JOHN LEE HOOKER
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Recording years |
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1948–2001 |
Electric blues |
Hobo Blues (1959) |
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Compilation
released: August, 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Dimples;
2) Hobo Blues; 3) I’m So Excited; 4) I Love You Honey; 5) Boogie Chillun; 6)
Little Wheel; 7) I’m In The Mood; 8) Maudie; 9) Crawlin’ King Snake; 10)
Everynight; 11) Time Is Marching; 12) Baby Lee. |
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REVIEW
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Consequently,
while no blues lover’s collection will ever be representative without a
serious compilation from Hooker’s early days on Modern (The Legendary Modern Recordings 1948–1954 will probably suffice),
we shall begin our journey through his long (and fairly uneven) recording
career with the opening of the LP era; for Hooker, this happened in August
1959, with his current Chicago label of Vee-Jay Records putting out a
selection of A- and B-sides stretching all the way back to 1955 as I’m John Lee Hooker, his very first
LP — as the title does indeed suggest. Hooker’s
association with Vee-Jay was far from accidental. In the second half of the
1950s, when it came to blues, Vee-Jay sort of established themselves in
Chicago as the «rebelliously unsophisticated», «proto-punk-blues» alternative
to the more «cultured» environment of the Chess label — this was hardly
intentional, but birds of a feather do tend to flock together, and Hooker
eventually ended up on the label in 1955 through his connection with Jimmy
Reed, who had already been cutting singles for Vee-Jay since 1953. In fact,
Jimmy himself accompanies Hooker on harmonica on his earliest singles for the
label (one of those B-sides, ‘Time Is Marching’, is included on the LP), and
it is no coincidence, either, that Jimmy’s own debut LP on the label,
released one year earlier than Hooker’s, bears the title of I’m Jimmy Reed. In stark
contrast to much, if not most, of his Modern era output, when it was usually
just Hooker and his guitar, in Chicago, following Jimmy’s example, the artist
quickly got provided with his own house band — which usually included Reed’s
friend and companion Eddie Taylor on second guitar, as well as a rotating set
of drum and bass players and, occasionally, a bit of piano backup. He did not
abandon his classic solo style completely, but for the most part, he confined
it to re-recordings of his best known oldies, which he began producing around
1958–59: this album, in particular, includes new versions of ‘Boogie
Chillen’, ‘Hobo Blues’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, and ‘I’m In The Mood’ — all of
these had been originally issued on Modern in 1948–1951, yet instead of
properly «modernizing» them with a backing band, Hooker remade them in his
traditional style. I am not exactly sure why; perhaps the people at Vee-Jay
asked for this themselves, afraid that other labels might make more money on
their former star’s back catalog than Vee-Jay would make with his new stuff. Once again,
purists will probably insist that these re-recordings are nowhere near as
«authentic» as the originals, but from an unbiased position this is
debatable. Obviously, the sound quality for a 1958 recording would be objectively
superior to a 1948 one. Also, over those ten years Hooker’s voice — arguably
the number one source for his legend, with his guitar playing skills strictly
stuck at number two — had gotten at least an octave deeper and even more
intimidating than it was in the late Fourties, which works wonders for his
inherently dark blues material. On the other hand, there is certainly a
chillin’ crudeness about the early recordings that makes them feel more
earthy and Neanderthal than the slightly more melodic, more overtone-relying
sound of the Vee-Jay era. All I can say is that it’s fun comparing the two,
and no fun debating which ones are more «authentic» and which ones more
«commercial». One other thing that I have noticed is that the new versions
are typically just a tad faster — this might be just a technical effect of
the mastering process, but could just as well be a side effect of John Lee
Hooker going more «rock’n’roll» as a result of his constant playing with a
band. In any case,
while the re-recordings all seem quite decent to me and fully deserving of
being part of the Hook’s legend, they still reflect a chunk of his older,
pre-Chicago life. His new life truly
begins with the lead-in track on this album, simply called ‘Dimples’. Who
didn’t know ‘Dimples’ in the early Sixties? Everybody knew ‘Dimples’. The
Animals did a great version of ‘Dimples’ that, in my opinion, was in many
ways superior to the original — but inevitably lost some of its rowdy caveman
spirit. "You got dimples in your
jaw – you my babe, I got my eyes on you". With this song, Hooker
showed that he was not above crossing over to the pop market — without sacrificing
an ounce of his bluesy authenticity. For all of Jimmy Reed’s appeal to the
unsophisticated, pop-loving crowds, this
is faster, catchier, and farther removed from the stereotypical 12-bar blues
formula than pretty much anything Reed did at the time. If not for Hooker’s
scary, growling, stalker-ish voice, this could have been real big with the
kids — as it is, the recording was probably creeping out most of the
conventionally-minded teenagers, not to mention the parents, back in 1956.
