Boogie Man

  ‘I can play the hell out of it by myself.’

  So, these days, who are Hooker’s true peers? No-one in the blues, that’s for sure. There’s B.B., of course, and B.B. is fabulous indeed, but he’s a different kind of creature and a different kind of artist, and he has walked a very different kind of path. We not only need to look beyond the blues, but beyond music itself, to two of Hooker’s most distinguished contemporaries: to Nelson Mandela and William S. Burroughs.

  After decades of imprisonment, Mandela only assumed his rightful place on the world stage at an age when most politicians are retiring. However, when he was finally able to do so, he became the best-loved statesman not only in Africa, but in the entire world. He was admired for what he stood for; for what he’d been through, and – ultimately – for what and who he was. Simultaneously Burroughs – another guy, incidentally, who knew how to wear the hell out of a snappy suit and hat – had spent decades defining an art incomprehensible to most and derided by many; gaining the approbation of a (comparatively) small but highly discriminating audience; enjoying an ineradicable effect on world literature but receiving comparatively petty rewards for doing so. His career then came under the direction of a young, tenacious, loyal and hard-working acolyte named James Grauerholz – Burroughs’ equivalent to Mike Kappus, if you like – who got his tangled business affairs under control and negotiated the contracts that enabled him to produce one final burst of great work: the trilogy comprising Cities Of the Red Night, The Place Of Dead Roads and The Western Lands. Burroughs died in 1997 at the age of 83: lionised, wealthy, dripping with awards, and waited on hand and foot: his place in world literature, and in the art and culture of the twentieth century, finally acknowledged and utterly beyond dispute. It was a long time coming, but it came.

  Say something once: why say it again? Because some things need to be said more than once. Like this: John Lee Hooker takes it easy. But he takes it.

  By way of illustration: whilst John Lee and Van Morrison were working on Don’t Look Back at the Plant in Sausalito, something else was going on down the hall. Hard-working roots-rockers Big Head Todd & the Monsters, fronted by singer/guitarist Todd Park Mohr, were hard at work on their latest album, Beautiful World, under the production guidance of former Talking Heads keyboards and guitar guy Jerry Harrison. And then synchronicity kicked in, yet again.

  As Mohr explains it, ‘Jerry Harrison had asked us to cut “Boom Boom” after seeing us perform it prior to making Beautiful World. It was one of the first songs we had played as a band, and became an audience favorite when we revived it at the request of our road crew. The band was very reluctant to cut it, and it wasn’t considered in the running to appear on Beautiful World.

  ‘John Lee had been working at the Plant, down the hall from us, when the idea occurred to us to try to get him to sit in on “Boom Boom”. I remember challenging Jerry on this point, telling him that that was the only way we were going to use the track. To me, covering the song without Hooker would just be covering a song, and something outside the spirit of what we wanted for the record. Involving John Lee makes the song a tribute, and it is one of our most relished experiences to have been able to honour him with his own music. At any rate, Jerry brought John Lee in. We were reluctant to believe it was really going to happen.’

  ‘When John Lee entered the studio,’ says Mohr, ‘even Jerry, our unemotional music highbrow, was ecstatic and a little fearful. John has an overwhelming presence, and when you see him, you want to be a fly on the wall. He was exactly as I’d always imagined him, decked in a pinstripe suit with suspenders. He seemed ageless and still driven to life. He sat down and boomed his “Boogie Chillen” bit for about nineteen minutes, as we tried to coax a few lines of “Boom Boom” out of him. “That’s another song, you understand,” he protested, because we only paid him for one. As soon as he heard the guitar break he couldn’t resist.

  ‘“Who’s the guitar player?” he asked. Brian [Nevin, (drums)] pointed at me. He looked at me and said, “You bad.” Hearing him say that to me was like getting my driver’s licence. I had been legitimized. When he finished, he muttered jokingly, “Where’s the beer? Where’s the keg? Where’s the pot?”’

