Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [112]
For Bartlett, Lightnin’ was a major influence. “He even taught me songs,” Bartlett says. “I was particularly drawn to the song ‘Mr. Charlie.’ He showed me an E minor thing that he did, and I played ‘Mr. Charlie’ for him, and he said, ‘You played that pretty good, and you have my permission to sing that song.’ And I made it part of my repertory.”29
Within weeks after Lightnin’ recorded for International Artists, Stan Lewis decided to bring him back into the studio for his Jewel label. He made the necessary arrangements with Lightnin’ and sent Don Logan, who had previously worked as a deejay on KEEL-AM, a top forty station in Shreveport, to produce the LP in Houston at Bill Holford’s studio on January 17, 1968. Logan had started work that year as vice president of Lewis’s recording company, which by then included three different labels: Jewel Records, Paula Records, and Ronn Records.
“Stan set the session [with Lightnin’] up,” Logan says, “As far as I know, Lightnin’ did not have a phone number that he gave out to anybody to where they could just call him. As far as I know, there was just a pay phone number that Stan would call…. Lightnin’ liked to handle his own business.” But when Logan got to Houston, finding Lightnin’ was more complicated than he anticipated. “It was one of the largest ghettos that I had ever seen,” Logan recalls, “and I’d been to Washington and Detroit…. I flew down to Houston by myself and got a rental car. And then a guy named Wild Child Butler, he was a blues singer and harp player who had recorded for Jewel, he was one of our artists; he helped me locate Lightnin’. I spent two days looking and finally we saw him in his Chrysler with his big whip CB antenna on the back, waved at him. Wild Child and I had been to every dive in the ghetto there. ‘Hey have you seen Lightnin’?’ Finally Wild Child went into a grocery store and asked if anyone had seen Lightnin’ around … and the people there knew him.”30
For the session, Lightnin’ put together a small band with Butler on harmonica, Elmore Nixon on piano, and two other sidemen on bass and drums, whose names were not written down. However, once the session was underway, Logan realized that the drummer was a problem. “He would slow up and get fast, and then slow down and get fast. And I said, ‘Well, Lightnin’ this is never going to see the light of day, and I got money in my pocket and I’m not going to give it to you if we don’t get a good cut on these things.’ And I told him the drummer would have to go.”31
Finally Lightnin’ gave in; he dismissed the drummer who was there and called another one. While they waited for him to arrive, Holford said, “You know, I’m going to have to charge you for the time while we’re waitin’ for the drummer to get here.” So Logan tried to get Lightnin’ to record a song he had written, but he wouldn’t do that and Logan decided to record an interview with him. The interview has never been released and, according to Lewis, it’s “buried away” in an off-site storage facility he rented. In the interview, Lightnin’ rambled on about playing at Carnegie Hall years before and retold the stories he’d been telling interviewers for years. “He even talked about playing for the Queen [of England],” Logan says, unaware that this was yet another “myth” that Lightnin’ sought to perpetuate. Interestingly enough, he had told the same story to Lelan Rogers during the International Artists session, and it appeared on the back cover notes of Free Form Patterns.
When the new drummer arrived, the session proceeded quickly; Lightnin’ recorded eleven songs and was finished in about four hours. Overall, however, the recordings were rough; the band was unrehearsed, and the recordings rehashed old material. The stand-out on this LP is “Vietnam War,” which he had never recorded before and had an ominous, though enigmatic, tone.
Mama says, “Son, how can you be happy