Review: John Lee Hooker - Burnin' (1962)

Tracks: 1) Boom Boom; 2) Process; 3) Lost A Good Girl; 4) A New Leaf; 5) Blues Before Sunrise; 6) Let’s Make It; 7) I Got A Letter; 8) Thelma; 9) Drug Store Woman; 10) Keep Your Hands To Yourself; 11) What Do You Say.

REVIEW

John Lee Hooker goes Motown... well, not exactly, but it is a stated fact that for this particular session, all of which took place on one single day of October 26, 1961, our creepy bluesman found himself backed by a full-blown incarnation of «The Funk Brothers», a.k.a. Motown’s home studio band: Joe Hunter on piano, Larry Veeder on guitar, James Jamerson on bass, Benny Benjamin on drums, Hank Cosby and Mike Terry on saxophones — all of them traveling to Chicago to help Hooker produce one of his most critically revered and professionally recorded, if not necessarily best, albums.

If you suspected, even for one faint moment, that this was part of some subtle plot on the part of Vee-Jay bosses to give their bluesy diamond in the rough a more glossy, commercial sound, put it out of your mind: John Lee Hooker is not going to sing ‘Please Mr. Postman’ for you, and even if he did, he’d turn it into a menacing 12-bar groove that would have Mr. Postman wearing a bulletproof vest and running for his life. For better or worse, Hooker stays in total and absolute control from morning to evening, using his session players to get his own preferable kind of sound rather than allowing them to take the upper hand and lead him in some unfamiliar direction. Unfortunately, precisely because of that — and also because Hooker, unsurprisingly, brought no new musical ideas into the studio on that day — Burnin’ sounds exactly how you’d expect it to sound: a standard, predictable set of John Lee Hooker tunes, as played by a bunch of Motown musicians.

The one track here that made waves and became an immortal standard, cherished and coveted by all those young British rhythm’n’blues practitioners to the same extent as the earlier ‘Dimples’, was, of course, ‘Boom Boom’. The funny thing is that ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’ are, in fact, almost the same song — that little riff opening the song is but a slight variation on the riff of ‘Dimples’, and both songs serve the same purpose, cooking up a menacing, but sexy atmosphere of demonic possession. The big difference is that ‘Boom Boom’ uses a stop-and-start structure, giving the song more primal power through the alternation of the «boom-boom-boom-boom» rhythmic stomp and Hooker’s unaccompanied voice sucking in all attention. Subsequently, ‘Dimples’ is the sound of a grizzly old stalker, disturbingly eyeballing your ass as you’re walking down the street, minding your own business; ‘Boom Boom’ is a more direct, in-yer-face, stand-and-deliver performance that calls for immediate action. What’s cool about it, though, is that the stop-and-start structure, paired with lyrics like "I love to see you strut / Up and down the floor / When you talking to me", paints the song not merely as a hot-blooded all-out-masculine come on, but as an implied dialog between the singer and his equally eager mate — the «empty spaces» in the pause sections symbolize the presence of Hooker’s lady who’s actually goading the guy into action, because it’s clear that she wants it every bit as much as he does.

I must say, though, that the definitive performance of ‘Boom Boom’ ultimately belongs to The Animals — precisely because ‘Dimples’ is more of a «hidden menace» song while ‘Boom Boom’ lays all of its cards on the table, and where Hooker has few rivals for the former approach, he lacks the voice or attitude to go smash-the-windows, knock-out-doors-wild on those of his songs that are made for this style. From this point of view, Hooker’s ‘Boom Boom’ almost feels like a demo to me, amicably supplied for Eric Burdon to carry the song to its hellraising peak. I mean, he does a nice enough "whoah, yeah!" when the song finally lifts off into the jamming stratosphere, but it’s very timid and cautious next to Eric’s gut-rattlin’ "COME ON LET’S SHAKE IT!" three years later. Likewise, Larry Veeder’s quiet, silky handling of the guitar riff has nothing on Hilton Valentine’s nasty, distorted tone. And before purists come screaming at me with the usual dirty-white-boy argumentation, why not take a moment to think that, perhaps, the sly old Boogie Man was consciously writing something here specifically for all of his young Boogie Chillun to latch on to? It’s a song that literally screams COVER ME, COVER ME! like a frantic Bruce Springsteen on National Bandana Day.

Admittedly, only The Animals, of all British bands at the time, knew how to cover the song properly — The Yardbirds, for instance, had a very timid version as well. And even in its relative demo-like shape, it is still pretty much the only truly memorable highlight on the entire album, which otherwise consists of well-trodden John Lee Hooker grooves, the only big difference about them being that they are played by a Motown backing band. So you get a busy, multi-layered sound this time, with pianos and horns very prominent on most of the tracks, almost ruining Hooker’s reputation as a stark minimalist throughout — you could even build a case about the man selling out on this album, but I’m not entirely sure if Hooker himself would understand the concept, much less agree with it. He’s just doing something a little different, that’s all.

Serious talk about the strictly musical qualities of the record is just as impossible as ever, but by this time we must all have come to the realization that the only right way to digest Hooker’s continuous output is to treat it as a musical diary, or even newspaper, of sorts. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the man just walked into the studio on that day with a bunch of disconnected thoughts on everyday life in his head, then quickly set them to established themes and gave us this snippet of a middle-aged black man’s casual life in the city in late 1961. Then it becomes a curious and informative sociological document, with just enough additional entertainment value to keep the listener from being academically bored.

