Boogie Man

  Then came Johnny Winter, checking in at Russian Hill to cut ‘Susie’ with his regular rhythm section of bassist Jeff Ganz and drummer Tom Compton. ‘Working with John Lee was real quick, man. We just went in the studio, set up the equipment and played. It took us longer to set up than it did to record the tracks! We recorded [“Susie”] twice: once with an acoustic bass and once with an electric bass. We did one other track [the still unissued “Face To Face”], then that was it! Three takes and finished!

  ‘John didn’t even show me the chords before we started recording, but I know pretty much how John works. He changes whenever he wants to so I knew we were gonna have to really watch him. I wish he could have stayed longer and done a few more things, but he had a real bad cold and wasn’t feeling that great – he had to get a bunch of stuff from the drugstore. I’d like to have done four or five tracks and done a few runs through; as it turned out, we didn’t even get to do two takes of each of the songs we recorded. I didn’t sing on the tracks, just played guitar, changing whenever he changed. In the past when I was doing sessions with Muddy Waters or playing live with him, Muddy would pretty much change on time, but when John has finished whatever he’s singing, he just changes regardless of whether it’s the ‘right’ time or not – you don’t know when the change is gonna come but you know it’s not gonna be normal.

  ‘It was a lot of fun!’

  Next up was Robert Cray and his team, cutting Mr Lucky’s title track and Boom Boom’s ‘Same Old Blues Again’. John Hammond rounded out the 1990 studio dates with an absolute peach of a session, which yielded three songs, two of which made the cut for Mr Lucky and the third, a joyful canter through Hooker’s perennial ‘Bottle Up And Go’, waiting in the wings for Boom Boom. ‘Highway 13’ was an astonishing atmosphere piece: Hooker driving through the pouring rain with Hammond’s plunking National guitar and eerie mouth-harp by his side, Scott Matthews’s brushed drums wiping his windshield. ‘Father Was A Jockey’ was rocking jump-up braggadoccio – hey, it’s a guy thing; I’ve never heard a woman boasting in song that she learned her sexual prowess from her mother.165

  Unlike either its predecessor or its successors, the final sequenced configuration of Mr Lucky featured no solo performances by Hooker. As Kappus explains, ‘The reason why there are two tracks with John Hammond [was] to try to offer that acoustic sound in the absence of solo tracks. We had a glut of . . . by the time we’d finished everything off, we’d put out the word to various people and we’d worked on the project and as we neared the end, several of the people we’d talked to suddenly came in and said that they were ready to do something. We found ourselves with more guests than we could squeeze in on the record and still have separate solo tracks. And we hadn’t recorded any solo tracks yet, so John Hammond was the only one with two tracks on the record, to offer a little taste of the acoustic side.’

  To speak of ‘a glut’ may seem ungracious, but there was certainly no famine. The album was completed in four more sessions between January and May of 1991. The first brought in Johnnie Johnson, Chuck Berry’s piano-playing alter ego from St Louis, alongside Ehrman, Matthews and Mike Osborn, for a romp through ‘I Want To Hug You’, and a still-unissued ‘Up And Down’.

  ‘I first met John Lee Hooker in New Orleans, when NRBQ called me to come do some work on the piano,’ Johnson recalled. ‘It was a great thrill to be with him, you know, because for years I’ve always heard of John Lee Hooker and his music, and to find out that I was going to play with him . . . hey, this is awesome. I couldn’t wait until I met the man, and then when we finally did meet, face to face, we hit it off. That was when he asked me would I be interested in making a recording with him. I told him never to make a record or nothin’ ’less he call on me to be his piano man. So far, so good! So I made the recording with him. He is the easiest man I worked with yet to record or play with. He’s very cooperative in everything, so I wouldn’t say he’s hard to work with. If you’re a musician, you can shift too. You can’t just go up there with one thing and think you can blend in with what he’s doin’, so you got people prepared to do what he do. You can feel it comin’ on, if you a musician. I been playin’ blues for quite a while, and it was when I was with Albert King that I learned all these different keys which came in handy when I played with artists like John Lee Hooker. So I had no problem with him, and his character is beautiful, he has his own style of playin’, his own style of singin’, and the songs that he sings hold everybody’s attention.’

