Release Date: 19 November, 1996
Audio CD
Tracks
- I'm Bad Like Jesse James
- She's Long, She's Tall (She Weeps Like a Willow Tree)
- When My First Wife Left Me
- Heartaches and Misery
- One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer
- I Don't Want No Trouble
- I'll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive
- Seven Days and Seven Nights
- What's the Matter Baby
- Lucille
- Boogie Everywhere I Go
- It Serves Me Right to Suffer
- Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang
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Rating 4.5
What an incredible man!It's hard not to get shivers when listening to this recording. John Lee Hooker had such an incredible voice and it's as if his singing and playing encapsulates all misery imaginable. He extracted so much emotion from these songs that made me feel as though I'd actually lived the experience. It's so incredibly painful to listen to in places that I expected the heavens to open up in response. This is a man who knew what he was doing.
The band is in top form and John Lee uses them to get the crowd rocking as he works his magic. Everything is spot-on! From slow, painful numbers to upbeat, rollicking shuffles, John Lee Hooker and his band can do it all.
This is a landmark album that shows a man (and a band) at the top of their game and it's something no self-respecting blues fan should be without! You'd have to be dead not to be affected by this!Artistry, Innovacation, Creative work by a sensitive genius Like too many blues artists, Hooker tends to be reduced to a primitivist stereotype. Rather than being a creative artist whose depth of spirit, intellect, music and poetry create a new power and product with his music, he is misinterpreted as some kind of relict of an older or truer blues tradition. Rather than a real artist, he is dehumanized as the real thing! Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could minimize his artistry more.
Hooker's music falls into the generation of the R & B bluesmen of the late 1940s who brought the stream of music from the Delta--Johnny Lee being from Clarksdale--to the North, Muddy Waters to Chicago, Johnny Lee to Detroit. Johnny's music, particularly his music from the late 1940s and 1950s when he was popular not among white ex folkies or whites who think they love the blues, but in the Black community, is impossible to understand outside of the context of postwar R & B, not the initial delta blues. The dance rhythm that proceeds from Boogie Chillun, King Snake, Boom Boom Boom, wouldn't have worked in a 1920s Juke Joint. It belongs someplace like Henry's Swing Club where a rockin' rhythm is coming from the attempt to combine the power of swing with the rock of the blues that created R & B in the 1940s.
Hooker was a highly sophisticated musician who developed his own off-shoot from the traditional trajectory of blues artists. Starting with the great female blues stars and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the direction of blues has been to harmonize the essential modal African-based musics of the blues.
Hooker took the music in an entirely different method, by returning to the modal base of the music. To do so he essentially goes away from the tendency of blues musicians to develop the music into a band music. He solves the problem of filling the sound that had become expected without the harmonizing basis for different instruments to work together in a band by technological innovation, not tradition. He was the first bluesman to take full advantage of the ability of electric guitars and amplifiers to do more than make the sound of a guitar louder. He used the settings on guitar, amplified, and recording studio to create a new and different sound, and used the amplification to fill the spaces in the music others would need bands to fill. This decision was really in the vanguard of the electric guitar revolution in blues, rock, country, and all popular music that exploded in the 1950s and has yet to end.
Hooker with accompanying musicians and bands. Some of the best sides came when he was recorded not with other blues players but with some of the top Jazz players in the late 1950s. His modal music, excellent timing, free form improvisation and general cool made his records sell not only among blues players but Jazz lovers back in the day. This speaks to how advanced his rhythmic sense really was. There was also a confluence between Hooker and some of the most advanced Jazz players of the late 1950s and 1960s who sought similar modal solutions to the problems of jazz improvisation.
Get this, and then get everything else Hooker Did. My favorites are the recordings he did in the 1960s for Vee-Jay a Black owned record company that produced him as a quality artist with great soundwork and free selection of his material. Hooker is really an electric artist, so some of the sides cut during the 1960's "folk revival" where he's made to play an acoustic are kind of an insult to his artistry and history, though like everything Hooker did,they were great music.
Again, you can't go wrong with this or anything else by Johnnie Lee. A Real TransformationDespite Hooker being in his prime and having a great band at the Cafe Au Go-Go, I found the tracks from his performance there tepid. It sounds like he was trying to tone down his act for an ofay audience. Really - it's not a lively performance. So, that part of the disc gets three stars.However, the tracks from Soledad Prison are scalding. "What's the Matter, Baby", "Boogie Everywhere I Go" and "Bang, Bang, Bang, Bang" in particular absolutely cook. That part of the disc gets five stars. |
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