Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  In 1978, Benson traveled with Lightnin’ to Japan and toured six cities in thirteen days, but once again he had some trouble persuading Lightnin’ to go. “Some guy got in the car one day in the Third Ward,” Benson says, “and told him that they had dropped an atomic bomb in Japan and there was no food. So Lightnin’ said he wouldn’t go to Japan. So I told him that was during World War II; that was thirty years ago. They’ve rebuilt and everything since then.” But Lightnin’ wouldn’t listen. He was adamant about not going, and he and Harold had such a big falling out about him refusing to honor what was already an existing contract that Dr. Harold turned over all of Lightnin’s records to Benson. “He said, ‘You’re the manager now. You go do it. I’m tired of messing with him.’ And I had to deal with it,” Benson remembers. “So around February, Miss Nette and Lightnin’ came over to my house, and I received a call from [the promoter] J. J. Jackson in California who said Lightnin’ had to go. He’d already signed the contract, and if he didn’t go, he was going to be sued for breach of contract. So I told Lightnin’ that and he said he didn’t really care, because he wasn’t going…. But then this Russian promoter and this woman showed up in the middle of the night in the rain over to Lightnin’s place on Gray, and brought a substantial down payment for the trip, and Lightnin’ just sat there when he saw the money. He didn’t say anything, so I just proceeded to negotiate it as if he was going. This is probably a Tuesday or Wednesday night, and they said they wanted us to be in L.A. on Friday. So I took the guy and the woman to a nearby motel that night, met him the next day and went to the Japanese consulate, and he arranged for us to get a work permit and all the paperwork that needed to be done. I just proceeded to talk to Lightnin’ as if we were going, and he gave in. He said he would go if I took three cases of Pearl beer and some sardines and some saltine crackers, so he could be assured that he would have at least something to eat while he was there.”27 Lightnin’ was always careful about what he ate and how his food was served. Benson says that Lightnin’ believed that his father had been poisoned, and throughout his life he worried that the same might happen to him.

  The overall contract for the Japanese tour was for fifty thousand dollars, which was by far the most Lightnin’ had ever been paid, and the organizers also provided first-class air travel and a fifty-dollar per diem. En route, Lightnin’ asked Benson a very curious question about whether or not the world would end. Benson says, “I thought he was kind of waxing apocalyptic and answered, ‘You know, Lightnin’, the Bible says, the world will end and Jesus will come back,’ and he said, ‘No, if we keep flyin’ in this motherfucka, will we go off the end of the earth.’ And I said, ‘No, the earth is not flat. Wherever we take off from, if we keep going, we come back to where we started.’ That was a real sweet moment [though it was also kind of sad that Lightnin’ seemed to lack such basic knowledge].”28

  Lightnin’ and Benson left Houston on February 10, 1978, and arrived the next day in Tokyo, where they had a rehearsal at TOA Attractions studio. On February 13, Lightnin’ performed in Tokyo, followed by Yokohama on February 15, Osaka on February 17, Nagoya on February 18, Sapporo on February 21, and Sendai on February 22. Also on the bill were Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, both of whom Lightnin’ had known for nearly two decades.

  Overall, the tour to Japan went well, but Benson says he always had to be on guard. “The language and the customs made it difficult to sort everything out. They’d want us to come to the studio. And they’d kind of play like they were just kind of rehearsing for the gig. And then, next thing you know, they got a couple of tracks out that he’s recorded. So we decided that we didn’t give them anything that they could use unless they really wanted to sit down and talk.”29

  In Sapporo, Lightnin’ ran out of sardines, crackers, and beer, and he had to go to the hotel restaurant. He was reluctant, but he had no choice, and when he got to the restaurant, he heard Sonny Terry complaining, “Can you see that waiter anywhere? I ordered some pancakes.” And Lightnin’ was amused and chimed in, “Get your order, man!” Finally, the waiter came and brought Sonny his pancakes, and Benson says, “They were these little silver dollar pancakes and when Sonny felt them on his plate, he yelled out as loud as he could, ‘Hey, motherfucka! I ordered some pancakes, I didn’t order no biscuits!’ And Lightnin’ kept eggin’ him on to give the people hell. I was embarrassed as hell in that situation.”30

  From then on, Benson either got Lightnin’ room service or brought food to him. “Lightnin’ pretty much stayed in the hotel. He didn’t like Brownie, and Sonny and Brownie hadn’t talked, other than on stage, for twenty-five years. Lightnin’ was more on Sonny’s side and they were better friends, and they hung together.”

