‘He had a cry in his voice,’ Raitt continues, ‘that would just break your heart. Sometimes when he was playing, it was as if he’d never left Mississippi, and there had never been any civil rights or any money for him or anything. He could authentically tap into all the pain he’d ever felt.’
Freeze frame. Rewind. Play that line again. He could authentically tap into all the pain he’d ever felt. Precisely because he was able to tap so profoundly into his own pain, he gained the power to carry our sorrows alongside his own. The instant you hear him, you know that he understands stuff about your life which you may not even understand yourself.
‘. . . 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 . . . 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.’
In one of our earliest conversations, John Lee Hooker told me, ‘When I die, they’ll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.’ It was a favourite line of his, and he probably said it to many people, but I never forgot it. I never will forget it. Or him. Neither will anyone else who ever met him, or anyone whom his music helped through those long nights in the dark room.
‘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.’
Oh yeah. Mm-hm.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thank you, fellas
It’s in him, and it got to come out. This book wouldn’t have come out at all if it wasn’t for the efforts of a virtual regiment of people, all of whom are owed a Big Drink. Some of them may even get one.
First and foremost, total love and respect to the man himself, John Lee Hooker, for inviting me into his life; and, through the many hours of interviews which provided the narrative spine of this book, rigorously turning over the topsoil of that life, including a few areas which I’m sure he would have preferred not to discuss. In the same breath, I thank the Hooker extended family, most prominently Archie Hooker, Zakiya Hooker, Robert Hooker and Paul Mathis; plus John Lee’s many friends and associates, notably Martin Thompson; and the then personnel of the Coast To Coast Blues Band: Kenny ‘Dr Funkenstein’ Baker, Brother Bowen Brown, Vala Cupp, Lizz Fischer, Jim Guyett, Deacon Jones, Rich Kirch and Mike Osborn. None of these folks had actually chosen to invite some English guy to come hang out with them for weeks on end, but they nevertheless made me feel utterly welcome. And Archie’s cooking is wonderful. Where’s that cornbread receipe then, Arch?
Next up, I want to thank Mike Kappus, John Lee’s manager, for selecting me to be the author of this book, and for sticking with me through what turned out to be a decidedly bumpy ride. By the same token, big props go out to the past and present staff of the Rosebud Agency, most notably Steve Lee and Tom ‘Agent Cooper’ Chauncey, for facilitating arrangements and generally doing the biz. Richard Wootton, John Lee’s UK PR guy, recommended me to Mike Kappus in the first place. And none of this would have happened without the inspired intervention of Pete Townshend, who in his own inimitable manner talked – on second thoughts, let’s make that ‘arm-twisted’ – me into taking up Mike’s offer when I wavered in the face of what seemed an impossibly daunting task.
Major shout-outs are also due to my agent, Antony Harwood of Gillon Aitken Associates, and my publisher, Tony Lacey at Viking Penguin UK, who turned out to be true twin towers of strength when the going got seriously rough. It’s a privilege to have guys like these on your side.
Guides, philosophers and friends who helped map out the terrain and who raided their vaults included these stalwarts of the BritBlues Posse: Roy Carr, Mike Rowe, Tony Russell, Neil Slaven, Mike Vernon and Cliff White: couldn’t’a done it without y’all. Nuff respeck.
During the process of creating Boogie Man, I was fortunate to be granted interviews and/or correspondence by many individuals, not all of whom are directly quoted in the text but all of whom helped immeasurably. In alphabetical order, let’s have some of that o-o-o-o-o-old soul clappin’ for Clifford Antone, Bernard Besman, Elaine Brown, Eddie Burns, Chicago Beau, Famous Coachman, Roy Fisher, Billy Gibbons, Peter Green, Buddy Guy, John Hammond, Archie Hooker, Maude Hooker, Robert Hooker, Zakiya Hooker, Mike Kappus, B.B. King, Rich Kirch, Eddie Kirkland, Taj Mahal, Paul Mathis, Charlie Musselwhite, Mike Osborn, Rick Parsons, the late Jimmy Rogers, Roy Rogers (no relation), ‘Sally’, Sid Seidenberg, the late Robert Shelton, Ali Farka Toure, Pete Townshend, Wade Walton, Tom Whitehead and Valerie Wilmer. My blues brother Joel Rosen rode shotgun for the interviews with Clifford Antone and Jimmy Rogers; Nick Gold of World Circuit set up the interview with Ali Farka Toure and also served as interpreter, and the late Kathy Acker co-conducted the interview with Taj Mahal.