(Come to think about it, with current attitudes it would have probably been
creeping out most of the young people in 2022 just as well). Transitioning
to the ‘Dimples’ style wholesale would be too much even for Hooker at the
time, though; most of the other recordings that Vee-Jay selected from his 12
or so singles recorded between 1956 and 1959 are more conventional and Jimmy
Reed-ish, though on the whole, Hooker favored faster tempos than Jimmy. A
typical example is ‘I Love You Honey’, which was a minor R&B chart success
for Hooker in 1958: strong, prominent boogie bass — free-flowing, old-school
piano accompaniment from Joe Hunter — and a nagging, insistent vocal that
sounds a bit like Reed (but on fewer drugs and with more teeth in his mouth,
metaphorically speaking). It’s a pleasant track, but it has neither the
voodoo magic of Hooker’s solo recordings, nor the dark pop enchantment of
‘Dimples’. Much improved
is something like ‘Maudie’, recorded about a year later, which departs from
the same territory as ‘I Love You Honey’, but features a much stronger Hooker
presence — here, Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen’-derived rhythm guitar, sounding
like a knife rhythmically sharpened on stone steps, is far more prominent,
and his voice is far deeper and more threatening (that "Maudie, why did you hurt me, I love you
baby, you been gone so long" bit should have sent any real life
Maudie running to the nearest police department). Melodically, there is
absolutely nothing here in 1959 that hadn’t already been done two hundred
times earlier, but it does a good job of polishing the Hooker formula to a
shinier state than ever before — that guitar-voice combo, with just a tiny
bit of echo and a solid metronomic rhythm section putting some meat on the
bones, could not be beaten even by such Chess competition as Muddy Waters. Most of the
other songs (including bonus tracks from the same era that can be found on
some CD editions) predictably recycle the same formula; the rhythmic
peculiarities and poppy geometry of ‘Dimples’ are more of a lucky exception
in this case than a standard example of Hooker’s creativity. But if we
refrain from worrying about the monotonousness and prefer to instead
concentrate on the impact of the general sound, Hooker’s uniqueness quickly
comes through even after he has been placed in the same general musical
context of the 1950s’ Chicago blues band sound. What I mean is,
where Muddy entices us with his swagger and cockiness, while Howlin’ Wolf
comes across as a theatrically malevolent demonic presence from the red-hot depths
of Hell itself, John Lee Hooker plays the role of that grim, moody, silent,
mysterious loner in the corner, mumbling out something frightening, if barely
comprehensible. His is less of an "I’m gonna come out and get you!"
or an "I’m gonna rule the world with my evil powers!" vibe than a
"Don’t mess with me, leave me alone to brood" vibe. Stuff like
‘Dimples’, in a way, is the spiritual predecessor to Ian Anderson’s
"sitting on a park bench, eyeing little girls with bad intent"
theme — if there is one old bluesman I could easily identify with Tull’s
Aqualung, it would be John Lee Hooker. Sure enough, it might be a much creepier vibe than Muddy’s or
Wolf’s, but if the blues ain’t about being creepy, then what the hell is it
about in the first place? If you want to keep your mind all clean and
sanitized, just stay away from these dudes altogether. |
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Album
released: November 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Black Snake; 2) How Long Blues;
3) Wobblin’ Baby; 4) She’s Long, She’s Tall, She Weeps Like A Willow Tree; 5)
Pea Vine Special; 6) Tupelo Blues; 7) I’m
Prison Bound; 8) I Rowed A Little Boat; 9) Water Boy; 10) Church Bell Tone; 11) Bundle Up And Go; 12) Good
Mornin’, Lil’ School Girl; 13) Behind The Plow. |
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It is no secret that John Lee
Hooker is first and foremost associated with the electric rather than
acoustic guitar — while he may have, on occasion, used the acoustic in the
studio over the first decade of his recording career, most of those classic
old hits we know, as well as the innumerable variations on said classic hits,
were played on good old Gibsons and Les Pauls and the like. He himself was
always saying that he preferred the electric sound — that all that
electricity running through his fingers really made him feel empowered, or
something of that sort. Throw in his «minimalistic» way of playing, not even
remotely approaching the acoustic virtuosity of a Lonnie Johnson or a Big
Bill Broonzy, and it won’t be difficult to understand why his acoustic
recordings tend to be overlooked in favor of that awesome headbangin’ riffing
on the ‘Boogie Chillun’ groove — it’s, I dunno, as natural as wanting to hear
Eric Clapton play the piano or something like that. You can take a peek at
that sort of entertainment out of sheer curiosity, but why waste time on
stuff that does not come naturally to an artist? |
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Curiously,
though, when Hooker signed up with the Riverside record label, the first
thing they demanded from him was an acoustic-only set of recordings. The
record label may be understood; Riverside, originally set up as a jazz label,
was at the time riding the nostalgia kick and seeking out «authentic»
Delta-style performers to provide them with enough ol’-timey performances to
satisfy the growing demand for the folk-blues roots of American music.
