Boogie Man Read online

  Charles Shaar Murray is an award-winning author, journalist, musician and cultural infidel: ‘the rock critic’s rock critic’ (Q Magazine), ‘front-line cultural warrior’ and ‘original gunslinger’ (Independent on Sunday). He first appeared in print in 1970 in the notorious ‘School-kids’ issue of OZ magazine. By 1972, he was working for NME, subsequently becoming Associate Editor. Crosstown Traffic, his acclaimed study of Jimi Hendrix, won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1990: a decade later, Boogie Man was shortlisted for the same award. The first two decades of his ‘journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse’, to use his own description, were collected in Shots from the Hip. In 2010 he received a Record Of The Day for his contributions to music journalism and a novel, The Hellhound Sample, appeared in 2011. He is currently at work on a ‘somewhat unconventional’ book about The Clash and playing blues guitar with his band Crosstown Lightnin’. He aspires to be the missing link between George Orwell and Robert Johnson.

  http://charlesshaarmurray.com/

  This edition published in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  Copyright © Charles Shaar Murray, 1999, 2011

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 2000 by the Penguin Group

  www.canongate.tv

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 0 85786 203 7

  eISBN 978 0 85786 204 4

  This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011

  Join the discussion:

  #boogieman or follow Charles Shaar Murray on @CharlesSMurray

  Dedicated to the Memory of

  KATHY ACKER

  (1947–1997)

  and

  AGNES SCHAAR MURRAY

  (1912–1997)

  and to

  ANNA CHEN

  Here’s looking at you, comrade . . .

  forever, babes

  CONTENTS

  Foreword

  Intro

  1. They Don’t Give This Old Boy Nuthin’

  2. Bluebird, Bluebird, Take a Letter Down South for Me

  3. The Real Folk Blues?

  4. Frisco Blues

  5. When I First Come to Town, People

  6. ‘Boogie Chillen’ Came Out Burnin’

  7. Ghostses on the Highway

  8. Time is Marchin’ On

  9. Folk Boom . . .

  10. . . . Blues Boom

  11. Motor City is Burning

  12. Interlude – Dark Room

  13. Into the Mythic

  14. Hey, You Just Gotta Make the Change: Iron John and the Healing Game

  Afterword: Saharan Boogie

  Don’t Look Back

  Acknowledgements: Thank you, fellas

  Appendix: Nuthin’ But the Best ’n’ Later for the Garbage

  Index

  FOREWORD

  I Fought The Lore And The Lore Won

  In the months immediately preceding the preparation of this new edition of Boogie Man, two things happened. The first was that I received a communication from a reader in the US which reopened questions I’d previously considered settled.

  It suggested that newly discovered documentary information implied that the birthdate I’d been given for John Lee Hooker was inaccurate, and that he had been born in 1911 or 1912, rather than 1917 – and was therefore actually five or six years older than previously thought. This would radically reshape the chronology of my narrative – the primary source for which was, of course, John Lee Hooker himself and members of his immediate family – thereby overturning quite a few applecarts, since, as part of the agreement struck with John Lee’s then-manager, Mike Kappus, when this project was first mooted, I had made a commitment to construct the narrative around John Lee’s own version of events unless I could come up with solid evidence to the contrary.

  This fresh revelation would mean that John Lee could’ve gotten to Detroit a few years earlier than he claimed in our interviews: some other sources have placed his arrival in his adopted hometown as early as 1937. It would also invalidate John Lee’s own account of his military service (which you’ll find in Chapter 5) because, obviously, if he had been five years older he wouldn’t have been underage, and therefore the entire anecdote would be ceremonially blown out of the water. A promising Google link tantalisingly offers the snippet that ‘later he avoided military service in World War II due to a stabbing wound’, but the site in question (Nothin’ But The Blues at http://www.t4p.com/blues/artists.html) offers no further elucidation. If this was indeed the case, the wound in question may well have been the hand-tendon injury inflicted by his then-wife Maude and mentioned by Zakiya Hooker in Chapter 8.

