72. In Owning Up (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1965), his autobiographical account of the British ‘trad’ (i.e. New Orleans revivalist) jazz scene of the 1950s.
73. In Townshend’s case, the group in question – The Detours – was primarily a rock band which also included his future Who colleagues John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, but their act featured a ‘trad’ section in which Entwistle and Daltrey respectively played trumpet and trombone.
74. In his celebrated 1971 Rolling Stone interview with Robert Greenfield, reprinted in The Rolling Stone Interviews Vol. 2 (Warner Books, 1973).
75. Blues Incorporated eventually schismed: Korner’s preference was for a jazzy, urbane-blues approach, while Davies had pledged fealty to explicitly Delta-derived music. After Davies’s sudden death, his band, the Cyril Davies All-Stars, was taken over by vocalist Long John Baldry, who renamed it the Hoochie Coochie Men and gave a young singer named Rod Stewart his first job. But that’s another story, if not several other stories.
76. Before he teamed up with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards to form the Rolling Stones, Jones had been playing as a soloist, and in a duo with Paul Jones (no relation) under the name of ‘Elmo Lewis’, partly because his full name was Lewis Brian Jones, partly as a tribute to Elmore James, and partly because ‘Elmo Lewis’ was the name of Jerry Lee Lewis’s father.
77. In Revolt Into Style: The Pop Arts In Britain (Penguin, 1970).
78. Wyman was fundamentally a rocker, but as the late Ian Stewart, the Stones’ pianist-turned-road manager-turned-pianist-again, told Bob Brunning in Blues in Britain (op cit), ‘As Bill actually got in the band he went completely overboard on blues, and he really got hung up on the worst blues players, he had to empathize with everything by Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker, you know, the kind of stuff that would put you to sleep.’ There’s no accounting for taste, is there?
79. In The Story Of The Who (St Martin’s Press, 1983).
80. From an interview by Timothy White in Rock Lives (Omnibus Press, 1990). Bowie’s kid bands never got around to recording any of Hooker’s material for release, but at his fiftieth birthday concert at Madison Square Gardens on 8 January 1997, DB performed a decidedly Hookerised intro to his 1972 hit ‘Jean Genie’.
81. The Animals’ version of ‘Boom Boom’ was released as a single in the USA – though not into the domestic market – in December 1964; it stalled just outside the Top 40 and was speedily chased by one of their British hits ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’.
82. The knock-on effects of this particular coup were the establishment of the Yardbirds and the Bluesbreakers as the hottest guitar chairs in British rock, and the formation of Led Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac: Clapton was replaced in the Yardbirds by Jeff Beck and then by Jimmy Page; and in the Bluesbreakers by Peter Green and then by Mick Taylor.
83. A shortlived band formed by organist Pete Bardens, later to join Van Morrison in Them, which included Mick Fleetwood on drums.
84. Townshend is unspecific concerning exactly when he saw Hooker play the Flamingo or which band was backing him, but the point he’s making remains unaffected.
85. Though the name is theoretically pronounced ‘Strettam’, glottal-stopped local pronunciation generally renders the ‘t’ silent.
86. An Epiphone, actually, but let’s not be too picky.
87. 47, actually.
88. Macdonald Queen Anne Press, 1988
89. In The Bluesmen (Oak, 1967).
90. James was rather readier for the world than House, by all accounts: legend has it that after both men had performed, House’s rediscoverers approached James’s and conceded that ‘we found the wrong guy’.
91. The History of the Blues: the Roots, the Music, the People from Charley Patton to Robert Cray, by Francis Davis (Secker & Warburg, 1995).
92. In his liner-note to the Jimmy Reed compilation Upside Your Head (Charly CRB 1003), whence also cometh the above diary extract.
93. Kenny Lynch was a jack-of-all-trades who darted between singing, song-writing, acting and comedy. His peak musical achievement came in 1965, when he and Mort Shuman co-composed ‘Sha La La La Lee’, a No. 1 hit for Don Arden’s protégés The Small Faces. For no apparent reason, he received a knighthood in the early ’70s.
94. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1998.