Like, case in point: ‘Process’ is four minutes of slow, repetitive hoochie-coochie blues groove, with even the brass players trying hard not to fall asleep throughout. But I had absolutely no idea what the lyrics meant — "I don’t want no woman, crazy ’bout a process head" — until a bit of research showed it most likely refers to a special «conk» hairstyle, used to straighten out curlies, and basically signifies an appearance-concerned African-American dandy, for the likes of which Hooker’s allegedly good woman seems to have fallen. Here, then, once again we have the subject matter of bright-lights-big-city-gone-to-my-baby’s-head, so pertinent in the songwriting style of the pioneers of New Urban Blues, bent on protecting their old Delta country ways from the metropolitan temptations of Chicago and New York. This knowledge did not exactly enliven the song, but brought it a little closer to home.

On ‘Lost A Good Girl’, which sounds exactly like a chugga-chugga Jimmy Reed number with extra saxes, Hooker becomes a process head himself, though a repentant one: "it’s all my fault, I didn’t do the things I should". On ‘A New Leaf’, which trods along with all the energy of a hoochie-coochie-man in the later stages of dementia, we are made aware of the current timeline: "1962, turn over a brand new leaf, all of’61, baby, I lived so bad". Somehow he thinks he’s going to start treating his woman better in 1962 — fat chance of that. On the suddenly energetic ‘Let’s Make It’, he’s apparently already turning over a brand new leaf: "let’s make it baby, right now, not your mother, not your sister, let’s get it, we’re gettin’ it, it’s good..." — one chord, one beat, one slogan, one desire, total commitment to this gloriously one-dimensional drive: Hooker continues to deconstruct and «essentialize» the blues idiom even with a full band playing behind his shoulder...

...which, come to think of it, is precisely why Burnin’ feels seriously frustrating at times: he got all those beautiful Motown musicians at his side, and they are commanded to just stick to two- or three-note repetitive phrases throughout. Even when the sax or guitar players take a solo, the solo has to be muffled, stick close to the root notes, and never, ever get carried away, like a dog on a really short leash; not to mention that, for instance, ‘Lost A Good Girl’, ‘Let’s Make It’, and ‘Thelma’ all have the same melody, and it’s the melody of ‘Maudie’ from I’m John Lee Hooker. The Funk Brothers may not have been the most inventive ensemble that ever lived, but I just can’t imagine them, you know, having much fun in the company of a guy like John Lee Hooker — although it certainly must have been quite an experience. They may also have been amazed at the man’s continuing appropriation of other people’s melodies: ‘Keep Your Hands To Your Self’, for instance, is a straight take on Bo Diddley’s classic groove, while ‘What Do You Say’ is essentially an improvised rewrite of Howlin’ Wolf’s ‘Howlin’ For My Darling’ — and I’m not sure if John Lee Hooker trying to sing like Howlin’ Wolf is a good idea. The two have their points of intersection, but Hooker’s ability to, well, howl is limited and comes across as less natural than Wolf’s. Was he jealous or something? He must have been a little jealous.

It goes without saying, too, that the system of values emerging from Hooker’s day-in-the-life tales of right and wrong can raise quite a few eyebrows in retrospect as well — just listen to the slow trod of ‘Drug Store Woman’: "I don’t want to know the drug store woman ... she in the drug store buying lipstick and powder... I want the kind of woman to stay home every day... Be home when I get there... My meal is on time, everything is on time..." I mean, you probably wouldn’t expect any other world view from the good son of a sharecropper / Baptist preacher, and/or you could always get away by saying this is just an ironic character impersonation, given Hooker’s sense of subtle dark humor and all. But we must not forget that, for all the fairly «modern» sound of Hooker’s output in the 1960s, this was a man born in frickin’ 1917 (or around that time, nobody really knows for sure) — much older than any of the new-school electric blues players, or rockabilly era heroes. (Then again, Muddy Waters was born in 1913, and he, of all people, sang about how "I don’t want you to be no slave, I don’t want you to work all day" — courtesy of Willie Dixon, of course, but still...).

Anyway, bottomline is that you might just as well call Burnin’ a concept album about the world being now in the hands of «process heads» and «drug store women» — a situation not entirely inapplicable, might I add, to the cultural sphere of the 2020s, where Mr. Hooker might have found quite a bit to rail about, had the good Lord expanded his lifespan to about 120 years or so. And regardless of how one feels about it, it’s the one fact about the album that gives it more personality than the entire multitude of The Funk Brothers. It’s a sort of «reality check», by somebody who is not bothered one bit by the necessity of making a commercial record — leave it to Mr. Hooker to turn one of the most commercially successful backing bands of all time into a bunch of musical drones, sub-servient to an overriding personality — nor gives one iota to the idea of «breaking new artistic ground» like all those hip young cats do. Just one middle-aged man’s critical look at the world around him as it prepares for the transition from 1961 to 1962.

I do believe that ‘Boom Boom’ is the only song from the LP to have transcended time and space; at least, it’s the only one that you typically find on budget-size JLH compilations. The rest really have very little value when listened to separately; but giving the LP one or two wholesome listens might make sense, just to get a good whiff of, let’s say, the «working man style» without all that witty literary poetry or all those exotic melodic inventions or anything «Artistic» with a capital A messin’ up the raw feeling. You’ll probably be bored to death along the way, but you’ll feel better knowing that a real man, made of flesh, blood, and fecal matter, is holding your hand throughout, not, I dunno, Frankie Avalon.

• Only Solitaire reviews: John Lee Hooker