Читать книгу Boogie Man - Charles Shaar Murray - Страница 12

4

FRISCO BLUES

‘Whuh-whuh-whuh-where the car at?’

Anybody who tells you an anecdote about John Lee Hooker as a young man – and Buddy Guy is the current champ, by a very short head indeed, of the Hooker Impressionists’ League – will inevitably end up mimicking his characteristic stutter. Bernard Besman, who recorded Hooker’s early hits in Detroit during the late ’40s and early ’50s, claims to this day that his primary reason for deciding to record the young bluesman in the first place was that he was intrigued by the notion of a man who stuttered when he spoke, but not when he sang. In a puckish spirit of self-parody, Hooker himself employs an exaggerated version of it when telling stories against himself. In 1953, recording a bunch of tunes in Cincinnati for producer/entrepreneur Henry Stone, he improvised ‘Stuttering Blues’, a classic monologue on that very subject wherein he appears, against the background of one of his primal riffs, in the role of a stammering seducer making a determined play for a hot babe even though his passion renders him so shivery that he can barely speak. ‘Oh, when I fuh-fuh-first saw you’, he murmurs, ‘you almost nuh-nuh-knocked me off my feet. I couldn’t hah-hah-hardly play, I was lookin’ at you.’ Mock-artlessly, he piles up the compliments, pretends that 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 settled when he relocated from Detroit to northern California almost three decades ago, and it’s where several members of his family still live. The accusation that black celebrities ‘lose touch with the ghetto’ when they make enough money to move out is a common accusation, but a short-sighted one. Unless, like Bob Marley or Ice-T, they simply ‘move the ghetto uptown’ with them, or unless they make so much money that they can afford to move their entire communities with them – or unless they do literally turn their backs on everyone they used to know – the black celeb remains keenly aware of how the less fortunate live. They have relatives and friends still out there where, with each passing day, the jobs grow scarcer and the crack houses more plentiful. John Lee still shops in Oakland, because H. Jon provides friendly personal service, and at least has the merit of being local and therefore easily accessible. The mall is eerily reminiscent of similar establishments in Warsaw under Communism; there, even those who were, by bourgeois Western standards, not over-burdened with liquid capital could afford most of what was on display, except that they wouldn’t want the stuff even – as they say – at any price. This is where poor people shop, and by prevailing community standards, H. Jon’s is Armani, Versace and Savile Row.

Jon’s range includes just about everything the well-dressed blues singer could desire. If you crave eyeball-threatening big-collared polyester shirts in acidic lime green or vintage Bridget Riley-style op-art, you got it. If you need a double-knit cream-coloured leisure suit with mildly flared pants, seek ye no further. If there’s an acute shortage of patent-leather tasselled loafers in your life, consider your problem solved. For younger patrons, there’s a selection of ‘X’ baseball caps and T-shirts, red-green-and-gold leather pendants in the shape of the African continent, and thinly gold-plated chains which might just fool a hardcore gangbanger at fifty paces if he happened to be on the pipe at the time. For John Lee Hooker, there are rich, soft bolts of the pinstriped broadcloths and slate-blue mohairs he favours, and H. Jon himself ready and waiting to cut suits to John’s measure, or to alter an off-the-peg item until it’s guaranteed to fit to perfection. Plus there are unlimited supplies of star-spangled socks, Hooker’s most distinctive sartorial fetish. Apart from anything else, H. Jon has the merit of familiarity and reliability. Such dependability represents one of the most important aspects of Hooker’s life: comfort, continuity, stability and, above all, trustworthiness. Familiar objects, familiar people, familiar foods, familiar clothes: they all serve to anchor and orient him. They’re the signposts by which he navigates.

By way of contrast, he displays little more permanent attachment to his homes than he does to his cars. He never seems to have less than two houses at a time; one principal dwelling-place which serves as a permanent open house to family, friends and acquaintances alike, and one bolt-hole elsewhere to which he retreats when he’s had enough of the pressure and clamour inevitably generated by his legions of invited, semi-invited and downright uninvited guests. Right now, the pleasant bungalow in whitebread suburban Redwood City is his main place of residence, supplanting a six-bedroom ranch-style spread in Vallejo, the other side of the bay, which had become a virtual bunkhouse for band members and assorted friends and hangers-on. The Redwood City location was originally chosen for its close, easy proximity to San Francisco airport, a mere twenty-minute drive away, and to the city of San Francisco itself, just a few additional miles further down the freeway. Hooker’s home is in a comfortable little close, at the far end of a long hilly avenue. There’s nothing distinctive about the outside of the house, other than the cars – the cream Lincoln, a black Cadillac Brougham (vanity plate: LES BOGY), and Archie’s roadworn Cadillac De Ville – but inside it’s a different story. There’s lush cream carpet in which you can practically lose your shoes, comfortable matching sofas and easy chairs, a great big fat cat called – inevitably – Fluffy, and cream-papered walls covered in plaques and awards, citations and honours, framed original prints of portraits of the distinguished occupant.

