Musically, David Bowie is as wavering as they come. His work might have a strand of the blues, but it is a mere dash in a heady cocktail. However, the facet that he did steal heavily from the deep south was the dark mysticism of a devilish character. The old blues players were dubbed players of the devil’s music by pastors because they diverted coins from the church’s collection boxes into their open guitar cases, but they quickly seized upon the nicknames as savvy marketing.
Bowie would never have passed up on such an opportunity. He created a world of counterpoint to normality with a string of characters and all the drama that imbued his music with a level of myth and intrigue. There were two central forces that planted this seed within him: Bob Dylan and the blues.
The young Starman’s early years were spent in the hive of Brixton, but it wasn’t long before his family moved to what he termed as the cultural no-man’s land of suburban Bromley. Bowie longed to return to the capital to cut his teeth in the happening scene ever since he read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, and by the time he was 16, he had headed back to the big smoke.
This was pivotal to developing his musical taste as a young musician. As he explained, “By 1963, I was working as a junior commercial artist at an advertising agency in London. My immediate boss, Ian, a groovy modernist with Gerry Mulligan-style short crop haircut and Chelsea boots, was very encouraging about my passion for music, something he and I both shared, and used to send me on errands to Dobell’s Jazz record shop on Charing Cross Road knowing I’d be there for most of the morning till well after lunch break.”
Thus, he was learning about both the importance of image and commercial viability at work and indulging his musical passion on his extended lunch breaks. “It was there, in the ‘bins’, that I found Bob Dylan’s first album,” he continues. “Ian had sent me there to get him a John Lee Hooker release and advised me to pick up a copy for myself, as it was so wonderful.” As he told Vanity Fair, the record Tupelo Blues quickly became one of his favourites and remained in his 25 favourite albums many years later.
“Within weeks my pal George Underwood and I had changed the name of our little R&B outfit to the Hooker Brothers and had included both Hooker’s ‘Tupelo’ and Dylan’s version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’ in our set,” he recalled. It is noteworthy that both of these tracks are resplendent with a dark and dense aura of mystery. Bowie might not have appropriated the crooked bending trees of the 1962 Hooker classic in his work, but you can easily see how it inspired him to work atmosphere into the many masterpieces he would spawn a handful of years later. And there’s a dose of ‘coolness’ that he conceived of too.
The concept of cool is one that is often besmirched by square cynics who think it’s a pointless juvenile ego flex that has no place in the sacred museum of the arts. But in the cocktail of all the best modern music, there is always a fair glug of swagger thrown into the shaker, and when you are crowned as the King of The Boogie, as John Lee Hooker was proudly known, you have to be an undoubted beholder of cool.
Born, like just about every other blues great, amid the Tupelo tree territory of the Mississippi Delta, John Lee Hooker was brought up on a sharecropping plantation where his stepfather, William Moore, provided the soundtrack to days toiling under the sun. It was from Moore that John Lee Hooker learnt his way around a six-string. In his early years, his biological father had brought Hooker up on a strict musical diet of religious songs, thus when he first heard the so-called devil’s music, he was stirred, like so many of us, Bowie included, by its power to perturb. That legacy rolled on into eerie fellows like The Thin White Duke.
