Nevertheless, there are songs he rarely entrusts to them. The title tune from The Healer is one such: for Hooker, it is his credo, and it is inextricably linked to its co-composer and featured soloist, Carlos Santana. Even though it is one of the most popular pieces in his repertoire, Hooker hardly ever perform it unless Santana himself is there alongside him. As for the songs from the imminently available Mr Lucky, which could use some promotional exposure . . . forget it. They ain’t in the set. Not tonight, anyway.
Though the band’s repertoire is large enough to permit song shifts from show to show, the structure invariably remains the same. Slouched in his chair and protected by his shades, Hooker works through his tales of lust and anger, sorrow and loneliness, regret and despair. They call certain kinds of blues ‘low down’, and sometimes what is meant by that is a social judgement on certain sorts of people and certain sorts of lifestyle. In Hooker’s case, ‘low down’ is a barometer reading of the emotional depths. This is as bad as it gets. Oh, the details may vary. He ain’t got no money. He ain’t got no place to go. He wants her. She don’t want him. She wants him. He don’t want her. But into each scenario, the grain of his voice breathes verisimilitude – I been there – and compassion – it hurts, I know it – and the sheer fact of his presence seemingly guarantees that, just as he survived it all, so will we. The inevitable climax is the joyful catharsis of his trademark boogie. It is for this moment that he goes to such extreme lengths to conserve his energy: that electrifying instant when he casts his guitar aside, tears off his shades, leaps to his feet and prowls the stage, all frailty or fatigue forgotten, exhorting both band and audience to greater effort. From the bluesman, arm-wrestling his pain and the world’s on a Delta front porch or in a rat-infested ghetto apartment, he is transformed into the preacher, who cajoles and bullies us towards salvation.
Like the preacher, he speaks in tongues. This closing boogie does little more than allude to his signature tune ‘Boogie Chillen’; it certainly doesn’t include any of that song’s celebrated monologues. All it is is a riff and a string of solos over which Hooker drops his nigh-wordless exhortations and incantations: ‘Hey-hey’, ‘I-I-I’ and the like. Transcribed, it would be not so much meaningless as language-less: the words, such as they are, are nothing, but the sound of his voice is everything. It is utterly primal; it reaches us on a level far deeper than any which can be accessed by words, or meaning, or language. It is a direct link from soul to soul. ‘You know what?’ asks Hooker’s son Robert, once his on-the-road keyboard player, now himself a preacher. ‘If you ever listen to him in that song “Boogie With The Hook” at his closing act, do it to you kinda sound like he’s preachin’ in there?’
This is what Hooker calls ‘preachin’ the blues’, though his storefront pulpit is the neighbourhood bar – or, more recently, the recording studio and the concert hall. Over that single hammering riff that he learned from his stepfather some six or so decades before, he orchestrates the celebration of this fact: that all present have triumphed over current adversities simply by finding this one moment – here, now – of solidarity and joy. If anything can truly be said to be the philosophical core of the blues, it is this: when you suffer, you can at least boogie, and when you boogiein’, you ain’t sufferin’. But, first, you got to face the fact that you’re sufferin’. Once you’ve acknowledged your pain, you can get to dealing with it.
The problem that a lot of people – not so much white people, but many younger blacks – have with the blues is that their perception of it never reaches that second stage. All they ever hear is that pain: that raw, naked pain. And they complain about ‘wailing self-pity’; they are more comfortable with the soul man’s sophistication or the rapper’s rage. The blues makes them feel bad, and they can’t get past that. They never reach the realisation common not only to every blues singer but to every participant in blues culture, which is that the blues is not about feeling bad, but about feeling good despite every factor in the world which conspires to make you feel bad.
And this is why the blues is the Devil’s music: because the church tells it one way and the blues tells it the other. If you boogie, says the church, you will suffer, because joy which does not comes from God is not relief from sin but a sin in itself. Hooker turns that dictum on its head: he shows us first that he understands just how much pain there is in the world, and also that – even if only temporarily – it can be vanquished; exorcized in an ecstatic explosion of clapping and singing and chanting.
And this is his art: the art of the Healer. This is what a blues singer actually does. Behind all of the idiosyncrasies of taste and style, behind all the stagecraft and devices which any long-term performer develops, behind the songs and the riffs and the shtick and the musicianship, is the bluesman’s true role: that of our confidant. The bluesman hasn’t heard our personal, individual story – not unless he’s a close personal friend, that is – but he should make us feel that he knows it anyway, that he has heard us and understands us. By telling his story – or a variation of his story, or several variations of his story, or even an outright embroidery of his story – John Lee Hooker enables us to face our own. In this sense, the bluesman is our confessor, our shrink; it is his job to forgive us and comfort us, shoulder our burdens as he invites us to help him shoulder his own. Against the forces of wickedness, the preacher is our leader; the general who marshals our forces; the conductor who orchestrates our instruments. But when the preacher’s mantle passes to the bluesman, it is so that he can enlist us against an epic battle against despair. When the bluesman hollers ‘Good mornin’, Mr Blues’ or tells us of blues walkin’ just like a man, he’s talking about what Winston Churchill called ‘the black dog’: the personification of despair. If he were a doctor, he would inject us with a small, controllable dose of that despair, an in oculation to protect us from ultimately succumbing to it. And it doesn’t matter who you are. I haven’t lived like John Lee Hooker. Neither have you. Nor has anyone who didn’t come up in the racist apartheid South between the wars. But his pain – recollected in tranquility as it may be, but evoked with the immediacy of a fresh bruise – sounds as if it feels like mine. When Hooker sings, in ‘Dark Room’, ‘and the tears roll down my face’ I remember how my own tears feel, rolling down my own face. I remember what it is to feel so flat-out, rock-bottom bad that you simply, involuntarily, apropos of nothing in particular, begin to weep. And I know that, eventually, the weeping stops. And then the boogie begins.
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