Boogie Man (3 page)

The reality of Cupp’s situation, though, is simply that he enjoys her company. When they check into hotels, her room adjoins his: she keeps track of his possessions and talks to room
service for him. Plus her presence – neat figure, ready smile, cascading brown hair – fuels his legend.

Once ensconced, Hooker removes his hat and shades, and wriggles into the most comfortable position. His hair, apart from a bald spot on his crown and the widow’s peak which runs in his
family, is still thick and healthy: it is dyed a rich reddish black and left nappy and uncombed beneath the trademark Homburg. Silver stubble gleams against his mahogany cheeks and jaw. His left
eyelid droops slightly, leaving one eye wide and guileless, the other hooded and watchful. Without the dentures which he wears for video shoots and major photo sessions, his remaining upper and
lower teeth are an almost exact mirror-image, requiring him to sling his jaw to one side in order to chew his food. As the Buick noses out to the freeway, the one-time Detroit auto-factory worker
disapprovingly notes the number of Japanese cars on the road. The Chevrolet, now that was a
fine
car. Made of US steel,
real
steel. You get into an accident in one of them, you can
get out and walk a-
way
. Mm-
hm
. Not like now. You get in an accident in one of them Japanese cars, you get
hurt
.

For most of the journey to the first show, Hooker is asleep. He can sleep just about anywhere, just doze right off like an old tomcat in front of a warm fire. The night’s concert is to be
held at a 7,000-seater auditorium set in the grounds of a lush, wooded park; he is to share the bill with fellow Rosebud stars Los Lobos and Robert Cray. When on tour, Hooker rarely headlines a
show if he can avoid it. He prefers the middle spot on the bill: this facilitates the quick getaways he
favours whenever there’s a long drive between his show and his bed.
As Hooker’s Buick pulls in, Los Lobos are in the home stretch of their set. By the time Hooker has found the most comfortable sofa in his dressing room, popped a can of lite beer and issued
instructions for the precise constitution of his plateful of cold cuts from the buffet, Los Lobos’ vocalists David Hidalgo and Cesar Rosas are in the dressing room to pay their respects.
‘Hello, John,’ they say, their voices soft and their eyes shining. Hooker extends a regal flipper. ‘Huh-huh-how you doin’, young man,’ he replies.

The Coast To Coast Blues Band have already arrived in the rather less luxurious circumstances of a collective van, and have already established themselves next door in a welter of guitar and
saxophone cases. There is a minor crisis within their ranks: one of the band’s mainstays, organist and master of ceremonies Deacon Jones, has opted to stay home in San Francisco to play a
series of shows with his own band for rather more money than a Coast To Coast sideman’s wage. His replacement is pianist Lizz Fischer, a sinewy pixie with a Rapunzelesque blonde braid,
formidable jazz chops and one of Coast To Coast’s only two clean driving licences. Her other qualification is that she looks absolutely stunning in stiletto heels and a little black dress;
Hooker, murmurs one of the male Coast To Coasters, would be happy to have an entire band of attractive female musicians.

As the band gather sidestage, quiet comments are passed concerning the forest of guitars awaiting the attentions of The Robert Cray Band. Hooker carries two (one in standard tuning, one in the
open ‘Spanish’ tuning in which he plays his show’s boogie finale) and the rest of the band’s guitarists – stocky, snubnosed Mike Osborn on lead; gaunt, hirsute Rich
Kirch on rhythm; spiky,
nuevo-wavo
Jim Guyett on bass – make do with one each. They have, after all, flown in from California, travelling light: the drums, amplifiers and piano are
rented. They hit the stage with a slow blues: ‘Cold Cold Feeling’, originated by T-Bone Walker, who more or less invented modern blues guitar and who, back
in the
Detroit of the late ’40s, gave Hooker his first electric instrument. It’s sparked by a rich, resonant vocal by Cupp – whose voice sounds like it should emanate from someone at
least three times her size – and Osborn’s plangent, sinuous lead guitar. Then the band settle into a rocking boogaloo as Cupp, head held high, strides into the wings and Guyett, depping
as MC for the absent Jones, takes the microphone to announce John Lee Hooker.

The man from Mississippi ambles into the spotlight, adjusting his shades and waving to the audience, as the man from Rosebud moves a folding wooden chair into position and adjusts a microphone
stand. The band’s only black member, the large, melancholy-looking saxophonist Kenny Baker, whose
nom de blues
is ‘Dr Funkenstein’, hands Hooker his guitar, painstakingly
tuned by Osborn a few minutes earlier, and the maestro regally seats himself before thumbing off a fusillade of jangling notes that hang in the air like an unruly swarm of splintered neon-blue
razor-blades.

Essentially, it’s the same set he always plays, last overhauled to include songs from
The Healer
. Hooker doesn’t so much dislike rehearsals as disdainfully refuse to recognise
even the simple fact of their existence. In 1979, Mike Osborn played his first show with Hooker entirely unrehearsed, and the only subsequent ones have been called by Osborn himself: to rehearse
the band in Hooker’s absence. The maestro simply can’t be bothered: anyone who lacks the instincts to play his music spontaneously shouldn’t be playing it at all. Once upon a time
– as thrillingly documented on any number of his records – John Lee Hooker used to rock any house with just his relentless boogie guitar, his inexorably stomping feet and his tireless,
incantatory singing. Dance ’til you drop? Those records could make you feel tired just
listening
to them. However, that was then. John Lee can’t put out like that any more: the
solo boogie is a young man’s art, an energy-draining ritual which requires the painstaking cultivation and maintenance of Olympic stamina and endurance. Energy is the most
precious commodity Hooker possesses: he tires very easily, and his every move is finely calibrated for maximum economy. So now The Coast To Coast Blues Band – two guitars, bass,
drums, keyboard and tenor sax – supply the muscle and the momentum. They unfurl the carpet beneath his chair, they build the pedestal for his monument. They are a literal workhorse of a band:
big and powerful and tireless, but also disciplined and reliable and self-effacing. They are sensitive to their boss’s every nuance; in collective person-years they have invested almost half
a century in interpreting Hooker’s wants and delivering what he needs when he needs it without so much as a second’s hesitation.

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.