Boogie Man Read online

  And this is why John Lee Hooker is not simply some funny old geezer in a hat who’s mastered the art of zen showmanship to the point where he can enrapture an audience by doing virtually nothing at all. His music has, even if only temporarily, inoculated us against despair; and that triumphal, climactic boogie is where we testify that the cure, for the time being, proved successful. Once again, the Healer has done his work. Robert Cray is still in full cry as Hooker’s limo speeds away through the night.

  Another night, another hotel. Muzzy with fatigue and still faintly dyspeptic from a Mac Attack sustained en route sometime during the wee small hours, the assembled company awakens the following morning to discover that it is somewhere in Connecticut. To be precise, in a town called New London, which bears precious little resemblance to the old London a few thousand miles away. Presumably due to lack of demand, the hotel disdains to offer any kind of news-stand facility to its clientele: inquiries as to the location of the nearest bookshop produce only puzzled stares and – eventually – directions to an establishment which does indeed stock books, but only of a Christian nature. Around mid-morning, Hooker rises regally from his slumbers to proceed to his next port of call: the Newport Jazz Festival.

  Some thirty-one years earlier, this self-same occasion had provided the springboard for the second phase of Hooker’s professional career. In 1960, the festival had presented an afternoon showcase for an assortment of blues performers, headlined by Muddy Waters’ Chicago Blues Band and featuring Hooker as one of the most prominent guests, alongside the likes of Louisiana’s old-timey guitar/fiddle duo Butch Cage & Willie Thomas, the urbane Count Basie veteran Jimmy ‘Mr Five By Five’ Rushing, and the cabaret-blues stylist Betty Jeanette. At the time, this was a mildly controversial move, since contemporary blues of the amplified ensemble variety was disdained by purists as a degenerate music only fractionally less despicable than that damned rock and roll; though the likes of Waters and Hooker had considerably more to do with jazz than, say, Eartha Kitt or The Kingston Trio, both of whom had appeared in previous years as part of the organizers’ misguided attempt to broaden the festival’s appeal. However, as controversies went, the blues afternoon paled into utter insignificance compared to the moral panic – concerning the critical mass achieved by that year’s combination of teenagers, beer and rhythmic music – which virtually capsized the festival’s future as an institution. The final two days’ concerts were hurriedly cancelled, and for a while it was feared that the blues afternoon would represent the institution’s swan song. Indeed, the climax of the afternoon was the performance, by Waters’ pianist half-brother Otis Spann, of the impromptu ‘Goodbye Newport Blues’, the lyrics of which had been hurriedly scribbled on the back of a telegram form by the poet Langston Hughes. It was sung by Spann, rather than Waters himself, because Waters – like Hooker and many other Southerners of their generation – didn’t read too fluently; and Spann, fifteen years younger and considerably better educated, was far better equipped to sing lyrics which had just been placed in front of him.

  Newport survived, and both Waters and Hooker did considerably better than that. (Incidentally, history repeated itself less than a decade later when, in the wake of the late-’60s flirtation between jazz and progressive rock, the 1968 festival included a rock night headlined by Jethro Tull, the Mothers Of Invention and The Jeff Beck Group, and all those bad kids – or rather, their younger brothers and sisters – went wild again. Tsk tsk tsk. However, this time there was no moral panic: they simply stopped booking rock acts.) Seeming simultaneously shy and feral, Hooker stood up in his slick sharkskin suit with Muddy Waters’ band behind him, and performed deep, brooding versions of classics like ‘Maudie’, a surprisingly mordant song dedicated to his then wife, and ‘It’s My Own Fault’, later to become a cornerstone of B.B. King’s repertoire. He climaxed a rocking finale of ‘Come Back Baby’ by walking offstage, still playing, and leaving the band to finish the tune; a marked contrast to the downhome demeanour of Cage & Thomas, wearing their best church suits and broad-brimmed hats and busily playing away while seated in their folding chairs.

  More than three decades later, it is Hooker, Mr Natty Urbanite of 1960, who performs from a chair and sports the broadcloth-three-piece-and-Homburg-hat which is the traditional formal dress of rural black Southerners. Nevertheless, the wooden Newport stage still looks the same, and the tranquil bay is still crowded with the yachts of the opulent. However, in this, the golden age of corporate sponsorship, the Newport Jazz Festival is now the JVC Jazz Festival and is spread over a variety of sites, including the original setting in Newport, Rhode Island, itself. You reach the grounds via immaculately maintained roads of neat bungalows where the weekend yard sale is a way of life, a sobering contrast to the pot-holed death-traps of New Jersey. Hooker is received like royalty. He barely has time to disembark from his limo before he is surrounded by well-wishers. Nevertheless, he heads for shelter at the first opportunity, unlike B.B. King, who tours the backstage area, greeting one and all with the ambassadorial graciousness which is his trademark. Once ensconced in his trailer, Hooker’s co-stars queue up to pay their respects. Virtually his first pair of visitors are a lean Englishman in his late fifties with a majestically pony-tailed silver mane, and a bulbous, bearded, bereted gent leaning on a Louisiana conjure stick.

