Word: hooker
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...John Lee Hooker, blues master, is dead. I remember talking to Hooker just a few years back. I had called him up to interview him about his latest album. Even over the phone his voice had a sonorousness that had one reaching for nature metaphors in order to describe it: echoes in underground caverns, waves booming against shorelines, thunder rolling overhead. Hooker was 79 then, and his health was starting to fail. I asked if he planned to do any touring anytime soon. "I'll go out once in a while," Hooker told me. He added: "I've paid...
...Like the sea, like the sky, like a pair of Levi's, like that Miles Davis song, Hooker was all blues. In fact, Miles once said that Hooker was so infused with the sound of the Delta that he described the bluesman as "buried up to his neck in mud." Hooker wasn't all blues all by himself: there was Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton before him, B.B. King and Muddy Waters right there with him, and many, many performers after him. Early in their careers, the Rolling Stones opened for Hooker. Early in his career, Bob Dylan shared...
...Hooker was born in 1917 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, a town where the soil was richer than many of the residents. He came from sharecropping folk, the kind that worked hard and prayed harder - his father was also a minister. Hooker's parents split up when he was young and his mother moved in with William Moore, who became Hooker's stepfather. God's agents had their chance, and now it was time for the Devil's music. Moore taught the young sharecropper's son how to do something else with his hands other than harvest crops - he taught...
...When Hooker was a teen he headed north, part of the great migration of black folks looking for jobs, and he started to make his name as a performer. Several names, in fact - Hooker played under a variety of nicknames and pseudonyms, including John Lee Booker and Johnny Lee and Texas Slim and Boogie Man. He also played all sorts of venues, from juke joints and dive bars to festivals and fish fries. He lived in Detroit for a time, and he worked in an auto plant by day and churned out the blues by night...
...disco and new wave. But if rock is good at two things, it's dying and coming back to life. And so last month Weezer found itself making its debut at No. 4 on the Billboard charts, its video for Hash Pipe--an eccentric, grinding single about a transvestite hooker--breaking onto MTV's Total Request Live. Last week Break the Cycle (Flip Records/Elektra), an angsty slab of dysfunction-metal from Staind, entered the charts at No. 1, selling a surprising 716,000 copies in one week. Right behind it was Lateralus (Tool Dissectional/Volcano), from arty gloom rockers Tool, which...