When Women And Men Sang The Blues For Keeps-The Hook Is In Play- With John Lee Hooker In Mind  

By Lance Lawrence

“Hey guys, do you want to go to the PX and have a couple of beers, near beers I guess you would call them but having a few drinks beats sitting here in this dumbass barracks waiting for some trusty corporal to look for volunteers to clean the latrine or make up beds or the ten thousand other stupid things they make you do here in fucking Basic,” chortled Ralph Morris as he asked Billy Raymond from Toledo and Bart Simmons from Scranton that most important question. Ralph from Troy in upstate New York was having a very hard time adjusting to the Army way, the military way the drill sergeants called it, usually called it at about four in the morning when they pulled a sneak inspection or had you carry your footlocker, Christ your footlocker, out into the company formation for no rational reason. Had a hard time adjusting there at Fort Gordon in godforsaken red clay Georgia, that red clay no joke as he had almost eaten some one afternoon when the company was doing bayonet practice drills out in the boonies and Drill Sergeant Mackey suddenly called out for the company to hit the ground and he crashed into the soft mucky soil. So every time the company was through for the day after supper (supper at five o’clock, Jesus, that was almost lunch time back home) he would head, alone or with his new found friends Basic friends this night Billy and Bart who were also having their own adjustment problems, Billy had been threatened with an Article 15 already, to the PX to drink the 3.2 authorized standard Army beer that wouldn’t get anybody’s mother drunk and listen to the jukebox to some tunes to make him forget.

Forget that he had actually joined the Army unlike the hippies and college guys who were burning their draft cards left and right up North. He hadn’t volunteered, signed up, no way, not at first, but when his number was called he went just like his father, grandfather and younger brother, Kenny, who actually had volunteered from the get-go back in 1965 when the whole shooting match in Vietnam was just heating up and was now safely home and trying to adjust as he said to the “real” world. That duty to country when called was the way the Morris family viewed the world, viewed it through patriotic eyes like most of the families in Troy who had sent their sons off to wars, and Vietnam whatever was happening in Harvard Square, New York City, Ann Arbor, New Haven, Old Town in Chicago or out on the whole freaking West Coast was no exception, not even as he thought about heading to the PX in 1969. Then he had made the stupid mistake of listening to Kenny who told him that Vietnam was a very dangerous place for draftees since all a draftee was good for was to be a “grunt,” an 11 Bravo, an infantryman, which is all the Army wanted in late 1968 to fill in the depleted ranks after a hard year of fighting when he was drafted (cannon-fodder Ralph would call it later but that was much later after he had taken the fall) and so he had signed up for a three year commitment, became Regular Army, an RA in front of his numbers and had decided on to sign up for communications school as his job.

But that was before he took the oath, before he was hustled out of the Army Recruiting Station in Albany and sent to Fort Dix first for Basic Training which turned out to be full when he arrived and so he had wound up at Fort Gordon just outside Augusta for Basic and this awful feeling that he had made a terrible mistake, that while he had no serious objection to going to Vietnam this mickey mouse crap was not for him. He had found kindred in Billy and Bart and a couple of other guys from Newton up in Massachusetts who would go to the section of the PX that was closed off from the main body where you bought clothes, smokes, and toiletries and sit at the small tables and drink a few beers, pop quarters in the jukebox and forget about what a hellish day it had been until the place closed at 10 PM. Jesus, 10 PM back home he and his corner boys would just be going out the door going over to Ready Teddy’s Bar to listen to live music, live blues music by Buddy and the Nighthawks who covered Muddy, Howlin’ Wolf, Magic Slim, and even John Lee Hooker on occasion.

That last performer, the Hook, was why Ralph wanted to go to the PX, wanted company too. See Ralph thought the Hook was dead, he had not heard otherwise, had not  heard any recent stuff on The Blues Is The Dues radio show he listened to on WSKI out of Saratoga Springs, out of Skidmore College about twenty-five miles up the road from Troy where they played the Hook and the others. Ralph had gotten all heated up when a week before he heard a group called Canned Heat on the juke playing a song called On The Road Again with a beat that sounded very much like the boom boom boom guitar stuff that the Hook had perfected along with that deep bass voice that would put the fear into anybody who crossed that brother if he had his whiskey and cocaine habits on. So he had made a call home to Ronny Black who would know and sure enough who was doing the boom guitar work on the song but one John Lee Hooker. The Army stuff was still chicken shit, probably always would be but at least for a couple of hours he could cool his fragile head listening to the real deal when they call off the names in the blues pantheon.