(Blues / Electric Delta Blues) [CD] John Lee Hooker - Kabuki Wuki (Live) [1973]/Born In Mississippi, Raised Up In Tennessee [1973] - 2013, FLAC (image+.cue), lossless

#77701. Your Love (Just A Little Bit) 05:29
02. Hold It 00:46
03. Look At The Rain 08:25
04. My Best Friend 05:15
05. Hit The Floor 05:46
06. A Little Bit Higher 05:26
07. I Wonder Why 04:38
08. If You Got A Dollar 04:50

#77701. Born In Mississippi, Raised Up In Tennessee 05:57
02. How Many More Years You Gonna Dog Me Round 05:20
03. Going Down 09:18
04. Younger Stud 08:43
05. King Of The World 06:05
06. Tell Me You Love Me 06:00

During the early 1970s John Lee Hooker was the chief money-maker for ABC-Bluesway, and the company squeezed him like a juicer: between 1971 and '74 they extracted six LPs from the sexagenarian bluesman. Born In Mississippi, Raised Up In Tennessee was one of two (the other was Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive) that came out of a session at Wally Heider's studio on September 28-29, 1971, produced by Ed Michel. The tapes waited 18 months to be mixed, and the LP was released in 1973. Kabuki Wuki had been recorded, again under Michel's supervision, about six weeks before the Heider session (but with the Heider recording truck), during an all-night Impulsei-Bluesway bash at at the Kabuki Theatre in San Francisco. (The venue was located on Post Street between Webster and Fillmore. It retains its name but is now a movie multiplex.) These tapes too were put aside for more than a year before being mixed, and the LP also came out in 1973.
Born In Mississippi was set in the mould of the double LP Endless Boogie, recorded in late 1970 and produced by Michel and his colleague Bill Szymczyk. Many of the musicians were the same -Mel Brown, Cliff Coulter, Mark IMaftalin, Gino Skaggs, Ken Swank and others - and most of the tracks were similarly post-produced to segue into each other. The 1971 session, like its forerunner, was one where musicians were constantly •: changing, or giving up, their seats in the studio, but it was quite artfully reconstructed into a more or less continuous recital. Hooker's guitar drifts in
and out of the mix, leaving space for the piledriver horn section on the title track, the wailing violin parts of Sugarcane Harris or 'Going Down' and 'King Of The World', John Klemmer's wa-wa soprano sax on 'How Many More Years' and the same player's wailing tenor piercing the melee in 'Tell Me You Love Me'. 'Going Down' is notable for a couple of other details: at one point Hooker uses a rhyme, something he seldom did even when (as here) recording someone else's song; and in the closing couple of minutes he hands over the vocal role to Van Morrison, who was in the studio mainly to duet with him on the song 'Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive'.
Kabuki Wuki is presented almost as a seamless performance, which is perhaps how it felt to the audience that witnessed the concert. Hooker sometimes blurs the differences between songs, 'Hit The Floor' briefly reprising the earlier 'Your Love (Just A Little Bit)'. The last track, 'If You Got A Dollar', is one of his meditations on the immutability of human nature: 'people are sick... they're fighting every day for no cause at all.' This is a vein that Hooker would mine for years afterwards, and nuggets from it are embedded in The Healer and the other albums of his later days.
Three years after Born In Mississippi and Kabuki Wuki were released, Living Blues magazine swept them up in a collective review with Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive and 1974's Free Beer And Chicken. It would be safe to say that Ed Michel
wouldn't have been buying the reviewer a drink any time soon. Blues Unlimited, which did at least cover the records on their release, was a little more friendly to Born In Mississippibut missed the drive of Hooker's early work, and his guitar-playing, while its verdict on Kabuki Wuki was curt and unsympathetic. A counter-note of appreciation was struck in Jazz Journal, where Kabuki Wuki was adjudged 'the sort of measured, hypnotic, midnight-hour, blues-and-boogie narrative that he excels at' and 'his unembarrassed borrowing from his musical sons and cousins - little verbal nods to James Brown, Sly Stone and the like' seen not as 'the desperate plagiarism of an artist slipping behind the times but rather [as] a nice awareness of the integrity of black music, and moreover of its tradition'.
the unsympathetic critics took the line they did because their view of Hooker was based on his recordings of 20 or 25 years earlier, the remarkable solo or near-solo sides for Modern, King and Sensation. What they seemed unwilling to recognise was that, for Hooker, that ship had sailed, and any return to dock would only be for extensive refitting. From where he stood in 1971, his past was another country, and one he had no interest in revisiting. Not for the first time, he was engaged in remaking himself. He had done so about a dozen years earlier, when the temper of the time called for 'folk blues'; now he was accommodating himself to the long-haired, tie-dyed Westworld of freak-outs and be-ins.
There is some evidence that he didn't, at first, enjoy the process. 'ABC and the rest of 'em was trying to turn me into something that I wasn't,' he told his biographer Charles Shaar Murray. 'You knew it was me, but with all the other stuff built around it: chorus girls, horns...' But Murray also notes that when he first met him, Hooker's favourite listening on his car stereo, day after day, was the weirdest of the ABC albums, Free Beer And Chicken.
I suspect that some part of John Lee Hooker was pleased to be surrounded by musicians who were a generation younger and from utterly different musical backgrounds. They gave his music a contemporary sound and pulse, so that he could feel like a man on the move, not imprisoned by his back catalogue, and, for much of the time, they avoided compromising the individuality at the core of his music, its ingrained Hookerness. Listen to Kabuki Wuki'% 'Look At The Rain', where the band simply creates a shadowed backdrop while Hooker sinks into a late-night, black-coffee mood of wry introspection that is quintessential him. Unadorned, straight from the hip, this is not the music of a man 'turned into something that he wasn't', but timeless John Lee Hooker.
Tony Russell, August 2013