LITMIR.BIZ

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always something cooking in Archie’s tiled, open-plan kitchen. Only on particular ceremonial occasions are meals consumed at any particular set time; sometimes it seems as if the entire day consists of people wandering in and out helping themselves to microwaved leftovers from the previous evening’s feast, or improvised snacks from the fridge, or to the freshly prepared delicacies du jour. The cuisine is the kind of Southern soul food that you don’t get in restaurants, the kind of stuff you only ever get to taste if you’re fortunate enough to get your knees under the table of someone who learned their culinary chops down home. There’s cornbread to die for. Fish, baked in foil, fresh from the Bay. Ribs from heaven. Chicken from hell. A colander of turnip greens sprinkled with chunks of fatback done . . . just . . . right. Peach or pun’kin pie. Mmmmwah! (The one thing you’ll never find on the menu chez Hooker, though, is lamb. You’d be more likely to find beef served in a Hindu home, or pork at a Muslim’s table. For John Lee and Archie, both raised as Baptists, the lamb is quite literally holy, and to cook and eat its meat would be utter anathema, a blasphemous offence against the Lamb of God.) Some times Archie, in affectionate exasperation, wishes out loud that he could plan his menus far enough ahead to allow him to do a week’s worth of shopping at one time, but John Lee only decides what he wants to eat about two or three hours before he’s fixing to be ready to eat it. Sometimes even then he changes his mind, and a raiding party gets dispatched to ‘The Colonel’s’ – that’s Kentucky Fried Chicken, to folks not born and raised in the South – for buckets of chicken and fries and mashed potato and biscuits and gravy.

      And it’s warm. Somewhere along the line, Hooker developed a marked aversion to being cold, and – as someone raised in the heat of the South – he defines ‘cold’ very differently from those accustomed to cooler climes. Sometimes the temperature in the Hooker home reaches the eighties. ‘Well, I lived in Detroit so long in the winter that when I come out here I was used to the heat,’ he explains. ‘Back in Detroit it didn’t bother me at all, cold weather. I used to shovel my car out, take my kids to school. Got out here, I just . . . I guess my blood got thin. Don’t like cool weather no more.’

      Everything’s laid back at John’s house. It’s mellow. Everything’s cool. Everything’s easy, just the way John likes it. There’s no hustle, no hurry-up. Everything happens when it’s supposed to: not earlier, not later. The only surprises are pleasant ones. No-one shouts at any body else. No-one quarrels with anybody else. No-one gets angry or uptight or loud. There are comparatively few house rules, and as long as those rules are obeyed, everybody has a good time, all the time. Anyone can take a drink – they can help themselves to a little nip from John’s well-stocked liquor cabinet, or if they so desire they can fetch in a case of beer or a bottle of wine from one of the nearby stores – but noticeable intoxication is frowned upon, and regular display of its symptoms constitutes grounds for withdrawal of visiting privileges. Ever since John Lee himself abandoned tobacco, under no circumstances does anybody smoke in the house. John Lee’s health in general (and his increasingly delicate throat in particular) is the house hold’s most precious asset, and therefore a total-exclusion smoke-free zone is rigorously maintained within the four walls. However, if you should happen to crave a cigarette, all you got to do is step over the threshold, and then you can smoke to your heart’s content. Similarly, it’s not a major problem if a visitor feels like enhancing the joys of a warm summer evening by blowing a little weed in the back yard, but anybody foolish enough to bring serious drugs anywhere near the premises will find themselves under extremely heavy manners. That shit has done too much damage to too many of John’s nearest and dearest for it to be anything but banned. Above all, Hooker’s Law states that anybody who steps into the house is required to display courtesy and respect to everybody else on the set.

