July 7, 2001
John
Lee Hooker, 1917-2001
Rest Easy, John Lee
By Jeffrey St. Clair
Lately it's become fashionable among
a certain wing of the post-modern critical bloc to reassess downwards
the accomplishments of the late great John Lee Hooker. He's been
written off as a one-trick Johnny, a derivative writer and a
"lazy" performer. Tired, perhaps, but lazy?
No way.
Hooker was one of the hardest
working bluesman in the business. He recorded more songs and
sessions than anyone else. More great songs, too. In fact, no
one's even close, not even the tireless BB King. By one account
Hooker had recorded more than 600 songs, under various pseudonyms,
from 1946 to 1960 alone. He wrote many of them. Played live nearly
every night. And worked in one of the most backbreaking jobs
imaginable, on an assembly line in a Detroit auto plant and at
a steel mill.
Admittedly, John Lee Hooker
isn't Son House. Son House may be the greatest country blues
singer who ever lived--greater than Robert Johnson or Charley
Patton or Mississippi John Hurt or the unforgettable Skip James.
But that wasn't John Lee's gig. He was creating his own kind
of music, a strange blend of swamp blues fused with an urban
urgency--the Delta meets Detroit.
The Hooker sound is as original
as it is unmistakable. Yes, his guitar playing was often limited
to one chord, but he could do as much with a single cord as Raphael
could do with the color blue (and a hell of a lot more than Alice
 Walker did with the color purple).
It's both a haunting and infectious sound. There's something
that links Hooker and Miles Davis, something more than the dismal
soundtrack they did together for that horrible neo-noir movie
The Hot Spot, directed by the ludicrous Don Johnson. It has to
do with the way that they could take a familiar line, a boogie
woogie in Hooker's case, break it apart, slow it down, transform
it into entirely something new. Into art. Check out Hooker's
reinvention of In the Mood or It Serves You Right to Suffer or
Tantalizing the Blues.
Hooker was also a fantastic
songwriter, and an original one, who jettisoned rhyming couplets
for an unnerving kind of blank verse. There's nothing submissive
about a John Lee Hooker song. Listen to I'm Bad Like Jesse James.
These are songs of strength, of optimism and defiance in the
face of hard times. Songs for working people, about sex, and
love, miserable jobs, friendship, boozing, barroom talk, and
disdain for the boss man. Many of them speak of the sounds of
the street as mimetically as the best hip-hop.
Hooker could also rock. Think
Twice Before You Go, one of my favorite Hooker songs from the
60s, is as good as anything to come out of the British invasion.
And his voice is one of the signature sounds in American music.
Both menacing and ironic, underlain with an incredibly playful
(yet dangerous) sense of humor. Any one of these qualities would
make Hooker someone to be reckoned with. Put them all in one
package and you've got one of the great bluesmen. Hooker, Robert
Johnson, T-Bone Walker, Lightnin' Hopkins, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy
Waters. In my book, that's damn exalted company, man.
My wife Kimberly and I saw
one of Hooker's last performances on a stormy spring night in
Portland's old Roseland theater. Hooker played for about 40 minutes.
From our perch in the balcony, he looked old, frail and impeccably
cool. His voice was raspy, deep, at times downright chilling.
He danced, flirted with the young blonde piano player, boogied
and sat on a chair, stomping his foot on the floorboards and
playing that black electric guitar, occasionally picking a few
notes, but more often whacking the strings hard with his palm,
transforming the guitar into a strange electrified percussion
instrument. The man got the point across. He always has.
Afterwards, I told my friend
Dave Marsh that I didn't think Hooker was long for this world.
"Perhaps," Marsh said. "But then again John Lee
could go on another ten years." In the end, he didn't make
it that long. But he kept playing as if his life depended on
it. Perhaps it did.
And if John Lee Hooker didn't
put it out to the max every moment, so what? When he was on,
he was as good as it gets. What more do we need? A sniveling
perfectionist like Eric Clapton (Johnny Winter is an albino,
but Clapton is so much whiter) or a soulless pampered robot like
Bonnie Raitt? For bluesmen like Hooker the music ain't just art;
it's a job. Why crack the whip? Lazy my ass. Round here we call
that laid back.
Rest easy, John Lee.
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