  Also . . . when John Lee made his triumphant return to the cultural forefront in 1989 with The Healer, his ‘official’ birthdate was given in contemporary press releases as 1920, which would’ve made him 69 years old. Even with the ‘revised official’ birthdate of 1917, he would’ve been 72 . . . and if my correspondent’s information could be properly verified and authenticated, John Lee would have been all of 77 at the time, which makes his achievement all the more astonishing and impressive. So when he eventually passed away in 2001 – having outlived, among others, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon and two (Albert and Freddie) of the Three Kings – he had reached the seriously impressive age of 89: still performing, still able to rock a house to the bone and raise the spirits and consciousness of an audience at a time in life when most of his few surviving contemporaries could, sadly, barely lift a spoon. He would also have been a fractionally closer contemporary of Robert Johnson, T-Bone Walker and Howlin’ Wolf than of Muddy Waters or Willie Dixon, let alone B.B. King.

  Well . . . I replied to my correspondent, requesting his permission to reproduce the relevant portions of his communication in this new edition and credit him fully for his research. Literally days before our final production deadline, he got back in touch to tell me that he had been unable to verify his preliminary findings to his own satisfaction, and was therefore unwilling to commit himself (or me!) to them.

  So there the matter rests, so to speak. Good old John . . . a man of mystery to the last, and beyond.

  I mentioned two things. The other is that, on 27 February 2011, Hooker’s former collaborator and running buddy Eddie Kirkland died in Florida after a Greyhound bus smashed into his Ford Taurus. True to form, the Road Warrior was driving himself to a gig. He was 87 years old.

  That was one tough generation.

  ‘I’ll be here forever, but my body won’t.’ About that, at least, John Lee was entirely right. His art was indeed immortal, and he is still here: or, to be precise, his voice and his songs are still very much with us, as is his brooding image on film. What isn’t here anymore is his sheer physical presence: hugely impressive but never imposing; towering but never overbearing. I’m thinking both of his physical presence in a room during our many hours of conversation (both on- and off-tape) and socialising, and the presence he could bring to a stage, be it in blazing afternoon sunshine at open-air festivals or under the late-night mood lighting of intimate clubs and theatres.

  As I’ve said, here and elsewhere, John Lee Hooker was deeply mysterious. Not the ersatz trick-lighting-smoke-and-mirrors mysteriousness of a stage magician, but the genuine broad-daylight mysteriousness of a real magician. He could, and did, explain exactly what he was doing and how he was doing it . . . and not one iota of the mystery would be dispelled.

  Now, because my agent tells me that folks love lists, allow me to leave you with my own entirely personal and infinitely subjective mini-list of my hal
f-dozen favourite covers and reinterpretations of John Lee Hooker’s songs.

  Covering his compositions is a tricky business, to be sure. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Richard, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, let alone the simultaneously sainted and damned Robert Johnson, were also hugely distinctive performers as well as gifted and eloquent songwriters – hell, while we’re at it we could also toss in Bob Dylan, Lennon & McCartney and a regiment more – but hundreds, if not thousands, of performers have managed to sing their songs without having to travel deep into their musical landscapes and specifically engage with the spirit of the originals.

  Hooker is different. With the exception of a few bar-band staples which can be rocked-up a treat by any halfway-competent group (‘Boom Boom’ and ‘Dimples’ come immediately to mind), composition and performance are virtually indivisible. The only real options open to most performers would be either to mimic Hooker (which sounds ridiculous) or to obliterate him (which reduces the songs to generic boogies with cute lyrics). The only way it can work is for the performer to delve deep within him- (or her-)self to find an aspect of that self which can connect with some aspect of Hooker. The easiest to reach is his dark, ominous, brooding side, with its undercurrents of lust and anger. The hardest, and most elusive, is his warmth, compassion and humour.

  Six, therefore, of the very, very best.

  JUNIOR PARKER & THE BLUE FLAMES:

  ‘Feelin’ Good’ (1953)

  Not so much a ‘cover’ as an audacious ‘Parkerising’ of Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’, this primo example of pre-Elvis Sun Records Memphis R&B speeds the sensuous, hip-twitching lope of Hooker’s original groove up to a faster-rocking itchy-foot kind of boogie messaround which still preserves the ethos of the original.

