Boogie Man

  ‘I can sit right in my house and do good. You notice me: you see how I love people, you see how I welcome all kinds of people into my house, all nationalities. To me, I sees no colour: I see people. I see a human being that God planted here on this earth. He made one race, that’s the human race. He made all different flowers, different colours, nationalities, but he made one race, the human race. But our people don’t see that. They fight among each other, then they run to church: segregated churches. I look at ’em, and talk about this, and people say, “You should have been a minister, you says things that’s so true.” No, God – if it is a God, ain’t none of us ever seen him, but we do know there’s a Supreme Being run this earth, all the stuff on this earth. Who put it there? Who created it? We never seen God, but there is a Supreme Being, and he made one race, and that’s the human race. Two arms, two legs . . .

  ‘One race! You see flowers in your yard: you got all colours of flowers: red flowers, blue, yellow, but they all flowers. You know what I mean? It’s all flowers, but it’s all one race. That’s the truth! If the whole world see’d and felt that way . . . it’s all one race, the human race. We all breathe alike. We own nothin’ on this earth, we don’t own nothin’. We don’t even own the clothes we got on our back; we just wears them, and use them. When we leaves here, we takes away nothin’. Nothin’ you brought into this world, nothin’ you gonna take away. You say, “I own this land.” You don’t own land, just the land you gonna be buried in. You owns nothin’. I don’t own this house, I’m just usin’ this house. The money I spend is paper; that paper’s gone. You only own enough spot to be buried in and you don’t own that. When they put you in there someone might plant stuff over on top of that. It’s a hole in the ground, that’s all you have. If you don’t do that, they put you in a incinerator and cremate you. Material things, fine cars, fine houses . . . yes, it’s nice to have this, it’s nice to be using that. It’s nice to enjoy things like that while you here on this planet which you know you just passing through, but why can’t we let everybody enjoy something, saying, “I want all of this”? Why can’t we share this like we ain’t gonna stay here always? Why can’t we share the wealth and what we claim is ours, what we accumulate and say is ours? Why can’t everybody get together and share that with the human race, which is one race?

  ‘The ones that got all the power and money, they look down on the poor. They see you layin’ there on the ground, they see you scufflin’, they never gonna reach out and give you a helpin’ hand, say, “C’mon, I wanna help you.” No, they ridin’ high. They leavin’ all of that here. They got nothin’. It go from generation to generation. I could go on and on, speak the rights and the wrongs, but I know ’bout life, what life is all about, how people should live . . . enjoy while you here, you passin’ through. I know we gonna have sickness, pain. We not gonna be happy all our lives. We not gonna be smilin’ all the time. On this earth you gonna have trials and tribulations, sad days, sick days . . . but that’s life. But try to enjoy while you here . . . and enjoy people, not thinkin’ that I’m more than you or you more’n me, I’m the big star and I’m more’n you . . . no. I’m just a creature of the human race God give a talent to, said, “John, you use this. I’m blessin’ you with this, now you go out and bless someone else. Go and share your wealth, help the poor.” That’s the way I look at life. There’s an old saying that what goes around comes around. You know, I don’t know nobody I dislike or I hate. There’s some people I don’t approve of they lifestyle; I don’t associate with them because they are not in my category, the life I want to live, and that direction. But I look upon them as a human being; we the same. God made us all, we the same.

  ‘Every word I said is true! I’m not God, but I do know that I’m a very smart person. I don’t act like just this old shoe in the corner don’t know nothin’. That’s the way I am. I think [things] are gonna get better, but you know for the human race it’s gonna maybe get down to be the end of their time, but the world ain’t gonna never end. Somewhere, maybe in a hundred years from now, everybody’s gonna realise they just one race, the human race, but right now it’s a long way from that. It’s got way, way, way better than it was fifty years ago, you know? Fifty years ago, I’m here and you there. You couldn’t sit in my house. Now, as the years go by, that’s gonna get better, better and better. We won’t be here to see it. Men gonna have to come together, lock hands. Not because of the colour of your skin, [but] because you’s a man. We just human beings, flesh and blood. We all bleed alike. Your clothes, or what you look like, don’t make you no more.