95. In Wishing on the Moon: The Life and Times of Billie Holiday (Viking, 1994).
96. The novel was by Max Miller; the movie, directed by James Cruze and starring Ben Lyon and Claudette Colbert, was – according to Pauline Kael in 5001 Nights At The Movies (Hamish Hamilton, 1982) – ‘a commonplace romantic melodrama’ which nevertheless included ‘some strong, memorable scenes’.
97. Not that it matters, but the Creation were actually quite an interesting band. Briefly perceived as potentially serious challengers to the Who, they proudly proclaimed, ‘Our music is red . . . with purple flashes’ and mounted a spectacular stage show in which guitarist Eddie Phillips sawed away at his guitar with a violin bow (way before Jimmy Page) whilst singer Kenny Pickett frantically spray-painted giant paper backdrops. Their first single, ‘Making Time’, occupied the no-mans-land between proto-psychedelia and proto-punk with crunching surliness, and their second, ‘Painter Man’, was almost as good, but neither reached the UK Top 30, and the group broke up. ‘Painter Man’ subsequently resurfaced as a ’70s disco hit for producer Frank Farian’s protégés Boney M . . . but I digress.
98. Quoted in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Postwar Pop (Faber & Faber, 1989).
99. The archivist who supplied the author with a copy of this particular clipping has appended the scribbled comment: ‘Blues fans! Dontcha just love ’em?’ Say no more.
100. The reader is once again referred to Dixon and Snowden’s I Am The Blues (Quartet, 1989).
101. Bass couldn’t be referring to Howlin’ Wolf by any chance, could he?
102. Twice, as it happens: once for Bernard Besman and once (as ‘Johnny Williams’) for Idessa Malone’s Staff label.
103. Scorchingly revived by James Brown in 1961.
104. I am not making this up. Honest.
105. A textbook example of the Hookerization process, this demonstrates as effectively as anything in Hooker’s repertoire the manner in which his ‘organic sampling’ approach to composition is a precursor of hip-hop’s approach to production. This notion will be explored in greater depth in the next chapter.
106. The notion that the guy in ‘Bourbon’ could well be the same protagonist as that of ‘House Rent’ (albeit in its ‘boogie’ rather than ‘blues’ incarnation) was not lost on Hooker’s admirer George Thorogood, who incorporated large chunks of the ‘House Rent’ narrative into the splendid version of ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ which graces his 1977 debut album. ‘He told me he was gonna do that,’ says Hooker, ‘and I said, “Okay, go ahead.”’
107. Marcus Gray posits, in his Last Gang In Town: The Story and Myth of the Clash (4th Estate, 1995) that the MC5’s version of ‘Motor City Is Burning,’ included on Kick Out The Jams (Elektra, 1968), provided the inspiration for ‘London’s Burnin’, a key song from The Clash’s eponymous 1977 debut album. The Clash song subsequently lent its title to a long-running British TV drama series celebrating the capital’s firefighters.
108. Subsequently recycled by Ed Ward in Michael Bloomfield: The Rise And Fall of an American Guitar Hero (Cherry Lane, 1983).
109. In this writer’s admittedly warped perspective, Blues Is King is actually superior to Live At The Regal: it was recorded in a club rather than a theatre, with a correspondingly higher-voltage audience contact, and B.B. had a particularly fabulous guitar sound going that night. This is a minority viewpoint, but please feel free to obtain both albums and compare them at your leisure.
110. Published in 1974 by Eddison Press as part of their BluesBooks series.
111. Not to mention between ‘form’ and ‘content’, but that’s another argument.
112. Alternative Boogie: Early Studio
Recordings 1948–1952 (Capitol Blues Collection, 1996).
113. Any Miles Davis fan should be able to tell you that. When Charlie Parker hired a fragile, inexperienced young Miles to replace Dizzy Gillespie – who unlike Miles could boast flawless execution and a terrifying command of the upper register of his instrument – in his quintet, a whole bunch of people, by no means all of them white, thought Parker’d finally flipped. ‘Miles can hardly play,’ they said. So much for the experts.
