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 know 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.
It’s August of 1991 and Hooker, a rhythm and blues veteran whose first million-selling record, ‘Boogie Chillen’, had been released over forty years earlier but whose career had been in effective hibernation for more than fifteen years, is surfing a renewed wave of popularity without any real precedent in the history of the turbulent relationship between blues, rock and the mass market. His last major record contract, with the once-mighty ABC label, had been allowed to expire in 1974, by mutual consent, after the last of an increasingly dismal series of rock-oriented albums, which reflected little credit on either company or artist, had died an ignomnious death in the stores. Subsequent recordings, for small independent outfits, had been few and far between; often of indifferent quality, and generating only mediocre sales. In the mid-’80s, management of Hooker’s career had devolved onto the shoulders of Mike Kappus, an ambitious young music-business entrepreneur. A California-based transplant from the Midwest, Kappus had found himself helming an album project to make a real, proper John Lee Hooker record and facilitate ‘a paying of tribute by friends’. To this end, he had assembled a bevy of Hooker’s famous admirers – including stars like Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt, plus his own other clients like George Thorogood, the fast-rising young blues star Robert Cray, and the East Los Angeles Chicano roots-rockers Los Lobos – to co-star on a new record which would restate the fundamental values of Hooker’s music, untainted by undignified concessions to transitory pop-rock fashion, and reintroduce the frail titan to the pop mainstream. Shopping the resulting album, The Healer, to the major record companies, he had found no serious takers. It saw eventual release in the winter of 1989 via two decidedly minor independent companies: Chameleon Records in the US and Silvertone in the UK. To the surprise of just about everyone, it was a hit. First in the UK and then in the US, the album climbed the pop charts. One week, Hooker was even outselling Madonna.
By the New Year, the illiterate septuagenarian from the Mississippi Delta had become the world’s oldest and unlikeliest pop star. During the summer of 1990, Hooker and his band, their fee now jacked into the stratosphere, hit every major blues, folk and jazz festival in the northern hemisphere. By autumn, the tour had grossed a figure not unadjacent to three million dollars.
In the summer of 1991, a sequel, Mr Lucky, stood ready for release. This time, the co-stars included Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones, Ry Cooder, Albert Collins, Johnny Winter and Van Morrison; and once again, Hooker was on the road, prised from his suburban California hideaway to perform three concerts on the East Coast in locations ranging from grimy New Jersey to genteel New England. In the baking heat of the hotel parking lot, Hooker’s car is ready: a rented white Buick Park Avenue