Charles Shaar Murray is an award-winning author, journalist, musician and cultural infidel: ‘the rock critic’s rock critic’ (Q Magazine), ‘front-line cultural warrior’ and ‘original gunslinger’ (Independent on Sunday). He first appeared in print in 1970 in the notorious ‘School-kids’ issue of OZ magazine. By 1972, he was working for NME, subsequently becoming Associate Editor. Crosstown Traffic, his acclaimed study of Jimi Hendrix, won the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award in 1990: a decade later, Boogie Man was shortlisted for the same award. The first two decades of his ‘journalism, criticism and vulgar abuse’, to use his own description, were collected in Shots from the Hip. In 2010 he received a Record Of The Day for his contributions to music journalism and a novel, The Hellhound Sample, appeared in 2011. He is currently at work on a ‘somewhat unconventional’ book about The Clash and playing blues guitar with his band Crosstown Lightnin’. He aspires to be the missing link between George Orwell and Robert Johnson.
http://charlesshaarmurray.com/
This edition published in 2011 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Charles Shaar Murray, 1999, 2011
The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2000 by the Penguin Group
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 203 7
eISBN 978 0 85786 204 4
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2011
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Dedicated to the Memory of
KATHY ACKER
(1947–1997)
and
AGNES SCHAAR MURRAY
(1912–1997)
and to
ANNA CHEN
Here’s looking at you, comrade . . .
forever, babes
CONTENTS
1. They Don’t Give This Old Boy Nuthin’
2. Bluebird, Bluebird, Take a Letter Down South for Me
5. When I First Come to Town, People
6. ‘Boogie Chillen’ Came Out Burnin’
14. Hey, You Just Gotta Make the Change: Iron John and the Healing Game
Acknowledgements: Thank you, fellas
Appendix: Nuthin’ But the Best ’n’ Later for the Garbage
FOREWORD
I Fought The Lore And The Lore Won
In the months immediately preceding the preparation of this new edition of Boogie Man, two things happened. The first was that I received a communication from a reader in the US which reopened questions I’d previously considered settled.
It suggested that newly discovered documentary information implied that the birthdate I’d been given for John Lee Hooker was inaccurate, and that he had been born in 1911 or 1912, rather than 1917 – and was therefore actually five or six years older than previously thought. This would radically reshape the chronology of my narrative – the primary source for which was, of course, John Lee Hooker himself and members of his immediate family – thereby overturning quite a few applecarts, since, as part of the agreement struck with John Lee’s then-manager, Mike Kappus, when this project was first mooted, I had made a commitment to construct the narrative around John Lee’s own version of events unless I could come up with solid evidence to the contrary.
This fresh revelation would mean that John Lee could’ve gotten to Detroit a few years earlier than he claimed in our interviews: some other sources have placed his arrival in his adopted hometown as early as 1937. It would also invalidate John Lee’s own account of his military service (which you’ll find in Chapter 5) because, obviously, if he had been five years older he wouldn’t have been underage, and therefore the entire anecdote would be ceremonially blown out of the water. A promising Google link tantalisingly offers the snippet that ‘later he avoided military service in World War II due to a stabbing wound’, but the site in question (Nothin’ But The Blues at http://www.t4p.com/blues/artists.html) offers no further elucidation. If this was indeed the case, the wound in question may well have been the hand-tendon injury inflicted by his then-wife Maude and mentioned by Zakiya Hooker in Chapter 8.
Also . . . when John Lee made his triumphant return to the cultural forefront in 1989 with The Healer, his ‘official’ birthdate