114. The New Yorker, November 14, 1983; reprinted in Kael’s collection State of the Art (Arena, 1987).
115. Op. cit.
116. Italics mine.
117. Interviewed by Jas Obrecht, Guitar Player, November 1992. Elaborating on this theme, Cooder explained to the producers of Hooker’s BBC-TV mini-special that he had enjoyed comparatively little previous success trying to figure out how to reproduce what Hooker was playing on record. ‘I never got anywhere until, a couple of years later, I picked up the banjo, began to play it and it was always in G-tuning. I began to see these chord progressions and these notes occur in the G-tuning, so I started to tune my guitar like that. I went back to the record, pulled the record out and said ‘Ah, here it is’. Here’s the notes and the chords, and you just had to sit there and figure it out. That led me into the idea of tuning the instrument to chords, which nowadays seems like a simple and obvious enough thing. Back in those days, that was a major discovery for me: in fact, the first major discovery I made on my own without being taught.’
118. About whom your humble servant is ashamed to admit he knows nada.
119. This pair were also great favourites of the mighty Howlin’ Wolf, as it happens.
120. Chuck Berry’s revved-up, justly celebrated tongue-twister ‘Too Much Monkey Business’ is built on a ‘Bottle Up And Go’ chassis.
121. Viking, 1996.
122. This seminal work was first published by Presses Universitaires de France in 1962; I’m working from the 1969 Pelican edition of the Roger Needham translation first published by Beacon Press in 1963.
123.Collected in Image Music Text (Fontana, 1977), edited and translated by Stephen Heath.
124. From Besman’s liner notes to the 3-LP collection John Lee Hooker’s Detroit (United Artists, 1973); reprinted in the booklet to Alternative Boogie (Capitol, 1995).
125. Quoted in Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll (Grosset & Dunlap, 1950).
126. Collected in Image Music Text (Fontana, 1977), edited and translated by Stephen Heath.
127. This contention was put forward by the distinguished British conductor John Eliot Gardiner in an ITV South Bank Show broadcast on 12 May 1996; your correspondent has shamelessly sampled Dan Glaister’s preview of the programme, published in the Guardian, 11 May 1996.
128. Not least amongst disenchanted soixante-huitards lining up to take an Oedipal pop at Daddy Marx.
129. John F. Szwed, annotating Hooker’s 1968 album Simply The Truth
130. At least, this inquisitive reader did.
131. Not to mention Ike & Tina Turner, Stevie Wonder, The Meters, Prince, Black Uhuru and Living Colour, all of whom at various times ran that same gauntlet with varying degrees of success.
132. Much of the analysis in this paragraph (not to mention portions of the argument which follows) is derived from remarks made by Michael Tucker in his Dreaming With Open Eyes: The Shamanic Spirit in Twentieth-Century Art and Culture (Aquarian/HarperSanFrancisco, 1992); Tucker, in turn, refers extensively to Marianna Torgovnick and others.
133. As beautifully demonstrated by Peter Guralnick in his wonderful pen-portrait ‘Don’t Laugh At Me’ (memorably included in Feel Like Going Home: Portraits In Blues & Rock ’N’ Roll (Omnibus Press, 1971), alongside an equally perceptive and affectionate ‘snapshot’ of Muddy Waters.
134. It must, however, be conceded that no blues performer has ever insisted as vociferously as – we name the guilty men! – Pete Townshend, Frank Zappa and Lou Reed not only on the right to review their own work but to question the ability of anybody else to do so.
135. The authors of such pieces are well aware who they are. Let us refrain from embarrassing them any further.
136. I cited this same text in Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix And Postwar Pop (Faber & Faber, 1989), and proffer no apologies whatsoever for doing so again here.
137. Your humble servant confesses to not having read Eliade’s book; this extract – and the quotation from Shirokogoroff – have been sampled from I.M. Lewis’ Ecstatic Religion (Penguin, 1971).
138. From Blues, by Robert Neff and Anthony Connor (Latimer Bluesbooks, 1975).
139. One wit subsequently remarked that it was just as well that Morrison hadn’t announced that he’d been thinking about John F. Kennedy.
140. Allegedly.
141. Cue Monty Python: do you want the twelve-minute boogie or the full three-quarters of an hour?
142. Both packages were subsequently combined in the three-CD collection Alternative Boogie (Capitol, 1995).
143. In Neff and Connor’s invaluable Blues (Latimer BluesBooks, 1975).
144. It finally emerged in 1992 on the Gitanes Jazz label: Hooker appears, with varying degrees of prominence, on five of the eleven selections, including ‘The Rehersal’ [sic] for the title track. The closing ‘Candy Kitchen’ is as close as these two veteran grandmasters of freeform blues get to a full-on duet.
