ALBUM REVIEW: ‘The Standard School Broadcast Recordings’ Unearths an Overlooked John Lee Hooker Session from 1973

Mississippi-born bluesman John Lee Hooker, who emerged in the late 1940s, played strikingly-original songs that helped fuel the 1960s’ blues-rock boom in England and the U.S., including “Boom Boom” and “Boogie Chillen’ ”; among the artists who recorded his tunes were Van Morrison, The Doors, and Tom Petty. Always more influential than financially successful, he walked away from the record business in the 1970s, fed up with dishonest labels, but resurfaced in the late 1980s for a series of popular albums featuring an all-star cast of fans, such as Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt.

Taped in 1973 for an educational radio series, The Standard School Broadcast Recordings captures Hooker on the verge of his recording sabbatical, sounding in fine form, albeit a bit subdued. The famously-irregular tempos that confounded backing musicians in his early days are largely absent, allowing Gino Skaggs (bass) and Ken Swank (drums) to provide unobtrusive support, with son Robert Hooker’s fluid piano filling in the spaces between his jagged guitar licks.

In contrast to the swaggering masculinity of Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, who also made their mark in the post-World War II era, Hooker was a brooding, more introspective performer, seemingly a greater danger to himself than to others. The Standard School Broadcast Recordings emphasizes his pensive side in gloomy tracks running as long as nine minutes, including the remorseful “Bad Boy,” where he murmurs, “Looking back over my days, I hurt so many people.” “I Hate the Day I Was Born” is even more despairing, and a medley of “When My First Wife Left Me” and “Hobo Blues” recounts how he abandoned his family. Transfixing and a little scary, the uptempo boogie “Rock With Me” finds Hooker in the mood to party, approaching the speaking-in-tongues abandon that comes from being possessed by the unseen forces, growling, “When the spirit hit me, I shake all over like a dog with the fleas.”

While The Standard School Broadcast Recordings offers eight tracks running nearly an hour in the CD and digital versions, two are omitted on the vinyl edition. One is an expendable jam, but the other is essential listening. Revisiting one of his earliest songs, “Sally Mae” is the only cut on the album to feature Hooker unaccompanied, spotlighting his clanging guitar as he scolds an unreliable woman who’s “drunk all the time.”

Newcomers to John Lee Hooker should start with recordings from his first decade to get a sense of how electrifying this young maverick could be, but all his music bristles with primal fervor. The Standard School Broadcast Recordings is a strong addition to a remarkable body of work.

John Lee Hooker’s The Standard School Broadcast Recordings is out Feb. 28 via BMG.