  And life went on. The 1998 Grammy Awards doubled Hooker’s Grammy stock virtually overnight with a Best Traditional Blues Album award for Don’t Look Back and a Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals award (shared with Van Morrison) for the title track; neatly bookending his Best Traditional Blues Album award for Chill Out, and Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals for his ‘I’m In The Mood’ duet with Bonnie Raitt.

  Plus he found the time to cut a brand-new lead-off track for The Best Of Friends, the best-of round-up from the post-Healer era which certified the arrival of his career at the half-century mark. Not surprisingly, he recut ‘Boogie Chillen’, this time in a scorching full-band incarnation complete with guitar by Eric Clapton – though the impossibility of reconciling the two men’s schedules meant that they couldn’t be in the studio simultaneously and therefore ‘met’ only on tape – riding out on a passionate incantation of self-assertion and self-definition.

  ‘I am,’ he sings, ‘the Boogie Man.’

  All in a day’s work. Yeah? Right. All in a life’s work.

  Let me tell you somethin’

  ’Bout my life

  At night I lay down

  To sleep at night

  Lovin’ people

  Keep me happy

  Down through the years

  I don’t care who you are

  Or where you come from

  I love you

  I love you

  Do you understand?

  John Lee Hooker, on ‘Loving People’,

  by Ollan Christopher, Zakiya Hooker

  and Chris Patton; from Zakiya Hooker’s Another

  Generation Of The Blues

  The highest purpose of the universe is to develop and grow and, as it does so, to heal itself, and everything within it, from the necessary wounds of development and growth. This is no dichotomy: no either/or, but a single continuous process, and the cycle cannot be broken. Without change and the possibility of change, there is only stasis and entropy. But change and growth create conflict; conflicts create wounds; wounds create pain. From these there can be no exemption, and no protection. Instead of protection, there can be – must be – healing. For without healing and the possibility of healing, there is only death. Thus the universe is forever wounded, and forever healing.

  To be a healer is to serve, very directly, the purpose of the universe. If we, or the world as we perceive it, seem to be damaging ourselves faster than we can heal, then we are in danger; and it is only healers who stand between ourselves and extinction. Because if we cannot be healed, or learn how to heal ourselves, we shall die.

  The universe will go on without us. If we inflict more damage upon this planet than it can sustain, the planet will protect itself by wiping us out. Then it will heal itself; and, as part of that healing it may or may not develop anything which we could recognize as ‘intelligent life’. Or, more to the point, anything which could recognize us as ‘intelligent life’.

  Damage comes in many forms, and so does healing. We can be damaged in body, and damaged in spirit. And we can respond to such damage in a variety of ways. We can refuse to recover, and simply die in our footsteps. We can drag ourselves around the world as walking wounded. We can seek revenge, hunt down those who have tormented or injured us, and seek to torment and injure them in our turn. Or we can heal, and we can forgive.

  It is not enough simply to say that healing implies forgiveness: the two are inseparable. Each is a way of ‘making right’. Neither can retroactively undo or unmake the original injury – make it not so, Number One! – but damage can indeed be repaired. Once healed, or once forgiven, we can be ‘as good as new’. And the ultimate triumph of the healer’s art can be to make ourselves or others better than new, because simply to be ‘new’ is to be untried, untested, untouched, un
exposed to the dangers posed us by our world and by ourselves – and to those which we, in our turn, pose ourselves, and our world.

  To have been damaged by those dangers, or to have become a manifestation of those dangers and thereby to have, knowingly or unknowingly, damaged others – and to heal or be healed, to forgive or be forgiven – is to have become part of the essential process of the universe: to have learned, and to have grown; and to have participated in, and aided, the processes of learning and growth in others. Most of all, it is to demonstrate, to ourselves and to others, the eternal truth of that most ancient of blues adages, that ‘trouble don’t last always’.

