Alan Govenar (34 page)

On one occasion Lightnin' was booked to play in San Francisco and Antoinette was with him, but someone had “reserved a room for them in a filthy, reeking, crime-ridden Tenderloin hotel on Eddy Street. There was a bed with dirty sheets on it, I think; the room was littered with rotting garbage and trash. Completely appalling.” Phillips says she had picked them up from the airport and was with them at the time. “When they got there, they were beside themselves with anger, bewilderment, and frustration. Antoinette was furious and disgusted, she began cursing and dumping the bags of garbage and trash out a window that opened onto one of those inner shafts or wells of the building. Then somebody threatened to call the police on
them
and have them arrested for disturbing the peace and vandalism, which put them into a complete tizzy. I don't think they even sat down on anything. Turned out the person who had booked the room for them, I can't remember who it was, said he thought they'd be ‘more comfortable.' More comfortable with what: ensconced in filth and squalor, as some Neanderthal, stereotype-riddled (even highly educated, liberal) whites to this day simply assume blacks are ‘comfortable' with? After contacting Chris [Strachwitz], within a very short time they were booked into a room at a clean, decent place,
not
in the Tenderloin. Profuse and profound apologies were tendered, but the outrage of such a crude and offensive assumption, you can imagine cut them deeply. I don't know how they maintained their dignity through it all, but they did.”
⁴²

Over the years that Phillips knew Lightnin', she never saw him lose his temper, as Blacksnake Brown in
Mojo Hand
did when he slapped Eunice. “While readers have the right to
interpret
this or any scene any way they choose,” Phillips says, “it is completely unwarranted to extrapolate from this, as some literalists do, that Lightnin' ever struck me, because he did not; nor did he ever threaten to, nor was he verbally abusive or otherwise aggressive or domineering. And I did not see him behaving that way toward others. True, Lightnin' had a violent past, but I was not clearly aware of that when I first became involved with him. Whatever the source of his transformation—and I think that in good part it was due to the presence of Antoinette in his life—the change, I contend, was genuine. I bogarted my way into Lightnin's life and indeed, he bore my intrusion, excesses, and inanities with amazing equanimity—far more equanimity than I could have mustered had some crazed, lovesick, fool fan fetched up on my doorstep out of the blue. But that is not to say that he'd become an angel or a pushover. By no means was this the case.”
⁴³

When
Mojo Hand
was published in 1966, it got enthusiastic reviews. The
Charlotte Observer
wrote:
“Mojo Hand
is as sophisticated as primitive sculpture, and has the same element of magic. The characters move along invisible threads, as if under a spell…. The language is racy and rough, so if you're easily offended pass over
Mojo Hand.
You'll be missing an odd, startling experience.”
⁴⁴
The
Los Angeles Times
described Phillips as “an impressive talent,” who “must surely write and write,” and the
Dallas Times Herald
stated, “This book should mark the entrance of a contributing talent of superb dimensions to the American literary scene.”
⁴⁵
Henry Miller loved the book. He invited Phillips to meet him, and they became friends. She even appeared briefly in
The Henry Miller Odyssey,
a biographical documentary made by Robert Snyder.

There was negative criticism as well, which came from different quarters, including a particularly scathing diatribe written by the black critic Albert Murray, who called
Mojo Hand
“a fiasco from the very outset and can be dismissed and forgotten as if it never happened.”
⁴⁶
Murray considered the book poorly written, patently inauthentic, and perpetuating racist stereotypes. And once, when Phillips gave a lecture at a college in Los Angeles, she was almost set upon by irate members of the emergent black power movement, who accused her of writing about retrograde aspects of African American culture and music. Ironically, it was Julius Lester, author of
Look Out Whitey!: Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama,
who in 1999 placed
Mojo Hand
on the Los Angeles Times's list of books considered as “Forgotten Treasures of the 20th Century.”

To Phillips's knowledge, Lightnin' never read
Mojo Hand,
though she was fairly certain that Antoinette did. But Antoinette didn't say anything about it, and Phillips never discussed it with Lightnin'. However, Lightnin' did once mention in passing that he knew the book had been published.
⁴⁷

While
Mojo Hand
was considered by some to be a significant literary accomplishment, Phillips's backstory related to its creation is the most lucid document that exists of Lightnin's personal life in the 1960s. It also gives a strong sense of the contradictions of the man behind the myth—impetuous, selfish, brash, boisterous, witty, and loving. Phillips's memories humanize Lightnin' and provide a vivid sense of his personal life and his community, which not only bought his records, but helped to energize his music.

8

B
y the mid-1960s, Lightnin's audience was growing to include rock ‘n' roll fans. The folk revival was fading, while the blues scene among white audiences was gaining strength. However, the enthusiasm for bluesmen like Lightnin' among rock ‘n' rollers wasn't completely new. Ringo Starr of the Beatles, for example, recalled that as a teenager in the late 1950s, he was “trying to immigrate to Houston, Texas, because Lightnin' Hopkins, the blues player, lived there,” and that he was still into the blues: “Lightnin' is still my hero…. We just wanted to be around Lightnin'…. It would have been interesting if that ever happened.”
¹

Lightnin's recordings with electric guitar, bass, and drums, particularly the Herald sessions, intrigued young white rockers. But it wasn't only his music that made him an icon. His lanky, mysterious appearance, his sunglasses, and the way he presented himself as a bluesman made him especially appealing. Lightnin' was never a hippie, but hippies were fascinated by him.