  They are, in fact, John Mayall, ‘the father of British blues’, and the New Orleans piano maestro Mac ‘Dr John’ Rebennack, and they’re almost knocking each other over in their eagerness to be the first to receive the passive handshake and the ritual greeting, ‘Huh-huh-how you doin’, young man?’ Excitable young women in shorts and halter tops vie with each other to be photographed sitting on his lap. Taking care not to dislodge his homburg, they feed him chocolate and icecream. The fearsome Boogie Man, the soulful, compassionate bluesman, the galvanic preacher: all are now replaced with the genial, guffawing, sleepy-eyed teddy bear.

  As three o’clock approaches, The Coast To Coast Blues Band mount the stage, inspect the rented amplifiers, keyboards and drums, and declare them adequate. Cupp and Fischer have squeezed themselves into the drop-dead dresses normally reserved for after dark, and some of the male band members have gone so far as to change their shirts and comb their hair. The venerable sage’s only concession to the heat is to remove his jacket and unbutton his waistcoat. Soon he settles into his folding chair, unleashes fusillades of deep blue notes from his much-travelled Gibson guitar, and chants his Mississippi soliloquies into incongruously blazing sunshine. He is rapturously received by a thoroughly broiled audience, many of whom should be discouraged from ever appearing in public in swimwear, and a tiny proportion of whom should never appear in anything else. Halfway through the show, Hooker sends the group down from the stage and brings on his longtime friend John Hammond, a tall, patrician singer/guitarist who is the son and namesake of the great talent scout who recorded everybody from Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Armed with an old steel-bodied guitar and a harmonica, Hammond accompanies Hooker as he sings ‘Highway 13’ from the new record: ‘And it rained, it rained so hard,’ sings Hooker, ‘I couldn’t hardly see the road.’ Even without the sympathetic brushed drums – soothingly shushing like windscreen wipers – which anchor the song on record, it requires a positive effort of will to remember that we’re sitting in ninety-plus temperatures under a burnished, cloudless sky, rather than huddled in a car, locked in a tiny, scudding bubble of dry warmth as a storm pounds on windows and roof. But Hooker is only nominally here with us under the Newport sun; his heart and mind are somewhere else, where things are very different, muscling an automobile through punishing rain. And such is the strength of his spell that he can carry us with him: to overpower our experience with his.

  As it turns out, the devastation he’s evoking is not to so much somewhere else as somewhen else. Hurricane Bob was still a day away when Hooker hits Newport, and twenty-four hours later, New England would be practically underwater. The fine w
eather is still holding as Hooker heads back to New London, but come morning the pressure begins to build, as the limo noses through Long Island under gunmetal skies, en route to the Wantagh resort of Jones Beach. The ensemble is decanted into a courtyard ringed with small, cell-like dressing-rooms: Hooker and his crew here, Etta James and her team next door, the Robert Cray Band across the way, and B.B. King’s posse somewhere over there. Hooker’s has a puddly shower as its annex: Cupp and Fischer, who use it as their changing-room, must be grateful for their high-heeled shoes. The bands and crew, preparations more or less complete, lounge around the courtyard, chomping their way through the backstage catering, and beginning to shiver in their summer clothes. Outside, Hurricane Bob is closing in on the New York area, and the blues lovers of Wantagh, Long Island, huddle damply and resentfully in their rainwear, awaiting performances by Hooker, King, Cray and the gargantuan James, and slapping irritably at the clouds of mosquitos which boil around them, intoxicated by the scent of fresh prey. The air is thick and humming with the sense that something is about to happen. ‘They don’t give this old boy nuthin’,’ complains Hooker, reclining mock-mournfully on his dressing-room sofa. ‘No radio, no TV, can’t watch no baseball . . .’

  The show is the standard set which Hooker and his gentlemen and ladies performed the day before, and the day before that, but this time it’s different. The Newport show, apart from that stunning performance of ‘Highway 13’, was sunny, in every sense of the word; this one is stormy, ominous, full of foreboding. Cupp’s curtain-raising ‘Cold Cold Feeling’ is as appropriate a prologue as any novelist or movie director could have chosen, and she rises to the occasion: singing her heart out before striding back to the wings through the mosquitoes, chest heaving, as Hooker emerges to commence the main event. This time, he rides the building storm to the final explosive boogie climax. Afterwards, the team dissolves into its component parts: Cupp is commencing a new day job the following Monday and thus will travel back to San Francisco with the band, but since Hooker has a few days’ business in New York City, Lizz Fischer has been asked to stay on in order to keep him company. New to the organisation and unfamiliar with its ways, she is a trifle concerned. Naturally, she is thrilled, but nevertheless she worries about exactly what such companionship will entail and what she might be expected to . . . umm . . . Just a few minutes ahead of the relentless downpour which will, the following day, have the flood warnings out on every radio station, John Lee Hooker rolls into Manhattan in a long black limousine. He will give a handful of interviews and, in a week of hurricanes, celebrate what he will claim to be his 71st birthday.

  ‘When I die, they’ll bury the blues with me,’ he states proudly to a well-wisher at the exit. ‘But the blues will never die.’

