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Post by Admin on Apr 6, 2013 16:46:36 GMT -5
Has anyone read and reviewed this one? I'm getting ready to undertake a study into John Lee Hooker. I met him back in the 60's and was immediately in love with his guitar playing abilities. Here's a review from Booklist: John Lee Hooker became an overnight sensation in the '80s after more than 40 years at his craft. The springboard for his "discovery" was the Grammy-winning album The Healer, which featured Bonnie Raitt and Carlos Santana among other younger musicians. This gambit, too, was not new, for Hooker had recorded Hooker 'n' Heat with Canned Heat in the late '60s--a truly seminal album. Hooker is one of the last surviving bluesmen with a direct lineage from the Delta blues tradition and for years was king of Detroit's blues scene. Murray's extensive bio goes all the way back to the beginning in a sprawling literary effort worthy of Hooker's lengthy career. Like many American blues artists, Hooker was revered by the early '60s English rockers, yet unlike Muddy Waters, widespread pop music interest in Hooker was slow to build. Nevertheless, Hooker's music is a national treasure; anybody who has ever boogied to George Thorogood's recording of Hooker's "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" or rocked out to ZZ Top's early recordings has heard the man's influence. Now they can read his life story in depth and celebrate Hooker and his music in a way that many of his contemporaries never lived to enjoy. Mike Tribby Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Post by muddylives on Apr 6, 2013 19:55:17 GMT -5
I read it. It is certainly worthwhile as the only biography of John Lee Hooker. But it could be better. There is quite a lot of focus on his later career and recordings, as opposed to what some of us, including myself, believe was his prime in the 40s-60s.
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Post by AlanB on Apr 7, 2013 6:28:02 GMT -5
Everything you ever wanted to know about Hooker but never dare ask. Hours of endless fun. www.jlhvinyl.com/
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Post by muddylives on Apr 7, 2013 8:59:59 GMT -5
Yes, that is a great site indeed.
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Post by Admin on Apr 7, 2013 9:55:39 GMT -5
Everything you ever wanted to know about Hooker but never dare ask. Hours of endless fun. www.jlhvinyl.com/Thanks Alan. I have spent a good part of my Sunday morning looking through the John Lee discography as well as the Twosides site. There is a ton of information here for sure. It represents a lot of effort on the part of several individuals. Even though there is a significant amount of redundancy between the various labels, it does show just how broad an influence John Lee had. If we only had as much biographical information on John - where he was at various times in his life, particularly between 1941 and 1972.
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Post by Deleted on Apr 14, 2013 7:08:17 GMT -5
YES I HAVE !!!!!
It;s based on the documentary JOHN LEE HOOKER THIS IS MY LIFE which he directed etc....
HE had to be in his late 70;s when it was done and his son would drive him around town to meetings,....never eve learned how to sign his name and another Bluesman falls prey to GREEDY RACIST white managers stealing there songs n giving em to ELVIS< PAT BOONE,,,,etc,
I m not big on reading stories, facts n stuff like that I don;pt mind but stories I prefer the movie !!!!!
do YOURSELF A FAVOR N WATCH THIS ON DOCUMENTARY CHANNELL or buy it for 11,95 thats all I paid for a DVD n CD I think it was a great deal !!!
JAMES
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Post by dadfad on Apr 16, 2013 9:40:16 GMT -5
I'd seen John Lee play several times in the late 60s. I shook his hand once after a set at a small blues club in Detroit, but never really "met" him.
In the late 80s I opened regularly (almost every Friday and Saturday night for over a year) at a bar (quite a dive, actually) for an old one-man band guy named Buddy Folks ("The Biggest One-Man Band in Dee-troit, yer Buddy, Mr. Buddy Folks." LOL) He was a good friend of John Lee's. They had been friends since right after WWII.
The club we played in was sometimes packed, but sometimes so dead me and Buddy would just sit at a table and talk most of the night, getting up to play when some customers came in. He was a great source of information, especially about John Lee. They'd hung out and often played together. Buddy said once "Weren't nobody wanted to play with us much 'cause of our timing (that non-strict 12-bar style many old country-blues guys used before they played in "combo" settings that required more structure), so we played together! John Lee'd had some good luck and made a few records, but he finally had to move out of Dee-troit to out west. That's when he really made good."
"One time me an' him was sittin' around drinkin'... Up at his place over on the Eastside, up on Kolb Street... We's sittin' there drinkin' and the repo-mens came in an' carried his couch off right out from under us. Took his table an' chairs too! Peoples knowed him, but he never did much good till he took off. I stayed here and went to Chysler's." (When I met Buddy, he'd retired from Chrysler's, drove a limo part-time for a funeral-home, and played small gigs. This one regular gig being his last. He eventually had a stroke and couldn't play, and died a few years later.)
(A little "meandering" for a moment... Piedmont bluesman Bowling Green John Cephas, who I'd become good friends with over many years was in Detroit. I took him to the club Buddy was playing at. John totally loved Buddy. We sat and drank and talked for hours after the club closed, and when John got back to the DC area he pulled a few strings and had a recording session all set up for Buddy with the Smithsonian in Washington DC as an "American Heritage Artist." Buddy declined, saying "I ain't gonna get dragged up in one of them airplanes for nothin'!")
Anyway, Buddy was a wealth of information regarding John Lee and the old "Blackbottom" Detroit blues scene in general. Contrary to what many think, John Lee was not illerate. I have in my posession (framed hanging on my wall) an old letter John Lee wrote in May of 1956 to a "Mr. Admiral" in which he asked to borrow/advance him $75 dollars because he had no gigs lined up for two weeks and "my ice-box has got low." He also asked him to send him some of his new records (which by the date I assume to be "Dimples") and some promo-photos, which he hoped to be able to sell at his up-coming gigs(and to please call him at Walnut 1-9880).
