Funky Lee Hooker

I was looking for my gardening gloves (!) yesterday and way at the back of my garage I found a box of half a dozen or so compilation CDs I had made up a few years ago. They’ve been in the garage since I moved house 2 years ago and I had forgotten all about them. Needless to say I was delighted with my wee find and I spent yesterday afternoon rooting through my weeds and rooting through my CDs in search of ‘new’ music.

So….here’s 2 tracks by the mighty John Lee Hooker. Both called ‘Homework’, both different in their own way. They may even be 2 versions of the same song, but I’m not sure! The first comes on like Sly & The Family Stone, with a great swampy bassline and a lyric possibly about cheatin’ on his woman, the second sounds more like James Brown, with a clipped Jimmy Nolen-esque guitar riff and a lyric this time about coming home and finding someone else teaching his old lady a thing or two about the finer things in life. The first version comes with added vinyl crackles and pops from 1971’s ‘Free Beer And Chicken’ album. The second I have from a 1992 Point Blank promo CD, although I think it was released around this time as a b-side to a re-released version of ‘Boom Boom’.

Cool

And that’s really all I know about these tracks except to say that they make me dance on my tiptoes. Up until now, Stevie Wonder‘s ‘Superstition’ and ‘Upside Down’ by Diana Ross have been the only 2 records capable of making me do this. John Lee Hooker has an incredible back catalogue, but it’s a bit of a mine field. What’s good? What’s bad? What’s essential? Many compilations feature re-recorded versions of older tracks – by 1960 he had released over 100 singles! It’s not surprising that many of these tracks were re-cut as movers ‘n shakers like John Hammond, Bob Dylan, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, etc etc blah blah blah worshipped at his impeccably dressed feet. If you’d like to get deeper into him, you could do worse than visit this site. It has everything you need and probably a whole lot more.