  And then in April came Keith Richards, the Human Riff, the heart and soul of the Rolling Stones. ‘The first John Lee Hooker record I heard was ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, funnily enough. Maybe that’s why I said, “That’s the one I want to do for the album.” I just thought “Crawlin’ King Snake” was so mysterious and so individual. You’re not going to mistake John Lee Hooker for anybody else, and it was just such a fascinating sound, and so different to other stuff I’d heard; in a way more archaic. It felt so electric, and sounded as if he’d jumped a generation. It was so dark and swampy. I learned those John Lee Hooker chords, which are very strange shapes, and it immediately affected everything I did since.

  ‘At the Stones’ gig in Atlantic City, John came on, and Eric [Clapton] was there too. John came by and I’d heard [The Healer] and said, “Nice job, John.” Then at the beginning of this year [1991], John calls up and says, “I’d really like you to do a track on this album.” He asked me what song I’d like to do. I said, “I wanna do a song about a subject you’re really interested in, John. Let’s do ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’.”

  ‘We just went in the studio and did three takes, and I think it was the first take we used on the record. It was all over in an hour and I said, “John, that’s too short”, and he said, “Yeah, I’m too tired.” He’s a sweet guy. I had a great time with him. I think I’m getting on, but this guy’s nearly twice as old as I am,166 and he’s still playing. It kind of gives you hope!’

  The evening after the session, Rich Kirch discovered that you don’t have to die to go to heaven. It was his birthday, and there he was, having dinner and a post-prandial jam with his two all-time musical heroes, John Lee Hooker and Keith Richards. He and Keith even wrote a song together.

  The version of ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ which John Lee and Keith cut on 11 April 1991 – with the omnipresent Scott Matthews on drums and Canned Heat’s Larry Taylor anchoring the bassline – is one of the stellar items on an album already embarrassingly over-stuffed with gems. Both men are past-masters of the greater and lesser arcana of ‘Spanish’ tuning; and both men are renowned for the idiosyncracy of their phrasing. The meshing of Keith’s weird way with a groove and Hooker’s weird way with a groove creates an agonisingly beautiful rhythmic tension behind Hooker’s menacingly reverbed vocal.

  ‘John Lee is definitely a man,’ says Richards. ‘He’s no spring chicken, but I went over to his house for a barbecue just after the session and he had a whole school of young ladies with him, all of them guitar players, so you end up in John Lee’s front room with everybody plugged in hammering away, and John just sits in the back there eating, going, “Yeah, yeah, that’s pretty good.”’

  Less than a fortnight later, Hooker was back in Sausalito, cutting once more with Santana. Apart from Chester Thompson and Carlos Santana himself, it was an all-new band, including the young Hawaiian bassist Benny Reitveld, soon to jump ship to work with Miles Davis during the master trumpeter’s final years. If the intent was to recreate the magical moment which produced The Healer, then it failed; after all, how often can you catch the lightning in a bottle? ‘Chill Out’ was, indeed, a post-Healer attempt to juxtapose Santana’s music with Hooker’s philosophy, and whilst it was cool, funky and felt – as the world heard when it was exhumed to serve as the title track of Hooker’s 1995 album – it was no ‘Healer’. However, ‘Stripped Me Naked’, the cut that ended up on Mr Lucky, was a very different beast indeed.

  For subject matter, Hooker strip-mined the residual
trauma of his divorce from Maude, two decades past and half a continent away. Where ‘The Healer’’s music was warm and tranquil, the angular jazz-funk of ‘Stripped Me Naked’ generates a palpable sense of unease. This time, the sonic world Santana constructs for Hooker to inhabit is a treacherous and inhospitable cityscape, delineated by an undulating chord sequence of serpentine menace, stalked by Reitveld’s spiky bass and chilled by Thompson’s icy synth, using a vocal sample that sounds like eerily calm robot voices going ‘ahhh’. The contrast with the human voice of Hooker – the most human voice ever recorded – could scarcely be greater.

  Hooker’s downtown, back in the divorce court from hell. His wife is looking to take him for everything he’s got – his money, his house, his car, everything – to strip him naked. And the judge is on her side. ‘That was a mean old judge,’ he muses, half-admiringly. And this time, Santana’s guitar isn’t healing him, but mocking him.

  By 11 May, when Hooker and Ry Cooder had finished cutting ‘This Is Hip’ – a Vee Jay outtake which had become a Hooker connoisseurs’ favourite as the title track of a 1980 UK compilation – at a Hollywood studio, Blue Rose pretty much had the new Hooker album in the bag, not to mention much of the next one. Cooder brought along drummer Jim Keltner and bassist Nick Lowe, the rhythm section of Little Village, his short-lived ‘roots-rock supergroup’:167 presumably Lowe didn’t invite Hooker to join him in a quick chorus of ‘Milk And Alcohol’. With Johnnie Johnson on piano and Cooder’s trusty backup singers Terry Evans, Bobby King and Willie Green supercharging the choruses, the track boasted a swing, solidity and swagger which were utterly impeccable.

