on this particular Saturday evening, the only real option seems to be to call up a mutual friend to hustle a lift over to John Lee’s house. It’ll be mellow. It’ll be so nice and laid back. Just sit around, watch a movie or a game, pop a couple of lite beers, chit-chat a little and kick back.
To start with, that’s just exactly how it goes down. There’s something fairly inconsequential like a Karate Kid movie on TV, and John is recounting Albert King’s riposte to a female fan who asked if she could take his picture – ‘Buy my album, there’s a picture of me on the cover!’ – when there’s a crunch of miscellaneous footsteps outside, and craziness walks in. First of all, there’s a hardbodied bleach-blonde woman in an elaborate black leather and PVC ensemble, waving a bottle of tequila and screaming in an ersatz Southern accent. By comparison, Madonna comes across like a morbidly prim Victorian schoolgirl. Because it’s not her name, let’s call her Cathy. It later turns out that during the week, Cathy is a seriously high-powered business whiz in San Francisco, holding down an extremely responsible and gruelling job involving eleven-hour days, seven-figure budgets and entire floorsful of people reporting to her. During the week, she works out conscientiously, she touches not one drop of alcohol, she is the precise, rigorous, disciplined, supremely organized Ms Jekyll. Guess who emerges at the weekend. Following in her wake is a bemused-looking, guffawing, denim-clad high-school kid with a blond shag-cut and a wispy moustache; two quiet and extremely obese women in stretch slacks, cardigans and training shoes; and assorted others whose best bet for weekend fun is to hang out at the home of the world’s most accessible superstar. Instant party. In fact, Cathy is a party all by herself: laughing and screaming like a jam session between a hyena and an air-raid siren, strutting and stomping in her stilettos, teasing everybody in the room in enthusiastic parodies of their own accents, she steals the show from The Karate Kid. Soon the TV is silenced, replaced by a rocking Albert Collins tape. She even starts flirting with Hooker’s Brit acquaintance, despite the fact that he is the kind of pallid-skinned muscle-free zone not generally considered attractive in California.
Hooker delivers polite, cordial greetings and encourages everybody to make themselves at home, but within moments he’s disappeared, barricading himself in his bedroom at the back of the house with his TV and his telephone. An hour or so passes, the noise level mounts and suddenly – brrriiinnnnggg! – there’s an insistent ring on Archie’s private telephone line. It’s John Lee, calling from the back room, demanding that the noise be held down. Fortunately, a natural break in the proceedings soon occurs as the booze runs out. Cathy threatens to drive out and pick up fresh supplies of beer and tequila and come right back to continue the festivities, but she’s eventually persuaded to gather up her entourage and seek her next round of wild delights elsewhere, preferably somewhere a long way out of John Lee’s earshot. The following morning, Archie and Martin ruefully assess the damage to the still-soft varnish of the hardwood floor. The varnished surface they’d so painstakingly applied, coat by coat, only two or three days before is now scarred with hundreds of tiny, shallow bullet-pocks, each one the approximate size of a stiletto heel. ‘No more fat broads,’ they announce, but it’s another couple of days before anyone remembers that the ‘fat broads’ had been not only trainer-clad but as quiet as a pair of admittedly generously-sized mice. The ‘fat broads’ probably won’t be back. But Cathy will. After all, she’s a friend.
