John Lee Hooker – The Healer

I said last time that I’m more of a fan of John Lee Hooker solo than with other players. And I’ve said before that I’m not really a fan of big name guest stars on records – too often, someone just comes in, does their signature lick, and neither song nor title artist are done a real service. But there are exceptions to both, and “The Healer” is absolutely one of those, and one of my all-time favorite albums.

John Lee Hooker was 73 when this album was released in September 1989 – an important month for him and for me. For John Lee, this album, featuring guest performances from Carlos Santana, Charlie Musselwhite, Robert Cray, Los Lobos, George Thorogood, and, most importantly of all, Bonnie Raitt, made a significant dent in the Billboard charts, his highest charter ever, and won a Grammy for best traditional blues performance for “I’m In The Mood,” his duet with Bonnie Raitt. It made him a recognizable name again even for non-blues fans, lit up his live bookings, and reportedly made him economically secure, something no blues man can ever rely on.

That was also a remarkable month for me, as I had moved into a moderately seedy fourth-floor walkup apartment in Albany and began a commuter marriage in order to take a position as a Fellow with the New York State Senate – a position that then set me up for the rest of my state career, and caused us to move from Syracuse to Albany less than a year later. It was challenging, scary, exciting. Keeping two apartments going in two different cities on very tight salaries didn’t leave much money for new music or anything else – and our media were split between our apartments. The vinyl and the cassettes went with me to Albany; the CD player was in Syracuse with Lee. We mostly commuted by train, with a cassette Walkman for entertainment. So any new CDs we bought that year, I had to listen to when I was back home in Syracuse on the weekends, and will forever associate with the little carriage house apartment we downsized into in order to make that all work. (Having now been forced to live separately not once, but twice, in order to either advance a career or simply stay employed, I can now say: can’t recommend it.)

There was a huge buzz about this record, we were already fans of John Lee Hooker (but I believe had only one compilation disc at the time), and we bought it pretty much as soon as it came out, and it quickly became absolutely emblematic of that year for me, and as we followed up with the rest of JLH’s excellent releases in the ’90s, always kept coming back to this one. So, yes, one of my all-time favorite albums.

But of course, we only had it on CD – until this past December, when it showed up at Forever Changes on this excellent Craft Recordings pressing. I’ve tried to have a rule about not buying new vinyl of records I already have on CD – but these days, which I’m hardly listening to any digital at all, I’ve made some fairly frequent exceptions, and for bringing this album back into my rotation, I have no regrets.