  ‘I don’t know nothin’ that’ll stop me from playin’ the blues. I’ll never retire. I’ll be doing this until God Jehovah call me to the next world, and I’m hopin’ I can play there. Once you a blues singer in your blood, you can retire from the public, but in your heart and in your blood you never retire ’til you gone. You know I wrote that song – me and Van Morrison did it – called “Never Get Out of These Blues Alive”? I’ll never – I’ll never – get out of these blues alive. I’ll be dealing with the blues ’til the day I done gone. Never get out of these blues alive. Yeah.’

  I never build myself up. I let the people do that. I’m the most laid-back person, and I let them build me up. If you ask me, I say, ‘I’m just a guy playin’ some blues.’

  AFTERWORD

  Saharan Boogie

  Not surprisingly, John Lee Hooker hasn’t yet gotten around to accepting Ali Farka Toure’s invitation to visit his home village of Niafunke in the Timbuktu province of northern Mali. Thanks to the good offices of World Circuit Records and the Daily Telegraph, however, I was able to do so on his behalf in the summer of 1999, in conjunction with the release of Niafunke, an album Ali recorded in situ with the aid of a mobile digital recording studio.

  The overland journey to Niafunke from Bamako, Mali’s capital, is not an easy one. The first stage is relatively uncomplicated – drive approximately 250 miles down long straight roads to Mopti via Segou, following the heat-shimmer to the horizon – but once you’ve crossed the Niger, just outside Mopti, things change. There are no more road signs. There is no more road. There is only the desert, a hard-baked golden plain marked only by a maze of dirt tracks and scrawny, scrubby bushes and shrubs. To reach Niafunke, you need to traverse more than another 160 miles of desert and cross the Niger once more.

  Ali is driving at the head of a convoy of four-wheel drive jeeps traversing the edge of Dogon country. He is in the lead because Niafunke is impossible to find unless you already know exactly where it is. However, we’ve gotten too far ahead of the rest of the vehicles, so we pull into a tiny village to take a break and give the others time to catch up. As is Ali’s wont whenever arriving in a new village, he slams a fresh tape into the deck and cranks the volume. This time it’s a tape by John Lee Hooker: to be precise, it’s Hooker ’N Heat.

  The effect is galvanic. From toddlers to elders, a crowd has already gathered around the jeep and as the music hits, everybody starts to dance. Ali and I leap out to join them. All 111 degrees of the noonday Sahara sun seem to be pounding down on us – an epithet which only seems like a cliché when you’re not actually undergoing the experience – as the music explodes into the superheated air and we dance around the jeep to the tireless, hammering boogie of Hooker’s ‘Burnin’ Hell’. One young guy literally pleads to be given the tape. I have to explain to him that it’s not my cassette but Ali’s, and that it’s one of his favourites.

  ‘They don’t understand the words,’ Ali explains later, ‘but they recognise the music as theirs. The roots’ – he emphasises the words: les racines – ‘are the same.’ In fact, he laughs, ‘at first they think it is my music and they ask, “Ali, where’s your guitar?”’

  As well they might. All of Ali Farka Toure’s music derives from the various tribes and ethnic groupings of the Timbuktu province, and those aspects of his music which sound, to Western-oriented ears, most like the blues are specifically those drawn from the Tuareg
nomads of northern Mali and sung in their language, Tamacheq; and the Gambari groove of the Peul peoples from the Mopti area, which bear an unmistakeable family resemblance to John Lee’s boogie and slow blues. But those musical connections which first led European critics to dub Ali ‘the John Lee Hooker of Africa’ are deep ones indeed. That John Lee Hooker is ‘the most African of blues singers’ (just as Bo Diddley – Mississippi-born and Chicago-raised, but with family roots of his own in Louisiana – is the most African of rock’n’rollers) has been a critical truism since the point was first made in the late ’50s, but it is more than simply a musicological issue. Appropriately enough, the first writers to notice were French.

