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Amazing footage of John Lee Hooker and the Groundhogs in 1964
04.02.2018
09:08 am
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John Lee Hooker and the Groundhogs

John Lee Hooker was a guest on the BBC2 music show The Beat Room in 1964. His band at the time, the Groundhogs, had only recently started playing the blues at the suggestion of their new guitarist, Tony McPhee, who had also renamed the group after one of Hooker’s songs.

They meet their hero in the second paragraph of the bio at Groundhogs HQ:

Tony and the band played all of the gigs on the blossoming blues circuit and then backed Hooker on the final week of his first British tour. John liked the band so much that he always asked for them to back him on British tours and preferred to travel with them in their Commer van. In an interview of the time he called them the ‘number one British blues band’.

Hooker and the Hogs’ studio recordings from this period have been issued under many different titles, but they first appeared in the US on the 1966 Verve Folkways album ...And Seven Nights. The song they are tearing up below, “I’m Leaving,” was not one of these, but a terrifying single Hooker cut for Vee-Jay in ‘63. (They also played “Boom Boom” on The Beat Room; there’s a kinda low-res clip of the whole appearance here.)

Paul Freestone’s biography of Tony (TS) McPhee, Eccentric Man, is available from the author.
 

Posted by Oliver Hall
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04.02.2018
09:08 am
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STOP what you’re doing! We found more bad-ass live footage of John Lee Hooker that you MUST see
10.02.2017
09:22 am
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John Lee Hooker
 
In 2015, we strongly urged you, the reader, to drop whatever you were doing and watch this amazing live footage of John Lee Hooker. Many of you rightly heeded our advice, resulting in one of the most popular Dangerous Minds posts of the last few years. The video clips in that post are from a 1970 TV broadcast of Detroit Tubeworks, which was shot on the campus of Wayne State University in Detroit. Hooker moved to the Motor City in the late 1930s, and, beginning in the late 1940s, recorded all of his initial classic tunes (including his debut, “Boogie Chillin’”) at United Sound, which is a stone’s throw from Wayne’s campus.

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of John Lee Hooker’s birth (he was born on August 22, 1917). With an event held on the day of the centennial, the Detroit Sound Conservancy celebrated by making JLH their first Hall of Fame inductee. It was the only happening in the city supported by the Hooker estate (I’m on the Board of Directors at the DSC).
 
Fantasy photo
 
Another estate-sanctioned undertaking that’s been in the works is a new John Lee Hooker boxed set. Due on October 6th, King of the Boogie is a 100 track, 5 CD set spanning his entire career, with rare tracks and a disc of live recordings, plus a 56 page book. Various bundles are available to pre-order in the store on the official John Lee Hooker site. The standard edition of the box is on Amazon.
 
King Of The Boogie
 
One of John Lee’s most famous numbers is “Boom Boom,” a #1 R&B hit from 1961. It was written in Detroit and inspired by a phrase regularly directed at him before gigs at a local venue. This place, like United Sound, is a Detroit music landmark.

“I come in the club that night – they called it Apex Bar. I was playing there every weekend. And every night there’d be a girl in there. Her name was Willa. She was a bartender. I never would be on time; I always would be late comin’ in. And she kept saying, ‘Boom, boom – you late again.’ Every night: ‘Boom, boom – you late again.’ I said, ‘Hmm, that’s a song!’ I put it together and I was playin’ it there in the club before I recorded it. People would really get up and go wild when I played that song. They would get on their feets and holler, ‘That’s a great song, man.’ I recorded it, and it just took off like wildfire.” (from the King of the Boogie liner notes, written by Jas Obrecht)

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Bart Bealmear
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10.02.2017
09:22 am
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You HAVE to see this live footage of John Lee Hooker from 1970. Really. Just drop what you’re doing.
01.27.2015
01:28 pm
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Early ‘70s Detroiters were fortunate to have a still-thriving auto industry, the Motown scene, tons of badass underground rock bands, and on top of all that, they had WABX’s music TV show Detroit Tubeworks. That awesome footage you’ve seen a million times of Captain Beefheart doing “Woe-Is-Uh-Me-Bop” is from that show, as is approximately a shit-ton of other brilliant material from the post-hippie/pre-punk era. Perfect Sound Forever has a great post about the show’s history.

Tubeworks was one monster of a music TV show. These shows were (and are) mean enough to make the entire staff and stockholders of both MTV and VH-1 start crying and hide in the bathroom. And to boot, Tubeworks was on an early version of analog cable TV. Detroit Tubeworks was a superb example of what was really good in 1969-1974 in rock and roll. It all makes you wonder what would happen if rock and roll on TV in the ‘70’s and the ‘80’s had followed Tubeworks’ lead. Detroit Tubeworks definitely relieved the doldrums of “just the five or six channels we had otherwise then. It was really the only place where we could SEE for ourselves the jams getting kicked out by a righteous bunch of motherfuckers.

Over the weekend, the Detroit alt-weekly Metro Times dug up some incredible footage from Tubeworks of none other than the man who brought electric guitar to Delta blues and brought Delta blues to Detroit, John Lee Hooker. I can’t find the exact date of the filming or broadcast, but it’s sometime in 1970, and there’s a generous 21 and a half minutes of footage. The video is degraded, but the sound is terrific. Per the Metro Times post:

This video features two of Hooker’s own kids plus legendary percussionist Muruga Booker. It was shot in the studio in 1970 for the local Tube Works show. Make sure you turn your device up loud before you hit play on this thing. Hooker was tuned in to a cosmic frequency of electric boogie drone, after all.

 

 

Posted by Ron Kretsch
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01.27.2015
01:28 pm
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