THE LONDON HOWLIN’ WOLF SESSIONS is a fascinating recording, pairing blues legends Howlin’ Wolf and Hubert Sumlin with the generation of English rock ’n’ rollers who discovered and helped to make their music a worldwide phenomenon, including Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Ian Stewart.
HUBERT SUMLIN: I was glad that they helped us record the London Sessions. We recorded numbers we’d already recorded in the States but we did them all over again.
Initially, producer Norman Dayron reached out to Eric Clapton to see if he’d be interested in playing with Wolf. He most certainly was.
HUBERT SUMLIN: The record company wanted Eric Clapton but they didn’t want me. But Eric Clapton called the record company and said, “If Hubert isn’t on the London Sessions, then neither am I.” I didn’t even have a passport, but the next day I had a visa.
NORMAN DAYRON: Hubert isn’t right about that. He was one of the first people I wanted to bring. I thought for Clapton to play his best on lead, he’d need his idol, Hubert, holding down the rhythm.
Initially, the band was supposed to feature another guitarist as well.
HUBERT SUMLIN: Keith Richards was supposed to have been with us too. But Eric Clapton beat him out some kind of way. Keith still talks about this today. He told me, “I was supposed to be on there.”
NORMAN DAYRON: He’s right about that. I was going to put together new arrangements nothing like the originals, I wanted as many piano players and guitar players as possible because I had a master plan of doing overdubs, but I still wanted to get as much as I could in London. Eric invited Keith to join him to play both lead and rhythm but he didn’t show up.
Later on, several musicians including Steve Winwood would add overdubs to the initial tracks. Also joining in on the first day of sessions were an array of Chess all-stars, including eighteen-year-old harmonica prodigy Jeffrey Carp (who drowned shortly after), as well as Klaus Voormann and Ringo Starr. The latter two didn’t last long.
Howlin’ Wolf and Mick at the recording of the London Sessions
KLAUS VOORMANN: Howlin’ was singing, he took the mic off the mic stand, and was walking around in the studio. He came right up to me, looked at me right in my eyes while he was singing and I was playing. I thought that was great and very inspiring, like he was talking to you: “Come on, boy, do your thing!” Then he went over to Ringo, but Ringo—as he often does when he loves playing—had his eyes closed, so he didn’t notice that Howlin’ was right in front of his face. When Ringo opened his eyes, he got a real shock and nearly fell off his chair with fright.
Ringo left and took Voormann with him, though Ringo still appears incognito in the liner notes, credited as “Richie.”
The sessions weren’t without other challenges.
ERIC CLAPTON: There’s that thing of him teaching me how to play “Little Red Rooster” and when that was happening it was awful. I wanted to just die. He kept grabbing my hand and shoving my wrist up and down the neck of the guitar. And he was angry. He was very angry.
Wyman recalls a kinder, gentler Wolf.
BILL WYMAN: It was very nice, actually. Except Wolf wasn’t feeling too well at the time. I remember on some of the tracks there was someone standing behind him whispering the lyrics into his ear because he was getting blanks which he couldn’t remember. But it was a good session—he showed us how to play “Little Red Rooster.” We cut the tune and he says, “No, it shouldn’t go like that.” We were playing it kind of backwards—the way white kids would play it, but the way we felt it. He started to show us the right way to do it, but the Chess people ended up using the old “backwards” take anyway.
NORMAN DAYRON: That was me whispering the words to him. I don’t think Wolf was angry at that point, but I do remember him being upset about something earlier on. It was my idea to have Clapton ask Wolf about the changes on “Little Red Rooster.” I didn’t think we’d use it for the record but I needed to break the ice.
Hubert confirmed Bill’s view of Wolf’s health, and remembers another celebrity visitor.
HUBERT SUMLIN: Wolf had doctors tending him night and day. He was so sick that on a couple of nights we didn’t even record; we just sat in the studio and got high. Mick Jagger and Bill Wyman came in, and we partied all night long, man. The cleaning lady came in the next morning and everyone was laying there on the floor. Mick Jagger had his head up inside the bass drum (laughs). It was wild. We had a ball.
NORMAN DAYRON: Mick was there, but that’s the only part of that that’s accurate. I had to get Wolf to take his pills but once he did, he was fine, he outworked all the other musicians. Mick played percussion on about five songs. He had perfect rhythm. I was not a producer who sat in the control room, I was out with the musicians conducting. I don’t think Mick liked that at all. He thought I was a prima donna. I remember him saying after one take, “Well, I do hope that her majesty the queen is satisfied with that take,” but Wolf stuck up for me.
The record stands as an amazing document and a great record that’s a lot of fun to listen to: it’s hard not to enjoy the coupling of “new” and old bluesy sounds. At the time, however, there was a bit of a backlash.
NORMAN DAYRON: The snobs and the blues-nerds who wrote for the magazines at the time generally resisted liking the album. These were people of a similar ilk to the ones who booed Dylan when he went electric at Newport.
But soon Dayron received the ultimate approbation.
NORMAN DAYRON: When I sent a copy of the record to B.B. King, he called me up and said, “That’s a good record, son. You ought to be proud of it.”
ABOUT THEM SHOES
One of the lasting achievements of the Rolling Stones is the consistency of their desire to pay back the blues heroes who inspired them. This isn’t just lip service or good PR. This is a real sense of urgency to honor and remember all of the giants whose shoulders they stood on during their fabulous trajectory to a level of fame and fortune that their own idols never attained. It began as far back as the group’s insistence that Howlin’ Wolf appear with them on the American television program Shindig (see chapter 6). It continues to this very day, ironically, with yet another connection to that same blues idol. In 2004, Wolf’s guitar player, Hubert Sumlin, recorded a solo album with a little help from his friends. Eric Clapton, Levon Helm, David Johansen, and Keith Richards all appear on various tracks on About Them Shoes.
In Life, Keith Richards wrote about his admiration for the record, noting that he especially liked the title. In a 2004 interview, I asked Hubert what those words meant to him:
HUBERT SUMLIN: Everybody walked in these shoes, everybody in this blues line. I named the album About Them Shoes for everybody who walked in them shoes. I’m a blues guy. The people who make music, I don’t care if it’s blues or rock or country and western, if they got soul, they say, “We been in these shoes, too.” This is what it’s all about. I got a little bit of all of it. If you feel it, somebody’s gonna feel it too.
When Hubert died of heart failure in New Jersey on Sunday, December 4, 2010, at the age of eighty, Mick and Keith once again stepped up to the plate for one of their idols. They insisted on picking up the costs of the funeral.
KEITH RICHARDS: He was an uncle and a teacher, and all the guitar players must feel the same as myself.
MICK JAGGER: Hubert was an incisive yet delicate blues player. He had a really distinctive and original tone and was a wonderful foil for Howlin’ Wolf’s growling vocal style. On a song like “Goin’ Down Slow” he could produce heartrending emotion, and on a piece like “Wang Dang Doodle” an almost playful femininity. He was an inspiration to us all.
It is that kind of consistency, empathy, and respect that will be remembered long after the Rolling Stones themselves cease to exist.