  In Mali, the leather-thonged amulets which some folks wear around neck, thigh or bicep are called gris-gris, a term generally applied to the paraphernalia of the animist spiritual traditions often lumped together into the admittedly imprecise category of ‘voodoo’; and one instantly familiar to those with even the most superficial acquaintance with the culture of Louisiana, even if it’s only via a copy of Dr John’s classic first album, Gris-Gris. Similarly, a canoe is known as a pirogue both in the bayous of Louisiana and on the banks of the Niger: two examples among many from what we might call the French Connection. During the days of slavery, it made a certain grisly economic sense for French slavers to have shipped Africans kidnapped from those parts of Africa which they controlled to their own areas of hegemony in the Americas. What is now the Republic of Mali was part of what was then French West Africa, just as Louisiana was once a French colony in the US.

  John Lee Hooker tells us that he learned his unmistakeable guitar groove from his stepfather, Will Moore. Though Hooker was born and raised in the Mississippi Delta, Will Moore was from Louisiana. And it was Louisiana which nurtured the spores of Tuareg and Peul music and culture until, in new settings and new forms, they were able to flower once more. So it should therefore come as no surprise that when Hooker’s music is heard by the denizens of a Saharan village so small that its name, and its very existence, are known only to locals, they should greet it like a message from a long-lost relative. As Ali says, they recognise his music as theirs.

  John Lee Hooker will probably never go to Timbuktu. But then he doesn’t need to. He’s been there all along.

  DON’T LOOK BACK

  John Lee Hooker

  1917–2001

  On 21 June 2001, two months and one day short of what would have been his eighty-fourth birthday, John Lee Hooker died peacefully in his sleep. He passed away in Los Altos, California, at the last of his many homes, surrounded by friends and family, with plenty money in the bank; and the love and admiration of millions of people all around the world. In Western astrological terms he was a Leo; according to Chinese astrology, he was born in a Year of the Snake. A Leo Snake, no less: small wonder that one of his signature songs was ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’. His passing coincided with a solar eclipse. Its optimum viewing point was in Africa: Zimbabwe, to be precise. Make of that what you will.

  Not atypically, John Lee Hooker had been taking things fairly easy during his last few years. The three freshly-recorded tracks with which he had spiked The Best Of Friends, his 1998 compilation of the cream of his ‘comeback years’ – ‘Boogie Chillen’, featuring Eric Clapton; ‘Big Legs, Tight Skirt’, with Ry Cooder and Co.; and a ‘Burnin’ Hell’ which teamed him up with Ben Harper and Charlie Musselwhite – had been pretty much his studio swansong, though in his last months he had been talking about going back in. Similarly, he’d been feeling sufficiently healthy and energetic to step up his in-concert work. For the summer of 2000, he’d even booked himself into what would have been his first European tour since 1991, which came as something of a surprise to many who believed that he’d never leave the US again.

  For insurance purposes, a German promoter requested that John Lee undergo a medical examination before hitting the road. The examination revealed that, even though John Lee himself was feeling fairly sprightly, he was carrying potentially fatal internal timebombs in the form of several aneurisms: tiny arterial dilations not in themselves debilitating, but liable to rupture at any time, without warning. The tour was instantly cancelled. Surgery was recommended, but even with the finest medical care available for cash money in the USA, it would still nevertheless have been an intensely gruelling and, considering his age, potentially risky operation. Hooker decided against going under the knife, and carried on with his life.

  In his last few months, there had been a major change in John Lee’s longest and most significant professional relationship. Some of those closest to Hooker desired a more hands-on involvement in his career, but having more than one person representing an artist is a recipe for chaos. After seeking other solutions, Kappus eventually decided that the best way to retain a positive relationship with John Lee and avoid further conflict would be to retire from the management role he had assumed twelve years earlier, but continue as agent for the twenty-fifth year. Into the breach stepped manager Rick Bates, a former Rosebud staffer who had maintained his friendship with Hooker. Bates and Hooker had actually discussed working together in the past, when Kappus had briefly opted out of the job. Kappus felt that Bates would have the sensitivity and dedication that managing Hooker required and before submitting his resignation, he checked in with Bates to see if he was still interested.

