Boogie Man

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Charles Shaar Murray. Boogie Man

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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.

KATHY ACKER

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The Reverend considered the departure of his son to be a sign of failure on his part, but on one thing at least, he and John Lee were in complete agreement. If John insisted on living where he was allowed to play his guitar indoors, he had to go. ‘Well, you know how church people are. He loved the heck outta us, he would give his right arm for us. They believed in the church, in God, in the Lord, and he didn’t want his son . . . he felt that I was givin’ myself to the Devil. He didn’t want me to do that, and that’s they way of thinkin’. He felt like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong, he felt that he could guide me the right way. That was the way he lived, and he wanted all his children to be churchgoing people. But my mother had as much authority over me as he did, and he said, “You go live with your mom and her husband, if that’s the way you wanna go. You welcome to stay here, but you just cannot do this in the house.”’ Mrs Hooker felt differently. ‘Well, my mother was open-hearted, very open. She wanted me to do what I wanted to do best, because she felt that if I was forced to go to church, it wouldn’t be for real. So she said, “I’m not gonna force you. If this is what you wanna do, you and Will go ahead and I won’t object.”’

Will Moore gave his new stepson his next guitar: an old mail-order Stella to replace Tony Hollins’s battered gift. Moore became John Lee Hooker’s spiritual and artistic father-figure: the father who approved, the father who encouraged, the father who supported, the father who empowered. William Hooker had loved John dearly and raised him according to the best and finest principles he knew, but an unbridgeable abyss lay between them. With all his heart, the Reverend hated, feared and despised that which John Lee wanted, above all else, to become. Inevitably, a battle would have been fought for the erring son’s immortal soul, and whatever the outcome, both father and son would have been irreparably damaged by the conflict. Will Moore appeared when he was needed, and he gave John more than a beat-up guitar and a home with a room of his own in which to play it: he gave him the means to become the man whom he wanted to be.

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