The phenomenal voice of the Howlin’ Wolf, the sound of Hubert Sumlin, the songs of Willie Dixon. You get this picture of a shack by a railroad track, lightning striking and this guy literally howling for his baby. That riff, and The Wolf’s singing, ‘woo-ooo’ and all that. Smokestack Lightning? Now there is some spooky stuff. His band featured Hubert Sumlin of course, a man that was responsible for some of the most powerful and expressive guitar playing you can hear anywhere. When he held a Fender Stratocaster it looked like a little ukulele. He was such a big man, and he sounded like it. When he’s singing he sounds like the microphone is going to explode and the speakers are going to blow, because his voice is just so powerful. “Oh, The Wolf, what can you say? His voice is like a force of nature, extraordinary. I never went to The Marquee until I played there with Dr Feelgood.” London? You might has well have asked me to go to the moon. In those days I was a schoolboy on Canvey Island, going to a gig in Southend involved big expenditure for me. I never saw him, even though he was in England a lot.
It’s such a great phrase, and while he has that whimsical jazz delivery, he’s singing with absolute authority. And this is a great song, I often use that expression myself, someone will ask me about somebody or something and I still say, ‘Don’t start me talkin’ or I’ll tell everything I know’. He used to radiate a very friendly, groovy feeling in his music. He looked like a jazzer, he had this hat… I don’t know much about jazz, but he looked a bit be-bop a bit cool jazz. I remember he used to do this thing where he played it with his nose. It wasn’t intense like Muddy Waters, it was more laid-back. “Although there were two Sonny Boy Williamsons, it’s the second Sonny Boy that we all know and are most familiar with. He was the leader and I was the guy that… killed people.” Lee would be standing there – and to me Lee was always the leader of Dr Feelgood, look at any pictures of Dr Feelgood and I’m looking at Lee, taking my cue from him – and he’d go, ‘It’s time for the guitar solo… boom’, and I’d go ‘whoom’, do my thing and ‘whoom’, I’m back by his side again. It really is a machine gun: ‘bang, bang, bang’, and you’re feeling that violence. When you’re a kid playing cops and robbers your fingers really are a gun, they really are, and it’s the same with my guitar. It was all just absolute pure enjoyment, everybody loves playing cops and robbers.
We’d stare people down and my guitar was my machine gun. One of the things we used to love in Dr Feelgood was putting on the violence. ‘I’m drinking TNT and smoking dynamite, I hope some screwball starts a fight’. “There’s menace lurking in all this music, a potential for violence, an unspoken threat. Obviously, it came from black culture in America, it was something they were born into, but you could live for a hundred years and never play the boogie like John Lee Hooker. It’s hard to put into words the power that these people exuded.
#WILKO JOHNSON EQUIPMENT FREE#
His voice is so vibrant and heavy, it sounds so free and natural. It’s not flashy guitar, but it’s powerful. He’s not playing a regular riff, he don’t give a damn about no 12-bar, he’s going to change the chords where he feels like it. I first heard Sugar Mama on The Blues Volume One, it’s just John Lee Hooker and his guitar. “I probably listen to more John Lee Hooker at home than anything else. Muddy played it with a slide, and when he hit this first note… Oh man, it just sounded so good. He was playing a Fender Telecaster, which excited me because my hero, Mick Green, played one and I wanted one. Muddy made his entrance walking along the railroad track. I also remember there was this fantastic television programme, a live British blues show filmed on a railway station in the rain. I first heard Muddy when the first Rolling Stones album came out. “The power and expressiveness of Muddy Waters’ voice is just miraculous, so direct, and the song’s marvellous. Here’s hoping these timelessly visceral recordings, many of which have been re-compiled by Wilko himself on The First Time I Met The Blues, will inspire a whole new generation. A whole lot of my early R&B education came from those records.” Living on the outer edge of the Thames Delta, on Canvey Island, and saving every spare penny for a Telecaster of his own made record-buying almost impossible: “But you could borrow records from school friends.” There were, however, a pair of truly essential albums that effectively changed the direction of Wilko’s young life: “Two great compilations from the Chess label were released on the Pye International R&B label – which had a very distinctive yellow and orange label that used to give me the shivers as well – The Blues Volume One and The Blues Volume Two.
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