Suze Rotolo, John Lee Hooker, and Another Dude
"Whenever John was around, I would talk with him. And when Bob and I got together, the friendship expanded."
When I interviewed John Lee Hooker in 1992, the bluesman was on a roll, with a recent Grammy, a hit album (The Healer), and a 1991 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Hooker had a new album out, Mr. Lucky, which is why I was interviewing him, for Musician. It was a phoner; I was in my office in New York and John was in a hotel in San Francisco. Which struck me as odd; he owned homes in Los Altos and Redwood City, both of which are less than an hour’s drive from San Francisco. (Hooker knew how to handle money, and hired others who did, too; he wound up owning five homes.) The great bluesman, who was either 80, 77, 75, 72, or 69, depending on which bluesologist you listened to, was layin’ up in bed watching two baseball games at the same time, on two TVs. He was a sharply-focused man, easily able to keep track of two baseball games while handling my questions.
John Lee Hooker had his own, immediately identifiable sound, which doesn’t mean that he didn’t keep a close ear on trends, adapting accordingly. In the late 1950s, with the folk revival getting underway, John put down his electric guitar, put his band on extended leave, picked up an acoustic, and cut the 1959 album The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker. Which is how Hooker and Suze Rotolo came to cross paths.
A politically aware teenager from Queens, Suze (that’s Soo-zee, two syllables) joined Bayard Rustin’s Youth March for Integrated Schools, which held its meetings next door to a record store on 125th Street. “Before climbing the stairs to Youth March headquarters,” Rotolo writes in A Freewheelin’ Time, her 2008 memoir, “I would stop by the record store, a small, narrow place full of albums in wooden bins where the owner always had a record playing. One day as I walked in, I heard music that stopped me in my tracks. It was as if the store were suddenly enveloped in an intense glow, and I lost a sense of where I was, aware only of the sound coming from the speakers. I was transfixed by the thumping guitar beat and the thick deep baritone of the singer. I had never heard anything like it and I don’t think I moved an inch until the end of side 2, when I managed to ask, What was that?
“The guy behind the counter showed me the album cover, with a drawing of a truck in the grass and the name John Lee Hooker written across it,” Rotolo recounts. It was The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker. “I couldn’t wait to take it home and play it for my sister. I bought it and ran up the stairs with my treasure.”
As a newly-converted country bluesman (or re-converted; it’s how he’d started out), Hooker began plying the nation’s folk-club circuit, one of whose Manhattan stops was the club Gerde’s Folk City on West Fourth Street (it moved one block south in 1970). An ardent folkie (her older sister Carla had a job working for the ethnomusicologist/
song collector Alan Lomax), Suze, who had moved to Manhattan, was an underage regular at Gerde’s. One night, the club owner announced the evening’s headliner, nobody but John Lee Hooker. To Suze, “[it] was like hearing that someone as mythic as Woody Guthrie was in the room. I had no idea John Lee Hooker was alive, let alone performing in New York City.
“I don’t remember what he played that night,” she continues, “but the room got quiet when he took the stage. When his set was over and he walked back to the bar and sat down, I overcame my shyness and went over to him, though it was a while before I managed to tell him how I first heard one of his albums and how much I loved it.” Whenever Hooker played Gerde’s, they chatted after his set. A friendship developed, and when, in 1961, Suze started dating the most scintillating talent to hit Gerde’s, ever, “the friendship expanded,” Suze writes, to include the onetime Robert Zimmerman.
Outtake from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album-jacket photo shoot, January 1963: Two barely post-adolescent admirers of John Lee Hooker
Oh yes, my Hooker interview. Aware that the young Dylan had admired John, I asked the bluesman, “Did you used to hang out with Bob Dylan back in the day?”
“He hung out with me!” said Hooker. “When I used to play Gerde’s Folk City, ain’t nobody heard of Bob. He used to come and see me all the time. Bob and his girlfriend, Suze.”
As it happens, I grew up knowing Suze Rotolo. My mother and her parents belonged to the same far-left New York circles. Though I don’t remember Suze from my six-year-old days, we became close friends when she returned, ca. 1970, from a long sojourn in Italy, where she’d met and married a Perugian named Enzo Bartoccioli, a devoted jazz fan in whose world Chico Hamilton loomed far larger than Bob Dylan. I spent many afternoons and evenings at the Rotocciolis’, as I referred to the couple and the child who arrived in due time. I valued Suze’s friendship tremendously, and was heartbroken, one of many, when she died in 2011 of lung cancer. She was only 67.
“You’re in touch with Suze?” said Hooker. “You tell her I say hi! Bob and Suze used to come visit me at the Broadway Central Hotel, where I always stayed. It’s no longer there. We’d sit around and drink and play. Bobby would ‘bout blow on his harmonica. Yeah, those were the days.”
“I’m going to bring her to your show here in New York,” I said, “and she’s going to come backstage afterwards to say hello.” I’d already arranged it with Hooker’s manager.
“Don’t let nobody stop you!” said Hooker. It meant more to me to have re-established their connection than it did to have written just another interview, even if it was with one of the greatest of all blues singers. I’ll let Suze finish the story.
“Decades later,” she writes in A Freewheelin’ Time, “when a music writer friend, Tony Scherman, was doing an interview with Hooker, the old blues man began to reminisce about his early days in Greenwich Village with Bob and Suze. Tony told him he knew me and gave him an update. After a blues concert at the Beacon Theater in 1991 [Suze was a year off] where John Lee Hooker was the headliner, his manager brought me backstage. When John saw me, he raised his hands in the air like the Healer, grinned, and said, Hey, Suze! The good old days!”
John Lee Hooker died, full of years and honors, in 2001.
thank YOU
Her book was great “A FREE WHEELIN’ TIME I recommend it.