Boogie Man

  Phase Four: The Wilderness, 1974 –1989

  The ABC experience soured Hooker on dealing with record companies, and his recordings during this time were few, far between, and mostly undistinguished. The exceptions include Tomato’s solo live double-CD Alone (1976), which contains some astonishing performances, first and foremost of which is the extraordinary ‘Dark Room’; and Jealous (1986), produced by Hooker himself for the tiny Pausa label, and subsequently reissued by PointBlank.

  Phase Five: The Healer And After, 1989–present

  In 1989, the release of The Healer – on Chameleon Records in the US and Silvertone in Europe – kicked off Hooker’s golden decade, and in 1991, the goodie-packed, radio-friendly Mr Lucky (apart from anything else, a masterpiece of sequencing) cemented his newly-earned status. The subsequent albums – Boom Boom, Chill Out and the mainly Van Morrison-produced Don’t Look Back (all on PointBlank) – were deeper, darker, less immediately approachable but ultimately equally satisfying. Hooker also appeared, in a radically different context, performing two songs on Pete Townshend’s musical adaptation of the late Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man (Virgin), as well as guesting on albums by B.B. King, John Hammond, Charlie Musselwhite, Zakiya Hooker, Van Morrison, Roy Rogers and Big Head Todd & The Monsters. And, on pain of major cultural deprivation, don’t you dare leave the store without a copy of The Hot Spot (Antilles), the magnificent movie soundtrack on which Hooker collaborated, albeit via overdubbing, with Miles Davis.

  To summarise: your basic Hooker library go sump’n like this:

  Fundamentals

  John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection 1948–1990 (Rhino)

  The Best Of Friends (PointBlank)

  The Detroit Years, 1948–1956

  The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948–1954 (Ace)

  The Complete ’50s Chess Recordings (Chess/Universal)

  Don’t Turn Me From Your Door (Atlantic)

  Boogie Awhile (Krazy Kat)

  The Vee Jay Years, 1956 –1964

  The Hook (Chameleon, US) or Dimples (Charly, Europe)

  The Acoustic Year, 1959–60

  The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker (Ace)

  That’s My Story (Ace)

  Concert At Newport (Chameleon, US)

  The Vee Jay/ABC cusp, 1966

  It Serves Me Right To Suffer (BGO, Europe; Universal, US)

  The Real Folk Blues (Chess/Universal)

  The Missing Album (Chess/Universal)

  The ABC/BluesWay Years, 1967 –1974

  Live At Cafe Au Go-Go (BGO, Europe; Universal, US)

  Urban Blues (BGO, Europe; Universal, US)

  Simply The Truth (BGO, Europe; Universal, US)

  Tantalisin’ With The Blues (MCA, Europe)

  Hooker ’N Heat (Rhino, US) or Hooker ’N Heat: The Best Of . . . Plus (See For Miles, Europe)

  Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive (Universal, US; See For Miles, Europe)

  The Wilderness, 1974 –1989

  Alone (Tomato)

  Jealous (PointBlank)

  The Healer And After, 1989–present

  The Healer (Chameleon, US; Silvertone, Europe)

  Mr Lucky (PointBlank, US; Silvertone, Europe)

  Boom Boom (PointBlank)

  Chill Out (PointBlank)

  Don’t Look Back (PointBlank)

  Plus:

  Original Soundtrack: The Hot Spot (with Miles Davis and Taj Mahal)

  (Antilles)

  The Iron Man (Pete Townshend, plus Nina Simone, The Who et al)

  (Virgin)

  ENDNOTES

  1. Mike Kappus: ‘John Lee advises that he spent between three days and a week in Knoxville . . . he’d travelled with a guy called Jack, but they split up when he got to Cincinnati.’

  2. One example – taken from the current pop charts as this section is written – is the rap hit ‘Come Baby Come’ by K7. Its call-and-response chorus is virtually an unalloyed field holler (which qualifies it as ‘folk’); it’s selling in the hundreds of thousands (which makes it ‘pop’); and its hi-tech mode of creation deploys techniques which, only a short while ago, were considered avant-garde (which, I guess, makes it art).

  3. Da Capo Books, 1982

  4. Henry’s Swing Club wasn’t actually on Hastings Street itself, but on nearby Madison. Nevertheless, it was part of the Hastings Street milieu: Hooker was flexing justifiable poetic licence and adhering to the general usage of the community.

