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Her shows, in fact, are as big a part of her music career as her albums. She has an easy, confident stage manner, spending little time in front of the audience, preferring instead to wander the tables and wink at friends. Before a performance in Canada a few years ago, Zakiya's longtime guitarist, Tony Cook, spotted a big Hells Angel near the dressing room, and, remembering a few previous run-ins with members of the motorcycle group, thought, Oh, God. Soon, Zakiya took the stage. The first thing she said was something like, "I see we have some Hells Angels in the crowd," then she launched into a story about her father's bodyguard, a Hells Angel. "The guy went crazy," Cook recalls. "From that moment, you could do no wrong."
Offstage, Zakiya comes across as quiet, almost shy; onstage, she'll wear an Afro and call herself "Foxy Brown" for an entire set. She's considering a new stage character, too. The costume: a homburg, a suit, and a pair of sunglasses.
John Lee Hooker was born in 1917 outside of Clarksdale, Miss., in the cradle of the Delta blues. His stepfather, Will Moore, was a musician from Shreveport, La. -- where the favored style was a formless one-chord vamp -- and when Moore moved to Mississippi, he'd play parties with blues forefathers Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Hooker learned guitar from his stepfather, but he developed the thick, dramatic singing style of a Mississippi bluesman. He had Louisiana in his hands, and the Delta in his throat.
Hooker moved to Detroit in 1943, and five years later recorded "Boogie Chillen." The song was a droning boogie on an electric guitar, bouncing above the thump of Hooker's foot -- simultaneously urban and backcountry. It closed with a spoken monologue: "One night I was layin' down. I heard Mama and Papa talkin'. I heard Papa tell Mama to "let that boy boogie-woogie. 'Cause it's in him, and it's got to come out.'" From there, he recorded under different names for different labels: Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam, Johnny Williams, The Boogie Man, John L. Booker, Johnny Lee, John Lee, and Sir John Lee Hooker. His songs were not diaries of metaphysical apocalypse, like Robert Johnson's. Some were violent; some merely sounded violent. Most were dance numbers.
Hooker's music changed over the years: In 1962, he recorded "Boom Boom," a stop-time rhythm-and-blues fuck song (recently used in a Gap commercial), and his sound began to creep into the riffs of British guitarists. In the 1970s, he worked with the white-blues band Canned Heat. Soon, his blues could be found in any 12 bars of ZZ Top. He moved to Northern California, and his reputation faded until the 1989 release of The Healer, featuring the likes of Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, and Robert Cray. Similar albums followed: Hooker would howl a few bars into the dense production, then hang back while Santana took a guitar solo. "He revived a lot of careers," Zakiya says. "He has been a steppingstone for a lot of people. A doormat for some, a steppingstone for others."
At the time of his death, Hooker was working on an album of unreleased tracks tentatively titled End of the World Blues, now the double album of outtakes that Zakiya and her husband are remastering. And there are other plans to keep his name alive. For Hooker's birthday in August, the John Lee Hooker Foundation hopes to co-host a benefit concert with the Grateful Dead's Rex Foundation. Skuratowicz, Zakiya's manager and the Hooker estate's manager, says he'd also like to put together an album of bootlegs. (The timing of these efforts is good; 2003 is the so-called Year of the Blues -- as proclaimed by the U.S. Senate and sponsored by Volkswagen -- celebrating the 100th anniversary of W.C. Handy's supposed introduction to the music on a Mississippi train platform.)
"Everything Zakiya and I have planned," Skuratowicz says, "is so that John won't be in the dustbins, with the reduced-rate things."
Ollan and Zakiya live in a mint-green house with pink trim, just a few unlit blocks from the Coliseum. An airless, low-ceilinged recording studio lies behind a thick door at the base of the house. Upstairs, in a small, carpeted room, Ollan sits in front of two computer screens, one of them alive with pistoning colored bars.
He and two other musicians -- Tony Cook and Gregg Crockett -- are working on a preliminary version of "Mean Mean World" for the album of outtakes. It's largely the same stark blues that Hooker recorded with his daughter a decade ago. Today, they're tacking on a brief guitar part. Earlier, they added synthesized strings, with a few pizzicato fills, and Hooker's mumbled introduction to the song: "It's a slow-going thing. It's about what's happenin' today. It will be happenin' maybe four or five years from today. Until things get down ... mellow ... all over the world."
"Is that deep shit?" Ollan says.
For the album, the challenge is to touch up songs that were deemed unusable, without straying too far from their spirit. Ollan handles the first part; Zakiya, the second. He tinkers with the music during the day, then runs it by Zakiya when she returns from work. The songs are mostly the residue of Hooker's late-career resurgence, and the plan is to eventually bring in a few big-name musicians to record guest spots. There's even the idea, Skuratowicz says, of getting a hip hop act to sing a duet, with the hope that it will expand Hooker's posthumous audience. He won't give out any names, saying only that he wants "someone who's positive, who's an African-American star today in what is called urban music."
After working on "Mean Mean World," Ollan moves on to "Wednesday Evening Blues," which Hooker recorded with George Thorogood on guitar: "She left me that Wednesday evening" -- which, in Hooker's mouth, sounds like wedeeeing -- "Lord, when the sun was sinkin' low." It's a rough song, bearing some of Hooker's trademarks: He stomps his foot throughout, often wandering from the beat, and he sings chord changes he doesn't play on the guitar. "I thought we were gonna try to do the authentic outdoor thing, with the birds and the cows?" Crockett asks Ollan. At one point, apparently, Ollan had considered adding natural sound effects, the kinds of things you might hear on a Mississippi porch.
