Alan Govenar (38 page)

While Lightnin' was in Los Angeles, Pearl took care of him. Pearl had an apartment across the street from the Ash Grove where Lightnin' sometimes stayed, but on other occasions, he'd go to a hotel or visit with his or Antoinette's relatives. “My impression was that they [Lightnin' and Antoinette] were married,” Pearl says. “I enjoyed being with Antoinette. She was shy, nice, gentle, and he treated her beautifully. And we'd have different social interactions. We had dinner together, and sometimes just sat around and talked.”
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The subjects of conversation varied, from Lightnin's gigs and his travels, and once in a while they even talked about politics. “He knew his limitations,” Pearl said, “and he was happy to be part of his community, but he knew there was a bigger world out there. He thought people should be equal and he thought, you know, poor people should have more. And everyone is a child of God. He was against the Vietnam war.”
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Bernie Pearl, Ed's brother, also got to know Lightnin' when he came to the Ash Grove. “He was charming, but he was also dramatic,” Bernie says. “He was immaculate…. He had sharp creases, he had patent leather shoes. He had bling on his fingers. He had that gold tooth. He had sunglasses, he had that hat. He had that towel around his neck…. And his words, you really had to listen to it. To me, he was charismatic. And he could play the guitar like hell…. He fit less into the idea of what a folk performer was, to my thinking. It was more theatrical; it was not phony. His gestures, how he would be expressive with the guitar, with his hands on and off, and the way he would explain things to people in that deep baritone, very Southern humor, kind of like he knew he was coming from a place different than the audience that was there.”
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Bernie was then a student at UCLA and had a varied schedule, making it possible for him to meet Lightnin' when he got to Los Angeles. Lightnin' usually came on a Greyhound bus, and Bernie would take him from the station to wherever he wanted to go. “Always see him with half a pint of Gordon's gin,” Bernie says, “That was his drink, and we'd sit down and talk, and I'd drive him around to see family around here.”
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Once, Bernie and two of his friends, David Cohen and Barry Hansen (who later became known as Dr. Demento), made arrangements with Lightnin' for a formal guitar lesson. “We each paid him twenty dollars,” Bernie says, “and he actually showed us this is this. He told us what the riffs were. Of course, we were looking mostly at the left hand, and not at the right. David was a much quicker study, and he got the thing immediately, and I had just spent years figuring this stuff out, and then realized how crucial the right hand was in getting the sound and the feel. But it was this is this lick, and I suppose we asked questions, like could you slow it down? He was not practiced in giving lessons.”
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Bernie liked hanging around Lightnin', and one night Lightnin' asked if he wanted to join him on stage at the Ash Grove. “I really kind of attached myself to Lightnin',” Bernie says. “I never demanded to play, but he asked me to come and play with him, which I did regularly throughout his tenure at the Ash Grove. What I played was back up. I never played a solo. I was there to support him. What I learned to do was play what he played on the treble. I learned to play an octave lower on the bass, and I would hit chords with him. He changed chords when he wanted to, and his measures never had to complete their full four counts. There was a basic coffee house thing that he did. He repeated a lot of the same material. Mostly he played in E. Typically, the B7, following the turnaround would be in some form abbreviated. It would not be a complete B7 chord. Just E, but not the standard E, A7, and B7 chords. I love the songs he played in A, 10 or 20 percent of the time, E was most of the time.”

In contrast to Lightnin's coffee house style, Ed Pearl recalls, was the way he played in black clubs. Ed had never really understood the difference until Lightnin' asked him if he would drive him to a gig in South Central after the Ash Grove closed. “We went there,” Pearl recalls, “and the place was full with people waiting to see Lightnin'. And he had played the Ash Grove so many times, but the electricity, what he was playing for the people there [for a black audience], was something different. He would make a gesture, or he would say five words and the audience would respond in a way that I didn't understand. But what I realized very quickly once he started was that he was expressing things in ways they may not have been able to express. He evoked deep feelings in every person there. Most of the people were middle-aged and had moved to Los Angeles from the South. He was somebody who spoke for them, and also was one of them.”
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Lightnin' liked working in Los Angeles. He had his black friends and his white friends, and to some extent, they mixed. In fact, Ed Pearl said that when Lightnin' wasn't working, he'd sometimes come to the Ash Grove just to hear some of the other styles of music. “He had a broad view. Lightnin' liked Bill Monroe. He came in to see Bill's show. He came in to see Doc Watson's show.”

Over the years, Lightnin' wrote several songs about California. In “California Showers,” he identified with the plight of the farm worker:

In “Burnin' in L.A.” he sang about the devastation of the fire in Los Angeles and the plea of one girl who wanted to get away:

