Alan Govenar (41 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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“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.”
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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'.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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 disjointed 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.”
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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.”
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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.”

With Harold and Benson managing Lightnin's bookings, he was much more selective, and he enjoyed spending more time with Antoinette in Houston. On Friday nights, Benson says, Lightnin' and Antoinette had a steady date night, and went to some friends' house where they played the card game Pitty Pat. On other nights, Lightnin' loved to gamble and shoot dice. “He would take me with him to Fifth Ward and to Third Ward,” Benson remembers, “different places where he would shoot all night. He would want me to go with him. I'm a pretty big guy, so he would want me to go with him to hold his money, and then we'd go in there, and he'd always have a couple of guns.”
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In the Third Ward, there was a man by the name of Mr. Blackwell that Lightnin' liked. “He owned a walk-up barbecue stand at the corner of McGowen and Dowling,” Benson said, “and he and Lightnin' would shoot dice at Lightnin's place. They would take a bathroom rug and turn it upside down, and they would shoot head to head dice all night. Sometimes Mr. Blackwell would lose fifteen thousand dollars, and maybe Lightnin' might lose. And they'd bullshit each other. Lightnin' would say, ‘Mr. Blackwell, you need to go sell some barbecue and c'mon back.' They were good friends.”
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On Sundays, Lightnin' liked to get in his car and cruise past the churches in the black neighborhoods of Houston, but never go inside. “We would get in the car,” Benson recalls, “and at twenty miles per hour we'd cruise Third Ward, and Fourth Ward, and Acres Home, but we would still have some cold Pearl and CC [Canadian Club] and he would cruise and yell at people and say little things like, ‘Hey, baby, where you goin' with them groceries?'”
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When he wasn't cruising the neighborhoods or shooting dice, Lightnin' hung out in front of Johnny Lee's, a Chinese grocery in the Third Ward. “He sat in his car at his corner,” Benson says, “and he would make loans to people in the community, and he would sit there with a couple of pistols in the car and a half pint of Canadian Club. So whenever I wanted to find him, I'd get in my pick-up truck and I would cruise and usually catch up with him there…. And I would go sit in the car with him and we'd sit and drink Canadian Club until both of us would get drunker than shit and then he would say, ‘Let's go get something to eat.' Well, I had a key to the apartment and Miss Nette would always keep the refrigerator full of food she'd cooked for us. So we'd go home and we'd warm up something from Miss Nette, or if she was there, she would fix something for us, and we'd eat and sit around and play guitars.”
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One time Benson drove up to Johnny Lee's grocery store and was shocked to see that Lightnin' “had a gun to a guy's head … and he had a Pearl beer in his other hand. And he walked over to my truck, still pointing the gun at the guy, handed me the beer through my truck window, and said, ‘Hold this beer for me, baby, while I kill this motherfucka.' And I'm looking at the windshield at him, and he's arguing with the guy. ‘Who told you to drink my liquor?' and the guy says, ‘Lee,' a cousin of Lightnin's, who lived out in Sunnyside. ‘Well, who told you to drink out of the bottle? Why couldn't you drink out of the cap? You're supposed to drink out of the cap so they can tell that you're not greedy…. You can't turn the bottle up.' See the guy had taken a drink from the bottle, and Lightnin' was going to kill him. Lee was so drunk; he was wallowing all over this hood of his car. He couldn't even stand up. And Lightnin' said, ‘Who told you to drink out of the bottle?' And the guy said, ‘My mama.' And Lightnin' said, ‘You're right, because if you had said my mama, you'd be dead right now.' And Lightnin' started pistol whipping Lee and then he come back to me and said, ‘C'mon, baby let's go.' And he got in his car and I followed him around to his apartment.”
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