  On stage Lightnin’ was accompanied by Donald Bailey, a drummer and studio musician who also worked with Sonny and Brownie. The other sidemen were Japanese, and according to Benson, “They were perfect mimics of Lightnin’s sound.” The concert venues were huge and sat four to five thousand people and they were lined up around the block.

  After Lightnin’ got back to Texas, he didn’t do too much traveling. He mainly played around Houston, where a new generation of white blues rockers connected with his music. Lightnin’ would let just about anyone get up on stage and sit in, and if he didn’t like what they were playing, he’d brush them off. As early as 1971, Jimmie Vaughan and his band Storm had appeared on the same bill with him at Liberty Hall and Fitzgerald’s, and in the years that followed, he played numerous dates at Liberty Hall with musicians as diverse as Tracy Nelson and Jimmy Reed. He also went often to Austin, where he was booked with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble in 1978 at the Armadillo, and was even featured on the Austin City Limits television show in 1979 in a program that included the Neville Brothers and barrelhouse blues pianist Robert Shaw.31

  Michael Hall, writing in Texas Monthly, described Hopkins’s appearance on Austin City Limits as “one of the all-time great Lightnin’ moments…. He was wearing a bright-blue leisure suit with rhinestones that sparkled in the TV lights and a beige fedora cocked at a 45-degree angle on the side of his head. He looked like a fabulous old pimp. He played a Fender Stratocaster in front of a rhythm section that included bass player Ron Wilson [who had been elected to the Texas House of Representatives].” While the performance was uneven, combining “flashes of brilliance competing with the age-related tendency toward sloth and crankiness,” Lightnin’ was nonetheless captivating and halfway through his song “Ain’t No Cadillac,” his soloing took an unexpected direction: “For some reason he had a wah-wah pedal, and he either stomped it too hard or it had been turned up way too high, because his amplifier let out a high-pitched squeal—a loud, intense, and not unpleasant sound that lasted about three seconds. At first he appeared taken aback, but he kept playing, and a satisfied smile crossed his face…. He may not have planned that particular outburst, but like all the other notes he played and noises he plucked, he was proud of it. ‘That’s what I’m talkin’ about,’ he said, and jammed the pedal down again. Then he went on to craft a solo that began quietly and cascaded through a fall of bad notes, bringing the song to an early crashing end, dragging his rhythm section down with him, as he’d been doing for years.”32

  As much as Lightnin’ might have enjoyed the attention he got from his white fans, Benson felt he was always suspicious of their motives. “I think all of us Southern boys have inculcated into us a certain amount of cultural paranoia that I call the ‘Emmett Till complex.’ And that is, white people will be straightforward with you as long as it behooves them, but they can turn on you in an instant. So if it comes down, especially, to white womanhood, then you had to be super-careful in terms of how you stepped. So all of these young guys who came along, who I felt were less prejudiced, he still saw them pretty much as being unpredictable; there was a possibility they could turn any minute and become very hateful. What he would say to me is that, ‘David, you’re going to get killed. These white folks are going to kill you because you t
alk to these white folks like they’re niggers.’ I was part of a different generation. I didn’t have any problem going haggling for his money or negotiating with [a] club owner.”33

  One time Benson and Alfie Naifeh were driving with Lightnin’ to Dallas, and they ran into an unexpected problem. “We were going to the club Mother Blues, and we were on Interstate 45. Well, he never would use a restroom anywhere. He had this paranoia about those things. He would always have a Spam can, a very long Spam can in the trunk of his car, and that’s what he would urinate in. So we stopped on the side of the road, so he could get his Spam can out, and he began to urinate. And a white woman in a car by herself drove past him on the highway, and he said, ‘Oh, my God, she looks like she’ll tell a lie.’ He thought she was going to stop and report him, accuse him of exposing himself. He was that paranoid. But he was standing on the side of the car. There was no way she could see what he was doing. But, for him, having been raised in segregated, hateful America, this was how people got lynched. And that fear never did leave his bones.”34

