| David Vest | |||
| John Lee Hooker | |||
Whose Bob Dylan? |
It was perhaps the shortest interview I would ever conduct. We were backstage down under the viaduct in Birmingham at a club called the Pussycat A-Go-Go. I couldn't believe I was talking to John Lee Hooker, and I'm afraid it showed. By this time I had already met and performed with a number of celebrities. I had been in a dressing room with Roy Orbison, shook Carter Stanley's hand, and discussed Dr. Strangelove with Slim Pickens. Mere fame would no longer have impressed me. People had stopped seeming more real to me simply because I had seen them on television or in films. But this was different. This was as close as I had ever been to the source of all the music I loved most. John Lee Hooker's records sounded older than time, blacker than coal dust, rawer than an open wound, and deeper than anything they were teaching me in college. I looked at him standing there, dressed in a dark suit, arms folded, leaning against a table, and thought about the cover of the first Hooker album I'd ever seen, the one called I'm John Lee Hooker, with the picture of an old stove and a coal bucket on the front. I thought about the radio station in Huntsville that used to give me all his records because they were considered too "primitive" for airplay. (They wouldn't play Gene Vincent, either.) I recalled a night in the Florida Panhandle, during a jam session with members of the Dorsey Orchestra (Lee Castle's edition), when a sax man asked me what I wanted to play next. "Do you know anything by John Lee Hooker?" I asked, as innocent as you can still be at 17. "We don't play hillbilly music, kid," came the reply. It seemed for years that I couldn't get anyone else I knew interested in John Lee's music. When I first started playing in bands, the guitar players didn't like his records because there was nothing on them they could imitate. They could learn to sound just like a Jimmy Reed or a Bo Diddley record, but they couldn't get anywhere near John Lee's sound. I think that's still true today. I can go to any jam session and find no shortage of players (in fact there are far too many of them) all too eager to present a passable imitation of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Albert Collins, Buddy Guy, or Eric Clapton. Occasionally I run across a Mark Knopfler or even a Roger McGuinn clone. But I rarely hear anybody even try to sound like John Lee. I suppose guitar players have sense enough to know that his music is unplayable by anyone but him. But it isn't just his guitar playing. I have often wondered why sax players don't try to play the lines he sings. A tenor player who could play what John Lee sings on a late masterpiece called "Highway 13" would get hired on the spot in my band. Anyway, there he was, waiting for my question, so I told him some of this in a long-winded nervous way and concluded by informing him that I had listened to a lot of blues and as far as I could tell, he was The Man. "That's right," he said. |