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 was a mildly controversial move, since contemporary blues of the amplified ensemble variety was disdained by purists as a degenerate music only fractionally less despicable than that damned rock and roll; though the likes of Waters and Hooker had considerably more to do with jazz than, say, Eartha Kitt or The Kingston Trio, both of whom had appeared in previous years as part of the organizers’ misguided attempt to broaden the festival’s appeal. However, as controversies went, the blues afternoon paled into utter insignificance compared to the moral panic – concerning the critical mass achieved by that year’s combination of teenagers, beer and rhythmic music – which virtually capsized the festival’s future as an institution. The final two days’ concerts were hurriedly cancelled, and for a while it was feared that the blues afternoon would represent the institution’s swan song. Indeed, the climax of the afternoon was the performance, by Waters’ pianist half-brother Otis Spann, of the impromptu ‘Goodbye Newport Blues’, the lyrics of which had been hurriedly scribbled on the back of a telegram form by the poet Langston Hughes. It was sung by Spann, rather than Waters himself, because Waters – like Hooker and many other Southerners of their generation – didn’t read too fluently; and Spann, fifteen years younger and considerably better educated, was far better equipped to sing lyrics which had just been placed in front of him.
Newport survived, and both Waters and Hooker did considerably better than that. (Incidentally, history repeated itself less than a decade later when, in the wake of the late-’60s flirtation between jazz and progressive rock, the 1968 festival included a rock night headlined by Jethro Tull, the Mothers Of Invention and The Jeff Beck Group, and all those bad kids – or rather, their younger brothers and sisters – went wild again. Tsk tsk tsk. However, this time there was no moral panic: they simply stopped booking rock acts.) Seeming simultaneously shy and feral, Hooker stood up in his slick sharkskin suit with Muddy Waters’ band behind him, and performed deep, brooding versions of classics like ‘Maudie’, a surprisingly mordant song dedicated to his then wife, and ‘It’s My Own Fault’, later to become a cornerstone of B.B. King’s repertoire. He climaxed a rocking finale of ‘Come Back Baby’ by walking offstage, still playing, and leaving the band to finish the tune; a marked contrast to the downhome demeanour of Cage & Thomas, wearing their best church suits and broad-brimmed hats and busily playing away while seated in their folding chairs.
More than three decades later, it is Hooker, Mr Natty Urbanite of 1960, who performs from a chair and sports the broadcloth-three-piece-and-Homburg-hat which is the traditional formal dress of rural black Southerners. Nevertheless, the wooden Newport stage still looks the same, and the tranquil bay is still crowded with the yachts of the opulent. However, in this, the golden age of corporate sponsorship, the Newport Jazz Festival is now the JVC Jazz Festival and is spread over a variety of sites, including the original setting in Newport, Rhode Island, itself. You reach the grounds via immaculately maintained roads of neat bungalows where the weekend yard sale is a way of life, a sobering contrast to the pot-holed death-traps of New Jersey. Hooker is received like royalty. He barely has time to disembark from his limo before he is surrounded by well-wishers. Nevertheless, he heads for shelter at the first opportunity, unlike B.B. King, who tours the backstage area, greeting one and all with the ambassadorial graciousness which is his trademark. Once ensconced in his trailer, Hooker’s co-stars queue up to pay their respects. Virtually his first pair of visitors are a lean Englishman in his late fifties with a majestically pony-tailed silver mane, and a bulbous, bearded, bereted gent leaning on a Louisiana conjure stick.
They are, in fact, John Mayall, ‘the father of British blues’, and the New Orleans piano maestro Mac ‘Dr John’ Rebennack, and they’re almost knocking each other over in their eagerness to be the first to receive the passive handshake and the ritual greeting, ‘Huh-huh-how you doin’, young man?’ Excitable young women in shorts and halter tops vie with each other to be photographed sitting on his lap. Taking care not to dislodge his homburg, they feed him chocolate and icecream. The fearsome Boogie Man, the soulful, compassionate bluesman, the galvanic preacher: all are now replaced with the genial, guffawing, sleepy-eyed teddy bear.
As three o’clock approaches, The Coast To Coast Blues Band mount the stage, inspect the rented amplifiers, keyboards and drums, and declare them adequate. Cupp and Fischer have squeezed themselves into the drop-dead dresses normally reserved for after dark, and some of the male band members have gone so far as to change their shirts and comb their hair. The venerable sage’s only concession to the heat is to remove his jacket and unbutton his waistcoat. Soon he settles into his folding chair, unleashes fusillades of deep blue notes from his much-travelled Gibson guitar, and chants his Mississippi soliloquies into incongruously blazing sunshine. He is rapturously received by a thoroughly broiled audience, many of whom should be discouraged from ever appearing in public in swimwear, and a tiny proportion of whom should never appear in anything else. Halfway through the show, Hooker sends the group down from the stage and brings on his longtime friend John Hammond, a tall, patrician singer/guitarist who is the son and namesake of the great talent scout who recorded everybody from Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Armed with an old steel-bodied guitar and a harmonica, Hammond accompanies Hooker as he sings ‘Highway 13’ from the new record: ‘And it rained, it rained so hard,’ sings Hooker, ‘I couldn’t hardly see the road.’ Even without the sympathetic brushed drums – soothingly shushing like windscreen wipers – which anchor the song on record, it requires a positive effort of will to remember that we’re sitting in ninety-plus temperatures under a burnished, cloudless sky, rather than huddled in a car, locked in a tiny, scudding bubble of dry warmth as a storm pounds on windows and roof. But Hooker is only nominally here with us under the Newport sun; his heart and mind are somewhere else, where things are very different, muscling an automobile through punishing rain. And such is the strength of his spell that he can carry us with him: to overpower our experience with his.
As it turns out, the devastation he’s evoking is not to so much somewhere else as somewhen else. Hurricane Bob was still a day away when Hooker hits Newport, and twenty-four
