Under the Hood: When Van Morrison met John Lee Hooker

Van Morrison – the Belfast Cowboy – has been mixing blues, jazz, folk and R&B for over four decades to create one of the most impressive bodies of work in modern time.   One of Van’s old friends is Peter Wolf of the J. Geils Band, and Peter recalls the time he arranged a meeting between Van Morrison and his idol John Lee Hooker.

Van was living in Boston, and he was a huge Hooker fan. And so I put together this lunch, and the interesting thing about it is Van had this very intense Belfast accent. It’d be hard for a lot of people to understand him, myself included. And John had his own way of talking too that some people could be hard to get. And so here is this guy from Mississippi talking one way, and then this guy from Belfast is talking another way. They were understanding each other perfectly. I couldn’t follow nearly a word of it. – Peter Wolf