Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [126]
From then on, Benson either got Lightnin’ room service or brought food to him. “Lightnin’ pretty much stayed in the hotel. He didn’t like Brownie, and Sonny and Brownie hadn’t talked, other than on stage, for twenty-five years. Lightnin’ was more on Sonny’s side and they were better friends, and they hung together.”
On stage Lightnin’ was accompanied by Donald Bailey, a drummer and studio musician who also worked with Sonny and Brownie. The other sidemen were Japanese, and according to Benson, “They were perfect mimics of Lightnin’s sound.” The concert venues were huge and sat four to five thousand people and they were lined up around the block.
After Lightnin’ got back to Texas, he didn’t do too much traveling. He mainly played around Houston, where a new generation of white blues rockers connected with his music. Lightnin’ would let just about anyone get up on stage and sit in, and if he didn’t like what they were playing, he’d brush them off. As early as 1971, Jimmie Vaughan and his band Storm had appeared on the same bill with him at Liberty Hall and Fitzgerald’s, and in the years that followed, he played numerous dates at Liberty Hall with musicians as diverse as Tracy Nelson and Jimmy Reed. He also went often to Austin, where he was booked with Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble in 1978 at the Armadillo, and was even featured on the Austin City Limits television show in 1979 in a program that included the Neville Brothers and barrelhouse blues pianist Robert Shaw.31
Michael Hall, writing in Texas Monthly, described Hopkins’s appearance on Austin City Limits as “one of the all-time great Lightnin’ moments…. He was wearing a bright-blue leisure suit with rhinestones that sparkled in the TV lights and a beige fedora cocked at a 45-degree angle on the side of his head. He looked like a fabulous old pimp. He played a Fender Stratocaster in front of a rhythm section that included bass player Ron Wilson [who had been elected to the Texas House of Representatives].” While the performance was uneven, combining “flashes of brilliance competing with the age-related tendency toward sloth and crankiness,” Lightnin’ was nonetheless captivating and halfway through his song “Ain’t No Cadillac,” his soloing took an unexpected direction: “For some reason he had a wah-wah pedal, and he either stomped it too hard or it had been turned up way too high, because his amplifier let out a high-pitched squeal—a loud, intense, and not unpleasant sound that lasted about three seconds. At first he appeared taken aback, but he kept playing, and a satisfied smile crossed his face…. He may not have planned that particular outburst, but like all the other notes he played and noises he plucked, he was proud of it. ‘That’s what I’m talkin’ about,’ he said, and jammed the pedal down again. Then he went on to craft a solo that began quietly and cascaded through a fall of bad notes, bringing the song to an early crashing end, dragging his rhythm section down with him, as he’d been doing for years.”32
As much as Lightnin’ might have enjoyed the attention he got from his white fans, Benson felt he was always suspicious of their motives. “I think all of us Southern boys have inculcated into us a certain amount of cultural paranoia that I call the ‘Emmett Till complex.’ And that is, white people will be straightforward with you as long as it behooves them, but they can turn on you in an instant. So if it comes down, especially, to white womanhood, then you had to be super-careful in terms of how you stepped. So all of these young guys who came along, who I felt were less prejudiced, he still saw them pretty much as being unpredictable; there was a possibility they could turn any minute and become very hateful. What he would say to me is that, ‘David, you’re going to get killed. These white folks are going to kill you because you talk to these white