This material has been supplemented by interviews conducted by others: Tony Knox, producer of London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show documentary about Hooker’s life and times, generously supplied full transcripts of his team’s own interviews with many of the above and others, including Bernethia Bullock, Van Morrison and Jim O’Neal. Equally generously, Mark Cooper provided unedited video of his interviews, derived from a special edition of BBC2’s much-missed Late Show, with Ry Cooder, the late Albert Collins, Peter Coyote, Robert Cray, John Hammond, Johnnie Johnson, Charlie Musselwhite and Bonnie Raitt. And Paul Trynka, currently of Mojo and formerly of The Guitar Magazine, gave me access to transcripts of his Hooker-related interviews with Ry Cooder, S.P. Leary, John Mayall, Keith Richards, Carlos Santana and Johnny Winter. Mark Bliesener supplied the testimony of Todd Park Mohr.
When additional quotations have been derived from previously published material, the original sources are cited in the footnotes. In some instances, I have blended material from a variety of sources in order to achieve the most complete and coherent narrative possible: for example, the interviews with Mike Kappus featured in Chapters 13 and 14 fuse extracts from my own interview with Mike; the South Bank Show interview, and from our correspondence.
Others also went out of their way to help on the road. In the Bay Area, there were the various constituents of the Hooker Community cited above. In Austin, Texas, the good guys included Clifford Antone, Ed Ward and all involved with South By Southwest. In Detroit my rabbis were Famous Coachman, Thom Jurek and all at Metro, Ben Edmonds, Robert Jr Whitall and Susan Whitall. In Mississippi, Joel Rosen dropped everything for a week to drive me round the Delta and plug me in to the zeitgeist, not to mention opening up the archives at Ole Miss in Oxford, Mississippi, and introducing me to Dick Waterman. In Clarksdale, Mississippi, I was indebted to Mrs Jessie Hooker, Euliss Broom, Clarence Dixon, Early Wright at WROX, Jim O’Neal, Dr Patty Johnson, Robert Birdsong, Wade Walton and Sid Graves at the Delta Blues Museum; and in Vance, Mississippi: James Thomas, Florence Jenkins (daughter of Marih) Walker, and Mr & Mrs Rick Parsons at the Fewell Plantation.
Small portions of this book previously appeared, in radically different form, in Q, Mojo, The Daily Telegraph and New Musical Express; I have also sampled bits of my own text from Blues on CD: The Essential Guide (Kyle Cathie). And many of the ideas discussed in Chapter 12, notably the relationships between postmodernism and the folk process, and various aspects of shamanism, were honed during hours of conversation with Kathy Acker.
This book was originally intended to run to 100,000 words, and to take approximately eighteen months to write. Instead, the original manuscript came in at over 275,000 words and took over seven years to produce, and, as ruefully stated earlier, it was a bumpy ride. The Roll of Honour of those who worked on the
author, as opposed to the book, during this time, includes Jon & Jackie Atwood, Sean Blanchard, Felicity Brooks, Deborah Crippen, Johnny Guitar Crippen aka Tha Dook, Bill & Kathy Dulborough, Paul Du Noyer, Neil Gaiman, Igor Goldkind aka The Big Ig, Vivien Goldman, Caroline Grimshaw aka Grimbo the Great, Peter Hogan, Dik Jude aka Lee Van Spleef, Roz Kaveney, Gary Lammin, Spike Liseiko, Ian MacDonald aka I. Mac (as opposed to ‘iMac’; sue ’em, Ian), Bernard MacMahon, Peter Mannheim aka Data Sheriff, Dave Marsh, Polly Marshall aka Pirate Pol, Alan Mitchell aka Jah Worf, Lucy O’Brien, Tom Paley aka Honest Tom, Patti Palladin aka Pal Pat, Tony Parsons, Joel Rosen, Tim Rostron, Stephen Russell aka Barefoot Doctor, Jon Savage, Sylvie Simmons, Su Small, Mat Snow, Neil Spencer, Tony & Kate Tyler, Del LaGrace Volcano, Ed Ward, Neil & Kathy Waterman, Alison West, Jack Womack and Elizabeth Young, who through the vagaries of alphabetical ordering always comes last in lists like this when she invariably deserves to be placed much higher.