‘Look on my wall,’ commands Hooker. ‘What do you see? You see the awards and the gold records, trophies . . . all them years brought me that. That hard road. You heard the song say “I ain’t goin’ down that big road by myself”? I went down by myself. That brought me all of this, but I don’t let that, you know, go to my head. It just something that I achieve, that I want people to look at when they come into my home.’

There are gold discs and silver discs from a half-dozen different territories, commemorating the substantial sales of The Healer and Mr Lucky: 50,000 here, and 100,000 there. Over in the corner, behind the dining table, is a rack of award statuettes: W.C. Handy awards, Bay Area Music awards, and – of course – John’s 1990 Grammy, the one he and Bonnie Raitt shared for their ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’ duet from The Healer. Here’s a huge framed photo of John Lee and Bonnie on their night of triumph, clutching their Grammies. There’s a reproduction of John’s ad for Remy Martin cognac. John, of course, no longer drinks cognac, and even back in his drinking days he was a Courvoisier man. Nearby there’s a gold disc and matching gold cassette awarded for sales of George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone album, which included a version of John Lee’s ‘Boogie Chillen’. And everywhere are photos of John Lee with his peer group. With B.B. King, with Albert King, with Albert Collins, with Carlos Santana and Bill Graham, with Robert Cray and Stevie Ray Vaughan; and, more recently, Hooker and Mike Kappus with Bill Clinton. On the mantelpiece is a framed clipping of a lead story from Rolling Stone’s ‘Random Notes’ section, reporting John Lee’s Atlantic City guest appearance with the Rolling Stones during their 1989 ‘Steel Wheels’ tour. The page features two principal photographs, each depicting one of the head Stones cavorting with their most suitably matched star guest. In one shot, John Lee is shown grooving with Keith Richards, standing up for a change as he leads the ensemble, which on this occasion also includes Eric Clapton, through a hectic ‘Boogie Chillen’. In the other, Mick Jagger appears buddying up to the microphone with Guns N’ Roses’ ‘troubled’ lead singer, Axl Rose.

Then there’s some serious hi-fi and a matching TV, video, cable and satellite system; not one of those ostentatious projection jobs, but nevertheless boasting more than respectable screen acreage. It gets more use than the hi-fi, which occasionally pumps out some of Hooker’s vintage recordings, or tapes of recent recordings by various members of his inner circle, but mainly it remains silent while the TV blasts movies or sport. Lately, John Lee’s grown fond of screening a recently-assembled stash of his own videos, and visitors are likely to be regaled with the promo clips for his own recent singles from The Healer or Mr Lucky, or that in-concert ‘Boogie Chillen’ workout with Clapton and the Stones, or – delving back into the archives – Hooker’s celebrated spot from the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival with the Muddy Waters Band rocking right behind him. Rarer still is a flickering, washed-out late-’60s clip from some local Detroit TV show featuring Hooker, in dashiki and black leather pillbox hat, perched on a stool performing ‘Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive’ with his teenage son Robert comping, hunched studiously over the key board of the Wurlitzer organ his dad bought him.