Meanwhile, Hooker, who had already had plenty of experience recording for
multiple labels at the same time — usually under different pseudonyms — was probably interested in making extra
cash in addition to his Vee-Jay career, and given that both his Vee-Jay album
and his Riverside album from 1959 are in his own name, his contract with
Vee-Jay must not have been exclusive, so at least he had nothing to fear when
accepting Riverside’s offer. But why did he accept it in the first place,
when acoustic Delta blues was never really his «thang»? And, more
importantly, is there any reason for us
to even bother?.. My own answer
to the second question is a definitive «yes»; I am not the biggest John Lee
Hooker fan in the world, yet even I feel that overlooking his acoustic output
would be as much of a mistake as, say, only worshipping Neil Young for his
crunchy electric classics while totally ignoring his softer, country-folksy
side. It’s not as if John Lee Hooker with an acoustic guitar were a
completely different person — on the contrary, he tends to play the acoustic
much in the same way as he plays electric, but since nobody really plays the
electric guitar quite the same way that Hooker plays it, this automatically
means that nobody really plays the acoustic one quite like he does, either.
The album title is spot on: this is, indeed, The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker, and of nobody else. Perhaps
Riverside did want an «authentic» experience from this guy, but we can safely
say that, regardless of whatever actually counts as «authentic» for a style
that used to be practiced by hundreds of practitioners with their individual
twists and quirks, nobody ever played Delta blues in the 1920s or 1930s in precisely
the same way John Lee Hooker played it in 1959. There is a
solid selection of covers of old songs by other artists on this record, from
Leroy Carr to Charlie Patton and the original Sonny Boy Williamson, but the
one tune that will probably ring some bells for most people is Hooker’s own
‘Tupelo Blues’, his lyrical and musical reminiscence of the great Tupelo
Flood that has since been covered by countless artists and even reimagined by
some of them (e.g. as Nick Cave’s ‘Tupelo’). It is not the most typical
representative from this record, because it is not so much an actual song as
a spoken-word performance with a musical backup — Hooker keeps twirling and
vibrating his way through a looped blues riff that sounds more like a
potential introduction to a song than a self-sustaining melody. Amplify these
sounds properly and you end up with something that a Robin Trower might play
before launching into ‘Bridge Of Sighs’, or, actually, that Jimi might have
played as a warm-up for ‘Voodoo Chile’ during the Electric Ladyland sessions. But don’t amplify those sounds and what you get is a distant,
ever-so-mildly creepy, ominous echo of terrible devastation some time in the
past, narrated by an old «quasi-survivor» as both a scary campfire tale for
the kids and a subtle warning of possibly comparable troubles yet to come.
This is not a John Lee Hooker invention — this sort of semi-chanted,
semi-spoken rambling blues was practiced by quite a few Southern performers,
e.g. Blind Willie McTell and others — but Hooker is among the first, if not the first such performer, to give the
thing a properly cinematic feel, very intentionally going for an artistic
effect where pre-war bluesmen would usually just tell it as it was. He might
not be the greatest Sophocles reader in the world, but he wants us to believe that he is Blind
Father Tiresias all the same, and I have no problem believing him when he
keeps taunting me with his questions of "wasn’t that a mighty time, a mighty time that evening?"
because it sure as hell was. Most of the
performances here are somewhat tighter structured, yet somehow even they
rarely feel like «songs». Hooker gives himself as much freedom as possible,
both with his vocals and his guitar playing — which very rarely has any sort
of smooth flow to it, it’s more like a crudely constructed, ugly-fitted
agglomeration of choppy licks, constantly changing tempo and time signature;
again, this used to be a trademark of some pre-war performers as well, most
notably Blind Lemon Jefferson (not coincidentally, Hooker begins the album
with a BLJ cover), but it never sounded quite as sinister as on this album.
Blind Lemon’s ‘Black
Snake Moan’ was a semi-realistic morning grumble about not being able to
get any — a sentiment quite close to the heart of many a listener; in
Hooker’s interpretation, ‘Black Snake’ basically
becomes a song about the Devil himself stealing the protagonist’s woman from
him, and you could probably guess it even without understanding a word from
cryptic lines like "he’s a mean
black snake sucking my rider’s tongue", just through the threatening
plucking of the bottom string with the man’s thumb and through the way he
draws out and shakes up all of his resonant m’s and r’s at the end
of each vocal line. He even manages
to insert a bit of a threat and a warning into ‘How Long Blues’, a song that
is almost literally impossible to reimagine as anything but a whiny,
broken-hearted, sentimental plead — that’s the way it was originally
performed by Leroy Carr and pretty much every black or white bluesman
covering it ever since, but Hooker’s choppy «time-marches-on» playing and the
thoroughly unsentimental insistence in his wording of the "how long, oh baby how long?"