As ever, Harold Waterman, my guardian angel in accountants’ clothing, successfully prevented the author and the Inland Revenue from killing each other. (So far, anyway.)
Vital words of support and encouragement also came from Jeff Beck, Robert Christgau, David Fricke, Robert Gordon, Vernon Reid, Ice-T and Ernie C. from Body Count, David Evans, William R. Ferris and Dick Waterman. And extra texture goes out to David Hilliard, formerly Chief of Staff of the Black Panther Party and now of the Dr Huey P. Newton Foundation, for all the conversation during the week of Marxism 98 in London.
Above and beyond the call of duty, friendship or anything else: the aforementioned Ian MacDonald sold me an Apple Macintosh 8200/120 when my old IIcx died on me in the summer of 1997, and willingly deferred payment until I could afford it, thereby enabling me to keep on working when all about me was collapsing.
Kathy Acker saved my life. I wish I’d been able to return the compliment.
And then there’s Anna Chen, my cherished comrade, who said come with me if you want to live, and made me realise that, despite everything . . . I did. With her.
Peace – I’m outta here.
CSM
Up against a deadline
4 February, 1999
APPENDIX
Nuthin’ But the Best ’n’ Later for the Garbage
(A Necessarily Selective Discography)
Meanwhile, in another part of the forest . . . let us attempt to distinguish the wood from the trees. The collected works of John Lee Hooker represent a discographer’s nightmare as well as a listener’s dream: hundreds of tracks cut for dozens of labels over five decades’ worth of recording. Moreover, record company catalogues have a habit of changing hands from one owner to another or getting themselves assigned to different distributors in different territories, with the same ‘families’ of tracks made available in different combinations on different compilations.
Then we have to factor-in Hooker’s penchant for perpetually returning to and reinterpreting his core repertoire for each phase of his career, generating a number of performances of key songs (often radically diverse) under a variety of different titles. Simply knowing the title of the particular Hooker song you want doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re going to walk home with the specific performance which enchanted you when you heard it on the radio or round someone else’s house.
As a result, the task of answering the ostensibly simple question ‘which John Lee Hooker tracks do I need and where do I go to get them?’ isn’t quite as straightforward as it might seem or, indeed, as it ought to be. It therefore makes sense to divide Hooker’s gargantuan output into specific periods and cherry-pick each one for the best representations of its finest moments.
Before doing so, let’s consider the absolute bottom-line solution to the problem of assembling a basic John Lee Hooker collection. The 1998 PointBlank compilation The Best Of Friends rounds up highspots from the Healer-and-after modern era – as opposed to the ‘Modern era’ – along with three toothsome nuggets not included on any previous releases. And Rhino Records’ beautifully-packaged and conscientiously-annotated two-CD set John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection 1948–1990 does a better job of providing a one-stop-shop encapsulation of the Hooker oeuvre than any casual consumer could reasonably expect, climaxing with the added bonus of a 1990 live duet version of ‘I’m In The Mood’ featuring Hooker and Bonnie Raitt backed up by Roy Rogers. If you don’t have any Hooker records and you want an affordable, comprehensible map of the territory which can be purchased for a moderate outlay and auditioned in a single evening, these two items are just what Doctor Blues ordered.
Of course, they’re likely to prove to be merely tantalising tasters for the greater riches which lie beyond. In which case: read on, y’all.
Phase One: The Detroit Years, 1948–1956
At the dawn of his career, Hooker was recording ‘officially’ under the aegis of Bernard Besman for Modern and Sensation; and unofficially for anyone prepared to slip him a few bucks to cut a pseudonymous single or two. Your first port of call for the juiciest fruits of the Besman sessions – and the earliest recordings of hardy Hooker perennials like ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘I’m In The Mood’ or ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ – should be The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948–1954 (Ace), supplemented by other Ace compilations like Blues Brother, Graveyard Blues and Everybody’s Blues; the last of which incorporates material Hooker cut for Modern after his split from Besman. (Besman subsequently opened his Hooker vaults to release a veritable tidal wave of outtakes, now formally collected on the Capitol Blues Collection three-CD set Alternative Boogie: Early Studio Recordings 1948–1952).
