Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [117]
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.”53
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.”54
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.”55
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