chorus gives it a completely different interpretation. Not a very appropriate
one for the song, perhaps, and I think this was actually one of the poorer
choices, but it is still interesting to watch the man take something so
remote from his usual style and give it the appropriate John Lee Hooker
treatment. Out of the
«originals», the one obvious standout other than ‘Tupelo Blues’ is ‘Church
Bell Tone’ which, under the right conditions, can sound scarier than any
Black Sabbath song out there — well, at least those opening church
bell-imitating string pulls certainly sound scarier than the actual church
bell that opens ‘Black Sabbath’ (the song); for what it’s worth, some of
those wobbly trills you hear throughout this track would later become a standard part of Tony Iommi’s guitar lick
arsenal. Just give a little push to your imagination, and those trills will
naturally transform into rolls of thunder and lightning, accompanying the
protagonist as he follows his loving baby’s hearse with its "two great
white horses" to the burial ground. This is some pretty sick country blues if I know anything
about anything... Certainly not all the tunes on this record are about
Death or the Devil — there are even occasional humorous turnarounds like
‘Bundle Up And Go’, an indecent variation on the ‘Step It Up And Go’ oldie —
but since Hooker’s playing style and voice themselves do not vary all that
much, most of the songs still end up meshing together, which is OK by me:
fourty minutes of such an atmosphere are quite tolerable, enjoyable and
evocative. Contrary to popular belief, country blues of the Delta variety in
pre-war times was never really all that «dark», not even when performed by
the likes of Blind Willie Johnson or Charlie Patton; to make it
conventionally «dark», one needed a modernist artistic touch, and John Lee
Hooker was among the first guys to understand this and make it work — which
is precisely why it was John Lee Hooker, and not Blind Willie or Charlie
Patton, who would later serve as such a major inspiration for all the
darkness-lovin’ modernist artistic white boys from Jim Morrison to Nick Cave.
Which sort of makes The Country Blues
Of John Lee Hooker one of those «seminal» albums, if my understanding of
the term is really correct. |
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Album
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Tracks: 1) No Shoes; 2) I Wanna Walk; 3)
Canal Street Blues; 4) Run On; 5) I’m A Stranger; 6) Whiskey And Wimmen; 7)
Solid Sender; 8) Sunny Land; 9) Goin’ To California; 10) I Can’t Believe; 11)
I’ll Know Tonight; 12) Dusty Road; 13*) Nightmare; 14*) Drive Me Away; 15*)
Love Me All The Time; 16*) Bundle Up And Go. |
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REVIEW In contrast to Hooker’s first LP
for Vee-Jay, Travelin’ was mostly
recorded over a single session in early March 1960, with Hooker accompanied
by Jimmy Turner on drums, Sylvester Hickman on bass, and Lefty Bates on
second guitar (Lefty had only recently become a session man for Vee-Jay, also
playing with Jimmy Reed on ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’, among other
things). As you can probably tell, this does not bode too well for the
record’s commercial potential — when John Lee Hooker gets in the mood, the
mood tends to stay very much the same throughout his entire recording
session, not to mention that he probably «composes» (or, more accurately,
«re-creates») most of his new material on the spot. Sure enough, the album
did not chart and yielded only one minor R&B hit single (‘No Shoes’) —
but it is also clear that John Lee Hooker was
very much in the mood while recording it, and it might be rewarding to try
and attune oneself to the man’s frequency to get the most of it. |
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Importantly,
there is a conceptual side to the record: it is not called Travelin’ for nothing — just look at
all those song titles with the words ‘walk’, ‘go’, ‘run’, and ‘road’ in them,
as well as references to all sorts of places from New Orleans to the state of
California. Hooker is the kind of artist who is equally comfortable with a
«sitting» / «tale-telling» mood, for which he usually (but not always)
reserves his acoustic guitar, and a «walking» / «strutting» / «racing» mood,
which is usually (but not always) represented by his electric playing — as it
is on this record. Travelin’ finds
him in a particularly dynamic state, and a good way to transcend its musical
conservatism (most of these melodies, honestly, you have already heard in one
way or another at least a few times each) is to imagine it as a coherent,
«blues-operatic» travelog, telling you the story of a man who is chased from
town to town by poverty, instability, and infidelity (his own or his
partner’s, doesn’t really matter), but who also has the honesty to lay a
large part of the responsibility on his own inner demons. In other words,
this is the same old story of John Lee Hooker’s lyrical hero’s complicated
relationship with the Devil, this time actually presented almost in the shape of an actual story, rather than
randomly scraped together bits and pieces. Once you settle
into that perspective, it’s almost surprising that ‘No Shoes’ could have made
it as a self-standing entry in the R&B charts — its actual musical
content is fully exhausted within the opening eight seconds as you get
acquainted with its two-chord grumbling blues riff. Granted, not a lot of
