"Tried a slide once, didn't like it," John Lee Hooker is saying as he fondles one of his treasured Les Pauls. "Tried a thumb pick, but it didn't work for me. All I used was these."
Hooker strums the instrument with his fingers, his enormous thumb bending backward as though it were made out of rubber instead of sinew and bone. "Broke this once playing baseball," he says, wiggling a pinky. "I was a catcher.
I thought I was pretty good, but I always knew I'd play music. Always knew that."
Tutored on guitar by his stepfather, a blues man named Will Moore who played with Charley Patton and other Delta greats, Hooker forged a unique style that had little to do with the traditional Delta sound. Moore favored one-chord drones and appropriated boogie-woogie piano grooves that he would augment by tapping both feet, often fracturing the sanctity of the 12-bar form in the process. It was a sound that captivated the young John Lee, who absorbed and then expanded upon it.
"I can play the changes if I want to play the changes. I know what I'm doing," Hooker says, fixing a visitor with his gaze. "But I don't follow no book." Instead he points to his head, and then his heart. "My book is in here, and here."
Roy Rogers, Hooker's longtime friend and frequent producer, broke in with Hooker's live band and quickly learned "that if you think straight 12-bar blues with John you have a serious problem. He takes the music as far as he can and he leads with his voice, and much of it is improvised on the spot. Blues is really a music about how you feel, and John embodies that."
By Greg Kot and Tribune Rock Critic / Chicago Tribune
Photo by Paul Natkin
Source Don’s Tunes (Flikkbok)
go on pay him a visit it’s fascinating and you just missed a piece on Jack Bruce taking the piss out of Eric Calpton’s perm so he looked like your Auntie Ivy - twat!
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