Reviving the Buddha

JUST AS classical music listeners must have been shocked when Mozart metamorphosized into the superstar Amadeus, blues fans might be suprised at the thought of scruffy old John Lee Hooker--alias the "Buddha of the Blues"--making a music video. But ever since the first folk/blues revival took off from Harvard Square, white blues promotors have been packaging Black blues players for white audiences.

There is supposedly a new blues revival on now. The full house that came out to see Hooker at the Channel on Friday certainly suggested that somebody'd been spreading the word, bringing in the usual Boston button-down types with a sprinkling of brooding hippies and underage punks. This was the first hard evidence I'd gotten of the blues being revived, aside from reading magazine cover stories on "Great Black Hope" Robert Cray. (Blues has recently developed boxing's problem in reverse: a formerly all-Black domain with no up-and-coming young Black players.)

Pounding away on a Gibson, Hooker packs country-blues licks with all the eerie, electric echoes of a factory city at night. (In fact he was working as a janitor at a Detroit steel mill when he cut his first records.) This merger of acoustic and electric elements in his trademark "guitar-boogie" style has helped him survive countless folk and rock packagings in his career as a blues deity.

The Buddha's free-form style is notoriously difficult to back up, and is best suited to a low key bass accompaniment. But this backing band's overblown sound could have been straight out of Blues Brothers soundtrack, with lead guitar from Spinal Tap. Perhaps the most spontaneous moment came when the backing guitarist announced that the videos would be on sale after the show, and the Buddha put on his black spaceman glasses to rousing applause.

IN THE '60S, blues was successfully marketed to white audiences without the aid of Belushi-esque theatrics. But in addition to capitalizing on its initial novelty as roots rock n' roll, it was flying on wings of social activism and psychedelic drugs. Liberal white people could listen to the blues and feel they were understanding Black culture, even after the centers of Black music had moved to Soul and Motown.

But while whites bought the blues "protest" theme, the opposite response from Blacks confirmed the alienation of blues from its traditional audience base. The blues message was antithetical to Black Power, for it brought political and economic oppression onto the level of personal squabbles, burying its roots in racist society.

On one level, the '60s blues revival was giving middle-class white kids a cathartic rush by hearing about the troubles of poor Blacks. On another, the revival was disproving Lead-belly's famous statement that "never has a white man had the blues, 'cause nothin' to worry about." The kids may have been "alright," but from Vietnam to the H-bomb, they had plenty to worry about. These broad social issues were not the sort of thing blues singers had sung about in the past. White musicians like Bob Dylan, The Band, and The Rolling Stones added new irony and social critique to the fabric of the form.

Hooker's warm-up band for the Channel concern were a couple of white blues popularizers from the '60s: Paul Butterfield (The Paul Butterfield Blues Band) and Rick Danko (The Band). They struck me as the real blues prophets for the '80s.

Fifteen years of surviving on the road in a de-radicalized America seemed to have linked them deeper into the blues tradition than the abstractly felt social issues of their youth. And being the ones who led the '60s revival in the first place, they don't rely on anyone to revive them. Their rollicking blend of country-western and cajun blues stands on its own, without glitz.

Danko and Butterfield definitely seemed like throwbacks, but as much to the Old West as to the Late Sixties. I felt like I was sitting round the campfire listening to a couple of ex-hippy pioneers who got the blues during New Orleans' Mardi-Gras--and stayed drunk ever since. They played blues standards like "Spoonful" and soul hits like Aretha Franklin's "Chain of Fools." But their rendition of the Band's "The Sun Don't Shine" reminded me where all this was coming from.

Paul Butterfield's sudden death last week marked a tragic end to a great blues career. While the Buddha was being video-taped, Danko and Butterfield were making hard-hitting, down-home music that was a little bit of honest sound on the new yuppie blues scene.