  We must needs make peace with very many angry ghosts, and in order to do that we need all the healers we can get. John Lee Hooker is such a man. He is a healer by both instinct and philosophy and each beyond doubt enriches and deepens the other; but the instinct comes first, and the philosophy after the fact. While he is here, we must treasure him. When he is gone, we must treasure his memory, his legacy, his work.

  And we have to understand precisely what the nature of that work is. John Lee Hooker’s gift is not specifically located in his ability to sing, or to play guitar, or to write songs, or to boogie-rock an audience cold. His gift is that he has been blessed with the power to reach way deep down into himself, into parts of himself that most people don’t even know exist, and to bring up from there the deepest truths about himself. And, having done so, to present those truths to us – through his words or his guitar licks or simply the physical sound of his voice – in such a way as to put us in touch with the hidden truths of how we feel, to connect us with parts of ouselves that we, maybe, didn’t even know existed. To connect us with the most fundamental essence of our own humanity: that which we share, not through choice or ethics or ideology or through any kind of decision but as a basic fact of our existence – as basic as the need for oxygen or water – with every other member of our species on this planet.

  In Iron John – a title so resonant in this context that to even attempt (if you will indulge the author by pardoning yet another use of the Star Trek infinitive) the process of deconstruction would be to debase it – Robert Bly writes eloquently of the need to grieve, and of the dire consequences of denying that need. To heal the grief you got to feel the grief. John Lee Hooker’s music does just that: it helps you to feel it, and feeling it heals it. He gives you permission to grieve in a culture which otherwise denies that permission.

  And that will last for ever. Long after John Lee Hooker – the body, the physical entity, the old geezer with the deep voice and the suit and the hat and the shades – is long gone, John Lee Hooker – the artist, the healer, the boogie man – will be here, for as long as recorded music exists, or – if the folk process holds up – maybe even longer. For all of us, and for generations yet unborn, John Lee Hooker will always be there for us: a spirit guide pacing the pathways of the heart and the backstreets of the soul, reporting back what he has seen and heard and felt. And, by doing so, giving us something warm and solid to hold onto during those long racking nights in the dark room; helping us to map our own way out of the traps we have built for ourselves; letting us know that others have been where we are now, and that they got out, and in the end, despite everything, they found their own happiness, and their own peace of mind.

  Healing us. Forgiving us. Teaching us to heal ourselves, and to forgive ourselves. Letting us start fresh, and whole, and clean: the way we thought, back when we were hopelessly mired in the bad craziness, that we could never possibly be, ever again.

  Because blues is the healer. Really, truly. And John Lee Hooker is the greatest healer the blues has ever known.

  In the words of Ice-T: I’m outta here like I stole sump’n. Right now, I’m going to leave you one-on-one with Mr Hooker. Evoke that voice: impossibly deep and rich and slow and dark, with infinite gradations of emphasis and a slight stutter; confidential, intimate. Listen.

  ‘I been out here a long time, about forty-five or fifty years. I got enough money. I need never work any more: just sit back and let Mike do the dirty work and bring the cheques in. I may go in the studio once in a while . . . I feel that now, at this stage, anything I make gonna sell so much now ’cause it’s from John Lee Hooker. Even if it ain’t the number-one best, it’s gonna sell so much because of my name. Whatever I do, they’re gonna buy it whenever I come up with something. I always try to make the best, so I’m gonna kick back and try to enjoy what life I got left . . . and love people, which I do, and that’s about it.

  ‘I can’t run these roads any more. I ain’t twenty-one any more. There come a time in a man’s life – a man or woman – that there’s an end out there somewhere ahead of you. And my end’s ahead of me. Years go by; you gets older. Nobody stays young. I ain’t young, I ain’t no spring chicken, but at times I feel pretty good, so I just want to sit around and enjoy what I done made over the years. Enjoy my family and my friends, and I just want to go out there once in a while and help people – the poor people, the homeless people – do benefits, help raise a little money for them. That’s what I want to do. I told Mike I don’t want no manager tellin’ me not to do that; I want to do this on my own. If I want to go to a night-club and play . . . the way I feel, you know? Not for the money: to help somebody. I put everybody in the same basket: I don’t love this person, hate that person. I love all people. Some things that comes out of them I don’t like, you know? That body stuff – you know, flesh and blood? I love that. But what comes out of it – your mouth, what you stand for – I don’t like that. I don’t dislike you as a human being – what God made. No, no. I feel good when I help somebody, and that’s what I’m gonna do now.

