James Booker

Posted by Mike Butler on Thursday, 11 February 2010 · 2 Comments

100 Club, London, October 1977

My live introduction to the soul of New Orleans came when I chanced to see James Booker at the 100 Club in London. I was eighteen years old, newly arrived in London, and anxious to catch up on live blues (and related) music. I knew Dr John - Gumbo was an established favourite - and dug Fats Domino, like everyone else on the planet, but nothing prepared me for the emotional impact of James Carroll Booker III in full flight. Heart-rending, nerve-end passion is not what you associate with Dr John and Fats, but it poured out of James Booker that night.

He was a flamboyant character, with a star on his eye-patch (he lost an eye through shooting bad heroin), and a diamond on his front tooth that flashed in the spotlight every time he smiled, or grimaced, it was difficult to tell the gestures apart. The sleeve-notes on his album Junco Partner (released on Island the year previously), talked about 'Little Chopin in living colour' and the 'Black Liberace', but they shed no light on the biggest mystery of all: how could they be enough hours in a single individual's lifetime to acquire such skill on the piano and be so comprehensively, mortally wrecked? Either accomplishment would be a life's work for lesser mortals. So Booker regaled with a running commentary on the acid flashback he was experiencing whilst performing. Previously innocuous songs were delivered with a harrowing intensity. For the first time, I realised that Lonely Avenue, the Ray Charles tune, was not a boy-girl song.

The entire performance was driven by freakish, fantastic anxiety. It was impossible to foretell what the manic maestro would do or play next. Fats Domino and Dr John tunes were strung together in random medleys. A lot of stress was given to the ominous line from Right Place, Wrong Time: 'It was the right arm / I must have used the wrong arm.' Junco Partner, the ultimate doper anthem, was given a hell-bent, demonically gleeful rendition. It was also a night when dark secrets emerged. Booker revealed how he sold the rights of his song So Swell to Aretha Franklin (as heard on the Queen of Soul's Hey Now Hey album). And of course, it made perfect sense. Vengeful self-loathing was never Aretha's thing: 'You're so swell when you're well / You've just been sick so long.'

The piano-playing was incomparable. It was Professor Longhair raised to the level of Liszt, larded with unlikely motifs and quotations. I picked up on the Woody Woodpecker theme and Flight of the Bumble Bee, which both surfaced with obsessive regularity. The delivery was so urgent, Booker may have been forewarned that it was his last night on earth. He was so engrossed in the music that whole tunes, not just licks, were repeated (Please Send Me Someone To Love received two airings). In fact, Booker finally shuffled off to boogie-woogie heaven five years later, in 1983.

Strangely, the spirit of that night is more faithfully captured on The Piano Prince From New Orleans and Blues & Ragtime From New Orleans, two LPs recorded live at Onkel Po's Carnegie Hall over two nights in October 1976, than the recently released James Booker: Manchester 1977, which was recorded at Belle Vue, Manchester, on the very same week as the London appearance. It can't just be that the Norman Beaker Band tend to iron out all of Booker's idiosyncrasies: they only appear on two tracks. It's a compelling document (actually on Document Records), but Booker had come down from his trip.

Mike Butler