he’s trying to conceal the effect that she’s having on him, slips a request for her address and phone number (‘s-s-s-so I can c-c-c-c-c-caw-caw-call you up’) into the conversation so casually that she’s giving up the info before she even realises he’d asked. And then comes the pay-off. ‘Ah, excuse me baby . . . I can’t g-g-g-g-geh-geh-get my words out just like I want to de-de-de-zi-zi-zide to get ’em out . . . but I can get my lovin’ like I want it.’ The guitar stops. A moment’s silence. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ Against all the odds, he’s scored, and he hits one last triumphant chord on his guitar – yesss! – to celebrate his victory.
One of his old Detroit buddies recalls a real-life incident which tells pretty much the same story: ‘I know one day we was talkin’ and some ladies was here, and the lady kinda crackin’ on John a little bit. He was bangin’ about goin’ out with him and so she would never give him the okay, but she say, “You know, you can’t talk at all”, just like that. He say, “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-man, I can’t talk but I can get my point across.” She says “Yeah, okay.”’ Hooker’s vulnerability is a vital ingredient of his strength: what may superficially resemble weakness is actually the secret of his success.
Relaxed and self-confident as he is, John Lee Hooker rarely stutters these days. When he does, it’s the equivalent of an Early Warning System: the first giveaway sign of incipient confusion or distress. Like right now: John Lee is growing steadily more and more agitated. It’s a warm early December afternoon in San Francisco, and Hooker is standing on a downtown street corner, sucking fresh-squeezed orange juice through a straw and waiting for his ride home. He’s just completed a radio interview in a small, cramped studio high above the city, promoting a couple of shows he’ll be doing in the city later that week even though they’re both foregone sell-outs. The station staff had practically abandoned their work when he arrived, downing tools as soon as he walked through the door, blocking corridors, queuing up to meet him and shake his hand . . . gently though, of course. The interview itself was no problem at all. Hooker hardly stutters once, and his formidable charm and spontaneity carry him through even though radio chat isn’t really his forte. Unlike his old pal B.B. King, who actually put in a few years as a deejay on WDIA in Memphis before his records got huge and the road swallowed him up, Hooker never cultivated the particular skills and mannerisms necessary to give good radio. The art of radio-friendliness demands that pitch and pacing and volume are all smooth and even, that syntactical structure is coherent, diction is clear and that the interviewee never ceases to be aware that the host and his microphone merely represent a bridge to those wonderful folks out there in radioland. Hooker doesn’t deign to address himself to a radio microphone; rather, he talks to the person behind it as if the two of them were sitting together in his living room, chatting intimately. He shifts in his chair in mid-sentence, he drops his voice into a murmur occasionally, he allows lengthy moments of silence to elapse while he considers his answers, he emphasizes his points with gesture and eye contact, and he never modifies his accent to suit anybody else’s convenience.
So anyway, the interview is completed, everybody shakes hands all over again, and Hooker and a recent acquaintance wander down to street level to wait until Hooker’s nephew Archie – Hooker’s live-in chauffeur, chef and butler – retrieves the cream Lincoln Town Car with the DOC HOOK vanity plate from the multi-storey car-park across the street. Unfortunately, there is some sort of inexplicable delay, and for nearly five minutes now, Hooker has just been left there, hanging on the corner. At first, this was no hardship: his public arrived. First one, then a couple more, then finally whole knots of people have begun to recognise him; their jaws dropping with awe as if some creature out of legend, like a centaur or unicorn, had suddenly appeared right before their eyes, casually lounging against a wall sluicing from a carton of fresh-squeezed OJ. ‘Are you John Lee Hooker?’ they ask reverently. Hooker smiles seraphically. He presses the flesh – gently though, of course – he murmurs greetings but, nevertheless, the stress begins to look like it’s getting to him. Something unpredictable and unforeseen has happened. A situation has developed over which he seems to have no control. He is powerless. In real terms, of course, he is in no danger whatsoever. Even if Archie and the Lincoln had been somehow sucked into a black hole and vanished completely off the face of San Francisco only to reappear some where near Betelgeuse in the late twenty-fourth century, all Hooker would have to do would be to drop a dime and call the Rosebud Agency, and in ten minutes or thereabouts, someone would have arrived to attend to his every need. He turns to his bemused companion, some English guy he barely knows who’s a stranger to San Francisco, and pulls him by the sleeve, pointing into the car park’s exit, right into the gaping maw from which the cars emerge back onto the street.
