comes offstage, and the line-up is radically reshaped shortly afterwards. Reminded of this occasion some two years later, after Zakiya has her first solo album under her belt and her second one halfway to completion, Ollan Christopher is happy to dismiss it. ‘Different artist,’ he says, with crunching finality, but the artist Zakiya is now could not exist without standing on the shoulders of the artist she was then.
To someone who had never seen him before, John Lee’s show would be a revelation. To someone more familiar with his set, it’s a better-than-okay night which definitely has its moments. Vala Cupp flutters around him like a thirsty butterfly hovering over a succulent plant when they duet a feverish ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’; a puffy-eyed Gregg Allman sits in – on guitar, as it happens – to perform what he evidently expects to be a marathon version of T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday Blues’, only to find John Lee bringing the song to a close, some what irritably, after a single verse and a couple of solos. A stalwart young woman with a baritone sax flanks Kenny Baker on tenor, providing the band with the rich thickness of an actual brass section. The textures created by the blend of Lizz Fischer’s deep-rolling piano and Deacon Jones’s exuberant Hammond organ are almost obscenely luxurious, and the climactic boogie – Jones launching great washes of Hammond that threaten to drown the audience in funk – induces a joyful, sweat-slick meltdown that blows the last remaining particles of dust off the mock-Victorian velvet seats in the balcony.
A good job well done, in other words. Backstage again, Hooker greets his final flock of visitors as regally as ever before settling back into the Lincoln for his forty-minute ride home. Before the car clears the city limits, his eyelids begin to droop. He is fast asleep well before the headlights lick on the street-sign reading ‘Hastings Avenue’.
5
WHEN I FIRST COME TO TOWN, PEOPLE
When I first come to town, people,
I was walkin’ down Hastings Street,
Everybody talkin’ ’bout Henry’s Swing Club,
I decided to drop in there that night.
When I got there,
I said ‘Yes, people, yes,’
They were really havin’ a ball.
Yes, I know . . .
Boogie, chillen!
John Lee Hooker, ‘Boogie Chillen’, 1948
Nineteen and forty, babe: halfway round the world, thousands of miles away, the Nazis were on the march and Europe was awash in blood and terror. Closer to home, John Lee Hooker was desperate to join the US Army. These particular circumstances were, however, entirely unconnected. Like the vast majority of Americans at that time, Hooker was sublimely unconcerned with the geopolitical implications of imminent American intervention in a distant foreign war. His desire to enter the armed forces had rather more to do with the strangely aphrodisiac effect that military uniforms seemed to exert on the local girls.
Hooker had but recently arrived in Detroit from Cincinnati: he had a little money in his pocket and, for the first time, he hadn’t had to hitch-hike. ‘I’d heard about all these big things in Detroit. The Motor City it was then, with the factories and everything, and the money was flowing. You could get a job paying money in any city in the United States, but this was the Motor City. All the cars were being built there. I said, “I’m going there,” and I went. Took me the Greyhound and I went straight to Detroit. Detroit was the city then. Work, work, work, work. Plenty work, good wages, good money at that time.’ He soon settled in, finding himself a job as an usher at the Park Theatre, and lodgings with a rather friendlier landlady than the one he subsequently immortalised in ‘House Rent Boogie.’ ‘She would give parties too, and I would work in the theatre and come down play on the weekend, Saturday night parties. It was nothin’ but work goin’ on there.’ Unfortunately, Hooker’s cosy Detroit applecart was soon upset. ‘When I come to town I had a girlfriend and I lost her. The army was a big thing; the soldiers became heroes and when they come into town all the girls was flocking up to them. She just flocked up to those soldiers, and I said, “I’m going to go to the army.” I went in on account of girls. They wanted a uniform. Guys come to the army, come out on a break with the uniform on, girls’d eat ’em up. Now uniforms don’t mean nothin’, but back then, uniforms was a big, big thing. I loved army life because that was the thing: the women would go crazy over an army suit. You get on a suit, you could get any woman, any chick you wanted.’
So Hooker, led by his libido, enlisted in the US army. Stationed just outside Detroit, he spent the next few months a mere spitting distance from the Ford Motor Company’s famous River Rouge plant. Half a century later, he still has fond memories of what turned out to be an extremely brief taste of military life. ‘I didn’t get too far with basic training; I mostly stayed around the camp. We would come into town every weekend. I would play on the barracks, go out, work in the kitchen. I never would even go out on the shootin’ range. I never would do that, just work ’round the barracks. They liked’ed me in there. I would play in there, and they all crazy ’bout me in there.’ Hooker’s sunny disposition enables him to enjoy, at five or so decades’ remove, a rose-coloured view of race relations within the US army of the ’40s which is entirely uncorroborated by mainstream con temporary accounts. Ask him if he experienced the army of that time as segregated and he answers in a firm negative. ‘No. Not in Detroit. If they did I didn’t know it. They loved’ed me in there, white, black and everybody. They didn’t allow that stuff [segregation] in the army. They maybe do it on the sly, but all I can tell you that I didn’t feel it. We all was together.’
This would have come as something of a shock to President Roosevelt and to his Assistant Secretary of War, Robert Patterson. In 1940, in answer to repeated urgings from black community leaders, Patterson published a position paper which amounted to a formal statement defining government policy on racial matters within the military. Six of its seven clauses were, broadly speaking, positive: they established the rights of ‘Negroes’ to receive training in areas, like aviation, from which they had hitherto been barred, and – radical step, this – to assume ranks and positions for which they had actually qualified. The seventh, however, was the cruncher: it stated that ‘the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organisation’. A clarifying statement from the office of the Adjutant General insisted that the army would not be manoeuvred into taking ‘a stand with respect to Negroes which is not compatible with the position attained by the Negro in civilian life’. In other words, the army would remain officially segregated until further notice: until 1950, in fact, when President Truman signed a military desegregation order as America entered the Korean War. Pandering to populist prejudice rather than biological fact, even blood supplies were segregated during World War II.
Sadly, Hooker’s military idyll didn’t last long. In his enthusiasm to don the khaki and get his leg over, he had blithely ignored the then-current proviso that enlisted men under 21 required the consent of a parent or guardian. A year or so shy of his formal majority, he had temporarily solved this vexing little problem by scoring himself some fake ID which claimed him to be three years older than he actually was. Hooker hiked his birthdate from 1920 to 1917, creating a miasma of ambiguity and confusion concerning his age which persists to this day. Having cited his elder brother William as next of kin, he was more than somewhat peeved to find William blowing the whistle on him to the army authorities. ‘They were good to me because I played guitar and they liked it. They liked’ed me ’til they found out I was too young to be in the army. I went into the army on false pretence, and they found it out real quick. I was in there four-five-six months. When they found out I lied, they kicked me out. They asked my brother [William], and he told ’em the truth. He didn’t lie. He told ’em how old I was, and they yanked me out. He was very honest. He was a minister too, but at that time he wasn’t . . . he told me I shouldn’t lie about my age. The army is strict, you know, they got to go by the rules no matter what they think of you. They called me into the office