Boogie Man (53 page)

Nevertheless, when the Groundhogs accompanied Hooker into IBC Studios in mid-November of 1964, they certainly proved their worth. In the rhythm section, drummer Dave Boorman and bassist Pete
Cruikshank kept everything nailed down that was supposed to be nailed down, and everything swinging that was supposed to swing. On lead guitar, Tony McPhee presents impressive bluesical
credentials. Like those Steady Eddies, Kirkland and Burns, he was able to Hookerize his own individual style to the point where he could create the illusion that John Lee had grown a second pair of
hands and was simultaneously playing two guitars: indeed, sometimes the only way to tell which guitarist is playing what comes when McPhee zooms up to the ‘dusty end’ of the neck, where
Hooker was traditionally reluctant to venture. As for the unfortunate Tom Parker, if he had indeed recently acquired all his blues chops in a crash course from Bob Hall, then these rocking,
surprisingly assured performances do him considerable honour. His greatest limitation is, as Hall points out, that his inability to adapt to Hooker’s idiosyncratic metre straps the band
– and John Lee himself – into the straitjacket of the orthodox twelve-bar sequence.

The resulting album was certainly no disgrace, but it remains a decidedly minor part of the Hooker canon. Though the album may not have been an absolute artistic triumph for Hooker, it was a
considerable achievement for the fledgling Groundhogs, winning their spurs by keeping musical pace with an acknowledged master. Unsurprisingly, it was solidly located in the tradition of the Vee
Jay sides which it was originally intended to complement. Equally unsurprisingly, it slotted straight into what the late Frank Zappa would have dubbed the
‘conceptual
continuity’ of Hooker’s repertoire by casting light both forwards and backwards, not merely illuminating aspects of the work he’d already done and previewing songs and themes
which would later attain their fullest flowering, but reflecting and transforming recent and current experience. ‘Seven Days And Seven Nights’, the new song which Hooker had mentioned
to Max Jones and which ended up as the sort-of-title-track when the album crept into American stores as
. . . And Seven Nights
on Verve-Folkways Records in 1965, was a haunting free-form
slow blues meditation incorporating a few lines of stock lyrics, also included in young Buddy Guy’s then-recent ‘Stone Crazy’, which would later serve as the foundation stone of
the towering edifice which eventually became ‘Dark Room’. The slow blues variously entitled ‘It’s Raining Here’ and ‘Storming On The Deep Blue Sea’ on
different editions of the record is a distant cousin of the Charles Brown ‘Drifting Blues’ which had, appropriately enough, ‘drifted’ in and out of Hooker’s repertoire
for so long. Whilst ‘Go Back To School, Little Girl’, an intriguing variant on the Sonny Boy Williamson staple ‘Good Morning Little Schoolgirl’, may or may not be an
explicit allusion to recent encounters with underaged fanettes, its message is nevertheless quite clear: ‘
I’ll wait on you ’til you get
[to be]
twenty-one
.’
Equally pressing and immediate concerns are expressed in ‘Don’t Be Messing With My Bread’: the song isn’t dedicated to Don Arden, though it might as well be.

However, the most significant addition to Hooker’s repertoire to emerge from these sessions was ‘I Cover The Waterfront’, a radical Hookerisation of a Tin Pan Alley ballad
already more than three decades old. Composed in 1933 by Johnny Green and Edward Heyman as, according to Donald Clarke,
⁹⁵
‘a promotional song for a
film of a novel of the same name’,
⁹⁶
the song was initially popularized by society
orchestras like those led by Joe Haynes and
Eddie Duchin. Louis Armstrong recorded it almost immediately, and it was soon taken to the hearts of Broadway and supper-club crooners, later entering the repertoires of Frank Sinatra, Billy
Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Mel Torme and Jo Stafford, to name but a few. Like Green and Heyman’s other enduring classic ‘Body And Soul’, it subsequently became a standard vehicle
for jazz improvisation. ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ was a perennial favourite of Billie Holiday’s – Lady Day recorded versions of the song in 1941, 1944, 1945, 1948, 1949, 1951
and 1954 – and its plangent melody also endeared it to Charlie Parker, Lionel Hampton, Coleman Hawkins, Django Rheinhardt, Art Tatum and the Prez himself, Lester Young. As sung by Holiday, or
by Sarah Vaughan, ‘I Cover The Waterfront’ is an archetypal torch song in the grand manner, languorously, sexily melancholic. As played by Parker, it is a ballad both pensive and
playful, with the great man simultaneously respectful of the moodiness of Johnny Green’s melody, and getting off on the sheer heady delight of the agile, graceful arabesques he spins around
it.

