Alan Govenar (22 page)

Other than traveling to New York and California, most of Lightnin's performance dates in 1961 were local and around Texas; he played the Rainbow Room and the Shriner's Auditorium in Dallas, though he did go on the road with Clifton Chenier and his Zydeco band. Clifton was related to Antoinette, and Lightnin' sometimes had Clifton's brother Cleveland accompany him on rub board.

Back in Houston, Lightnin' (with or without McCormick's knowledge) made a largely acoustic folk-blues album that was issued the following year on Vee-Jay as
Lightnin' Strikes.
It was an effective album, presenting some songs that he'd never recorded before, like the utterly rural “Coon Is Hard to Catch” and a rare nod to gospel music, “Devil Is Watching You.” The writer's credit on all but two of the album's songs went to Bill Quinn and Lola Cullum, who probably produced the album along with Houston country music kingpin H. W. “Pappy” Daily.
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(Daily released two of the songs as a single on his Dart label prior to the Vee-Jay album.) Andrew Brown speculates that both Quinn and Cullum “must have wanted to do something to re-establish themselves as Lightnin's discoverers after he started to become famous again. Perhaps they both read articles or album liner notes that only mentioned Charters and McCormick and were miffed about not being credited for the major roles they played in Lightnin's career. So they pooled their money together and paid him $100 a song, just like old times, and Lightnin' did this for them as an expression of gratitude.” It was the last time Lightnin' worked with Cullum, though he did apparently continue to have some contact with Quinn, whom Brown speculates probably engineered his
Goin' Away
album in 1963.
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During the summer of 1961, Chris Strachwitz returned to Texas hoping to produce his own recordings, but it didn't work out. “Well, I tried one night to record Lightnin' [at a live club date],” Strachwitz says. “It was horrible sound…. The tape recorder was apparently overmodulating without indicating that this was happening. I used one of those little volume controls with two microphones, one for the singer and that electric guitar and the other for the drummer … but what I found out later was that the two microphones were out of phase with each other. That one night we tried to record Lightnin', he got really pissed, ‘I gotta have my money, you know!' Mack [McCormick] tried to explain to him that I had to see if this [the test recording] was any good or not, and Lightnin' didn't like that one bit. He said that anything he does is good. But he didn't think about my being technically incompetent. You see, the previous guys he'd encountered, they all had good recording machines and they knew what the hell they were doing. I didn't know nothing. So they almost started a fight outside this beer joint; I'll never forget that. Mack and Lightnin' were yelling at each other, and they were ready to punch each other in the nose, except there was both of us. So that didn't really come about and then he left.”
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Frustrated, Strachwitz returned to California, and finally got the opportunity to record Hopkins in Berkeley on November 26, 1961, at Sierra Sound Lab. “He was already in California for a program,” Strachwitz recalls. “On October 20, Lightnin' had appeared with Jack Elliott at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. While he may have gone back to Texas, it's possible he stayed in California and went on to Oakland, where he had two cousins. He was probably booked at the Cabale.”
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The Cabale was opened in 1961 by Debbie Green and Rolf Cahn with the help of Bay Area “proto-hippie” Howard Ziehm. Green and Cahn had moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley a year earlier, but were both quite familiar with the Bay Area folk scene as performers and promoters. “It was a real hippie, folkie-dokie club,” Strachwitz says. “They were selling coffee and cookies. All these folkies would come by. Lightnin' didn't draw any huge crowd. He never said if he liked it or not. It was just part of the day.”

