Boogie Man Read Online Free PDF

unbutton his waistcoat. Soon he settles into his folding chair, unleashes fusillades of deep blue notes from his much-travelled Gibson
guitar, and chants his Mississippi soliloquies into incongruously blazing sunshine. He is rapturously received by a thoroughly broiled audience, many of whom should be discouragedfrom ever appearing in public in swimwear, and a tiny proportion of whom should never appear in anything else. Halfway through the show, Hooker sends the group down from the stage and
brings on his longtime friend John Hammond, a tall, patrician singer/guitarist who is the son and namesake of the great talent scout who recorded everybody from Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday to
Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen. Armed with an old steel-bodied guitar and a harmonica, Hammond accompanies Hooker as he sings ‘Highway 13’ from the new record: ‘ And it rained,
it rained so hard ,’ sings Hooker, ‘ I couldn’t hardly see the road. ’ Even without the sympathetic brushed drums – soothingly shushing like windscreen wipers
– which anchor the song on record, it requires a positive effort of will to remember that we’re sitting in ninety-plus temperatures under a burnished, cloudless sky, rather than huddled
in a car, locked in a tiny, scudding bubble of dry warmth as a storm pounds on windows and roof. But Hooker is only nominally here with us under the Newport sun; his heart and mind are somewhere
else, where things are very different, muscling an automobile through punishing rain. And such is the strength of his spell that he can carry us with him: to overpower our experience with his.
    As it turns out, the devastation he’s evoking is not to so much somewhere else as some when else. Hurricane Bob was still a day away when Hooker hits Newport, and twenty-four hours
later, New England would be practically underwater. The fine weather is still holding as Hooker heads back to New London, but come morning the pressure begins to build, as the limo noses through
Long Island under gunmetal skies, en route to the Wantagh resort of Jones Beach. The ensemble is decanted into a courtyard ringed with small, cell-like dressing-rooms: Hooker and his crew here,
Etta James and her team next door, the Robert Cray Band across the way, and B.B. King’s posse somewhere over there . Hooker’s has a puddly shower as its annex: Cupp and Fischer,
who use it as their changing-room, must be grateful for theirhigh-heeled shoes. The bands and crew, preparations more or less complete, lounge around the courtyard, chomping
their way through the backstage catering, and beginning to shiver in their summer clothes. Outside, Hurricane Bob is closing in on the New York area, and the blues lovers of Wantagh, Long Island,
huddle damply and resentfully in their rainwear, awaiting performances by Hooker, King, Cray and the gargantuan James, and slapping irritably at the clouds of mosquitos which boil around them,
intoxicated by the scent of fresh prey. The air is thick and humming with the sense that something is about to happen. ‘They don’t give this old boy nuthin ’,’
complains Hooker, reclining mock-mournfully on his dressing-room sofa. ‘No radio, no TV, can’t watch no baseball . . .’
    The show is the standard set which Hooker and his gentlemen and ladies performed the day before, and the day before that, but this time it’s different. The Newport show, apart from that
stunning performance of ‘Highway 13’, was sunny , in every sense of the word; this one is stormy, ominous, full of foreboding. Cupp’s curtain-raising ‘Cold Cold
Feeling’ is as appropriate a prologue as any novelist or movie director could have chosen, and she rises to the occasion: singing her heart out before striding back to the wings through the
mosquitoes, chest heaving, as Hooker emerges to commence the main event. This time, he rides the building storm to the final explosive boogie climax. Afterwards, the team dissolves into its