Customer Reviews

John Lee Hooker: The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is such a nice set.

Almost a primer for the new fan, and a refresher course for seasoned vetrans...John Lee is well portrayed on these very nicely remastered cuts.

Disc 1 starts with his solo accoustic stuff...

"Teachin' the Blues" is a classic blues gem, and this is a great cut of it.

Disc 2 features gritty, rocking cuts of legendary blues tracks including Hooker staples like "Boom Boom," and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, and one Beer."

If you think you like Hooker, this is your starter kit.

If you love him, this little portable collection completes the set.

There is also a 2CD set from Tomato Records that closely mirrors the titles on the Rhino collection but uses different cuts. It is grittier, and poorly produced, but makes a wonderful companion peice to the Rhino set.

Boogie, Chillun.

I've been listening to Hooker for about 45 years. I can't say that there is a single Hooker side I have ever heard, at least until some of the last sides where other artists pitched in with him to do some CDs to help raise money to get him through his final illness, any single track by Hooker that I didn't think every single blues lover should have. Get this, and then get everything else Hooker did, whatever you can afford!

These recordings start with some of the initial hits that Hooker had when he first began to record blues and his great combination of electric guitar and basic modal blues won him great popularity. The originals like Boogie Chille and King Snake, followed by a bunch of remakes of hot R & B tunes like One Scotch One Bourbon one beer.

There seems to be a lot of later material here, where Hooker remakes not the R & B hits that are contemporary to him, but a number of "delta blues" tunes that became standards among blues performers playing for "folk" artists starting in the late 1960s.

Hooker is good all the time. Myself, I prefer the stuff from the 1940s and the early 1950s which were R & B oriented blues. His covers of songs made famous by Amos Milburn, Winnonie Harris, and even Charles Brown were great music and an important dialogue about the blues. I also prefer the two covers of non-Blues material, Jazz and pop standards here: "I cover the waterfront" and "Frisco Blues" which is really based on Tony Bennett's "I left my Heart in San Fransisco." There are really important statements about how the blues dialogues with the the tin pan alley method of song writing. They also speak to Hooker's power as a poet and a musican.

Like too many blues artists, Hooker tends to be reduced to a primitivist stereotype. Rather than being a creative artist whose depth of spirit, intellect, music and poetry create a new power and product with his music, he is misinterpreted as some kind of relict of an older or truer blues tradition. Rather than a real artist, he is dehumanized as the real thing! Nothing could be further from the truth. Nothing could minimize his artistry more.

Hooker's music falls into the generation of the R & B bluesmen of the late 1940s who brought the stream of music from the Delta--Johnny Lee being from Clarksdale--to the North, Muddy Waters to Chicago, Johnny Lee to Detroit. Johnny's music, particularly his music from the late 1940s and 1950s when he was popular not among white ex folkies or whites who think they love the blues, but in the Black community, is impossible to understand outside of the context of postwar R & B, not the initial delta blues. The dance rhythm that proceeds from Boogie Chillun, King Snake, Boom Boom Boom, wouldn't have worked in a 1920s Juke Joint. It belongs someplace like Henry's Swing Club where a rockin' rhythm is coming from the attempt to combine the power of swing with the rock of the blues that created R & B in the 1940s.

Hooker was a highly sophisticated musician who developed his own off-shoot from the traditional trajectory of blues artists. Starting with the great female blues stars and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the direction of blues has been to harmonize the essential modal African-based musics of the blues.

Hooker took the music in an entirely different method, by returning to the modal base of the music. To do so he essentially goes away from the tendency of blues musicians to develop the music into a band music. He solves the problem of filling the sound that had become expected without the harmonizing basis for different instruments to work together in a band by technological innovation, not tradition. He was the first bluesman to take full advantage of the ability of electric guitars and amplifiers to do more than make the sound of a guitar louder. He used the settings on guitar, amplified, and recording studio to create a new and different sound, and used the amplification to fill the spaces in the music others would need bands to fill. This decision was really in the vanguard of the electric guitar revolution in blues, rock, country, and all popular music that exploded in the 1950s and has yet to end.