      ‘I’m a crawlin’ king snake,’ sings Hooker in one of his signature songs, ‘and I rules my den.’ How does he rule his real-life den? Like a benevolent patriarch who issues few direct orders anymore, because his wants and needs are so clearly established that they no longer need to be stated. The only thing he lacks is privacy: his door is literally always open. Like this one time, a few months later: John was sitting on the sofa chatting to an acquaintance, laughing over some of the misconceptions surrounding him and his career, and the degree of attachment which many people bring to pet misconceptions, based on an over-literal assumption that all Hooker’s lyrics are directly autobiographical. The one about the freight train, for example, from ‘Hobo Blues’. That’s one of Hooker’s most affecting performances, the one that begins ‘When I first started hoboin’, I took a freight train to be my friend, oh lord . . .’ And ever since he cut it, it’s been trotted out as an article of faith that Hooker spent years as a hobo, riding the blinds on the Southern freights. ‘I never rode a freight train!’ he insists, laughing.

      ‘Oh John, it’s such a great story,’ replies the acquaintance. ‘How can you spoil it for everyone?’

      ‘I would never spoil it,’ ripostes Hooker, laughing all the harder. ‘Go right ahead and say it! That’ll ruin they ego, they illusions. Tell ’em I rode all over the world, freight trains here, there . . . got shot on freight trains, broke my leg on freight trains . . . tell ’em all that! They likes all that!’

      ‘Tell ’em you robbed a freight train,’ interposes Martin Thompson, lounging in a nearby armchair. Martin is a big, iron-pumped guy with a droopy moustache, a lazy grin and a deadpan sense of humour. He started out as a handyman, doing some work on one of John’s houses, and the two men hit it off to the extent that Martin graduated to being John’s deputy driver and occasional bodyguard. He and Archie are taking a beer-cooled break from the arduous task of varnishing the hardwood floor of the living room’s lower level, when suddenly a truck door slams outside.

      ‘Oh God,’ breathes Hooker. ‘Jeff.’

      We’re calling this particular guy Jeff because it’s not his real name. He’s one of those people Hooker just meets, and he seems to have become semi-permanent. It could have been at the vet’s surgery while getting some essential maintenance work done on Fluffy, because Jeff’s dog had been run over by a careless driver and needed considerable veterinary work, and Hooker – who likes to think of himself as being tough and hard-headed about money but in fact seems to end up putting his hand in his newly capacious pocket for the benefit of at least half the people he knows – wound up footing the pooch’s bills. Bearded, plaid-clad, long-haired, baseball-capped Jeff is hugely amiable and essentially harmless, but undeniably a touch on the weird side. For example, he has this story that he regularly insists on telling: apparently before they got famous the Beatles flew John Lee to London for a whole year so that he could teach them guitar, and it was only after John Lee thought they were ready that they made their first records. So why hasn’t this story ever been told before? Easy; it was hushed up. And they paid John a lot of money not to tell anybody.

      So here’s Jeff tramping up the front garden path and before you know it, there’s a whole family of complete strangers standing over John in his sofa, and a thickset blind guy is shaking hands with John, telling him that he’s been a big, big fan since forever and it’s a real thrill. Seems Jeff met these people somewhere, mentioned that he knew John, asked if they felt like meeting him, and here they are. So they all shake hands, and then John tells Jeff that he’s busy – which he’s not, particularly – and that they’ll all get together soon. And so Jeff leads them all out again.

      ‘This kid Jeff, he’s a nice kid but he’s a pest,’ sighs Hooker once the coast is clear, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. ‘You know me, I’m a very easy-going, quiet person. I’m just a softie. I don’t tell ’em to go to hell or get out or nothin’; I don’t do that. A lotta stars, they couldn’t even get in the house, but I’m not like that. That blind guy, he really nice. A lot of ’em nice. This Jeff kid nice. They all be nice. But . . .’

      Exactly. But. John Lee – as he never tires of repeating – loves people. All people. All kinds of people. People in general, and people in particular. But . . . that doesn’t necessarily mean that he wants all of them in his house, all the time. However, sometimes that’s what he gets. So, while we’re briefly looking ahead to spring, imagine

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