By contrast, Hooker dumps not only Green’s music but virtually all of Edward Heyman’s lyric, retaining only the title and the storyline – that of an abandoned lover waiting
patiently by the dockside for the Adored One’s vessel to appear on the horizon – incorporating elements of his own Detroit-era ‘Down At The Landing’. Ships arrive,
passengers disembark, everyone else’s loved one but Hooker’s shows up for joyful reunions, he hangs in there, alone and palely loitering. A young girl approaches him, attempts to entice
him away, but he opts to remain, steadfastly waiting for his baby. However, Hooker’s version has, unlike Heyman’s, a happy ending. Long after everybody else has left, he spots a distant
ship emerging from the fog, and she’s on board: his faith and dedication are rewarded after all. Uncharacteristically, he casts the song in the key of C rather than his preferred E, using
‘normal’ first-position chords of C, F and G7, as a sort-of-slow-blues. The Groundhogs patter along behind him, with Parker
sounding exposed and uncomfortable
playing organ rather than piano; Hooker’s tone is hushed and undemonstrative, apart from the vibrato and growl with which he emphasizes the first person singular.

Artistically, the sessions were a moderate success; as a career move, the project turned out to be a complete bust-out. Calvin Carter did indeed record a Groundhogs single, comprising
‘Shake It’ (a revibe of ‘Shake It On Down’ most frequently associated with ‘Bukka’ White, but which had also been a staple of Tony Hollins’s repertoire)
and ‘Rockin”, but neither its US release on Vee Jay nor the European issue on Interphon generated any noticeable impact, and the leaders of the British Invasion remained unchallenged.
Hooker’s album fared little better, not even receiving the courtesy of a UK release until 1971, when it snuck out on a budget label. In the States, Verve-Folkways rapidly deleted
. . . And
Seven Nights
, and the tapes have been ignominiously bounced around from label to label ever since: sometimes under the near-fraudulent billing of
John Lee Hooker With John Mayall And The
Groundhogs
, sometimes – as on the 1969 Wand album
On The Waterfront
– with several tracks retitled and an actually-not-bad horn section overdubbed at some later date by a
person or persons unknown. In the summer of ’65, former Kinks and Who producer Shel Talmy acquired two tracks, ‘Mai Lee’ – Hooker is actually singing ‘
Mary
Lee
’ and, to Brit ears at least, pronouncing it
‘Ma’y Lee
’ – and ‘Don’t Be Messing With My Bread’, for British single release on his
short-lived Planet label. However, Planet’s star act, The Creation,
⁹⁷
failed to make a major chart breakthrough, the label went
pear-shaped, Talmy released no further Hooker/’Hogs material, and the whole adventure didn’t amount to a hill of beans in this particular crazy mixed-up world.

‘The British,’ Joe Gore once wrote in
Guitar Player
magazine, ‘discard their heroes as of ten as they brush their teeth – practically every week.’ That
observation was as true, if not even truer, back in 1965 as it was when Gore wrote it some thirty years later. Many of the bands who’d initially launched themselves on their strength of their
affinity for the blues were moving on to pastures new; some drew fresh inspiration from contemporary soul music rather than older blues, and others, in the spirit of furious modernism which became
the engine which powered the next wave of British rock, explored the frontier territories of experimental pop opened up by the Beatles. Dispirited, the Groundhogs would attempt to reincarnate
themselves as a soul band, and then temporarily dissolve. The Rolling Stones were covering Marvin Gaye and Otis Redding rather than Muddy Waters and Bo Diddley whilst Mick Jagger and Keith Richards
were cutting their songwriting teeth; Eric Burdon and the Animals borrowed from Nina Simone and Ray Charles as opposed to Chuck Berry and John Lee Hooker; the Kinks, never that comfortable as a
blues band in the first place, ploughed their own unique fur row as Ray Davies settled into his compositional stride. Sensing which way the wind was blowing, the Who – partway through the
sessions for their first album – scrapped much of the blues repertoire they’d already recorded and replaced it with more Pete Townshend originals and a James Brown cover. One of the
numbers the Who dumped was Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Smokestack Lightnin”, a rave-up version of which had been a highlight of their early stage act. However, the song had by that time
already appeared on albums by the Yardbirds, Manfred Mann and the Graham Bond Organisation (featuring Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker in the rhythm section), and was well on its way to becoming a
cliché. And for a new group to seem to be selling clichés was instant death.
And in the excitement of the British Invasion and the pop-art avant-garde, the
bluesmen themselves were beginning to seem like clichés. Even the likes of Pete Townshend became increasingly blasé about their former heroes. ‘The irony was,’ he once
told the present author,
⁹⁸
‘that they all seemed so pathetic, John Lee Hooker in his checkered jacket, doing his cabaret . . . somehow, they
weren’t able to attend to the quantum jump that we’d made.’