Off to one side is a narrow corridor, also lined with plaques, posters and awards, from which the bedrooms and bathroom branch off. The first one you pass is a small one, all bed, closets and framed photos, which is occupied by Archie; at the end are two facing doors. The left-hand room is occasionally occupied by John’s god-daughter Crystal; the other is the master bedroom which is the ultimate refuge for John himself. It has its own luxury-size TV and video, permanently tuned to a satellite sports channel, its own toilet and water cooler; capacious closets for all his suits, and for his small but impressive collection of Gibson and Epiphone guitars. Hooker owns a couple of tobacco-sunburst Gibson ES-335s, one the workhorse instrument he has used since the early ’70s and the other a newer model presented to him by Carlos Santana; the cherry-red mid-’60s Epiphone Sheraton with which he poses on the cover of Mr Lucky; and a spanking-new cherry-red Gibson B.B. King ‘Lucille’ signature model which he used when sitting in with the Rolling Stones in Los Angeles. And, of course, there’s Old Blondie. Old Blondie is the only one of his guitars about which Hooker is sentimental: she’s the big-bodied, single-cutaway Epiphone Broadway which Hooker acquired in the late ’50s and carried with him everywhere for the next decade and a half. Blondie doesn’t travel anymore; the 335s are the working guitars. The old one, in standard tuning, is the one Hooker uses for the bulk of each performance; the Santana guitar, tuned up to open A, is reserved for the closing boogies. But unless there’s work to be done, or unless a visitor requests a guided tour of the guitar collection, the closet is where they stay. Hooker doesn’t sit around the house playing the guitar, let alone strumming in a rocking chair on his back porch.

Meanwhile, there’s nearly always something cooking in Archie’s tiled, open-plan kitchen. Only on particular ceremonial occasions are meals consumed at any particular set time; sometimes it seems as if the entire day consists of people wandering in and out helping themselves to microwaved leftovers from the previous evening’s feast, or improvised snacks from the fridge, or to the freshly prepared delicacies du jour. The cuisine is the kind of Southern soul food that you don’t get in restaurants, the kind of stuff you only ever get to taste if you’re fortunate enough to get your knees under the table of someone who learned their culinary chops down home. There’s cornbread to die for. Fish, baked in foil, fresh from the Bay. Ribs from heaven. Chicken from hell. A colander of turnip greens sprinkled with chunks of fatback done . . . just . . . right. Peach or pun’kin pie. Mmmmwah! (The one thing you’ll never find on the menu chez Hooker, though, is lamb. You’d be more likely to find beef served in a Hindu home, or pork at a Muslim’s table. For John Lee and Archie, both raised as Baptists, the lamb is quite literally holy, and to cook and eat its meat would be utter anathema, a blasphemous offence against the Lamb of God.) Some times Archie, in affectionate exasperation, wishes out loud that he could plan his menus far enough ahead to allow him to do a week’s worth of shopping at one time, but John Lee only decides what he wants to eat about two or three hours before he’s fixing to be ready to eat it. Sometimes even then he changes his mind, and a raiding party gets dispatched to ‘The Colonel’s’ – that’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, to folks not born and raised in the South – for buckets of chicken and fries and mashed potato and biscuits and gravy.

And it’s warm. Somewhere along the line, Hooker developed a marked aversion to being cold, and – as someone raised in the heat of the South – he defines ‘cold’ very differently from those accustomed to cooler climes. Sometimes the temperature in the Hooker home reaches the eighties. ‘Well, I lived in Detroit so long in the winter that when I come out here I was used to the heat,’ he explains. ‘Back in Detroit it didn’t bother me at all, cold weather. I used to shovel my car out, take my kids to school. Got out here, I just . . . I guess my blood got thin. Don’t like cool weather no more.’

Everything’s laid back at John’s house. It’s mellow. Everything’s cool. Everything’s easy, just the way John likes it. There’s no hustle, no hurry-up. Everything happens when it’s supposed to: not earlier, not later. The only surprises are pleasant ones. No-one shouts at any body else. No-one quarrels with anybody else. No-one gets angry or uptight or loud. There are comparatively few house rules, and as long as those rules are obeyed, everybody has a good time, all the time. Anyone can take a drink – they can help themselves to a little nip from John’s well-stocked liquor cabinet, or if they so desire they can fetch in a case of beer or a bottle of wine from one of the nearby stores – but noticeable intoxication is frowned upon, and regular display of its symptoms constitutes grounds for withdrawal of visiting privileges. Ever since John Lee himself abandoned tobacco, under no circumstances does anybody smoke in the house. John Lee’s health in general (and his increasingly delicate throat in particular) is the house hold’s most precious asset, and therefore a total-exclusion smoke-free zone is rigorously maintained within the four walls. However, if you should happen to crave a cigarette, all you got to do is step over the threshold, and then you can smoke to your heart’s content. Similarly, it’s not a major problem if a visitor feels like enhancing the joys of a warm summer evening by blowing a little weed in the back yard, but anybody foolish enough to bring serious drugs anywhere near the premises will find themselves under extremely heavy manners. That shit has done too much damage to too many of John’s nearest and dearest for it to be anything but banned. Above all, Hooker’s Law states that anybody who steps into the house is required to display courtesy and respect to everybody else on the set.