Hooker with accompanying musicians and bands. Some of the best sides came when he was recorded not with other blues players but with some of the top Jazz players in the late 1950s. His modal music, excellent timing, free form improvisation and general cool made his records sell not only among blues players but Jazz lovers back in the day. This speaks to how advanced his rhythmic sense really was. There was also a confluence between Hooker and some of the most advanced Jazz players of the late 1950s and 1960s who sought similar modal solutions to the problems of jazz improvisation.

Get this, and then get everything else Hooker Did. My favorites are the recordings he did in the 1960s for Vee-Jay a Black owned record company that produced him as a quality artist with great soundwork and free selection of his material. Hooker is really an electric artist, so some of the sides cut during the 1960's "folk revival" where he's made to play an acoustic are kind of an insult to his artistry and history, though like everything Hooker did,they were great music.

Again, you can't go wrong with this or anything else by Johnnie Lee.

Let's get one thing straight: as of today 09/15/03, there is no "ultimate" John Lee Hooker collection. But with 31 of his best tracks, this Rhino mini-box comes the closest to Hooker nirvana. (There is a 10-CD set, Epitath, but since it would take a week to listen to it once, I'll pass.) The problem with compiling such a collection is implied in Boogie Man, Charles Shaar Murray's fine biography. Hooker recorded for a number of different labels, especially in his early days, and also under a variety of different names (John Lee Booker, John Lee Cooker, Little Pork Chop, etc.), so it takes a lot of legwork to figure out just which recordings were made by Hooker at all, much less obtain the rights to rerelease them. (Murray spends almost half the book on such detective work.) Therefore, such classic gems as "The Flood" and "Whiskey and Wimmen" are not included in this set. Still, it's a very good attempt. Rhino has chosen to start the collection with the track "Teachin' the Blues," which is an aural primer on how he created his unique sound. Thus educated, the listener can then move on to such primal tunes as "Boogie Chillun" (A live staple for virtually every major blues band from Canned Heat to Savoy Brown, this was the number Hooker chose to perform in a guest spot on the Rolling Stones Steel Wheels tour in the eighties.), "Crawling King Snake" (covered wonderfully by the Doors), "Boom, Boom" (the Animals), and his reinterpretation of an Amos Milburn song, here entitled "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer (which, when combined with John L's House Rent Boogie, was very well covered by George Thorogood). He recorded several such reinterpretations, most notably "Frisco Blues" (In this case, he reportedly didn't try to get the correct lyrics to Tony Bennett's famed "I Left My Heart in San Francisco;" he just sat down and recorded his own off-the-cuff rendition.). In conclusion, there is plenty of John Lee Hooker's best stuff here to warrant a recommendation; it's just not as "ultimate" as his most devoted fans would want it to be.

So why "only" four stars?
Well, the music is great, but Rhino could certainly have found room for more than 31 songs on two compact discs. And why include two versions of "In The Mood" when songs like "I'll Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive", "Onions" and "Old Time Shimmy" are missing?

The sad thing is that there are really no John Lee Hooker-compilations on the market that truly get it right. Either they're too short, or they're limited by the fact that the compilers were only able to chose from recordings made for one particular record company.
This one is the best of the lot in my view, though. It almost gets it right (although the missing "Never Get Out Of These Blues Alive" is a pretty big minus), and the sound quality is very, very good.

(If you're not against spending a little extra, you might also want to look for the fine Vee-Jay compilation "The Early Years", which also spans 31 tracks, many of them essential in the Hook's canon. It's been re-released on two CD's, but the contents - and the layout - are the same.)

Thank you Rhino for doin' it one more time. This fabulous 2-CD compilation, nicely packaged and including a good booklet, profiles The Hook in all his glory. Perfect if you're new to John Lee and an excellent overview for those attempting to efficiently replace several worn-white Hooker LPs, The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990 provides everything except the board he's beating his foot on. Those who would weep and wail that this compilation is incomplete are losing sight of the basic truth about Hooker, he only did one thing. And it was incredibly simple. And he did it over and over and over. Most Hooker songs aren't even structured like songs, they seem to begin and end in vapor. But what happens in-between is nothing short of magical.