electric guitarists at the time could reach such a clear and expressive
emotional effect with such utmostly minimal means, but still, the song works
better as a thematic setting: "No
food on my table, no shoes to go on my feet / My children cry for mercy,
Lord, they ain’t got no place to call their own" — which is, I guess,
all the pretext one needs to just dump the children anyway and trudge off
into the great American unknown. There is not an ounce of self-pity in the
tune: all the emotions are purely animalistic. The riff growls and gnashes
its teeth at you, and the vocals are that of a hunted animal prepared to
defend itself, or at least to ensure itself some grounds for survival by
getting the hell out of here, once and for all. For that
matter, the «great American unknown» is shown through the animal’s teeth just
as well. In the hands of the average New Orleanian performer, ‘Canal Street
Blues’ would probably be a celebration, guaranteed to put a smile on your
face or at least die trying. For John Lee Hooker, ‘Canal Street Blues’ is
just another slow, bleeding trudge that leaves the protagonist impressed in
only one respect: "They tell me
Canal Street is the longest street in town / You ride all day long, you’re
still on Canal Street". There’s nothing New Orleanian about the song
— it’s the look of a total outsider, furthermore, one who seems to measure
everything in strict accordance with the quantity and quality of whiskey and
women found therein. Judging by the relaxed, not-too-excited pace of the
song, the protagonist would probably rate New Orleans about a 3 out of 10 on
that particular scale. Slowly, piece
by piece, Hooker is drawing up here the most stereotypical, but quite
true-to-life, portrait of the ramblin’ man turned penniless urban slicker —
one minute he is sucking up to the local ladies to put him up for the night
(‘I’m A Stranger’), the other minute he is putting down his country bumpkin
of a girlfriend for refusing to let go of her cornbread ways in the big city
(‘Sunny Land’). Eventually, we find him ‘Goin’ To California’ while also
sending his baby back home because there’s no way he’s taking somebody who
"looks good", but "won’t do right" back with him to
the promised land... however, he still "ain’t goin’ down the big road by myself", as he declares at
the end of the album (‘Dusty Road’), and "if you don’t wanna go, baby, I’m a-gonna take somebody else"
because why the hell not? Honestly, as I
gaze intensely at these lyrics and try to follow these ragged rhythms, I keep
getting the feeling that the entire album was conceived, «written»
(figuratively speaking), and recorded in precisely those thirty minutes it
takes to play it. I would indeed be glad if that were so, because any artist
who can come up with an experience like this in no time flat is still a
genius artist in my book. Yes, all the riffs (two or three of them) are
recycled from past records — but the rhythm section very naturally adapts to
them (particularly Hickman on bass, who understands very well what the «John
Lee Hooker Growling Tone» is and always supplements it with his own). Yes,
all the lyrics feel like they just floated through Hooker’s mind without any
prior considerations — this is why the sequencing of some of the lines and
verses makes no sense — but hey, what a mind, right? And somehow they still manage to coalesce in this musical
portrayal of a human being, driven by the simple biological propensity to
live — I mean, very few artists make you remember that deep down inside,
we’re all just animals as efficiently as John Lee Hooker does. Nor is there
any glorification of that fact: it’s simply told the way it is, as food for
your own further thought. You get born, you grow up, you eat, you have sex,
you gamble, you lose everything, you travel from town to town, you play your
guitar, you live on just because Mother Nature told you to. From the modern
point of view, all that’s missing is probably dying in a police choke hold —
but John Lee Hooker was not a modern man, and he had nothing against spending
about eighty years of his life in this mold. If you want a
memorable John Lee Hooker track from the Vee-Jay years, go for ‘Dimples’ or
‘Boom Boom’. But if you’re in the mood for a minimalistic, repetitive,
«primitive» travelog that converts the most basic elements of life into art
without a single flash of annoying pretense (that would be Bad Company, I’d
say), Travelin’ is a good
potential choice — far from the only one in Hooker’s extensive discography,
but with the added benefit of catching the man in a small company of fine and
understanding musical friends. His future bands would not always be on the
exact same wave. |
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Album
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Tracks: 1) I Need Some Money; 2) Come On
And See About Me; 3) I’m Wanderin’; 4) Democrat Man; 5) I Want To Talk About
You; 6) Gonna Use My Rod; 7) Wednesday Evenin’ Blues; 8) No More Doggin’; 9)
One Of These Days; 10) I Believe I’ll Go Back Home; 11) You’re Leavin’ Me,
Baby; 12) That’s My Story. |
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There is no sense in pretending, I
think, not to understand the real
reason why Hooker had two record contracts going on at the same time in the
early 1960s — and if you don’t want to hear it from my lips, well, here it is quite succintly stated in the opening
