June 13, 2004

'Moanin' at Midnight': Delta Force

e was arguably the greatest artist the blues ever produced, but when he wasn't singing, Howlin' Wolf was not ordinarily an eloquent man. James Segrest and Mark Hoffman's indispensable yet frustrating new biography, ''Moanin' at Midnight,'' quotes an interview in which he said: ''You don't need no book learnin'. . . . Common sense, that's all a man needs.'' (In fact, he spent years taking adult education classes, and finally learned to read and write at a sixth-grade level.) Wolf struck one uncharitable recording engineer as ''two steps ahead of an idiot''; when a nervous breakdown ended his brief Army hitch in 1943, the examining physician pronounced him a ''mental defective.'' But in the summer of 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Howlin' Wolf gave a remarkable interview to a journalist from Los Angeles's Open City magazine, in which his metaphors morphed from those of a small businessman -- which he was; he even took money for Social Security out of his band members' pay -- to those of John the Revelator. ''Somebody has been cashing checks and they've been bouncing back on us,'' Wolf told the unidentified reporter. ''And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it. And sooner or later it's going to bring on a disease on this country, a disease that's going to spring from midair and it's going to be bad. It's like a spirit from some dark valley, something that sprung up from the ocean. . . . Like Lucifer is on the earth.''

Wolf's Blakean sociopolitical prophecy -- not unusual in those naively apocalyptic days -- seems quaint in George Bush's America, where the comparatively wretched of the earth fantasize not about revolution but about becoming apprenticed to Donald Trump. But in the world of music, his vision of working-class blacks and whites rising up from the dark valleys of America to trouble the mighty had already been fulfilled, and Wolf himself, a crucial influence on everyone from the Rolling Stones to the D.J. Wolfman Jack (whose trademark growl came as much from Wolf as from Lon Chaney Jr.), was partly responsible. Even by 1968, the black-hillbilly hybrid called rock 'n' roll had swept away most of popular music's middle-class gentility; today, we still live in essentially the same musical landscape of sonic rawness and emotional directness. If Wolf were to come up out of his grave -- when you're listening to his records, that doesn't seem so unlikely -- he might be baffled by 50 Cent or the White Stripes; in 1972, when he opened for Alice Cooper, the sight of a stage-prop guillotine gave him a minor heart attack. ''I just don't understand,'' he kept muttering. On the other hand, he got on just fine with the long-haired British bands who backed him on tours of Britain in the 60's and 70's, and with such then-young white acolytes as Eric Clapton. He might recognize raspy-voiced rappers and faux-primitive post-punk guitarists as his spiritual children.

Howlin' Wolf, born Chester Burnett in 1910 and named after President Chester Alan Arthur, had blues credentials so authentic they seem parodic. As a teenager in the Mississippi Delta, he really did pester Charley Patton -- Mississippi's seminal blues singer -- for lessons, and took on Patton's grainy voice and powerful, elemental slide guitar style. In the 30's and 40's, he became one of the Delta's many wandering entertainers, using the nom de guerre he derived from a childhood nickname, and he really did team up with Patton and such now-legendary figures as Robert Johnson and Son House. In his latter days -- he was only 65 when he died in 1976 -- Wolf presented himself as a musical nostalgic. He complained that bands were getting too loud, and in a 1966 Newsweek profile said that ''all the electric stuff'' couldn't touch the traditional acoustic guitar. ''That one with the hole in it, it got a good, sweet sound. But . . . in this here modern world you got to keep up with modern people.'' In fact, he was an archmodernist himself: like his friend and rival Muddy Waters, he transformed Mississippi's archaic country blues into the electric urban blues of Chicago, his adopted home. His early electric groups, with just a couple of cranked-up guitars, took pride in blasting larger bands, with their swing-era horn sections, right off the stage. And the master sidemen he hired, notably Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin, overdrove their amplifiers to achieve those burry, distorted textures that are still the lingua franca of rock guitar.

Wolf's music never lost its primal quality: some of his best songs, such as ''Smokestack Lightning,'' ''Commit a Crime'' and ''I Asked for Water, but She Gave Me Gasoline,'' are trancelike one-chord vamps reaching back to African-American music's pre-Western roots. ''That's something I got from the old music,'' he said. But this was a deliberate, even stubborn, artistic choice, as much as Wolf tried to commodify himself. (''If you don't like the way I play the blues,'' he said, ''don't order me no more.'' As one of his musicians commented, ''He made it sound like you just kind of ordered him right out of a catalog or somethin'.'') Wolf wasn't a primitive, with no sense of a wider musical world: he eventually learned to read music and to play such pop songs as ''I'm in the Mood for Love,'' and even made Sumlin study at the Chicago Conservatory of Music. He was a primitivist, who made a consciously modern music by emphasizing the intense weirdness of ''the old music,'' and a deliberate innovator in a far-from-nurturing environment: ''I always tried to play a different sound from the other fellow.'' As Vaan Shaw, the son of Wolf's manager, explained: ''You gotta remember, these guys didn't have blueprints. . . . The thing that makes Wolf so magical is that you see a person create a whole genre of music through just their mind, and you ain't supposed to do it. You're supposed to have a sheet of paper, a desk, a quiet room. . . . And here's a guy using just his ego, creating lyrics in a room full of smoke, alcohol, four-letter words and intimidating individuals -- and yet he still creates.'' Sam Phillips, the first to record him -- in 1951, in that Memphis storefront studio where he later discovered Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash -- sometimes spoke of Wolf as his greatest find. ''When I heard Howlin' Wolf, I said: 'This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.' ''