‘I’m a crawlin’ king snake,’ sings Hooker in one of his signature songs, ‘and I rules my den.’ How does he rule his real-life den? Like a benevolent patriarch who issues few direct orders anymore, because his wants and needs are so clearly established that they no longer need to be stated. The only thing he lacks is privacy: his door is literally always open. Like this one time, a few months later: John was sitting on the sofa chatting to an acquaintance, laughing over some of the misconceptions surrounding him and his career, and the degree of attachment which many people bring to pet misconceptions, based on an over-literal assumption that all Hooker’s lyrics are directly autobiographical. The one about the freight train, for example, from ‘Hobo Blues’. That’s one of Hooker’s most affecting performances, the one that begins ‘When I first started hoboin’, I took a freight train to be my friend, oh lord . . .’ And ever since he cut it, it’s been trotted out as an article of faith that Hooker spent years as a hobo, riding the blinds on the Southern freights. ‘I never rode a freight train!’ he insists, laughing.

‘Oh John, it’s such a great story,’ replies the acquaintance. ‘How can you spoil it for everyone?’

‘I would never spoil it,’ ripostes Hooker, laughing all the harder. ‘Go right ahead and say it! That’ll ruin they ego, they illusions. Tell ’em I rode all over the world, freight trains here, there . . . got shot on freight trains, broke my leg on freight trains . . . tell ’em all that! They likes all that!’

‘Tell ’em you robbed a freight train,’ interposes Martin Thompson, lounging in a nearby armchair. Martin is a big, iron-pumped guy with a droopy moustache, a lazy grin and a deadpan sense of humour. He started out as a handyman, doing some work on one of John’s houses, and the two men hit it off to the extent that Martin graduated to being John’s deputy driver and occasional bodyguard. He and Archie are taking a beer-cooled break from the arduous task of varnishing the hardwood floor of the living room’s lower level, when suddenly a truck door slams outside.

‘Oh God,’ breathes Hooker. ‘Jeff.’

We’re calling this particular guy Jeff because it’s not his real name. He’s one of those people Hooker just meets, and he seems to have become semi-permanent. It could have been at the vet’s surgery while getting some essential maintenance work done on Fluffy, because Jeff’s dog had been run over by a careless driver and needed considerable veterinary work, and Hooker – who likes to think of himself as being tough and hard-headed about money but in fact seems to end up putting his hand in his newly capacious pocket for the benefit of at least half the people he knows – wound up footing the pooch’s bills. Bearded, plaid-clad, long-haired, baseball-capped Jeff is hugely amiable and essentially harmless, but undeniably a touch on the weird side. For example, he has this story that he regularly insists on telling: apparently before they got famous the Beatles flew John Lee to London for a whole year so that he could teach them guitar, and it was only after John Lee thought they were ready that they made their first records. So why hasn’t this story ever been told before? Easy; it was hushed up. And they paid John a lot of money not to tell anybody.

So here’s Jeff tramping up the front garden path and before you know it, there’s a whole family of complete strangers standing over John in his sofa, and a thickset blind guy is shaking hands with John, telling him that he’s been a big, big fan since forever and it’s a real thrill. Seems Jeff met these people somewhere, mentioned that he knew John, asked if they felt like meeting him, and here they are. So they all shake hands, and then John tells Jeff that he’s busy – which he’s not, particularly – and that they’ll all get together soon. And so Jeff leads them all out again.

‘This kid Jeff, he’s a nice kid but he’s a pest,’ sighs Hooker once the coast is clear, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. ‘You know me, I’m a very easy-going, quiet person. I’m just a softie. I don’t tell ’em to go to hell or get out or nothin’; I don’t do that. A lotta stars, they couldn’t even get in the house, but I’m not like that. That blind guy, he really nice. A lot of ’em nice. This Jeff kid nice. They all be nice. But . . .’

Exactly. But. John Lee – as he never tires of repeating – loves people. All people. All kinds of people. People in general, and people in particular. But . . . that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wants all of them in his house, all the time. However, sometimes that’s what he gets. So, while we’re briefly looking ahead to spring, imagine a quiet Saturday night in Redwood City. Tell you the truth, it’s moderately difficult to imagine any other kind of Saturday night in Redwood City, but 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 as she begins her life afresh. Her show is more significant this particular night for what it represents than for what it is; a few harsh words are exchanged after the band 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’.