  Mr Lucky’s front cover showed a seraphically smiling Hooker, wearing a beautiful suit, reclining against a beautiful old Buick with a beautiful old cherry-red Epiphone Sheraton guitar in his lap. The back cover triumphantly emblazoned its rollcall of celebrity drop-ins in strict, egalitarian alphabetical order. There they were: Albert Collins, Ry Cooder, Robert Cray, John Hammond, Johnnie Johnson, Booker T. Jones, Van Morrison, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana . . . ‘and many more’. Mr Lucky took The Healer’s Guest Star Syndrome about as far as it could go. With Hooker’s next pair of albums, Kappus and Rogers resisted the temptation to play ‘can you top this?’

  Boom Boom and Chill Out reflected the shift in Hooker’s own concerns: as he wound down his touring schedule yet further and concentrated his attention nearer home, he would start to carry the Coast To Coast Blues Band, plus other – non-famous – friends from the Bay Area blues scene with him into the studio. There would be more solo sessions, or duets with Rogers. Less and less emphasis would be placed on the participation of big-name colleagues. Boom Boom would feature performances by Albert Collins, Robert Cray, Charlie Musselwhite and John Hammond, as well as, on the thunderous remake of the title track, a stunning cameo by Jimmie Vaughan, former guitar enforcer of the Fabulous Thunderbirds and big brother to the late Stevie Ray Vaughan. And Chill Out included on its rosters Carlos Santana, Van Morrison, Booker T. Jones and the veteran Charles Brown, composer of the perennial ‘Merry Christmas Baby’ and Hooker’s own lifetime favourite ‘Driftin’ Blues’, complete with his regular band. Nevertheless, all these names were buried in the credits for their individual tracks rather than emblazoned on the sleeves.

  The spotlight was now firmly on John Lee Hooker; not on his famous friends, but on the man himself, and his music, and his own unique gifts. He was also mastering the art of Zen Stardom, the mystical process by which an artist does less and less work whilst their media presence becomes progressively more and more ubiquitous. If, to mangle a cliché in a phildickian manner, nothing ubiks like ubiquity, then Hooker in near-retirement loomed larger over the media landscape than most bluesmen at their active peak. The paradigm indicator of Hooker’s iconic status was, of all things, a TV commercial. Lee Jeans, conscious of ranking a distant third to Levi’s and Wrangler in the Great American Legwear League (Mythic Division), launched a campaign around the slogan ‘The Jeans That Built America’, centring around Great Americans Called Lee, including Jerry Lee Lewis, Robert E. Lee, Gypsy Rose Lee, Marvel Comics figurehead Stan Lee, and guess who. In a truly giddy piece of mythmaking, Hooker – or, to be more precise, a stunt double shown in long-shot silhouette – is seen clambering from a railroad boxcar in a haze of mist to the strains of ‘Boom Boom’. Then cut to the great man himself, performing the song on stage with the Coast To Coast Blues Band.

  In Britain, where folks care about such things, the song promptly zoomed into the Top 20. A clip from the vid was even shown on Top of the Pops, and the revisionist take of ‘Boom Boom’ thereby became a bigger hit than the original had been almost thirty years earlier. The commercial spawned a legion of imitators, wherein blues became a signifier of authenticity, and all manner of African-American senior citizens in Big Suits and jaunty hats certified all manner of products as The Real Thang. Nothing and no-one, it seemed, could be more ‘real’ than John Lee Hooker – or someone like him. It didn’t even have to be the real John Lee Hooker.

  Meanwhile, the real John Lee Hooker stayed home, and took life easy. Even when Boom Boom was nominated for a Grammy, he spared himself the hassle of making a trip to New York to attend the awards ceremony. Instead, he stuck to his sofa, and watched the proceedings on television. After firing off a few cursory comments about performers like Whitney Houston (‘Oohh, I could just kiss her all over’) and a certain crew of veteran hard-rockers (‘They ain’t shit’), he tipped his hat over his eyes, folded his hands across his paunch, and went to sleep.

