The Boom Boom Room — John Lee Hooker's San Francisco club

John Lee Hooker opened the Boom Boom Room at 1601 Fillmore Street in San Francisco's Western Addition in 1997, naming it after his 1961 recording "Boom Boom" — one of the most influential blues singles ever made, a recording so rhythmically distinctive that it effectively defined the boogie-blues form that runs from his work through to every subsequent heavy rock and blues-rock band that borrowed from it. He was eighty-three years old when the club opened and had been living in the Bay Area since moving from Detroit to Oakland in the early 1970s.

Hooker had relocated from the South to Detroit in 1943, working in a car factory by day and playing the Detroit bar circuit by night until "Boogie Chillen" — recorded at United Sound Systems in 1948 — became a national R&B hit and launched his recording career. He made hundreds of records over the following five decades, recording for dozens of labels under various pseudonyms, and collaborated in his later years with the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Carlos Santana, and others who had absorbed his influence. His move to the Bay Area placed him in proximity to the rock and blues community that had formed around his music, and the Boom Boom Room was the physical culmination of that relationship: his own room, his own stage, his name on the door.

Hooker died on June 21, 2001, at his home in Los Altos, California, at the age of eighty-three. The Boom Boom Room continued operating after his death and remains one of San Francisco's primary blues venues, still at the Fillmore Street address. The Fillmore corridor itself — the stretch of Fillmore between Geary and Post — was the heart of San Francisco's African-American jazz and blues scene from the 1940s through to urban renewal in the 1960s that destroyed much of it; Hooker's club sits in the geography of that history.