  ‘It’s hard to retire. One way you can do this: you get sick and you cain’t. You go as long as you can, until you cain’t go. As long as you on your feet, can walk around, can breathe, you go out there once in a while. But when you cain’t, it’s a different story. I know where you comin’ from; you understand where I’m comin’ from, too, but I will never completely retire. I will go out there once in a while . . . and do it. To keep on doin’ it.

  ‘You have it in your mind that you want to do that, but when the day come and you say, “Well, this is it” . . . you cain’t. You stay out a little while, maybe a month or two . . . and then you come back out. The Stones retired, they come back . . . The Who done at least two farewell tours . . . Oh yeah. I know what you’re sayin’. Tina [Turner], she done some farewell tours too! When I say that, Mike kinda laugh. I can see that in his face: he don’t believe I’m gonna retire.

  ‘I may lay out for a long time. I’m thinkin’ on it. “Well, this is it. There ain’t no more.” And then we say, “Well, John Lee Hooker come back out of retirement.”

  ‘It’s hell on this planet, and your hell is here while you alive. Your heaven and hell is what you make it, but it is someplace God Jehovah will let you go, but there ain’t such a thing as you gonna burn in fire and you gonna go to hell. Right now, I think I’m in heaven, what you call heaven. I think I’m living good and enjoying people, I’m very successful, I got people around me who love me – so that’s my heaven and my paradise. Lovin’ people, people lovin’ me. I repeat myself again: the most important things in life [are] your health, friendship and people. Give love, you get love back. No matter how much money you got, I got, anybody: you got no health, money don’t mean nothin’. You can’t enjoy it, you miserable. If you got health and a little money to survive, you’s okay.

  ‘And peace . . . of . . . mind. Peace of mind takes people around you who love you; health; a little money for good living, and good people. They give you peace of mind. If you ain’t got that, you ain’t got peace of mind. If you ain’t got that, you got problems. You tormented, people always buggin’ ya, making your nerves bad, things on your mind . . . you can’t have peace of mind. If you got people who love you and you know they do, and your health . . . you got peace . . . of . . . mind.

  ‘I’m goin’ t
o say this, and it’s true: the blues was here the day that the world was born. Sadness, loneliness; it come from man and woman. A woman gets sad ’bout her man done left her, man gets sad ’bout his woman done left him . . . started hummin’ sad songs. Somethin’ ’bout a woman. You can’t say nothin’ . . . a man can’t say nothin’ that ain’t about a woman. A woman can’t say nothin’ without sayin’ somethin’ about a man. That’s what it come from, now, ’cause even Adam was in the garden. It’s no sin. Do you see in the Bible anywhere where singin’ is a sin? This leads into what I’m going to say. God, if there is such a thing as God, because we all believe in a Supreme Being: he wants you to do right, love people all over the world, and that’s what I’m doing. I’m serving people all over. I’m serving people, I’m reachin’ out, gettin’ people, helpin’ people. I do benefits, I gives ’em. That’s treatin’ ’em as God want. And all the people that I don’t see, my song reaches them all over the world. I never see ’em, I never will see ’em. But my voice is all over the world: John Lee Hooker on a record. I’ll be here for ever, but my body won’t. Accordin’ to the Bible, you doin’ what God want you to do: help people. People that need help: the sick, the needy, crippled kids. I do’s all of that. I study givin’. I’m a Christian, but I just don’t run to church. I don’t believe in runnin’ to church. I don’t believe in gettin’ on my knees prayin’. I don’t believe in that.