  THE ANIMALS: ‘I’m Mad Again’ (1964)

  For a chubby kid from Newcastle to attempt not only to sing John Lee Hooker songs but also to redeliver one of his most idiosyncratic dramatic monologues would’ve been a spectacular act of hubris if Eric Burdon hadn’t pulled off this variation on the ‘Bad Like Jesse James’ theme so impressively. This bravura performance appeared on The Animals’ very first album as one of no less than three Hooker reinterpretations, alongside rocking covers of both ‘Boom Boom’ (with which they enjoyed a medium-sized US hit single) and ‘Dimples’. The latter also served as Steve Winwood’s pro recording debut (albeit medleyed up with ‘Boom Boom’) on the very first single by The Spencer Davis Group. In a rare triumph for natural justice, it was Hooker’s own original and timeless 1956 recording ‘Dimples’ which came out on top in the UK singles chart.

  MC5: ‘Motor City Is Burning’ (1968)

  Don’t forget the Motor City! The year after the Detroit riots and JLH’s own release of this mordant commentary, the song received this incendiary, incandescent in-concert hot-rodding from the composer’s fellow Detroiters, the insurrectionary activist band whose brief career helped lay a powder trail for what erupted only a few years later as punk. Almost a decade further on, the title was obliquely referenced by The Clash in one of their most powerful early songs, ‘London’s Burning’.

  POP STAPLES with STEVE CROPPER and ALBERT KING:

  ‘Tupelo’ (1969)

  Where Hooker’s baritone is dark and heavy, the unassuming, understated tenor of Roebuck ‘Pop’ Staples, the founding patriarch of The Staple Singers, is light in both senses of the term. A fellow Mississippian and contemporary of Hooker’s, he explores this incantatory account of the apocalyptic flood of 1927 (which also inspired classic songs by Charley Patton and Bessie Smith, not to mention – many years later – by Randy Newman) from the inside: the trademark vibrato pulse and throb of his ominous guitar subtly coloured and decorated with truly exquisite restraint by Cropper and King. Bob Dylan reworked and deconstructed ‘Tupelo’ as ‘The Big Flood’ in one of the still-unofficial stretches of The Basement Tapes, along with ‘I’m In The Mood’.

  THE DOORS: ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ (1971)

  Since everybody who enters the universe of a Hooker song finds there what they’ve brought with them, it should come as little or no surprise that The Doors’ Jim Morrison finds an ominous, brooding sexual brag’n’swagger. Morrison fancied himself as a blues singer (among other things), and this performance, from their LA Woman album, stands alongside their eponymous debut album’s stab at Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Back Door Man’ (composed by Willie Dixon) as a cornerstone of his claim to those particular keys to that particular highway. Mean, moody, measured and menacing, with a mid-tempo funk stomp from the rhythm section and guitar and piano solos respectively idiosyncratic (Robbie Krieger) and chilly (Ray Mabnzarek), Morrison evokes Hooker without mimicking him – a harder trick to pull off than you might think.

  GEORGE THOROGOOD & THE DESTROYERS:

  ‘One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer’ (1977)

  Raw, extrovert and thoroughly rockin’, this exuberant ride through one of Hooker’s greatest party-time barroom boogies mashes up the titular song and the picaresque shaggy-dog narrative of ‘House Rent Boogie’ with relentless energy and extravagant panache. Riotous and rambunctious, this reaches out to the FUN side of John Lee Hooker: the groovaliciously dynamic entertainer who used to wreck/rock the house at all those legendary long-gone Detroit taverns, making sure the dancers just couldn’t hide, receives all due honour here.

  DR FEELGOOD: ‘Mad Man Blues’ (1986)

  The Thin White Wolf – Dr Feelgood’s late lead vocalist Lee Brilleaux – fronts a latter-day version of the legendary Canvey Island R&B gangstaz for a visceral take on one of Hooker’s toughest, nastiest, scariest songs. Delivering a grimily distorted vocal through a harp mic plugged into an amp and backed only by guitar and footstomp, Brilleaux squared up to the maestro on his own musical turf and gave a very good account of himself indeed. Rough, raw and as far in-yer-face as it’s possible to get. I reckon John Lee would’ve heartily approved.

  This foreword is long overdue – as I type, I fancy I can hear my publisher’s fingertips drumming impatiently on his desk – but I’m strangely reluctant to declare it done, sign it off and send it off . . . partly because there’s always more to say, and partly because it means saying goodbye again . . . both to Boogie Man, and to John Lee himself.