This is where it gets interesting: those ‘official’ recordings are shadowed by the subsidiary bodies of work cut for Joe Von Battle and others in those backroom moonlight sessions, many of which are easily a match for the contemporary Besman sides. An excellent two-CD collection, The Complete ’50s Chess Recordings (Chess/Universal), assembles one such; and Don’t Turn Me From Your Door (Atlantic) another. Other important and worthwhile material from this period can be found on Boogie Awhile (Krazy Kat) and No Friend Around (Red Lightnin’).
Phase Two: The Vee Jay Years, 1956 –1964
Signing to Vee Jay in 1956 gave Hooker his first stable recording deal, not to mention a much neater discography. It also gave him the chance to cut albums-as-albums for the first time, though hurried sessions and contrived settings produced often inconsistent results. Completists will thrill to the six-CD set John Lee Hooker: The Vee Jay Years 1956–1964 (Charly), but this era is best summarised for civilians by compilations like The Hook (Chameleon, US) or Dimples (Charly, UK): look out for ‘Dimples’, ‘Boom Boom’ or ‘Maudie’. In the US the Vee Jay catalogue is stable: Chameleon have also reissued all the original Vee Jay Hooker albums with their original tracklistings, artwork and annotations intact, along with a better-than-solid compilation, The Hook. However, in Europe Hooker’s Vee Jay sides have been so frequently licensed and sub-licensed, compiled and recompiled, that it’s almost pointless to recommend specific selections, since the various permutations of Hooker’s Vee Jay oeuvre remain in what appears to be a constant state of flux.
Interregnum 1: The Acoustic Year 1959–60
Midway through his Vee Jay stint, Hooker took a one-year sabbatical to record three acoustic folk-blues albums for Riverside, though only two were released at the time. Hooker has very fond memories of playing the folk clubs and ‘coffee houses’, and true enough, those acoustic settings gave him the opportunity to prioritise backporch intimacy as opposed to barroom hollering, performing solo on The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker and backed by a sensitive jazz rhythm section on That’s My Story (both currently on Ace). His performance at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival, Concert At Newport, was issued on Vee Jay but spiritually belongs with the Riverside albums.
Interregnum 2: The Vee Jay/ABC cusp, 1966
Hooker went a-wanderin’ (like a sheep out on the foam?) before settling down to his next major record deal. Stylistically speaking It Serve M
e Right To Suffer was essentially an update of That’s My Story, teaming Hooker up with jazz musicians in a chamber-blues setting. Recorded for ABC’s jazz subsidiary Impulse!, it was most recently available in the US on MCA and in Europe on BGO. The riproaring The Real Folk Blues was also cut as a one-off, this time for Chess, and is available via Universal (formerly MCA) in the US and Europe, alongside The Missing Album, which collects the tracks recorded at the same sessions but reserved for a follow-up album which remained unissued until Hooker’s post-Healer success in the ’90s. A European MCA compilation, The Complete Chess Folk Blues Sessions, which compiled all the fruits of that day’s labours onto a single CD, was available for a while but has subsequently been deleted.
Phase Three: The ABC/Bluesway Years, 1967 –1974
Hooker’s stint with the Big Label commenced with three strong (and strongly recommended) albums – Live At Cafe Au Go-Go (on which he was backed by Muddy Waters and his band), Urban Blues and Simply The Truth – before the energy began to dissipate. Endless Boogie and Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive undeniably have their moments, but caveat emptor: they also have their longeurs. Available in the US via MCA/Universal and in Europe via BGO Records or See For Miles, this particular section of the Hooker catalogue was filleted on two MCA compilations, Tantalisin’ With The Blues and The Best of John Lee Hooker, which latter also incorporates a few early-’50s Chess sides for good measure. Hooker’s most powerful album from the latter part of this period wasn’t even cut for ABC/BluesWay, but for Liberty: Hooker ’N Heat, the epic double-album team-up with Canned Heat, is available as a double-CD in the US via Rhino and, minus two tracks, as the awkwardly titled single European CD The Best Of Hooker ’N’ Heat . . . Plus from See For Miles.
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