  2

  BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, TAKE A LETTER DOWN SOUTH FOR ME

  In my mind, music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at McDonalds?

  Henry Rollins, interviewed in Rolling Stone

  Alabama’s got me so upset

  Tennessee made me lose my rest

  And everybody knows about Mississippi . . .

  Goddam!

  Nina Simone, from Mississippi Goddam

  I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.

  John Lee Hooker,

  interviewed in Melody Maker, October 1964

  So how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen the big city? Some people just can’t wait to get out of the country, feel some pavement under their feet, scrape the mud off their boots and morph, as smoothly as possible, into urban slickers ready to parade their new-found sophistication at the expense of the rubes fresh off the latest bus from down home. Every big city is full of people from the sticks or the ’burbs who’ve taken on urban coloration like so many concrete chameleons, shedding their country skins, going native on Broadway or in Hollywood, pumped and cranked all the way up, and primed to mud-wrestle the locals for that big-town pay-cheque. For others, the basic fact of who they are changes not one iota no matter where they may find themselves.

  John Lee Hooker left the Mississippi Delta whilst still in the turbulence of adolescence. Nevertheless, Mississippi never left him. Though he’s lived in major conurbations – first Cincinnati, then Detroit, then Oakland, California, and finally the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area – ever since reaching his late teens, he remains a quintessential man of the Delta. His slow, deliberate drawl has never revved itself up to city speed. His manners are still country-courtly. His fondness for traditional Southern food remains unaffected by the temptations of any exotic delicacies from Europe, Asia or, come to that, anywhere else you could name. He’s seen it all and he’s not terribly impressed, but he’s far too much the country gentleman to give offence.

  The Delta formed his voice, and he in turn became the voice of the Delta: the very incarnation of the traditional culture of its African diaspora; a king in voluntary exile. However, the suggestion that ‘Mississippi made him’ would be an outrageous oversimplification. There is only so much for which purely sociological heredity-and-environment hypotheses will account; there is no process, no set of circumstances, which can truly be said to ‘explain’ John Lee Hooker. We can certainly state without fear of significant contradiction that the ‘environment’ of the Mississippi Delta not only produced considerably more than its fair share of blues singers, but was most probably the spawning ground of the primal blues from which all the different varieties of blues-as-we-know-it ultimately derived. The blues of the Delta is the oldest, deepest blues there is; it therefore creates no major rupture of the laws of probability to propose that the Mississippi Delta (as opposed to, say, Surrey, England) would produce the artist with the most profound ability to tap into that primal blues, and the chromatic range of human emotions it explores. Even within the small community in which Hooker spent his formative years, two of his former playmates became blues singers and good ones at that: but not great ones. We can also discard immediate heredity: even considering the complex interaction between the two primary factors of heredity and environment fails to take us significantly further forward. John Lee Hooker came from a large family, but none of his many brothers and sisters became professionally successful blues singers, though his younger cousin Earl did. ‘I was different from any of my family, as night and day,’ he says today, ‘I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em.’

  This is, of course, the big question. Why was Hooker ‘so different from the rest of ’em’? Of course, almost every person who becomes successful and famous and admired grows up amongst ‘normal’ people (read: people who don’t). Statistically it could hardly be otherwise, even if – in the cable and satellite era – it now seems impossible that anybody at all will be able to live through an entire lifetime without being seen, at least once, on television. It also seems as if every successful person elects to strive for that success from a very young age. Yet John Lee Hooker came up at a time when the majority (read: white) culture had decided that the sons and daughters of black Southern sharecroppers were not supposed even to entertain the possibility that they could escape their fate and take control of their own lives. Their culture was so ‘primitive’ that, by the standards of the times into which Hooker was born, it barely qualified as culture at all. The ‘leaders’ of the black communities, in their turn, decided that blacks not only could but most definitely would ‘make progress’ despite white opposition, but they would do so by self-improvement, by proving their worth to a society which treated them as though they were worthless. By dint of sobriety and study; they would haul themselves, hand over hand, up an American ladder from which most of the rungs had been cut away. Hooker steered precisely the opposite course: that of taking a fierce, incandescent pride in the identity he already had, and exploring the implications
of that identity no matter what the consequences.

  The story of John Lee Hooker’s life is, essentially, the story of his resistance to any and all attempts to change him, to dilute an intrinsic sense of self which has successfully withstood all pressures, including those of institutionalized racism, family, church and the music business. That resistance has been, at times, essentially a passive one: throughout his life, Hooker has remained polite, deferential, quiet-spoken and accommodating. Despite the occasional peevish or impatient outburst, he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t bluster, he doesn’t bully. And then finally, when absolutely no alternative remains, he quits. By which I mean: he leaves, he splits, he dusts, he’s outta there, he’s nothin’ but a cool breeze. It doesn’t matter if it’s a marriage, a record contract, a family, a home: once Hooker decides he’s had enough, that is it. No discussion, no recrimination, nothing. Just gone. And the reason he does it is to protect himself. Not because he’s callous, or cowardly. He is neither. But himself – or rather, his self – is that which makes the music, and that will be protected at all costs; yea, e’en to the ends of the earth.