track of the album, which is in itself a country blues arrangement of Berry
Gordy’s, Janie Bradford’s, and Barrett Strong’s classic ‘Money (That’s What
I Want)’. Given that the latter had only just been released (August 1959)
when John Lee Hooker went into the studio to record That’s My Story (February 9, 1960), one has to note the man’s
surprisingly keen interest in the contemporary pop scene — ‘Money’ did not
even have the time to become a smash hit for Motown before it was whisked
away and reinterpreted by Hooker... without giving either Gordy or Bradford
any credit, but I think he might have assumed that they just appropriated it from somebody else, anyway, just as
it’s always worked in the happy old pre-copyright days. Regardless, the song
would make a hell of a lot more cash for Berry Gordy and Motown than it would
for John Lee Hooker — even if JLH is definitely more believable than Barrett
Strong when he sings about how your
lov’n’ gimme such a thrill, but your lov’n’ don’ pay my bill. |
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And this very
fact is admirably ironic: I do not see much reason other than financial for
Hooker to have been pumping out records for two labels at the same time with
such impressive speed, yet it is also clear that, due to his uncompromising
(the cynically minded would probably say «lazy») style, he could hardly have
hoped to make a lot of money on
either of those, and definitely not with his Riverside contract — at least
the Vee-Jay sessions occasionally produced a hit single or two, whereas these
acoustic recordings could only be of interest to a small bunch of folk blues
enthusiasts. On the other hand, it is also true that the invested effort was
minimal. That’s My Story was cut
on a single day, with Hooker accompanied by two side players from Riverside’s
pool of jazz musicians (Sam Jones on bass and Louis Hayes on drums) — and,
just as it was with Travelin’, it
feels very much as if he were «composing» this album right on the go,
selecting rhythms and riffs from his trusty pocketbook and making up lyrics
with no prior thoughts at all. Again, singling
out individual high- or lowlights is barely possible: the only proper «song»
on the album is ‘I Need Some Money’, and even that one disintegrates into
grumbly rambling after the first couple of verses, with Hooker much more
interested in re-enacting a tense family squabble over finances than
producing a pop hit. After that, all it takes is establish a
mellow-but-ominous acoustic blues groove, lay back, and spew out some talkin’
blues (only occasionally polished into singin’ blues) on whatever topic
springs out at any given moment. It’s all very honest, life-like, minimalist,
devoid of surprises, and, true to the album’s title, having to do with John
Lee Hooker’s «life creed». Even when we
finally get to the title track, which comes last on the album, expecting,
perhaps, to hear some interesting revelations about what it was that made
John Lee Hooker into John Lee Hooker, all we get to know is that "I was only 14 years old when I hit the
road, I left Mississippi, I come to Memphis, Tennessee", after which
it was Cincinnati, and then Detroit, Michigan ("I been there ever since"). "I had a hard time, now I’m doin’ alright". Come to think of
it, what else would we be expecting to hear? That the night he was born, the
moon turned a fire red? That his father was a gambler down in Georgia and he
wound up on the wrong end of a gun? That he’s a-runnin’ down the road, tryin’
to loosen his load? Forget all that pretty poetry bullshit, it’s all
self-mythologizing narcissistic crap anyway. Just let ol’ John Lee Hooker
tell it to you the way it really
is. The day you end up with tears on your face by the end of the song instead
of falling asleep in the middle of it is the symbolic day your atman finally connects with the brahman. For me, that
day is quite a long ways away, because, honestly, That’s My Story tries my patience much more than The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker,
where songs like ‘Tupelo Blues’, with minimal effort, still managed to churn
up a primal feeling of religious terror. That’s
My Story does no such thing; all of its songs are fully and completely
centered on the album’s protagonist and the simple chores he has to go
through on a daily basis in order to survive — such as, for instance, chase
away a pesky guy rooting for his wife (‘Gonna Use My Rod’ — I originally
thought this one was about the ancient art of wife-beatin’, but turns out
that JLH thankfully inverts the
cliché and is planning to use his rod on the pervy seducer instead),
or, in an interesting and rare foray into political matters, openly endorse
the Democratic Party (‘Democrat Man’), complaining about how "Democrat put us on our feet" but
"these crazy women, they vote them
out"; I presume he is talking about the significant preponderance of
women’s votes for Eisenhower that was noted in the 1950s. "It won’t be long ’fore the Democrats be
back in again", JLH goes on to promise, and his prediction would
nicely come true by the end of the year (ironically, Kennedy would indeed be
cumulatively voted in by more men than women, despite his dashing looks and
all). But as nice as it is to learn about Hooker’s party preferences,
‘Democrat Man’ is basically just a bunch of kitchen table talk set to
familiar acoustic patterns of the thunder-on-the-mountain variety. Not
something your local barroom blues band is going to be featuring in its