When Strachwitz recorded Hopkins, he wanted him to play the instrument of his choice. “The whole business of electric and acoustic never entered my head. People played what they had…. If I thought about it, I wanted the electric sound that he had on those later records…. The stuff being played on the radio then [the early to mid-1950s] were the Mercury and Herald records, especially the Herald ones. They got the ferocious electric guitar, also the Decca—‘Merry Christmas' and ‘Happy New Year'—That's just gorgeous stuff. So that's what I wanted.”
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In his contract with Lightnin', Strachwitz agreed to pay “the total of $400 (“$300 to be paid … at the time of the session—$100 to be paid to Mr. Harold Leventhal [who was then acting as Hopkins's “super-agent” in association with McCormick and as the representative of the music publishing company Sanga Music] for commission earnings as an advance royalty of 5 percent of the retail price of the records if in the LP form, 1 cent per side in the case of 45s or similar

singles.”
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Lightnin' came to the session prepared. “He had the numbers kind of figured out of what he wanted to do,” Strachwitz says, “But he really wasn't into this idea of making albums at all. He was still on the trip of making a couple of songs now and then. And that's how he would make all his singles down there [in Texas]. Because ideas would come to him, a few at a time.” Strachwitz asked him to play some of his “older stuff” because he knew that was easier for him, and he did manage to record him playing the piano singing “Jesus, Won't You Come By Here” (“Needy Time”), an old religious song that Lightnin' recorded several times under different titles.

While Strachwitz was certainly a part of the folk revival, he was still trying, at that time, to reach an African American audience. “I was trying to make those 45s for the black market. [The DJ] Rockin' Lucky would actually play them on KSAN-AM [in San Francisco] at that time. And he had a record shop, and you had to give him a hundred free ones otherwise he wouldn't play them, because he sold them in the store. I was all for it. That's the way that stuff got on the air. He was funny. He was from Orange, Texas, and he would have this little rap, ‘All right, baby, Come on, Say shake or break it. You want me to shake or break this damn thing.'” But after Lightnin's first session, Strachwitz didn't feel any of the songs were strong enough to stand alone as a single release. “I was working with the black distributor, Olin Harrison,” Strachwitz says. “He had the Acme Sales Company in San Francisco. It was difficult to get LPs distributed on the radio and the little mom and pop record shops. They wanted 45s with a big sound. That's why I got the Bay Area drummer Victor Leonard for Lightnin', but it wasn't enough and I never released a 45 of any of those first recordings.”
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However, Strachwitz was not deterred in his efforts to reconnect Lightnin' with a black audience. Lightnin' had never had a black promoter in California, and Strachwitz wanted to get him booked into a couple of black venues: the Continental Club in West Oakland and the Savoy Club in North Richmond. Lightnin' liked the idea of going to the Continental Club, and the people there definitely responded to his music. Many had bought his records, or heard them on jukeboxes in the 1950s. But after Lightnin' got off stage, a well-known, local black R & B promoter approached Strachwitz, when Lightnin' was in earshot, and said, “I could use that boy.” Lightnin' recoiled. He left the club soon afterwards with Strachwitz, insulted that he was called a “boy” by the black promoter. When he went to play at the Savoy Club, he was even more warmly received; one woman going in the front door at the same time as him looked over and asked, “Are you the real Lightnin' Hopkins?” And he replied, “You better believe it, baby.” Lightnin's presence made people gravitate to him, though he could rebuff them in an instant. “He never seemed to lose his cool,” Strachwitz says, “and moving around the black world of the Bay Area, he was amused that he was still so well known. He'd been selling records for all these years. But no one had ever seen him, because he wouldn't travel behind his records, and as much as he liked the black club scene, he was starting to realize he could make more money playing for white folkies.”
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To finish his first LP with Lightnin', Strachwitz recorded him performing the song “California Showers” in his apartment in Berkeley, but he still needed more to round out the release. So after Lightnin' returned to Houston, Strachwitz asked him to go with his drummer Spider Kilpatrick to Bill Holford's ACA studio to record four more songs.
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Lightnin' was used to going over to ACA Studio, and Holford sent Strachwitz the tapes.