  5. Besman has previously been quoted as stating that the demos he heard featured Hooker’s gigging sidemen James Watkin (piano) and Curtis Foster (drums). If these two differing accounts are in any way reconcilable, all I can say is that it must have been a very large record-your-voice booth.

  6. Todd Rhodes’ greatest contribution to the rock and roll era was the use of one of his tunes, ‘Blues For Moondog’, as the signature tune of Cleveland-based DJ Alan Freed’s hugely influential rock and roll radio show Moondog Matinee.

  7. Boogie Chillen: A Guide To John Lee Hooker On Disc (Blues & Rhythm, 1992)

  8. Actually, Muddy’s breakthrough hit ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ was an 11-bar rather than a strict 12-bar. The song loses one bar, the nominal sixth, halfway through the second A-line of its A-A-B structure. but it does this regularly – and, once you’re aware of it, predictably – in each and every verse.

  9. The familiar version of ‘Sally Mae’ on most of the recent reissue compilations of Hooker’s work with Bernard Besman is actually the second take, which is stronger and more measured than its immediate predecessor. However, it was the first take – which seems more spontaneous, has more vitality and boasts the wonderful line ‘If I was the chief of police, baby, I would run you out of town’ – which Besman decided to pair with ‘Boogie Chillen’ for Hooker’s first single release. The second take which eventually supplanted it stayed in the can until it was released on album in 1960.

  10. Pianist Joe Willie Perkins (b. 1913 in Belzona, Mississippi) mastered this piece so thoroughly in his youth that his admiring friends nicknamed him ‘Pinetop’, after Clarence Smith. As Pinetop Perkins, he replaced Otis Spann in Muddy Waters’ band in 1970, and as of the time of writing still plays the boogie as well as any man living.

  11. Which makes this piece an ancestor of Jerry Lee Lewis’s ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’ and Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’ – in both of which the Girl In The Red Dress reappears, still shaking her stuff – as well as various other things.

  12. ASCAP also excluded what was then known as ‘hillbilly’ music, which meant that the rival BMI organisation – the initials stood for ‘Broadcast Music Incorporated’ – was able to scoop up vast tracts of these burgeoning markets, much to ASCAP’s fury.

  13. Country: Living Legends And Dying Metaphors In America’s Biggest Music (Secker & Warburg, 1988)

  14. Comparatively recently, rapper KRS-1 used the name ‘Boogie Down Productions’ for his group, originally a team-up with the late DJ Scott La Rock. This is as good a time as any to state that for much of the above information, I am indebted to Pete Silvester’s A Left Hand Like God: The Story Of Boogie-Woogie (Quartet Books, 1988), about as useful a history of all things boogoid and pianistic as it’s possible to buy, even for real money.

  15. The author must confess a perverse fondness for a remake of ‘Boogie Chillen’ which Hooker cut a decade later for Vee Jay Records: the performance is fractionally steadier and more assured and the guitar Hooker used for the session has an odd resonance which creates a sour, eerie, sitar-like twang. However, it’s marred by a clumsy, seemingly premature fade ending, and there’s no question that the historical significance of the original renders it the truly definitive account of the truly definitive John Lee Hooker song. It’s the Vee Jay version, however, which is featured in The Blues Brothers as the BBs are pulling up outside Bob’s Country Bunker.

  16. Goldmine magazine, March 20, 1992

  17. E-mail from Ed Ward to the author: ‘All the books say the Biharis were Lebanese, a fact
I duly noted in Rock of Ages (Rolling Stone/Viking Penguin). Then I got this violent letter from I think Jules, typed on an ancient manual typewriter, excoriating me. ‘Our father was Hungarian and he always told us to be proud we were Hungarian and we had nothing to hide and for you to call us Lebanese is awful and I oughta sue’, and on and on in that vein. I wrote him a mollifying letter and asked him if he was up for an interview and . . . nothing.’

  18. For an account of what did happen to Tupac and Snoop, consult Ronin Ro’s devastating Have Gun Will Travel: The Spectacular Rise And Violent Fall Of Death Row Records (Quartet Books, 1999). It also demonstrates that the more the music biz changes, the more it remains the same.

  19. The late Willie Dixon’s autobiography – I Am The Blues: The Willie Dixon Story, co-written by Don Snowden (Quartet Books, 1989) – provides as authoritative an account as could be desired of the business methods and operational procedures of a typical front-rank blues indie of the ’50s and ’60s.

