When John Lee Hooker died in his sleep at age 80 last week, I was having a dream in which I was back in seventh grade band with a plastic clarinet, telling the people, "Yes, this is where I got my start, but there was no music here." I put it away in its case and closed the lid. The dream changed. This time I was in a room with a bunch of grandmas all sitting at church organs learning to play. Another music lesson nightmare.

I've been trying to find a piano I can afford that sounds good, but we don't have any place to keep one until we move out of this little apartment in about 5 weeks. The wait is weighing on my mind. I had to just walk away from my old piano when I left Nevada four months ago. Back in the dream, I was trying to play a little electronic keyboard with rows of tiny keys and a nasal sound. My fingers felt like they were all tied up in knots and running into each other. I could not make any music, fumbling around on those little plastic keys. I felt just like a fool. Fumblin' ol' fool. I started feeling the Blues real bad. A funky bass line came up from the side like smoke from something on fire and I started playing a furious piano break burning through twelve bars in the key of G. In the searing heat of the music, all the grannies & their church organs evaporated away. Then came the words:

Ol' Fumblin' fool
I feel just like a fumblin' ol' fool
When I got the blues,
boy that fumblin' fool come 'round

But I can't sing worth a damn, even in my dreams. Thank goodness it wasn't me - it was John Lee Hooker shouting and Haw-hawing in that voice that sounds like gravel stuck in your brakes. I woke up with renewed hope, went out to the kitchen and wrote down the words I heard:

Stumblin' clown
I'm just the ol' stumblin' clown

It was 6:30 in the morning, so I switched on the radio to get the news. It was the first story Australia National News reported. They said it was natural causes. Quite unexpected. John Lee Hooker had just performed a day or two before to a crowd of about a dozen people in the bar he owned with another guy. I don't imagine he ever filled out an application to become a blues singer, and there ain't no way to retire from it, either. It must have been like breathing for the rest of us - you just do it as long as you live, and don't stop until you're done living.

You know you got me crawling baby
and the grass is very high
I'm just gonna keep on crawling baby
until the day I die.
I'm a crawling king snake
and I rule my den.

John Lee Hooker started when he was about 14. When I was that age, all I knew about the blues was what I saw on TV and in the movies. And what I saw was Dan Akroyd & John Belushi as the Blues Brothers. When Jake & Elwood went to see Matt "Guitar" Murphy at Aretha Franklin's soul food restaurant, there was this old guy sittin' and playin' with a band out on the sidewalk.

Boom Boom boom boom
Gonna shootcha right down
Right offa your feet
When you talk that talk
Love the way you talk
That baby talk

I sat up and said to myself, "Who is THAT??" I was astonished at how much could be said with music and a few (as far as I knew at that age) nonsensical lyrics. The power it had to make me feel something was surprising and a little frightening. It could not have been merely manufactured for effect, as I suspected of most pop culture. It was too real, too natural. I started listening to anything I could get that sounded like Blues.

That's how John Lee Hooker found his way into my consciousness (and my unconsciousness). It's twenty plus years later, and in that time I have changed my opinions about most things a few times over. But the music still makes me feel the same way. Life for John Lee Hooker meant playing the blues. Death leaves the rest of us with the blues, and the hundred or so records he made. Don't know how, but they'll just have to do.

June 2001