  When Lightnin’ finally got to Mother Blues, Benson says, his demeanor changed. If anything, he exuded a sense of confidence and cool. Mark Pollock, a white blues guitarist from Irving, Texas, said when he saw Lightnin’ live at Mother Blues, he felt he “looked exactly like he stepped off the album cover, the half-pint in the back pocket, or shoved down his boot. He had those dark sunglasses … he played that old Gibson, or a Stella, or a black Stratocaster … he wore a cowboy hat and he was the first blues guy I saw wearing cowboy boots.”35

  Anson Funderburgh, another aspiring white blues guitarist, saw Lightnin’ for the first time in 1974 at Mother Blues when he was about nineteen years old. “I was awestruck. Lightnin’ had on a brown suit and a brown hat and had a fifth of whiskey in his coat pocket wrapped up in a brown paper bag. He had like a big gold-colored medallion around his neck with a lightning bolt on it.” On stage, Lightnin’ was in complete control, but it was obvious that he hadn’t rehearsed with his sidemen, or perhaps even met them, until he showed up at the gig. “He had a bass player and a drummer playing with him,” Funderburgh says, “and by the second set, the bass player was gone. He fired the bass player. Both of them were white. But the drummer stayed. Lightnin’ made his music go where his vocals were going, and where his singing was going. Lightnin’ went right where he wanted to go, and he expected anyone that was with him to follow him…. He was the one who was making the rules.”36

  Three years later, Funderburgh understood even more clearly what it was like to play with Hopkins when he was invited to perform with him on stage at the Granada Theatre in Dallas on August 27 and 28, 1977. “I was scared to death,” Funderburgh says, “because I was such a big fan.” For the show, the promoter Danny Brown put together a group of musicians to accompany Lightnin’ on stage that included Funderburgh and Marc Benno playing rhythm guitar, Doyle Bramhall on drums, and Larry Rogers on bass. “At the rehearsal,” Funderburgh recalls, “we were set up, and they had a piano on stage, because evidently he had requested a piano. Well, we were just sittin’ around talkin’ and the piano tuner came and he got it all tuned up. And after a while, they brought Lightnin’ in and he hit one chord on the piano and he said, ‘That goddamn piano’s out of tune, I can’t use it.’ And he didn’t play it all night.”37

  Prior to the show, the band had very little interaction with Lightnin’, who seemed to be reserved and a little withdrawn before he went on stage. Funderburgh, Benno, Bramhall, and Rogers were the opening act, and at the appointed time, they started a song. Lightnin’ came on, and “evidently,” Funderburgh says, “we weren’t doing it exactly the way he wanted to, and I remember him turning to Marc Benno and saying, ‘I told you, you were going to do this to me.’ Well, I was nervous as a cat. But he always seemed to like what I did. I just turned down really quiet. I just listened to him and tried to follow him. I know I made mistakes. I really wasn’t trying to be loud or anything. I think maybe that’s what he liked about me … I wasn’t trying to play all over him.”38

  Funderburgh learned quickly what he needed to do. “He was very difficult to follow because he kind of changed chords whenever he wanted to change chords. It was a slow blues, so it was built around a three-chord slow blues thing, but he may play an extra measure of the one chord and then switch real quick down to the four, and then back to the one. The whole key to following Lightnin’ Hopkins was to really listen to where his vocals were going. He didn’t follow a hard pattern.”39

  Doyle Bramhall concurs, “He [Lightnin’] was a tough bird. There weren’t any rehearsals or sound checks or anything like that. You just showed up, and you immediately jumped in the deep end. He made you pay attention, so my deal was to just stay in the groove, in the pocket. But he would stop the whole show with a packed show at the Granada and say, ‘Man, this bass player just got to get it together.’ He never did it to Anson, and he never did it to me. But he gave bass players a hard time. He used to say, ‘Lightnin’ change when Lightnin’ change,’ as far as his chord playing went.”40

  After the first set, the band went backstage and Lightnin’ held court, Bramhall says. “When Lightnin’ came into a room, he was the center of attention, and he was that way without ever trying. Here we were, a bunch of white kids, just soaking up everything he had to say.”41