  20. This threat has subsequently been rescinded.

  21. Guitarist/inventor Les Paul was not only creating far more sophisticated multitrack recordings with his singer wife Mary Ford by this time, but had already enjoyed the first of a string of eerie hits in this style with ‘How High The Moon’. Nevertheless, the procedure was still far from standard practice and it would be churlish to quibble with Besman’s achievement.

  22. The Bluesman: The Musical Heritage of Black Men and Women in the Americas (Quartet Books, 1989). This extraordinary work, currently – and unforgivably – out of print, is the most obscure and underrated of the essential texts on the subject of the blues.

  23. Quoted in Hershey’s Nowhere To Run: The Story Of Soul Music (Times Books, 1984).

  24. Eddison Bluesbooks, 1973

  25.W.H. Allen, 1974

  26. Besman refers here to ‘Strike Blues’, recorded in April 1950, but unissued until the early ’70s.

  27. For what it’s worth, Les Fancourt attributes this track – a scary, swirling pre-psychedelic piece drenched in echo and slightly reminiscent of ‘I’m In The Mood’ – to a session cut for Fortune Records soon after Hooker’s final session for Besman. It was subsequently acquired by Chess, who released it in 1954. The superb blues piano on this cut is generally credited to Bob Thurman, a Detroit pianist who worked occasionally with Hooker between 1952 and 1954.

  28. Released on Collectables COL-CD-516, with a cover photo of Burns rather than Hooker. The British edition of the same collection (Flyright FLY CD 23) features nineteen tracks as opposed to the Collectables edition’s sixteen. It includes three additional tracks (one extra by Burns, plus two by Robert ‘Baby Boy’ Warren), but the booklet contains only an abbreviated version of Rowe’s liner note text.

  29. These three gentlemen were associated with Vee Jay Records of Chicago, for whom Hooker recorded between 1955 and 1964. We’ll meet them later.

  30. As it happens, he says precisely that.

  31. Almost the only one, but the principle remains the same. See above.

  32. Again, not strictly correct. According to Fancourt, Hooker and Besman cut a reunion session in Culver City, California, in 1961. The resulting album, for the now-defunct Lauren label, was decidedly non-vintage, and certainly doesn’t invalidate Hooker’s point.

  33. Where Did Our Love Go: The Rise & Fall of the Motown Sound, Omnibus Press, 1986.

  34. This isn’t the appropriate time or place for a history, however concise, of the indigenous music scene of the Detroit area, but it’s worth pointing out that the city can also claim Suzi Quatro and Madonna – though they had to relocate (to London and New York, respectively, to achieve anything) and successful and unique variants of House and Techno music.

  35. Not to mention a few sides for Fortune, which subsequently ended up being purchased by Chess.

  36. Modern and Chart continued to issue Hooker singles, competing with his new Vee Jay product, well into 1956.

  37. In the booklet to the compilation album John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection 1948–1990 (Rhino, 1991)

  38. Actually, it wasn’t the Vandellas but Motown’s in-house backing singers the Andantes, plus Mary Wilson from the Supremes. Still, we’ll get to that a little later. Be patient!

  39. Since ‘Big Town Playboy’ sold a more than respectable 37,000 copies, Taylor hadn’t done too badly by the admittedly shoddy standards of the time. It’s worth remembering that, during the late ’50s and early ’60s, royalties were less than generous for white artists also. Under the terms of their original British contract with EMI, a highly respectable multinational corporation, the Beatles received one farthing – a quarter of an old penny – for each single sold. Without wishing to delve into the intricacies of Britain’s pre-metric currency and the pound-to-dollar exchange rate, it should be sufficient to state that, for every thousand singles sold, each Beatle would have had just about enough money left, before taxes and deductions, to buy one packet of cigarettes.

  40. Available on CD as New World Records 80252-2 and highly recommended, despite the petulance of Lomax’s contemptuous dismissal – subsequently recanted, thankfully – of amplified urban blues.

  41. This enormously influential book, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1966, was the first major study of the blues to focus on the music as it was then, rather than simply to use the pre-war rural blues as a stick with which to beat its vulgar, degenerate urban offspring.

  42. Not to be confused either with Ivory Joe Hunter, the silky-smooth West Coast blues-balladeer and composer of ‘I Almost Lost My Mind’, or with his near-homonym ‘Ivy Jo’ Hunter, the Motown producer/songwriter best-known for co-writing Martha and the Vandellas’ anthemic hit ‘Dancing In The Street’ with Marvin Gaye and William Stevenson.