  Hooker attempted to persuade Kappus to withdraw his resignation, but Kappus felt that, painful though it was, the time had come for a change. Kappus suggested Bates as his replacement. Hooker pondered the change for a few days before approving Bates as Kappus’s successor. However, this regime wasn’t destined to last too long: the demands of guiding the career of a living artist being a very different proposition from the administration of a complex estate. As John Lee Hooker’s executor, Zakiya Hooker was unable to come to an agreement with Bates and opted to take the reins herself, managing her father’s legacy alongside her husband, Ollan Christopher, with Kappus standing by to advise on an unofficial, informal basis.

  Paradoxically, John Lee had been enjoying an Indian summer of renewed vigour and vitality. Medical treatment had finally seen off a thyroid condition which had sapped his energy during the early ’90s. In the last week before his death, he’d performed twice, bringing audiences to their feet with his trademark endless boogie, dedicating what turned out to be his last Saturday night on the planet to rocking the house for 1500 people at the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, California. ‘I don’t know nothin’ that’ll stop me from playin’ the blues. I’ll never retire. I’ll be doing this until God Jehovah call me to the next world, and I’m hopin’ I can play there. Once you a blues singer in your blood, you can retire from the public, but in your heart and in your blood you never retire ’til you gone.’

  ‘“The Boogie” was, of course, the last song he played,’ recalls Mike Kappus, ‘and he brought up the opening acts to join in, with about ten people on stage altogether. He stayed after the show for about an hour talking with everyone, having a great time ’til the end.’

  John Lee’s memorial service was held at the Mormon Temple at Oakland’s Inter-State Center Auditorium, on 27 June 2001, coincidentally this writer’s fiftieth birthday: make of that what you will. Past conflicts were set aside: Kappus was invited to sit with the family; relatives had flown in from distant Clarksdale; and John Lee’s sons, John Lee Hooker Jr and Rev. Robert Hooker, delivered eulogies, alongside Eddie Kirkland, Charlie Musselwhite, Bonnie Raitt and Hooker’s eldest daughter Frances, for so long unacknowledged. Shana Morrison read a message from her father, Van. Deacon Jones played ‘We’ll Meet Again’. Ollan Christopher and the Natural Four sang. Zakiya Hooker served as Mistress of Ceremonies. Buddy Guy attended, but did not speak or perform.

  ‘I know I’ve lost a good friend,’ said B.B. King, ‘and the world has lost a great talent.’

  ‘There are no superlatives,’ wrote Carlos Santana in a tribute which appeared in Mojo magazine, ‘to describe the pro
found impact John Lee left in our hearts. For musicians and common people – all of us feel enormous gratitude, respect, admiration and love for his spirit. When I was a child he was the first circus I wanted to run away with. He, Jimmy Reed and Lightnin’ Hopkins were the foundation for all of my music. Working with him on The Healer, Chill Out and also playing live on the blues festivals is something that I will deeply treasure.

  ‘John’s voice doesn’t sound like anybody. It definitely fits in the category of Supreme Universal Music. When you hear that moan, 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. On behalf of Chester Thompson, everyone in my band and myself we say to you John – Boogie in The Light.’

  ‘He was the last of the solo guitar players, a throwback even in his own time,’ testified Keith Richards. ‘Even Muddy Waters was sophisticated next to him. He was a guy more in line with Charley Patton, Blind Blake and Robert Johnson – a one-man band, totally his own man. As much as it was a joy to perform with him, you would really have to become him in order to play along. His style really came from Africa. It was unique, the most compelling stuff.’

  Bonnie Raitt, for her part, penned an affectionate and affecting tribute for Rolling Stone, dwelling at some length on her long-running platonic love affair with Hooker, who would ‘come up to whatever man I was living with and say, “You got to understand that I’ll always be Bonnie’s backdoor man. There got to be always room for me.” So the men in my life always knew that John Lee held a special place, even though we never were intimate.