The blues has never, never produced a richer or more authoritative voice, as a singer, John Lee Hooker is untouchable. His guitar playing is beyond simple, it's rudimentary, but that boogie groove is his and his alone and he works it to death - you can feel it in bones you didn't know you had. What is really nice about this compilation is the authenticity, you get The Hook in the raw. (Some later work had him collaborating in very unfortunate over-productions.) You simply can't go wrong in this anthology but I guarantee you that if you begin with Peavine you will find it almost impossible to turn back. In a world of manufactured music that is slick, shiny smooth, and totally without soul it is thoroughly refreshing to encounter this. Buy it.

John Lee Hooker, who turns 80 August 22nd, is America's greatest living bluesman. His warm, grumbly vocals toasted over trademark blues rhythm guitar formed the bottom of today's revered classic blues rock. Not for nothing did Van Morrison and Carlos Santana play in the studio with him, and Bonnie Raitt and the Rolling Stones play behind him. Their music, along with that of Canned Heat, Foghat, Eric Clapton, the Black Crowes, and ZZTop (whose adulation veered close to pilferage, prompting a lawsuit) are inconceivable without his "dance music for the young and the old." Big Head Todd & The Monsters' remake of "Boom Boom" (heard now in a restaurant commercial) is but the latest revival of this master's classic sound.

"The Ultimate Collection" omits much from Hooker's 70s ABC/Bluesway output, but cherry-picks the best of the rest from the many labels (and aliases) under which he recorded. His insistent strumming and voice are compelling as you roll through "John L.'s House Rent Boogie," "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (combined to form an early George Thorogood classic), "Crawlin' Kingsnake," "Big Legs, Short Skirts," and others.

Hooker's style also scuffs up rock and pop classics like Tony Bennett's "I Left My Heart In San Francisco" (done here as "Frisco Blues" with Martha & The Vandellas on backup), Glenn Miller's "In The Mood" ("I'm In The Mood") and Barrett Strong's "Money." Some of this meanders; none of it (save the incendiary Canned Heat collaboration) is the most intense blues ever created. But it's all quietly powerful, even later duets into Hooker's 70s with Raitt and former sideman Roy Rogers.

John Lee Hooker not only preserved the blues, but grew and strengthened them. His "Ultimate Collection," with later releases such as "Boom Boom," "Chill Out" and the now-deleted Vee Jay collection "The Hook," are essential to fans wanting to hear the foundation of classic rock.

Muddy Waters and Howlin's Wolf may be more important historically, but I enjoy John Lee Hooker more. It's the beat that grabs you - foot-stomping, polyrhythmical, intriguing even when slow-as-molasses. And his guitar is percussion too. As such, he is probably the true precursor to James Brown. The other amazing thing is how far he stretches this formula, from dance ("Boogie Chillun") to Rock ("Dimples") to Funk ("Let's Go Out Tonight") to pop ("San Francisco Blues".) Since JLH has recorded under so many names and labels, this album provides a great service and a perfect introduction. If you thought you knew the blues ... you gotta get this one!

This is a solid collection of songs by John Lee Hooker, spanning most of his long career. It doesn't have every important track by him, but it's the best that's available.

People who know nothing about any kind of blues and blues afficionados alike will have a ball with this collection of some of the finest moments of Hooker's long career.

Many different styles and a whole array of production values are laid down chronologically in order to give one a linear idea of Hooker's output.

So many great moments exist on this puppy that I will not begin to list them. There is lots of treasure here - that's for sure.

Listen to this long enough, and it'll just whet your appetite. Now in his mid-'80's, John Lee Hooker has recorded some of the most original electric blues in the history of the genre. Any time you hear that one chord droning away and that shoes tapping the floor, you know you're hearing the Boogie Man. Everything he's done since then seems to revolve around the sides in this collection. Throughout modern history, several other bands have tried to record Hooker and wind up sounding like cheeseballs. From "Teachin' The Boogie" to "I'm In The Mood", this two-disc set blows away any other Hooker "best of". If you can afford it, accept no substitutes! Long live the Boogie Man!