Review: John Lee Hooker - Travelin' (1960)

Tracks: 1) No Shoes; 2) I Wanna Walk; 3) Canal Street Blues; 4) Run On; 5) I’m A Stranger; 6) Whiskey And Wimmen; 7) Solid Sender; 8) Sunny Land; 9) Goin’ To California; 10) I Can’t Believe; 11) I’ll Know Tonight; 12) Dusty Road; 13*) Nightmare; 14*) Drive Me Away; 15*) Love Me All The Time; 16*) Bundle Up And Go.

REVIEW

In contrast to Hooker’s first LP for Vee-Jay, Travelin’ was mostly recorded over a single session in early March 1960, with Hooker accompanied by Jimmy Turner on drums, Sylvester Hickman on bass, and Lefty Bates on second guitar (Lefty had only recently become a session man for Vee-Jay, also playing with Jimmy Reed on ‘Baby What You Want Me To Do’, among other things). As you can probably tell, this does not bode too well for the record’s commercial potential — when John Lee Hooker gets in the mood, the mood tends to stay very much the same throughout his entire recording session, not to mention that he probably «composes» (or, more accurately, «re-creates») most of his new material on the spot. Sure enough, the album did not chart and yielded only one minor R&B hit single (‘No Shoes’) — but it is also clear that John Lee Hooker was very much in the mood while recording it, and it might be rewarding to try and attune oneself to the man’s frequency to get the most of it.

Importantly, there is a conceptual side to the record: it is not called Travelin’ for nothing — just look at all those song titles with the words ‘walk’, ‘go’, ‘run’, and ‘road’ in them, as well as references to all sorts of places from New Orleans to the state of California. Hooker is the kind of artist who is equally comfortable with a «sitting» / «tale-telling» mood, for which he usually (but not always) reserves his acoustic guitar, and a «walking» / «strutting» / «racing» mood, which is usually (but not always) represented by his electric playing — as it is on this record. Travelin’ finds him in a particularly dynamic state, and a good way to transcend its musical conservatism (most of these melodies, honestly, you have already heard in one way or another at least a few times each) is to imagine it as a coherent, «blues-operatic» travelog, telling you the story of a man who is chased from town to town by poverty, instability, and infidelity (his own or his partner’s, doesn’t really matter), but who also has the honesty to lay a large part of the responsibility on his own inner demons. In other words, this is the same old story of John Lee Hooker’s lyrical hero’s complicated relationship with the Devil, this time actually presented almost in the shape of an actual story, rather than randomly scraped together bits and pieces.

Once you settle into that perspective, it’s almost surprising that ‘No Shoes’ could have made it as a self-standing entry in the R&B charts — its actual musical content is fully exhausted within the opening eight seconds as you get acquainted with its two-chord grumbling blues riff. Granted, not a lot of electric guitarists at the time could reach such a clear and expressive emotional effect with such utmostly minimal means, but still, the song works better as a thematic setting: "No food on my table, no shoes to go on my feet / My children cry for mercy, Lord, they ain’t got no place to call their own" — which is, I guess, all the pretext one needs to just dump the children anyway and trudge off into the great American unknown. There is not an ounce of self-pity in the tune: all the emotions are purely animalistic. The riff growls and gnashes its teeth at you, and the vocals are that of a hunted animal prepared to defend itself, or at least to ensure itself some grounds for survival by getting the hell out of here, once and for all.

For that matter, the «great American unknown» is shown through the animal’s teeth just as well. In the hands of the average New Orleanian performer, ‘Canal Street Blues’ would probably be a celebration, guaranteed to put a smile on your face or at least die trying. For John Lee Hooker, ‘Canal Street Blues’ is just another slow, bleeding trudge that leaves the protagonist impressed in only one respect: "They tell me Canal Street is the longest street in town / You ride all day long, you’re still on Canal Street". There’s nothing New Orleanian about the song — it’s the look of a total outsider, furthermore, one who seems to measure everything in strict accordance with the quantity and quality of whiskey and women found therein. Judging by the relaxed, not-too-excited pace of the song, the protagonist would probably rate New Orleans about a 3 out of 10 on that particular scale.

Slowly, piece by piece, Hooker is drawing up here the most stereotypical, but quite true-to-life, portrait of the ramblin’ man turned penniless urban slicker — one minute he is sucking up to the local ladies to put him up for the night (‘I’m A Stranger’), the other minute he is putting down his country bumpkin of a girlfriend for refusing to let go of her cornbread ways in the big city (‘Sunny Land’). Eventually, we find him ‘Goin’ To California’ while also sending his baby back home because there’s no way he’s taking somebody who "looks good", but "won’t do right" back with him to the promised land... however, he still "ain’t goin’ down the big road by myself", as he declares at the end of the album (‘Dusty Road’), and "if you don’t wanna go, baby, I’m a-gonna take somebody else" because why the hell not?

Honestly, as I gaze intensely at these lyrics and try to follow these ragged rhythms, I keep getting the feeling that the entire album was conceived, «written» (figuratively speaking), and recorded in precisely those thirty minutes it takes to play it. I would indeed be glad if that were so, because any artist who can come up with an experience like this in no time flat is still a genius artist in my book. Yes, all the riffs (two or three of them) are recycled from past records — but the rhythm section very naturally adapts to them (particularly Hickman on bass, who understands very well what the «John Lee Hooker Growling Tone» is and always supplements it with his own). Yes, all the lyrics feel like they just floated through Hooker’s mind without any prior considerations — this is why the sequencing of some of the lines and verses makes no sense — but hey, what a mind, right? And somehow they still manage to coalesce in this musical portrayal of a human being, driven by the simple biological propensity to live — I mean, very few artists make you remember that deep down inside, we’re all just animals as efficiently as John Lee Hooker does. Nor is there any glorification of that fact: it’s simply told the way it is, as food for your own further thought. You get born, you grow up, you eat, you have sex, you gamble, you lose everything, you travel from town to town, you play your guitar, you live on just because Mother Nature told you to. From the modern point of view, all that’s missing is probably dying in a police choke hold — but John Lee Hooker was not a modern man, and he had nothing against spending about eighty years of his life in this mold.

If you want a memorable John Lee Hooker track from the Vee-Jay years, go for ‘Dimples’ or ‘Boom Boom’. But if you’re in the mood for a minimalistic, repetitive, «primitive» travelog that converts the most basic elements of life into art without a single flash of annoying pretense (that would be Bad Company, I’d say), Travelin’ is a good potential choice — far from the only one in Hooker’s extensive discography, but with the added benefit of catching the man in a small company of fine and understanding musical friends. His future bands would not always be on the exact same wave.

• Only Solitaire reviews: John Lee Hooker