  43. Quoted in Blues, Latimer, 1976.

  44. You’ll search the Hooker discography in vain for anything entitled ‘Two White Horses’; that was the original title of the Blind Lemon Jefferson song from which Hooker developed the piece he calls ‘Church Bell Tone’, one of two Jefferson-derived numbers featured on Country Blues. The other, ‘Black Snake Blues’, was, along with a similar piece by Victoria Spivey, one of the primary sources for the ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ which Hooker learned from Tony Hollins.

  45. From his liner-note to the British version of Country Blues; reprinted, along with a generous helping of Oliver’s other sleeve-notes and journalism, in Blues Off the Record: Thirty Years of Blues Commentary (The Baton Press, 1984).

  46. Listed, for some obscure reason, as ‘Tat Harris’ in the credits of the original edition of the Muddy Waters At Newport live album, Auburn ‘Pat’ Hare achieved a particular kind of Staggerlee notoriety by recording a song called ‘I’m Gonna Murder My Baby’ for Sun Records in 1954 and doing exactly that, eight years later, after being fired by Waters shortly after Newport for persistent drunkenness. Locked down for a 99-year stretch, he died of cancer in a prison hospital after serving 18 years of his sentence.

  47. Quoted in Guitar Player, August 1983.

  48. Included in The Jazz Life (Peter Davies, 1962).

  49. Go on, look it up. I had to.

  50. And let’s leave Bill Clinton out of this.

  51. Quoted in Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography (W.H. Allen, 1972).

  52. More recently, of course, Dylan has oscillated between high-octane rock-band work and a neo-folk stance which has included an MTV Unplugged special and albums of traditional material performed solo. Just as Hooker himself did, we might say.

  53. No Direction Home: The Life And Music Of Bob Dylan (Penguin, 1987).

  54. The author learned all this, plus a lot of other fascinating backstage stuff about the classic Motown era, from Standing in the Shadows of Motown: The Life and Music of Legendary Bassist James Jamerson by Dr Licks (Dr Licks Publications, 1989).

  55. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987.

  56. I am indebted to Norman Darwen for this particular piece of R&B detective work, documented in his liner note f
or Let’s Make It (Charly CD CHARLY 170), a 1989 compilation of Vee Jay sides drawn from the Burnin’ and Big Soul sessions.

  57. In I Am The Blues, by Dixon & Don Snowden (Quartet, 1989), from which much of this account of the ’62 Festival is derived.

  58. Quoted in Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story, by Helen Oakley Dance (Da Capo, 1987).

  59. French record producer Philippe Rault, quoted in Dixon & Snowden, op cit.

  60. Helen Oakley Dance transcribes this as ‘Mighty 88 man’: not accurate, but undoubtedly true.

  61. As reprinted in Jones’s collection Black Music (Quill, 1967).

  62. As reprinted in Bob Dylan: A Retrospective, edited by Craig McGregor (Picador, 1975).

  63. Talking to Q Magazine, June 1995.

  64. In Gillett’s invaluable The Sound of the City (Souvenir Press, 1970, rev. 1983).

  65. Quoted in Smith’s On the Record: An Oral History of Popular Music (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1988).

  66. Smith, op cit.

  67. A Cellarful Of Noise (Four Square, 1964). The ghost was the late and sorely missed veteran PR, sage and bon viveur Derek Taylor.

  68. Actually, Ifield was a transplanted Australian whose gimmick was yodelling. He peaked with ‘I Remember You’, which reached No. 1 in 1962; unaccountably, his career went into decline with the arrival of the Beatles and their successors.

  69. In Shout!: The True Story of the Beatles (Elm Tree, 1981; rev. Penguin, 1991.

  70. Before Starr joined the Beatles, he had made vague plans to emigrate to the States, and had gone so far as to fill out an application form. He had chosen Houston, Texas, as his destination for no other reason than that Lightnin’ Hopkins lived there. After the Beatles imploded at the end of the decade, Starr fulfilled at least part of his early ambition by drumming on sessions with both Howlin’ Wolf and B.B. King.

  71. I’d recommend Christopher Sandford’s Clapton: Edge of Darkness (Gollancz, 1994) and Stanley Booth’s The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (Wm Heinemann, 1985) respectively, though in neither case is the inquisitive reader spoiled for choice. Despite its clubfooted prose and complete absence of critical judgement, Bob Brunning’s Blues in Britain (Blandford, 1995), a revision of the same author’s Blues: The British Connection (Blandford, 1986), is nevertheless both an invaluable reference work and an engaging personal memoir.