John Lee Hooker – The Best Of Friends (1998/2024) [FLAC 24bit/44,1kHz]

John Lee Hooker – The Best Of Friends (1998/2024)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:08:03 minutes | 805 MB | Genre: Blues
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BMG Rights Management (US) LLC

For half a century, the much-recorded bluesman John Lee Hooker has cut music so primal it blurred into itself–his albums often seem interchangeable, his great signature songs rerecorded to the nth. He defeats this tendency with The Best of Friends, a compilation on which such admiring colleagues as Eric Clapton, Jimmie Vaughan, and Bonnie Raitt help him reprise the likes of “Boogie Chillen,” “Boom Boom,” and “I’m in the Mood,” respectively. Three of the album’s tracks, among them the Grammy-winning Raitt duet, go back to 1989’s mostly collaborative The Healer. Others cherry-pick his ’90s catalogue, and three, including the pace-setting “Boogie Chillen,” were cut for this project.

Rock and rollers cotton to Hooker because, like Elmore James and for that matter Chuck Berry, he has a hook: the boogie beat, a vamping drone that’s propulsive at any speed. But reduced to slow one-chord guitar and ageless Delta vocal, as on this album’s solo showpiece, “Tupelo,” his groove can be pretty foreboding even though its darkness is full of subtle color. The guests, all instrumental except for Raitt and his old fan Van Morrison, open it up. Special kudos to Hispanic interpreters Los Lobos, who rock into his boogie, and Carlos Santana, who with two different bands bends “The Healer” and “Chill Out” into polyrhythmic workouts. And hey, give the drummers some–eight all told, every one of a single mind and a single beat, a beat that only gathers detail when it’s stated outright.John Lee Hooker’s recordings for Virgin/Point Blank may have varied in quality, but never in formula. Once The Healer earned reams of praise and, more importantly, solid sales upon its 1989 release, it was pretty much set in stone that every future Hooker album would be painstakingly constructed and boast a plethora of superstar cameos. The guest stars were designed to bring in a larger audience, who would hopefully be impressed enough to stick around for Hooker’s solid stuff, which was usually better than the attention-grabbing, star-studded tracks. Of course, the names are what sold, and Virgin did not overlook that fact, choosing to assemble a collection of highlights titled The Best of Friends in 1998. The title refers to the superstar duets, and while this very well may be the best of those cuts — well, almost all of the duets are here, including both the sublime (“I Cover the Waterfront,” with Van Morrison) and the mediocre — this stuff still isn’t as good as Hooker’s solo recordings from this era. Which means this disc is primarily for listeners who like to think they like Hooker, but they really just want to hear Eric Clapton wail away. – Stephen Thomas Erlewine

Tracklist:

01. John Lee Hooker & Eric Clapton – Boogie Chillen (04:36)
02. John Lee Hooker – This Is Hip (Feat. Ry Cooder) (03:26)
03. John Lee Hooker & Carlos Santana – The Healer (05:40)
04. John Lee Hooker – I Cover The Waterfront (Feat. Booker T. Jones) (06:42)
05. John Lee Hooker & Jimmie Vaughan – Boom Boom (04:19)
06. John Lee Hooker & Bonnie Raitt – I’m In The Mood (04:29)
07. John Lee Hooker & Ben Harper – Burnin’ Hell (05:02)
08. John Lee Hooker – Tupelo (03:55)
09. John Lee Hooker – Baby Lee (03:43)
10. John Lee Hooker & Los Lobos – Dimples (04:02)
11. John Lee Hooker & Carlos Santana – Chill Out (Things Gonna Change) (04:47)
12. John Lee Hooker & Ike Turner – Big Legs, Tight Skirt (06:02)
13. John Lee Hooker & Charles Brown – Don’t Look Back (06:44)
14. John Lee Hooker – Up And Down (04:29)

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