‘G-go up there look for Archie,’ he orders, ‘fuh-find out where he at.’
Obediently, the Brit shambles off to locate the errant Lincoln and, not surprisingly, achieves little more than a few hair’s-breadth escapes from sudden death as an assortment of cars – none of them the Hookmobile – zoom within inches of him. Fortunately, Archie reappears, Lincoln intact, before there’s any permanent damage to safety or sanity, and Hooker clambers thankfully back into the comfortable, familiar environment of his car. Hooker loves cars, even though he hasn’t driven one himself for years, and he’ll buy a new one at the drop of a Homburg. The stereo is playing a tape of one of John’s own albums. John likes to listen to his own music – oh yeah – and through just about any conversation he’ll keep an ear cocked to the tape, ready to repeat and emphasize any lyrical sally of which he is particularly fond or proud, either echoing the intonation of his recorded voice or responding to it. Normally, to say that someone loves the sound of their own voice is tantamount to an accusation of being the kind of raving egomaniac or rampant solipsist that Hooker so patently isn’t. He literally does love the sound of his own voice; he’d love it just as much if it were somebody else’s, and he considers his proprietorship of that voice a ‘blessing’ from the Supreme Being; a blessing to be celebrated with all due humility. This album playing now isn’t one of the ones which blues buffs or Hooker aficionados consider to be one of his classics; far from it. Free Beer and Chicken is a gooey psychedelic-soul confection dating from the artistic nadir of the early ’70s, when he was signed to a major corporate record label whose pursuit of the rock-fan’s dollar gracelessly shoe-horned him into a succession of ever-more contrived and inappropriate progressive-rock studio formats. However, even though Hooker himself has little good to say of this particular phase of his recorded career, he picks this album for in-car listening over and above his recognized masterpieces. For over a week, this has been the tape that has kicked in whenever John Lee has set loafer-shod foot past his own front door.
When he’s making one of his rare forays into downtown San Francisco, or paying a quick visit to the bank – Archie claims John Lee has opened an account at every local bank where he’s ever spotted a good-looking female cashier – or picking up a visitor from the airport, or travelling to a concert, this music is what wafts him there and brings him back. For in-car entertainment, at least, he prefers it to both the reverberant, itchy-foot Detroit recordings which form the foundation-stones of his legend, and the triple-distilled, oak-barrelled mellowness of his contemporary hits. A considerable part of Free Beer’s appeal is that it features the virtuoso Fender electric piano of John’s second son Robert, once the youngest member of John Lee’s touring band and now a minister back in Detroit, out of ‘the world’ and the blues life for good. The same album plays again when John heads out to visit his tailor. It’s been a long time – a decade and a half, easily, since anybody’s seen Hooker in anything other than those smart pinstripe suits: so where does he get ’em? If he so desired, he could easily become a valued customer of Giorgio Armani, Gianni Versace, Paul Smith or even – if he was feeling exceptionally adventurous and fancied the built-in nipple-clamps – Jean-Paul Gaultier. He could shop at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, or any number of fine establishments in London’s Savile Row or Rome’s Via Veneto. He can certainly afford it, and if there’s one thing that a celebrity designer truly loves, it’s a celebrity customer. Nevertheless, John Lee prefers to shop at H. Jon’s, a Jewish tailor based at a shopping mall from hell in Oakland, California; an hour or so’s drive from his home in a cosy San Francisco Bay Area dormitory town named Redwood City.
Oakland is where John Lee first