  This book took me eight years to write. It cost me more money than I’ve ever earned from it, my sanity (a fragile thing at the best of times) and a marriage (of which the same could be said, though I was too deeply immersed in my task to realise it at the time) . . . but I’m still proud of it, still glad to have written it and thoroughly delighted that it’s now available once more. A massive ‘thank you, fellas’ is thereby due to John Seaton at Canongate for bringing it back to the world after a first attempt at another publishing house stalled, and to my agent Julian Alexander at the LAW agency, for unflappably sorting out all that stuff that always needs sorting out.

  I hope you’ll enjoy reading it, and that it moves you to explore some of the music discussed herein and the times, places and culture that stimulated its making; if such is the case, may the music do for you what it’s supposed to do, just as God and John Lee Hooker intended.

  Blues is still the healer, and always will be.

  Peace be upon you.

  Charles Shaar Murray,

  London, May 2011

  Celebrating the centenary of the birth of Robert Johnson . . . and raising an extra glass to John Lee . . . just in case.

  INTRO

  I got a history long as from here to London, England, and back, and back again. I got so much to tell, and so much to write about. Everything you read on the album covers is not true, and every album cover reads different. People using their own ideas; they didn’t come to me, to get it from me. John Lee did this, he did that. I’m gonna tell you, as far as I know, the truth about my life. I got nothin’ to hold back. Some things I have forgotten. Some things you ask me, I know but I done forgotten. I just about know what I did, but some people may say . . . tell you some things I didn’t do. Nobody k
now John Lee Hooker. They know as much about my cat as they know about me. It was a hard road.

  Sometimes I don’t enjoy talkin’ about it, but it’s true. Some of it you hate to think about, you just want to throw it out your mind. You don’t even want to think about what you come through, because sometimes it brings you down thinking about the hard times, the rough times, what happened to you over the years. There’s a lot of misery, hatred, disappointment . . . all that. I hate to talk about it . . . but it’s there. A lot of them were rough years. You just want to think about the good things, the happy things. There’s so many things I regret, I can’t put my hand on it. I made my decisions early in life, to be a musician. Before that, I was a hard-working person. I didn’t like handouts. I’d get out there and work, earn a living and stuff like that, but that wasn’t what I was going to do the rest of my life. I knew that.

  That was a hard road, right up to now. It was a hard road.

  1

  THEY DON’T GIVE THIS OLD BOY NUTHIN’

  High noon in the lobby of a generic airport hotel on the outskirts of Newark, New Jersey. John Lee Hooker, the blues singer, is leaning on the reception desk methodically charming the pants off the receptionist. He is an elderly, dark-skinned man of slightly below medium height, lean and wiry except for a neat, globular pot-belly, and dressed like a Japanese banker, albeit a Japanese banker fond of augmenting his immaculate pinstriped three-piece suit with menacing wraparound sunglasses, a rakish Homburg hat decorated with a guitar-shaped brooch, and socks emblazoned with big white stars.

  He turns from his banter to greet a recent acquaintance. ‘Huh-huh-how you doin’, young man,’ he says in a deep, resonant voice, as grainily resilient as fine leather. Electronics companies make fortunes by manufacturing reverberation and equalization devices which make voices sound like that. Hooker sounds as if he has $100,000 worth of sophisticated digital goodies built into his chest and throat. Yet his voice is quiet and muted, its tonal richness off set by a residual stammer and blurred by the deepest alluvial accents of the Mississippi Delta. He extends a hand as softly leathery as his voice, a hand like a small cushion, but he leaves it bonelessly limp in his acquaintance’s grasp. The top joint of his right thumb joins the root at an angle of almost ninety degrees, the legacy of more than six decades of plucking blues guitar bass runs. Were the acquaintance sufficiently injudicious to give Hooker’s hand an overly enthusiastic squeeze, the response would have been a warning glance from behind the wraparounds, and a mock-agonized wince and flap of the offended paw. No-one crushes John Lee Hooker’s hand, just as no-one allows cigarette smoke to drift into his breathing space. That hand, and its opposite number, creates a blues guitar sound which nobody, no matter how gifted, has ever been able to duplicate effectively; that voice is one of the world’s cultural treasures. You endanger either at your own peril.