  “He was like a hero,” Funderburgh adds, “I was just kind of hanging on to every word that he said. And we were all backstage, and he looked over at me, and I guess I had done a pretty good job because I felt like he kind of took to me somehow. I was surprised because he remembered my name. He said, ‘Anson, go get Lightnin’ a beer,’ And so I just hopped right up and ran over and got him a can of Pearl. And right when I leaned down to give it to him, I popped the top. And it was like I was froze in time. I’m sure it wasn’t very long, but it seemed like hours had gone by. I’m standing there holding this beer and he would never take it from me. And finally he looked up at me and goes, ‘Anson, don’t ever drink from something someone opened for you. Now, go get Lightnin’ a Pearl.’ So, I just jumped on over there and got him another Pearl and let him open it. And he drank it right down.”42

  Funderburgh was needless to say a little embarrassed, but Lightnin’ didn’t rub it in. He just wanted his needs to be met on his terms. “Lightnin’ knew what he was doing,” Bramhall says, “Him being the teacher and all of us being his students. He would be backstage: Would you get ole Lightnin’ a cigarette, or would you get ole Lightnin’ his guitar or whatever. We didn’t mind doing it because he was Lightnin’.”43

  Yet Lightnin’ and his sidemen were worlds apart, not only in terms of their musical backgrounds and worldview, but most noticeably in appearance. “We were hippies,” Funderburgh says. “I had hair down to probably the middle of my back and a feathered earring in my left ear with bell-bottom blue jeans and house slippers called Jiffy’s that I wore all the time. They [Bramhall, Benno, and Rogers] looked about the same.”44 And Hopkins wore suits: “He was a slick dresser with a lot of gold,” Bramhall adds, “and he was very articulate. He always had a tie. He always dressed really sharp. His shoes were shined so bright you could see your face in them.”45

  Tim “Mit” Schuller in his Living Blues review of the Granada show was far more critical than the musicians themselves, describing the opening act as a “miserable four man aggregation introduced as the Lightnin’ Hopkins warm-up band. No more need be said about them except to point out that their rhythm guitarist was Marc Benno and their lead guitarist was of the type who have given white blues musicians a bad name.”46

  According to Schuller, when Lightnin’ finally took the stage in a “highly theatrical walk-on,” he took “an absurdly long time to tune his guitar … and just when things were rolling tolerably, he’d stop and begin reprimanding an errant sideman.” To be fair, Schuller pointed out that the sidemen actually made few “really drastic mistakes,” but that Hopkins’s songs “emerged as rambling inconglomerates, made of disjo
inted fragments from any of his countless recordings. Little real music surfaced … the irritating part of this whole trip is that Lightnin’ is quite able to play well but simply chooses not to do so.” The highlights of the evening for Schuller were the performance of “Mojo Hand” and his playing of “My Babe” for two verses until the drummer “blew a cue (one that most bluesmen could have covered easily) and the music stopped while Lightnin’ chewed him out, griped, philosophized, and drank from a Pearl beer can.” Schuller concluded his review by stating that “one hesitates to criticize a legend, but Lightnin’ has done this bit before in Dallas and I have seen him do it in Cleveland’s Music Hall. That Lightnin’ deserves respect is indisputable; he is an irrevocable part of the musical history of this nation. But the legend has become a caricature of itself.”47

  During this period, Benson says, Lightnin’ became more selective about the touring dates he accepted because he “didn’t really want to go out that much on the road.” However, he did continue to play at venues that he liked in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and New York City, where he might get three or four dates a year at the Village Gate. In the summer of 1978, he returned to Canada to play at the Rising Sun in Montreal and the New Yorker Theater in Toronto on the same bill with John Hammond, whom Benson heard criticize Lightnin’ in a radio interview in Houston. “I was listening to KPFT and the DJ was talking to John Hammond, who was playing at Liberty Hall, and he was kind of defaming Lightnin’ and Juke Boy Bonner…. He was talking about how Lightnin’ never made it big and how he would never make it big because he didn’t play according to meter. So I heard it on the radio, so I went to Liberty Hall and I went straight to the dressing room. And I confronted John Hammond and he and I were there for a couple of hours talking music theory and that kind of thing. We were talking about meter being something that actually had been introduced later. Because meter is to the blues what grammar is to language. The music existed before.”48 Benson was defensive about Lightnin’, but clearly by the late 1970s, he was declining. “I thought something might be wrong with his health, but I couldn’t be sure. And he didn’t say much about it.”