145. Fax to the author, 3 July 1998.
146. Or, when Star Trek: The Next Generation reran that particular gimmick, Lt Geordi LaForge.
147. Da Capo, 1987, op cit.
148. In Down By The Jetty: The Dr Feelgood Story (Northdown, 1997).
149. Not to be confused with the Specialty reissue album of the same name.
150. Thompson went on to form his own band, a reasonably entertaining sub-Thorogood outfit called Ron Thompson & The Resistors.
151. The author humbly requests his Gentle Reader’s indulgence for another wholly unprovoked use of the Star Trek infinitive.
152. In March ’91, Hooker received a Blues Brothers royalty cheque for $13.
153. The article in question appeared in New Musical Express for 5 June 1982, and was reprinted in my collection Shots From The Hip (Penguin, 1991). This has been a gratuitous and unabashed plug.
154. It reappeared in 1998, reissued by PointBlank and thereby entering the ‘official’ Hooker canon.
155. Presumably a reference to the long ‘blues’ version of ‘Voodoo Chile’ (as opposed to the more familiar acid-funk take) on Hendrix’s Electric Ladyland (1968).
156. Said interview by Paul Trynka: unedited transcripts supplied by, and appearing courtesy of, Mr Trynka.
157. As a matter of fact, he had met the band – albeit briefly – when they’d found themselves gigging together in Florida.
158. Italics mine.
159. I am, of course, indebted to Ed Michel for the coining of this felicitous phrase.
160. Including one by the present author.
161. In a fax to the author, December 1997.
162. No relation to the philosopher of almost the same name.
163. In Miles: The Autobiography (Simon & Schuster, 1989) by Miles Davis with Quincy Troupe.
164. So was Collins, but sadly he’s here no more: the biggest guitar tone in the business was stilled when he died in 1993.
165. Compare and contrast: Annette Peacock’s ‘My Mama Never Taught Me How To Cook’ (punchline: ‘but my brother taught me how to suck . . .seed’), from X-Dreams (Aura, 1978).
166. This is a slight exaggeration.
167. Named after a fairly obscure Sonny Boy Williamson track.
168. He did it again four years later, with 1997’s Deuces Wild.
INDEX
Abbey Road ref 1
ABC ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8, ref 9, ref 10, ref 11, ref 12, ref 13, ref 14, ref 15, ref 16, ref 17, ref 18, ref 19, ref 20, ref 21, ref 22, ref 23
Abner, Ewart ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5
Ackers, Graham ref 1
Adderly, Julian ‘Cannonball’ ref 1
‘Ain’t Gonna Be Your Doggie’ ref 1
‘Ain’t No Big Thing’ ref 1, ref 2, ref 3
Alexander, Dan ref 1
‘Alimonia Blues’ ref 1
All Around The World ref 1
‘All Night Long’ ref 1
Allison, Mose ref 1, ref 2, ref 3
Allman, Duane ref 1, ref 2
Allman, Gregg ref 1, ref 2, ref 3
Allman Brothers ref 1, ref 2
Alone ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6
Alternative Boogie: Early Studio Recordings 1948–1952 ref 1n, ref 2n, ref 3
American Folk Blues Festival ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5
American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) ref 1
Ammons, Albert ref 1
Ammons, Gene ref 1
. . . And Seven Nights ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4
The Andantes ref 1, ref 2, ref 3
The Andrews Sisters ref 1
The Animals ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6, ref 7, ref 8
Antone, Cliff ref 1, ref 2
Arden, Don ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6
Areas, Chepito ref 1
Armstrong, Louis ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4
Arnold, Billy Boy2 ref 1
Arnold, Mac ref 1
Atlantic Records ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4, ref 5, ref 6
Aykroyd, Dan ref 1
‘Baby Be Strong’ ref 1
‘Baby Lee’ ref 1, ref 2, ref 3
‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ ref 1, ref 2, ref 3
‘Backbiters And Syndicators’ ref 1, ref 2, ref 3, ref 4
‘Bad Like Jesse James’ ref 1
Boogie Man Page 67