Lightnin' returned to Los Angeles often between 1965 and 1973, when the Ash Grove closed, though Ed and Bernie Pearl continued to see Lightnin' whenever they got a chance. Bernie even traveled to Houston to visit with Lightnin' and Antoinette. “I took a Greyhound to Navasota,” Bernie says, “I spent Christmas with Mance [Lipscomb], and stayed three or four days and then I took the bus to Houston. And when I got off the bus in Houston, I hailed a cab and there was a black woman cab driver. And I gave her the address, she said, ‘No, you don't want to go there.' I said, ‘Yes I do.' ‘Oh, yeah that's in the Third Ward.' ‘I'm gonna see Lightnin' Hopkins,' and she just about flipped out. ‘You're going to see Lightnin' Hopkins.' So she delivered me there and got an autograph from him.”
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Over the years, Bernie became close friends with both Lightnin' and Antoinette, and one time, he traveled with them to the Bay Area. But when they got to Berkeley, there were no rooms left in the motel. “Antoinette was with him,” Bernie says, “and I didn't have a place to stay. So they invited me. They said, ‘Well, come stay in our room,' … and the three of us ended sleeping in the same bed because there was no couch, and they didn't want me to sleep on the floor. And needless to say, it was a very warm and generous thing…. It kind of shows the nature of the friendship.”
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In the mid-1970s, Bernie played backup for Lightnin' when he appeared at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. For Bernie, Lightnin' was a mentor who taught him not only how to play some of his licks on the guitar, but who also helped him to define himself. “There was one point where I might have been with his family and I might have been acting white or nervous. And he looked at me and said, ‘Be yourself.' And I've taken that to be the watchword of how I approach this music. It was like
boing
somebody dropped a life message on me.”
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The Ash Grove had been an anchor for Lightnin' on the West Coast. It was a base from which he could plan other gigs, both in Southern California and the Bay Area, where Strachwitz was eager to record him and help him find jobs. Ed Pearl would book Lightnin' whenever he wanted, and the combination of family and friends made Los Angeles one of his favorite destinations, even as he began to get offers for larger concerts as a headliner. Lightnin' was loyal to Pearl and to Strachwitz because they treated him well and paid fairly.

In 1972, Lightnin' received his one and only Grammy nomination for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording for
Lightnin' Strikes,
a reissue on the Tradition/Everest label of his 1965 album of the same title for Verve-Folkways. Muddy Waters, however, won the award for his LP
The London Muddy Waters
Session.
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Even though Lightnin' didn't win, interest in his music continued to swell, and whether or not he played electric or acoustic guitar became irrelevant. However, it became more difficult for him to assess the opportunities that were presented to him and to organize the logistics of touring. Dr. Harold worked with him to manage his contracts, but only on a volunteer basis, and he didn't really have the time to go out on the road with him. After Lightnin's car wreck, he became more cautious about whom he traveled with, but he was still drinking heavily. As time went on, his needs intensified; the invitations to play festivals and concert dates had never been greater.

9

I
n Houston, the Third Ward of the 1970s was in many ways more dangerous than it was in the 1940s or ‘50s, when the neighborhood was flourishing and Dowling Street was a main thoroughfare of African American life and culture. During the years of desegregation and integration, many of the black-owned businesses in the Third Ward closed or moved, and the problems of drugs and violence were exacerbated by urban decay and neglect. In music, the Third Ward had gone from the jazz-oriented big bands of Milton Larkin, I. H. Smalley, Conrad Johnson, and the rhythm and blues of the Duke/Peacock era to the popular soul/funk of the TSU Tornados, Oscar Perry, and John Roberts and the Hurricanes. Archie Bell and the Drells had a #1 hit with “Tighten Up” in 1968 and continued to have a strong presence in the Houston scene of the 1970s. Guitar-based blues in Houston was declining. Young African Americans were after a sound that reflected the world in which they were coming of age and most were not interested in down-home blues.

In this context, though Lightnin' may still have been known among older African Americans in his community of the Third Ward, he had become a legend for white blues and rock audiences. He rarely played in the bars and nightclubs in the Third Ward anymore, and even he viewed his neighborhood as threatening. Lightnin' always carried a loaded gun and had been known to drive around with a shotgun on the back seat of his car. He lived in a culture of violence, where he knew people who had been killed, beginning at an early age when he learned about the murder of his father. And as he got older, there were others. According to McCormick, Buster Pickens, who had accompanied Lightnin' on piano, was “senselessly shot to death in a West Dallas Street bar on November 24, 1964.”
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Moreover, Leadbitter wrote that Thunder Smith had been “murdered in 1965 after a drunken argument.”
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David Benson, a twenty-three-year-old African American from the small town of Waycross, Georgia, met Lightnin' in the fall of 1970 while he was a student at the University of Houston. A classmate, Alfie Naifeh, who was then accompanying Lightnin' as a drummer on some local gigs, asked him if he wanted to go over to Lightnin's apartment on Gray Street. Benson had played alto saxophone when he was younger and had grown up playing the blues: “So I knew about these old bluesmen already, though I had never known a bluesman. I knew the validity and the history of that music because my uncles lived in that world.”
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Going into Lightnin's apartment for the first time, Benson felt that he “was walking into the presence of greatness.” He wanted to get to know Lightnin' and went to visit him as often as he could. He also got to know Antoinette, because they were often together. “I had been around older people as a younger boy,” Benson says, “so I knew how to say, ‘Yes, Ma'am,' and ‘No, Ma'am,' and keep my mouth shut and be properly respectful and polite and that's how I got in there.”
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In time Benson met Dr. Harold, who realized that Benson could help Lightnin' in ways that he could not. Dr. Harold began asking him to drive for Lightnin' and to accompany him as a kind of road manager, ensuring that he was paid properly and that his lodging and per diem needs were adequately met. Benson respected Dr. Harold and worked in coordination with him to manage Lightnin's business dealings. “From the start,” Benson says, “we were part of that shifting of gears in Lightnin's career…. He considered me and considered Dr. Harold … to be intelligent African American men that he could trust and depend on to change that whole exploitative sort of cycle that he had been in for so long.”
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