casual setlist anytime soon. On the other
hand, ‘Democrat Man’ is at least a curious and unpredictable diversion from
Hooker’s usual stuff: most of the other songs on here either continue to
detail his stalking efforts (‘I Want To Talk About You’), or to lament about
his broken family life (‘You’re Leavin’ Me Baby’), or to even try and
introduce that aspect of self-pitying which was so conspicuously missing from
Travelin’: on ‘I’m Wanderin’, the
longest track on the album, Hooker reinvents himself as a whiny dog, trudging
after his former lady and yelping for one last chance. It doesn’t work out
too good — John Lee Hooker ain’t a guy accustomed to saying "I’m
sorry" — but it’s kinda fun to see him try for a couple of minutes,
before the slow and static groove really begins to try my patience. Overall, if you
are looking for a cohesive and atmospheric acoustic John Lee Hooker
experience, That’s My Story is
hardly the perfect candidate; The
Country Blues (as well as its later follow-up from the same sessions, Burning Hell) are a better way to get
acquainted with the fire-and-brimstone side of the man. But as an
approximation of a relatively sincere and truthful «musical diary», That’s My Story seems adequate enough
— the only problem is that sincere and truthful diaries rarely have space for
genuine thrill and excitement. |
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Tracks: 1) Tupelo; 2) I’m Mad Again; 3) I’m Going Upstairs; 4) Want Ad
Blues; 5) Five Long Years; 6) I Like To See You Walk; 7) The Hobo; 8)
Hard-Headed Woman; 9) Wednesday Evening Blues; 10) Take Me As I Am; 11) My
First Wife Left Me; 12) You’re Looking Good Tonight. |
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REVIEW By 1961, Hooker’s contract with
Riverside must have run out (at least, his only other record on the label
would come out in 1965 and consist exclusively of archival takes), so Vee-Jay
took the opportunity to try and capture both sides of the man — the country
acoustic one and the urban electric one — at the same time, with the album
title (The Folk Lore Of J. L. H.) transparently
following the pattern of Riverside’s The
Country Blues Of J. L. H., even if far from all the songs on the album
could formally qualify as examples of «folk lore». Then again, Hooker himself
never made a big point of separating those two sides, and, in fact, there are
those times in the studio where it’s hard to tell if the man is playing a
meekly amplified acoustic guitar or a nearly unplugged electric one — or, for
that matter, if his brainwaves are specifically following a «countryside» or
a «big city» pattern. Not infrequently, they’re just conflating both scenes
in a single messy whole. |
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With just a
little help from Vee-Jay Records, of course, as they introduce each of the
album’s sides with an acoustic track culled from Hooker’s performance at the
Newport Folk Festival the previous year. ‘Tupelo’ was, of course, a standout
number on The Country Blues Of John
Lee Hooker, and since it was performed very close to the original, the
only big difference is the overall sound — the well-isolated studio gave you
the impression of a one-on-one dialog between Hooker and yourself, with the
apocalyptic story transmitted directly inside your ear; the live recording
gives a more «authentic» around-the-cave-fire feel, piling on an extra layer
of gloomy darkness if you feel the atmosphere demands it (the only thing
bringing you back to 20th century reality being a few faintly heard
automobile beep-beeps in the distance). ‘The Hobo’, however, is a seriously
slowed-down and «doomified» version of Vee-Jay’s own ‘Hobo Blues’, which used
to be somewhat more upbeat and cocky, but now has turned back into a pensive
rumination on the ugly hand of fate. (The reissued CD version adds ‘Maudie’
from the same performance, also transformed back into an acoustic number,
although Hooker manages to mostly salvage the stern, martial bassline from
the original electric recording). No sooner than ‘Tupelo’
is over and done with, though, there is a quick shift to a decidedly more
urban tone, as Hooker moves into the studio and, with the help of Quinn Wilson
on bass and Earl Phillips on drums, launches into another of his famous tunes
— at least, famous enough to later be also picked up by The Animals for their
repertoire: ‘I’m Mad Again’, a three-minute perfect expression of pure,
primal, steadily seeping rage. The pretext is that a certain unnamed friend
cheated on the protagonist with his very own wife — a traditional motive for
sure, but it could have been anything else, as long as it gives our guy the
opportunity to deliver the mantra: "I’m
mad with you, like Al Capone!" (Eric Burdon would later add Sonny Liston
and Cassius Clay to the list of comparisons, but John Lee Hooker was probably
not as much of a fan of the mighty black boxers as the young Geordie;
besides, the famous Liston-Clay fight only took place in 1964, just in time
to be referenced in the Animals version — as for the original song, well, I
do guess that if you are based in Chicago, references to Al Capone are the
most natural thing to jump off your lips at any time). The really interesting
thing about ‘I’m Mad Again’ is that it is based on more or less the same
simple riff that propels the Muddy Waters / Bo Diddley ‘I’m A Man’ / ‘Mannish
