Boss Tracks, Boom Boom, John Lee Hooker

Though Springsteen probably first got acquainted with this gem through the Animals, I decided to pick John Lee Hooker's original over Eric Burdon's straight forward cover of the song. We'll get to the Animals some other time. Like so many of those 45s a great piece of music history is attached to this one on various levels. The most obvious level is because of Hooker's own pivotal role in the redevelopment of Blues. His characteristic droning, one chord, Blues, redesigned the genre "Boogie Chillun" was released on Modern in 1948. With that single Hooker created a riff that would be recycled over and over again in R&R, most recently of course by Springsteen in his revamping of "Reason to Believe," some 60 years down the line. "Boogie Chillun" would become a million seller. Remarkable for a 45 that featured little more than John Lee's stomping feet and staccato guitar and vocals. Hooker's music worked on a very primary level which I imagine was quite a bit of the appeal when he was 'discovered' by the beat generation in the mid sixties. With one chord, Hooker's approach was basic enough ,and had more raw appeal to struggling and starting guitar players.

By the time John Lee Hooker was introduced to a broader audience and gained wider international appeal, he was one of Vee-Jay's biggest selling artists. Vee-Jay is most well known these days amongst Beatles collectors for those very hard to find first US Beatles 45s they released. Vee-Jay saw the potential in marketing a black sound brought by skinny white boys with funny hair-dos before anybody else in the US. Maybe the fact that Vee-Jay was a black owned R&B label, well before Motown came around, had something to do with that. Nobody had to explain the appeal of R&B to Vivian Carter Bracken. At the start of the fifties Vivian had been a popular local DJ who also owned her own record store. Even before starting in the record business, miss Bracken was a black feminist avant la lettre. Getting an own enterprise together in the segregated fifties of Gary Indiana makes her accomplishment even more inspiring. Vee-Jay was of to a flying start when the Brackens produced a huge R&B hit for The Spaniels with "Baby Its You." Soon after that the label decided to move their base of operations to Chicago, right across the street from Chess records, where they would play an almost as determining role in the development of R&R as the Chess brothers. Carrying both an excellent Gospel as an R&B roster, many of the great R&B artists kick started their career at Vee-Jay. Next to John Lee Hooker, amongst the artists who found their first success at Vee-Jay were Jerry Butler, The Impressions, The Swan Silvertones, the Staple Singers and the Blind Boys of Alabama.

It was at Vee-Jay that John Lee Hooker started fleshing out his style. Hooker started performing with a band and started to develop a more distinct electrified sound. Boom Boom even featured a horn section, which the Animals left out of their version, but Springsteen kept when he started playing the song regularly during the Tunnel of Love Express tour of '88, though adding a few more, with the Miami Horn section. By the time Springsteen covered "Boom Boom", it's original artists was all but forgotten until apparently out of nothing he scored a monster hit with Carlos Santana on guitar with '89's "The Healer". After that John Lee Hooker turned out to be one of the few Blues artists to sustain a comfortable level of success until his passing in 2001. The last years of his live Hooker lived in San Francisco, where he opened the Boom Boom Room, in '97. Today this club is still open, keeping the Blues legacy alive on stage.

John Lee Hooker
Available on The Very Best of John Lee Hooker

Bruce Springsteen

MP3 File