The regular cast of characters chez John is a fascinating one, and we may well meet more of them later on. However, right now we’ve got a show to go to, and we don’t want to be late
Christmas is coming, and John Lee is playing his major hometown showcase of the season. As its name might suggest, the 600-capacity Great American Music Hall is tricked out in velvet-plush Victorian kitsch. Archie rolls the Lincoln in with one hand on the wheel, the other holding a walkie-talkie into which he’s talking quietly and urgently, making sure that the pavement is clear, the parking space is free, and the side door is open so that John Lee can disembark as smoothly and easily as possible. Inside, the band is assembled at rather more than full strength. The elusive Deacon Jones is back, there being no other activities with a prior claim on his attention, and so is his wife’s T-shirt stall. Deacon Jones is a screwdriver-jiver and a half: slick, loud, impossible to ignore on or off stage. In contrast to the laid-back hippie demeanour of his colleagues, Jones is dressed up to the nines and beyond; a vision of elegance in his crisp pin-stripes, snowy French cuffs with gold cufflinks, tie pierced with a diamond stickpin, and an immaculate black Homburg hat easily the match of Hooker’s perched on his head. He seems to have some friends with him: the basement dressing-room designated for the band is full of mustachioed guys in major hats, commandeering the table, pulling tricksy one-hand river-boat-gambler shuffles with their decks of cards, and saying things like ‘My name is Jake and your money I’ll take.’ Even with Jones back in the band, his replacement Lizz Fischer is still around, celebrating the season by topping off her Little Black Dress with a jauntily drooping red Father Christmas cap. As it turned out, her fears concerning the precise nature of her role as Hooker’s companion during that summer’s New York sojourn had been entirely unfounded. She’d occupied the hotel room next to John Lee, all that had been required of her was her company, and she’d had a hugely enjoyable time.
Yep, ’tis the season of good will; yep, John Lee is headlining a major San Francisco venue of the kind that he works during his increasingly infrequent road trips, as opposed to the unadvertised small-club gigs he normally plays in the Bay Area, both to stay in shape and help out the friends who run his favourite bars. But there’s something else that’s very special about the show tonight: if you caught sight of the Music Hall’s marquee on the way in you’ll have noticed the other name on the bill. It’s a family affair: tonight’s opening act is Zakiya Hooker.
Zakiya is John Lee’s Number Two daughter. Originally christened ‘Vera’, she subsquently changed her name to something she felt suited her better. She’s a tiny little woman with a slick cap of hair that looks as if it had been painted across her head with a single stroke, and if you saw her only from a distance you might be tempted to describe her as ‘doll-like’. Close-up, though, the warmth and mobility of her mouth and the humour and pain in her eyes would wither the word on your lips. She is in her early forties, though most people would find it hard to reconcile her hip, youthful appearance with her chronological age unless they were shown a birth certificate first. Tonight she’s making her major-league debut, fronting a bandled and directed by her partner Ollan Christopher, formerly a member of the Natural Four, a vocal group who used to record for Curtis Mayfield’s Chicago-based soul set-up, Curtom Records. However, this is more than a simple coming-out party for a late-blooming ‘new artist’, even one who happens to be related to the headliner. Just a few weeks previously, Zakiya had lost her youngest son, John Sylvester, in a road accident. By all accounts, he’d been a lovable, sparky teenage kid; for his entire life a favourite of all who knew him. His doting granddad’s friends adored him, too.
‘His grandson must’ve been about five years old, and John used to bring him over to see me,’ recalled B.B. King. ‘For some reason, his little grandson, named John, like his grandfather, liked me. I don’t know why, but he took up with me, seemed to like me, and John knew it. So every time he would come or I’m near him, he’d always bring little John. And when little John got old enough and big enough, he would ask [John Lee] to take him to see me. And then, about a year or so ago, I had a call from John telling me that his grandson had been killed in an automobile accident.’ The Coast To Coast Blues Band have their own memories of that awful night. John Lee was playing a low-key show at his favourite club, The Sweetwater in Marin County, and he was given the terrible news of young John’s death only seconds before showtime. His face just closed up like a fist be fore, as Rich Kirch remembers, ‘he hit that stage . . . rockin’’.
By all accounts, it was the one of the most powerful shows anyone could recall him playing. When Hooker found himself tumbling into a moment of deep, intense personal sorrow and agony, his music was there to catch him, to bind the wound, to enable the Healer to begin the painful, wrenching process of healing himself. And tonight it is Zakiya’s turn to face the world from her father’s stage, to assert her position as her father’s daughter and her son’s mother, and to dedicate herself, slowly and haltingly, to the new future towards which those relationships steer her