From September 21 to 26, 1965, Lightnin' was the headliner at the Matrix in San Francisco, which had opened about a month earlier with the Jefferson Airplane as its house band. Initially the Matrix was a folk and blues club, but it soon became synonymous with “The San Francisco Sound” in psychedelic rock music. Once again Lightnin' was in unfamiliar territory, but he was treated as a star, and apparently adapted well to an ever-changing audience. Lightnin' was invited back the next month to perform with Jean Ball and J. C. Burris, and over the next two years, he shuttled back and forth to San Francisco, appearing at the Matrix and the Fillmore, where he even appeared on October 21 and 22, 1966, with the Grateful Dead and Loading Zone. During this period, Lightnin' was greeted with anticipation wherever he performed, whether it was at the Matrix, the Fillmore, or the Berkeley Blues Festival, Sylvio's in Chicago, the Longhorn Jazz Festival in Austin, or the Ash Grove, where he was a regular, appearing with groups as diverse as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Lydia E. Pinksham Superior Orchestra.

In the mid-1960s, aspiring filmmaker Les Blank frequented the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, where he heard Lightnin' for the first time and got the idea to make a documentary about him.
²
Blank was making a living doing industrial and corporate films, and one of his clients, the Gulf States Tube Company, sent him to Texas. At the time Blank was thirty-three years old; he was originally from Tampa, Florida, where he grew up in an upper-middle-class family. He attended Tulane University, where he received a BA in English literature and an MFA in theatre. Then, in 1967, after two years in a PhD film program at the University of Southern California, he left college and began doing freelance work. In Texas, Blank met Skip Gerson, the son of a ladies shoe manufacturer who had grown up on Long Island, outside of New York City. Gerson was in his early twenties and was also trying to figure out how to become a filmmaker. Blank told him if he came to Los Angeles he would hire him as an assistant; he had finished his first short independent film on Dizzy Gillespie in 1965 and was starting a new film on the hippie love-ins in Los Angeles.
³
Gerson had been working as a “hippie clown” on a television station in Houston, but was looking for something “more meaningful” to do with his life.

“For me,” Blank says, “it was the cohesion of what they called the alternative movement, or the hippies, or the love children, the flower children. There was something definitely happening in American culture that had never happened before, and I got a sense there was an important movie to be made. Well, around the time I was completing the film,
⁴
I was at the Ash Grove listening to Lightnin' and Skip told me, ‘If you want to do a film on Lightnin' Hopkins, I think I could get some money from my dad.' And that's exactly what he did, and his father came through with five thousand dollars in 1967. It was a lot of money.”
⁵

To get started, Blank and Gerson got in touch with John Lomax Jr., whom they had heard was the “only white man” Lightnin' trusted, and Blank sent him his short film on Dizzy Gillespie that he had finished in 1965 as a kind of sample of what he wanted to do. Lomax was impressed and agreed to help. He then arranged for Blank and Gerson to meet Lightnin'. “We approached Lightnin',” Blank says, “with a 16mm projector in hand and a copy of the Gillespie film and we asked him if we could do a film on him and he said, ‘Uh …' And we said, ‘We could show you some stuff I had done in the past, to give you an idea what I can do with musicians and film.' So we showed the film on the wall of his dressing room at the Ash Grove in between sets. And he thought it was pretty interesting. And he said, ‘How much money you boys got for Po' Lightnin'?' And we told him we had five thousand dollars. And he replied, ‘That'll do.' Well, we said, ‘That's all we have, and we need some of that for film stock and food and we got to get to Texas.' So we knocked some figures around and he agreed to accepting about a third of it, or fifteen hundred dollars, and we offered him five hundred dollars in advance and then promised to give him another five hundred dollars half way through and then another five hundred dollars when we were all wrapped up. And he agreed, and John Lomax Jr. suggested that we give him the money in dollar bills, which sounds kind of weird now, but it looks like a lot of money when you see 500 one-dollar bills all stacked up together.”
⁶

To make the film on Lightnin', Blank borrowed a 16mm Éclair NPR camera, a tripod, and a Nagra II recorder and headed off to Houston. But the first day of filming was not very successful. “The very first day we showed up we were very eager to film,” Blank says, “and he was friendly and we hung around at his feet and tried to film everything he did. He had an apartment. I think there was a Naugahyde [vinyl] couch, a big chair, and then there was a little dining area beyond that. Somewhere there was a bedroom. I wouldn't say he was that well off, but it wasn't a slum, that's for sure. It was a decent place. And a woman was there named Antoinette, whom he referred to as his wife. Antoinette was quiet and pretty and kind and generous. And we got some stuff with Lightnin' sitting on the front porch overlooking the street. We tried to get him to sing some songs, but there was a telephone going in the background. This was 16mm so the film would only run for eleven minutes at a time. We'd run out of film and have to change the magazine. And it was pretty rough going, and we were all drinking with him because that's what he wanted. And we weren't very good at what we were doing, trying to get synchronous sound recordings.”
⁷

Lightnin' didn't fully understand the filmmaking process, and at the end of the day, he thought he was done. “He announced to us that he had recorded ten songs that day,” Blank says, “and when he did an LP album, ten songs was all he ever did, and he wanted us to pay him the rest of the money we owed him and clear out and not come back. And we tried to plead with him to get him to change his mind, and he wouldn't hear of it. And so, as we were packing up, we were very depressed because we had fucked up all day long trying to get this equipment to perform for us. He had played in a little club and we tried to film him there, and we had sound problems. We got lots of songs he performed all the way through, and we tried to film them but we couldn't. We didn't get any of them in their entirety. We just got snatches here and there. He felt he'd done his ten songs and he definitely felt he'd had enough of us for impeding his normal enjoyment of his life.”
⁸