The caravan of screamagers and cutting-edge artists thus moved on, but a solid hardcore of blues fans nevertheless remained loyal to the true faith. In a fierce reaction to changing trends, Eric
Clapton, the high card in the Yardbirds’ musical hand, quit the group as a protest against their switch from R&B to Progressive Pop. They replaced him with Telecaster terrorist Jeff Beck,
a guitarist much better suited to their new approach, but Clapton’s decision to join John Mayall in the summer of ’65 effectively sited Mayall’s BluesBreakers at the centre of
what remained of the blues scene. As far as Hooker was concerned, his enviable Britpop status had evaporated as suddenly as it had originally appeared. Mere months earlier, he’d been riding a
small but respectable hit, appearing on the hippest pop TV shows, and receiving respectful notices from the music press. Now he had a brand-new made-in-England album in the can, and couldn’t
even get it released in the UK. There would always be work for Hooker in Britain and the rest of Europe – just as there would always be work for him back home in folk clubs, colleges and
festivals – but there would be little further glory and even less money.

‘I went back and come back,’ recalls Hooker. ‘I was [in the UK] about a year and a half.’ Well, yes and no. During the ‘year and a half’ to which Hooker
alludes – the period between the summer of 1964 and the late autumn of 1965 – he was not resident in the UK, but made four transatlantic trips, each lasting approximately a month. For
his summer ’65 tour, there were a few changes made. For one thing, the immediately pre-Clapton edition of John Mayall’s BluesBreakers stepped in as back-up combo in
place of the temporarily disbanded Groundhogs. And since Don Arden was now out of the picture, this next tour was booked by another agency, that of the brothers Rik and John Gunnel, who managed
Mayall’s band and the more soulful and cosmopolitan Georgie Fame & the Blue Flames. (Their roster also included clubland favourite Zoot Money’s Big Roll Band, and Geno Washington
& the Ram Jam Band, led by an expat American ex-GI whose brassy, all-action soul revue, jampacked with Stax, Motown and Atlantic cover versions, made him a figurehead for those unreconstructed
mods who hadn’t switched their loyalties to nouveau pop.) The Gunnels’ mini-empire also included the Flamingo and a string of lesser venues like the Bag O’Nails in the West End of
London, and a chain of Ricky-Tick Clubs throughout the south-east.

‘Of course they were of the same type as Don Arden,’ Roy Fisher opines, but Hooker remembers them rather more fondly than that. ‘They was pretty good by me,’ he says.
‘They knowed what I had been through with Don Arden, and they were
straight
with me. They said, “We know what Don Arden did to you. We not gonna do this to you, we gonna be
straight up front with you.” And they were.’

The tour itself was certainly no bed of roses. Arriving at London’s Heathrow Airport on Monday, 10 May, according to a report by Tony Lennane in
Blues Unlimited
’s July/August
issue, Hooker was whisked straight off to Newport. Not his familiar stamping ground of Newport, Rhode Island, but Newport in south Wales: as the car flies, 159 miles due west of Heathrow, in the
county of Monmouthshire. With a mere four hours’ sleep under his belt, he then found himself onstage at Newport’s Majestic Cinema,
sans
rehearsal, banging out the likes of
‘Boom Boom’, ‘Dimples’, ‘Maudie’, ‘Shake It Baby’ and ‘I’m Leaving’ to the extemporised accompaniment of Cops ’N’
Robbers, a local combo described by Lennane as ‘Newport’s own brand of codswallop’.

‘Despite the local “hood” section jackassing their way through the evening on each others’ shoulders,’ Lennane wrote, ‘charging through
the crow, gyrating in front of [Hooker], using as much abusive language as their tiny minds allowed and generally disrupting – this was a night I shan’t forget.’ Lennane and
Hooker hung out after the show, chatting in the bar. ‘As we talked some of his records spun and he was anxious all present listened to his
Big Soul
LP, letting us know that the
Vandellas backed him. He was full of stories of his later recordings, ignoring the classics on Modern, Sensation and even earlier Vee Jay; ah well.’ Presumably Hooker didn’t repeat to
Lennane what he’d said about the
Big Soul
sessions, a few months earlier, to another
Blues Unlimited
contributor, Simon Napier: ‘I don’t particularly like ’em,
but . . . say! the bread’s good.’
BU
’s previous issue had, incidentally, carried a scathing report of a gig which had actually taken place a few days later at the
Ricky-Tick club in Guildford, Surrey. The splenetic John J. Broven excelled himself: