Townshend had opted, as part of his post-Who therapy and general redefinition of self, to serve a spell as an editor at Faber & Faber, one of London’s oldest and most prestigious publishing houses. As well as publishing Horse’s Neck, his own first book of short stories, and commissioning a series of extremely fine volumes,160 he conceived the idea of a musical adaptation of one of the company’s bread-and-butter properties, The Iron Man, an ecological fable by Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. The title character is, as Townshend puts it in his notes, ‘a large self-maintaining robot programmed to destroy any machinery or system that threatens man’: simultaneously a symbol of earth – if soil is the planet’s flesh, then iron ore is its bones – and, as a ‘made’ thing, of man’s interaction with his world. As far as Townshend was concerned, there was only one choice of ‘actor’ for a character so heavily weighted with symbolism: John Lee Hooker.

  ‘I wanted a primordial voice,’ writes Townshend.161 ‘The voice from R&B that I remember first being disturbed by was Howlin’ Wolf, but JLH’s voice is less that of a macho monster, more of a dark, frail masculine soul. He evokes something whale-like in a way, a spirit that is thrashing powerfully beneath the surface, but in grave danger from the world and his own restrained anger and vengefulness. Ted Hughes’ Iron Giant in the story has no history; we must project it onto the story for ourselves. Hughes invites us to ponder with him: “Where had he come from, nobody knows.” The first time I heard the blues by JLH that’s how I felt – where does this come from? It was so familiar to me, so resonant, and yet so obviously not of my experience or society. Could I have been remembering?’

  ‘The Iron Man’ had been one of Hooker’s nicknames back in Detroit: the honorific bestowed on him by his friends to acknowledge his powers of stamina and endurance during those long years of working in steel mills by day and playing in bars by night. Now he was the Iron Man once more: not just to his friends, but to the world.

  The character has two songs to sing in Townshend’s musical: ‘Over The Top’, in which the Iron Man, smashed to pieces in a fall from a clifftop, faces the task of rebuilding and reconstructing himself; and ‘I Eat Heavy Metal’ wherein, restored to full metal health and prowling the countryside for sustenance, he takes on all the military equipment deployed against him. A demo tape arrived on Hooker’s doorstep in late ’88; listening to it, he found
himself initially nonplussed. Naturally, he recalled Townshend and the Who from ’60s days in London – ‘Yeah! They was loud! He’s deaf, y’know!’ – but this kind of music was a very different proposition from his memories of the brash young bashers of yore.

  ‘When Pete Townshend asked me to do it I laughed at him,’ Hooker confesses ‘“Iron Man? Gargling gasoline? What do you mean by this? That ain’t me. That ain’t the blues.” But he just said to me, “If anyone can do it, you can.”’

  Pete Townshend has fond memories of the session. ‘It was completely natural. It was tricky to get used to the fact that his young blonde girlfriend was younger and prettier than any I had known, but despite his crisp suit, elegant hat and sharp demeanour, there was humility. He couldn’t read music or text, and learned each line parrot-fashion. He said it wasn’t blues, but he could feel it nonetheless. It was an affirmation for me to sense that he felt at home with what I was doing because I know how deeply everything I do is rooted in his own work.’