John Lee Hooker: Alive and Well and How

With blues legend John Lee Hooker, “how” has always been a far more relevant question than who, what, why, where or when. And that was easily the most revealing one during a rare concert appearance by the Boogie Man on Thursday at the Sun Theatre in Anaheim.

Specifically, his signature growl “how, how, how, how,” as identifiable a musical lick as any Chuck Berry guitar riff.

Other blues musicians sing about the hellhound on their trail; when Hooker in his prime called up that otherworldly “how, how, how, how” from some dark place in the recesses of his soul, he was the hellhound.

At the Sun, however, the extremely frail-looking singer-songwriter-guitarist’s “how, how, how, how” was a faint echo of what it once was--spoken, almost queried as if it has indeed become a question of how to resummon what he once could take for granted.

At 82 (or 79, depending on which source book you read), he’s one of the last living blues men who came of age in the ‘30s and one of the very few still physically capable of even showing up at a concert.

It’s remarkable that more than half a century after his earliest recordings Hooker’s still got the mind to set foot on a stage at all, much less spend 50 minutes there making music of any kind. He’s been in semi-retirement in recent years and nobody’s earned the right through decades of prodigious music-making, to eliminate the “semi-” more than he.

His guitar work Thursday showed flashes of the old brilliance--wild bursts of fierce, stinging tones that give voice to the pangs of a broken heart. He’d flutter his fingers across the strings of his big Gibson, or yank notes out more than pluck them. But he restricted himself largely to such staccato fills and left any extended soloing to the two guitarists and keyboard player in his Coast to Coast Blues Band.

Things might have been more satisfying had he brought along Los Lobos, who backed him on several tracks on his most recent album of new material, 1997’s “Don’t Look Back.” That wondrous band from East L.A. matched his still marvelously craggy vocals and unpredictable guitar play with equally searing, searching accompaniment.

The Coast to Coast band, by contrast, served up Blues 101 backing, mostly straight three-chord progressions with little of the ebb and flow--the human pulse--of the blues that local fans can find in abundance in such Southland-based groups as the James Harman Band, the Mighty Flyers, the Fabulous Thunderbirds and the Freddie Brooks Band.

On Hooker’s watershed hit “Boom, Boom,” a horrific narrative about a man gunning down his unfaithful lover, the five-member band played not like an accessory to the fact, but with the detachment of a chauffeur keeping the motor running while the boss was doing his banking.

Thank heaven for the recording studio, which is where Hooker probably ought to limit any musical outings he has left in him. His ‘90s albums have shown that there’s spirit left in that animalistic voice, even if the rest of his body seems a lot less willing. In the right musical company--as longtime admirer and disciple Van Morrison assembled for him in producing “Don’t Look Back”--Hooker may even have some musical high points yet ahead.

Little of that, however, seemed to matter to the near-capacity audience. Shouts of “John Lee!” and “Boogie Man!” accompanied his every utterance and move, especially when he rose from his chair and sang a final number on his feet before slowly ambling offstage. For many fans, simply seeing a legend in the flesh is more important than that legend’s condition.

Why?

That’s not important. What matters with Hooker is the how.