The handwriting penmanship is pretty good (in that "studied" almost meticulous way often used by some of his generation).
I'd driven by 8858 Kolb St. (the address on his letter) a few years back. The house is gone, the yard overgrown with weeds and brush, most of the other houses on the street either torn down, burned-out or boarded up, like so much of Detroit.
Anyway, just a bit more Hooker lore!
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Post by Admin on Apr 16, 2013 10:43:44 GMT -5
Another great DADFAD story....thanks John. groupwave
I've told my John Lee Hooker story a few times before, but I'll add it here.
I was at a little catfish joint just outside Holly Springs back in the 60's enjoying some fried catfish, hushpuppies and a pitcher of redeye. Back then, most places hadn't heard of integration unfortunately, or if they had, the black community was still a little hesitant to mingle with the white folks. I heard some music coming from out back of that joint, so I took my pitcher of redeye and wandered around the parking lot (actually just bare dirt that cars had wore down over the years) to see what was going on. There were these three black musicians playing some of the best music I had ever heard.
I sat there dumbfounded at just how great these guys were playing. The one song I particularly remember was "Boogie Chillen". Just the three guys playing guitars and one pounding out the rhythm with his foot stomping. While I'm sitting there, drinking my redeye and taking this in, one of the singers comes over and asks what I'm drinking. I tell him it's redeye. He goes back over to the others and asks if they have any whiskey. One reaches into his pocket and pulls out a pint of Old Granddad and gives it to the other. He then walks over to me and pours him a dixie cup full of my redeye...proceeds to pour about a half of the pint of whiskey into the glass and goes back to his guitar. Yells out, now white boy, that's how you drink a bloody mutherfuc**er.
I sat there for about an hour listening to these three jamming away with the best damn blues I've ever heard. As I got up to leave, the owner of the joint came up and said, do you know who you were just listening to? I said, no, but whoever they are, they are the best blues singers I've ever heard. The owner said, you got that right, That's Fred McDowell, R. L. Burnside and John Lee Hooker. A lot of record labels would give their right arm (or was it nut ) to be able to record what you just heard.
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Post by dadfad on Apr 16, 2013 10:57:57 GMT -5
Great story, Jim! Must have been tremendous. And doesn't it always work out (in those pre-cell phone days) that ya never had a recorder when ya need one? LOL
(I met R.L. myself in a little studio in Holly Springs back in the mid-90s.)
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Post by Deleted on Apr 17, 2013 13:14:51 GMT -5
Kind of amazing how some of us are separated by just 15-20 years but the stories chronologically and Geographically made all our back rounds in music different yet we all ended up HERE !!!
Some of you saw guys like JOHN LEE and I was lucky to meet the STONES, other hero;s of the 60-80';s
I would have loved to have met John Lee but I am sure there are many who wished they saw JANIS or JIMI or met BB KING and BUDDY GUY like I was lucky to......
The blues does more than attract us to the music it bring us together like some unspoken fraternity.
JAMES
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Post by dadfad on Apr 17, 2013 15:20:29 GMT -5
Kind of amazing how some of us are separated by just 15-20 years but the stories chronologically and Geographically made all our back rounds in music different yet we all ended up HERE !!!
Some of you saw guys like JOHN LEE and I was lucky to meet the STONES, other hero;s of the 60-80';s
I would have loved to have met John Lee but I am sure there are many who wished they saw JANIS or JIMI or met BB KING and BUDDY GUY like I was lucky to......
The blues does more than attract us to the music it bring us together like some unspoken fraternity.
JAMES You're right, James. Being an old-guy now at least means having some good memories. Like you, I got to see and meet some of the 60s rock-guys back then too. I've seen Big Brother, Airplane, Blue Cheer, Spirit, Jimi, the Who, Steppenwolf, Zep, CS&N, Stones, Beatles (if you want to count nose-bleed seats glimpsing and hearing four "ants" waaaay down below for maybe thirty seconds before total pandemonium broke out and you couldn't see anything and all you could hear was girls screaming! LOL), and lots of others. And met a few too... Janis, Grace, Eric, Sly, Rod (total jerk-wad), Felix, Iggy, etc. Even opened for a few (as the kind of no-name band everybody booed to get off stage so the "real band" could come on! LOL) like the Faces, Savoy Brown, the Airplane, Funkadelic (which was by far the most "professional" group of musicians I've ever seen), and virtually all of the "Detriot-scene" bands of that era. (Us and the Alice Cooper Band flipped a coin to see who would open for who first at a Friday-Saturday two-night gig at a club in a Detroit suburb! LOL Obviously before they became famous!) "Those were the days, yes they were. Those were the days... Miracles everywhere, where are they now. They're gone..." But lots of great memories... Me and Grace after a gig
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Post by steve on Apr 22, 2013 16:17:51 GMT -5
Great thread chaps- loving the stories.
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Post by Admin on Jan 4, 2014 9:49:00 GMT -5
Here's a great performance by John Lee Hooker accompanied by a saxophone
and one of JLH's gospel songs. He performed with the "Big Six" and "Fairfield Four" early in his life.
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Post by AlanB on Jan 4, 2014 11:18:45 GMT -5
That is one of the coolest versions I ever heard, of "Will th Circle be Unbroken". When I am off my voice rest........ Good isn't it? Recorded Chicago, 4 January 1961, this remained unlisted until 1980 when it was released on a US Dynasty LP which contained other unknown VeeJay Hooker recordings.
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Post by billf on Jan 4, 2014 12:12:21 GMT -5
Saw John Lee Hooker just once - in a club in Leeds, UK in the 60s. It was a small room with an audience of about 30 and 2 or 3 couples dancing. The backing group was the Yardbirds, who seemed very youthful to me, although I was only about 25!
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