  He looked after his health and watched what he ate, though the exercise bike his daughter Zakiya bought for him gathered dust despite her thoughtfully taking the precaution of setting it up in front of the TV set, and his resolute aversion to most kinds of physical activity generated some cause for concern amongst friends, family and colleagues. He saw a star with his name installed on the sidewalk of Hollywood Boulevarde. Like Buddy Guy in Chicago and B.B. King in Memphis, he even lent his name to a club: John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Room, opposite the old Fillmore West site in San Francisco. And back in the music, he lent his colossal presence to the endeavours of others: when, in the spring of 1993, B.B. took a leaf out of Hooker’s book to record Blues Summit, an album of duets,168 Hooker was there, with Roy Rogers and most of Robert Cray’s band, including Cray himself, to cut a version of Willie Dixon’s ‘You Shook Me’ which saw King venturing into Hooker’s musical turf, rather than the reverse. The highlight of an album by no means deficient in great moments – other featured guests included Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Etta James and Cray – the track was a testament to the generosity of spirit of both men, and to the strength and durability of a friendship which had lasted almost forty years.

  Others who benefited from Hooker’s benign intervention included Van Morrison and President Bill Clinton: he guested at a San Francisco concert by one which was subsequently issued as a live album, and played an election rally on behalf of the other. And over a decade after the project was first mooted, the full-scale John Lee Hooker/Van Morrison collaboration finally took place. Though its lead track was a storming version of ‘Dimples’ performed with, and produced by, Los Lobos, Van The Man’s participation in 1997’s Don’t Look Back was literally hands-on; he produced and played guitar on ten of the eleven tracks, and sang on four. The title track was a vintage Hooker blues-ballad Morrison had recorded with Them back in 1964. Apart from ‘Dimples’, the album’s wildest card was a radically Hookerized and thoroughly deconstructed version of Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Red House’; Hooker had recorded the song once before, for a limited-edition CD release which justaposed several very different takes on the piece by Hendrix himself with a 1989 Hollywood-cut reading of the song by Hooker and, among others, Booker T. Jones. Then he’d sung it more or less straight, faithfully following ‘the great Jimmy Henry’’s original blue(s)print and personalizing it only with his patented one-bar anticipation of each chord change. This time, under Morrison’s prod
uction aegis, he took Hendrix’s signature slow blues all the way back down the line to Hooker Central Station.

  Yet the album’s centrepiece was a song called ‘The Healing Game’. It clearly meant a lot to Morrison, who by now had taken to sporting a full-scale John Lee Hooker look, complete with trademark Hooker-style suit, hat and shades, because he not only included the song on an album of his own which he was recording more-or-less back-to-back with the Hooker sessions, but he made it his record’s title track. Due to the tightness of Morrison’s own schedule, the album provided an unwelcome flashback to the bad old recording ways of the pre-Healer era: too many songs cut at too few sessions; too much haste, not enough speed. Once again, many sparks are struck – with Hooker and Morrison together, how could it be otherwise? – but too few tracks catch fire. Nevertheless, on ‘The Healing Game’ itself, they catch the lightning. Morrison’s own subsequent version seems flat by comparison.

  These days, Hooker does what he wants, how he wants. He listens to advice from those he considers qualified to give it, and then he does what he wanted, anyhow – boogie, chillen! Those whose advice he doesn’t take generally appreciate why he doesn’t take it. Unless, that is, that person is Bernard Besman. ‘I saw him play a concert at the Palace,’ recalls the venerable entrepreneur, ‘and I told him at that time . . . as a matter of fact, he’s had a lot of bad reviews when he plays with his group. Terrible. Because people want to hear him play how he plays. I talked to him some time ago and I said, “John, do some numbers yourself and then have them come in at the end, because people don’t come to hear the band, they come to hear you.” But he doesn’t follow that advice. He still plays with the band.’

  Hooker knows full well that people still love to hear him play solo, but he has his reasons. ‘Oh, I know that. Yeah, I know. I been told that a lot of times, but I don’t like playing by myself any more. I play by myself some once in a while, but not all the time. I wouldn’t want to do that all the time. With the band, a small trio, something like that . . . but people do want to hear me by myself a lot, they want to hear some of my records of me playing by myself. I give ’em some of that. Whenever I cut an album I try to do a little solo stuff on it, but I don’t want to do it all the time. Things change, but I’m still playing the same thing I played then. I ain’t playin’ no different. I just ain’t playin’ as much. I just go with the band, sit on top of the groove, just sit there and enjoy it. I might do a solo album sometime. Oh boy, I can play by myself.