For others, though, Wolf was all about the body. ''When you're a little pre-teenage girl,'' Bonnie Raitt has said, ''and you imagine what a naked man in full arousal is like, it's Howlin' Wolf. . . . He was the scariest, most deliciously frightening bit of male testosterone I've ever experienced in my life.'' Wolf had an unforgettable physical presence: around 6-foot-5 (Segrest and Hoffman offer conflicting figures) and 300 pounds in his prime, with incongruous blue-gray eyes and velvety black skin, which, as his fellow bluesman Johnny Shines recalled, ''looked like it would ripple if you would blow on it, like a vial of black oil.'' In a different interview, Shines said: ''I first met Wolf, I was afraid of Wolf. Just like you would be of some kind of beast or something.'' Onstage, he would crawl like a kingsnake and howl like his namesake; on at least one occasion, he told an audience he had an actual wolf's tail, and a few believed him enough to come backstage to check it out. Among the people he scared was his own son, Floyd, who feared Wolf was a damned soul. Shortly after Wolf's death, Floyd Burnett thought he heard his father's voice in the kitchen asking him for water. ''And from the Bible speaking, that's hell-bound.'' He sometimes carried a gun (not uncommon in the Chicago blues scene), took part in countless fights and told Hubert Sumlin he'd once killed a man by slicing off the top of his head with a hoe. Yet those who knew him best -- Floyd, whom Wolf did not see for years, wasn't one -- found him shy and surprisingly gentle. ''He was just really a big pet,'' the drummer Sam Lay said. ''I would go so far (hey, I'm not funny or nothing -- don't get me wrong) and say he was one of the sweetest people you ever saw in your life.''

Segrest and Hoffman, noting that Wolf had often been beaten by the uncle who raised him, argue that in this mix of violence and tenderness he ''exhibited the classic symptoms of the abuse survivor.'' To their credit, this passing remark is their only attempt to get Wolf on the couch. Mostly they stay out of the way of the research, testimony and anecdotes they've collected -- so thoroughly that this book should scare off any rival biographers until everyone who ever knew Wolf is dead. But even blues obsessives are apt to bog down in the book's undigested, repetitive and often unnecessary information, including God knows how many similar accounts of Wolf onstage, and a capsule description of seemingly every song he ever recorded. ('' 'Dorothy Mae,' a down-home Delta blues, again featured James Cotton on harp. 'Sweet Woman' was a slow blues in which Wolf sang the praises of his woman.'') Paragraph after paragraph ticks away in pointless Wolf sightings, stuck in for no apparent reason. ''East St. Louis bluesman Little Cooper, born in Prattsville, Ark., in 1928,'' one non-anecdote begins, ''was a teenager when he first heard Wolf. 'Wolf, he was playing in Woodson, Ark. That's the first time I come in contact with a professional blues player. There was a club they had in Woodson called the Woodson Hall and he and his band come in there. He was in Arkansas awhile and he was doing a show there every Friday, Saturday and Sunday night.''

Little Cooper may be a heck of a guy, but few people (including me) have heard of him, and he had nothing to do with Howlin' Wolf's life. So who cares where and when he was born, whether Wolf was the first professional blues player he saw -- or indeed, about any of this? And where was the editor who should have cut it (along with probably a quarter of the book) and helped these first-time biographers shape their narrative? In places you sorely miss editorial guidance, as when they quote wildly varying testimony about whether or not Wolf was a good guitar player. Since Hoffman is a musician, and he and Segrest have both written for such magazines as Blues Access, they must have the expertise to settle the point; as biographers, they certainly have the obligation. (It would have been simple enough to say that Wolf played powerfully within a limited technique. Listen to his lead slide guitar on the splendid 1961 recording of ''Down in the Bottom.'') In other places, you wish they'd butt out, as when they tell us what key such and such a song is in; musicians intent on learning the song can easily find this out, and the general reader doesn't need to know. ''Moanin' at Midnight'' is this generation's first and probably last full portrait of one of the giants of American music -- a figure who belongs in the company of Duke Ellington, Hank Williams and Bob Dylan. Since it's essential reading, it's heartbreaking that it's not more readable.

Still, this book offers more than enough information to satisfy anyone who loves the music, and it might tantalize some of the uninitiated into seeking out Wolf's scary, magisterial recordings. Oh well. Probably no biographer short of Samuel Johnson, the Great Cham of book learnin', could have wrestled with Wolf on equal terms, and gotten his titanic spirit into something like the right words.