ACA Studio was highly regarded, not only because of Holford's technical expertise but because he could work well with Lightnin'. In 1962, McCormick supervised the recordings at ACA Studio of three more of Lightnin's LPs for Prestige/Bluesville:
Walkin' This Road by Myself, Lightnin' and Co.,
and
Smokes Like Lightning.
For these LPs, McCormick wanted a bigger band sound, probably because he or his producers thought it might sell better, and he brought in Billy Bizor on harmonica, Buster Pickens on piano, Donald Cooks on bass, and Spider Kilpatrick on drums. They were all friends of Lightnin's who had played with him at different times over the years.
Walkin' This Road by Myself
contained one of Lightnin's most well-known songs, “Happy Blues for John Glenn,” which, according to McCormick, he composed after watching John Glenn make the first American orbital space flight on his landlady's TV on February 20, 1962. In his session notes, McCormick wrote, “He arrived at the studio an hour early, in itself a rare event presaging things to come. As members of his entourage unloaded instruments and ran his errands, he sat out back in his car. At one point he asked for a piece of paper, and with a nod at the Gettysburg address legend, a torn envelope was provided. His making notes for the song was essentially a symbolic act, for a half-hour later the envelope contained only three marks resembling hex signs.” But when he sat down to record, he “insisted on propping it up in front of him as he took his place beneath the microphone. In some way the cryptic marks identified for him the incidents he wished to touch upon, and with it in place he was ready to extemporize. He called for a last-minute reference to confirm Glenn's first name and whispered his question because, child-like, he intended to surprise those present (including the musicians who accompany him) with his song's subject.”
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Despite all the preparations, a short in the guitar amplifier ruined the first take. “It had been a moody blues set to the same tune as the bitter protest ‘Tim Moore's Farm,'” McCormick said, but while the repairs were being made to the amplifier, Lightnin' saw a newspaper account of Glenn's flight and changed his tone: “some detail there seems to have altered his concept, for when he launched into the song again it was definitely a happy blues.”
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In the song “Happy Blues for John Glenn,” Lightnin' played a melodic pattern that was less familiar than what he usually did, and while performing he apparently couldn't remember the chord sequence and the band got confused, but in the end were able move into a strong, grooving rhythm. And while the lyrics were some of Lightnin's most imaginative, they bordered on nonsense.

The other songs on the LP were more typical to Lightnin's repertoire, but the band had difficulty following him. Lightnin' did play an up-tempo version of Sonny Boy Williamson's standard “Good Morning Little School Girl,” in which he quipped, “Lightnin' is a school boy, too.”
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On
Smokes Like Lightning
the band sound was a little tighter, and the solos by Hopkins were the highlights. But in McCormick's notes, it became clear that his relationship with Hopkins was deteriorating. McCormick began the notes by responding to a question he was then being asked about how Lightnin' had changed since he met him: “No, he has not changed. He is just the same as he has been his adult life, a natural born easman, consumed by self-pity and everlastingly trying to persuade the world that it is his valet.” McCormick then ridiculed Lightnin' further, maintaining, “We might almost imagine Lightnin' the most purely dedicated of all artists for he goes to astonishing lengths to maintain himself in a pathetic, blues-producing state. He is, for example, an incorrigible gambler who will take advantage of simple-minded friends with the crudest of dice tricks…. He is a joke to the gamblers of Houston's Third Ward.”

McCormick's tone was at once angry and illuminating about Hopkins's personal life: “Lightnin' sings endlessly of mistreating women though in fact he has been the pampered daytime pet of a married woman [Antoinette Charles] for 14 years. She often accompanies him on trips out of town and is then introduced as his wife, but in Houston, a triangle is maintained with everyone keeping carefully to their own corner. He has no personal relationships that are not severely limited. He spends most of his time surrounded by a coterie of ‘helpers,' restless young men who envy him on one hand and on the other answer his incessant demands for attention, accept his drunken tongue lashing, and let him maneuver them into humiliating positions (ie. [sic] Clearing a path to the men's room for him). He is lovable and yet tyrannical in the same sad way of a very spoiled child.”
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