Boy’ series of swaggy call-outs; in fact, Hooker’s "I’m mad, I’m mad" is in itself a variation on Muddy and Bo’s
"I’m a man, I’m a man",
and is thus an excellent symbolic representation of what’s different between
those artists. Unlike them, Hooker has little need or desire for boastful
self-aggrandizing; he is far more passionate about exploring the inner
workings of man’s dangerous nature, which makes his output a much more
natural object of psychoanalytical study than Muddy’s or Bo’s. When Bo Diddley
threatens anybody in his songs, it is typically done in a light-hearted,
jokey matter; when John Lee Hooker growls "I might drown you, I might shoot you, I don’t know... gonna tie your
hands, gonna tie your feet, gag you so you can’t talk to nobody...",
that’s the Old Testament morality of retribution breathing down your back. To
the best of our knowledge, Hooker never properly practiced what he preached (unlike
Leadbelly, for instance); remember that it’s all theater, after all, but it’s
damn believable theater, and much
more disturbing than the relatively safe, «commercial» by comparison
vaudeville stagings of Hooker’s competitors from the Chess artist pool. The rest of the
album, unfortunately, does not quite live up to the dark brutality of ‘I’m Mad
Again’. Most of the other songs are rather predictable and modest expansions
on the well-known Hooker stylistics, all set to familiar minimalistic guitar
grooves and previously explored lyrical imagery. ‘I’m Goin’ Upstairs’ continues
the «I’m going away, nobody needs me here» vibe of ‘Hobo Blues’; ‘Want Ad Blues’
makes space for a little sexual self-advertising (again, very modestly stated next to the usual Chicago blues swagger); the
title of ‘I Like To See You Walk’ is pretty much self-explanatory; and the
cover of Eddie Boyd’s ‘Five Long Years’ is a little misplaced, because it’s a
soulful song about self-pitying ("if
you’ve ever been mistreated, you know just what I’m talkin’ about..."),
and that’s not exactly Hooker’s «native vibe», if you know just what I’m
talkin’ about. This one’s more for the likes of B. B. King or Eric Clapton. On the second
side of the LP, we get treated to a piece of relatively fast boogie: ‘Hard Headed
Woman’ has nothing to do with the Elvis classic under the same title, and its
lyrics are far more routine than the Bible-stuffed verses of Claude Demetrius
— though the basic sentiment (women just ain’t no good) remains more or less
the same. More interesting is the presence on the recording of both Jimmy Reed
(who blows a bit of barely noticeable harmonica in the background) and his trusty
sessionman, William "Lefty" Bates, who complements Hooker’s choppy
rhythm playing with stylistically similar choppy, stingy, torn-and-frayed
electric lead licks; for about a minute and a half, with Lefty’s aid the
track turns into one of those wild and snappy guitar jams that would
eventually become the bread and butter for the likes of ZZ Top. Most of the
time, however, the atmosphere is comparably more relaxed (though still
suspenseful); soon after ‘Hard Headed Woman’, for instance, we get Hooker’s
amusing take on the «sentimental ballad» genre with ‘Take Me As I Am’, which I
could only describe as «what would happen if, just for a brief moment out
there, John Lee Hooker would suddenly want to be Sam Cooke». Honestly, I am
not sure if the song was intended to be taken seriously or parodically — you
can hardly ever tell with this kind of artist, of course, so perhaps both at
the same time. (I often ask myself this question with all sorts of later
artists, from J. J. Cale all the way up to Ween, but it’s not that often that
it comes up while talking about a song recorded back in 1961, mind you). Even
the lyrics beg that question: "If
you can cook and be a good housewife / You don’t have to wear lipstick and
powder... / If you can cook, then it’s all that I need" — come on
now, didn’t we just hear from Muddy Waters not too long ago that "I don’t want you to bake my bread, I don’t
want you to make my bed"? Surely this kind of «regressive» attitude
cannot be anything other than sarcastic. Even the acoustic accompaniment, which
sounds like somebody desperately practicing to master some doo-wop chords and
to be able to serenade one’s sweetheart with wildly exaggerated «romantic
licks», sends out hints that this stuff is not to be taken seriously. However,
when you think to yourself of all the innumerable «lo-fi», rough ’n’ crackly,
covers or imitations of Tin Pan Alley ballads done by your average indie kid
with an acoustic guitar in his bedroom at the turn of the millennium, do
remember that there’s nothing new under the sun and that the roots of this
approach go all the way back to Mr. Hooker (at the very least). In the end,
like so many of John’s albums, this one ends up relatively unsurprising,
fairly monotonous, largely predictable, and yet thoroughly entertaining and thought-provoking
at the same time. Perhaps Vee-Jay Records thought that, with the folk craze
going around the country, its title would significantly raise sales among the
regular customers of Greenwich Village and the Newport Festival — but while Hooker
did go along with their promotional ideas (over which he probably had no
control anyway), there is not a single sign here of his shifting his musical,
lyrical, or spiritual priorities, and in the overall atmosphere of 1961, this
kind of conservatism is actually quite admirable. |
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