Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [127]
One time Benson and Alfie Naifeh were driving with Lightnin’ to Dallas, and they ran into an unexpected problem. “We were going to the club Mother Blues, and we were on Interstate 45. Well, he never would use a restroom anywhere. He had this paranoia about those things. He would always have a Spam can, a very long Spam can in the trunk of his car, and that’s what he would urinate in. So we stopped on the side of the road, so he could get his Spam can out, and he began to urinate. And a white woman in a car by herself drove past him on the highway, and he said, ‘Oh, my God, she looks like she’ll tell a lie.’ He thought she was going to stop and report him, accuse him of exposing himself. He was that paranoid. But he was standing on the side of the car. There was no way she could see what he was doing. But, for him, having been raised in segregated, hateful America, this was how people got lynched. And that fear never did leave his bones.”34
When Lightnin’ finally got to Mother Blues, Benson says, his demeanor changed. If anything, he exuded a sense of confidence and cool. Mark Pollock, a white blues guitarist from Irving, Texas, said when he saw Lightnin’ live at Mother Blues, he felt he “looked exactly like he stepped off the album cover, the half-pint in the back pocket, or shoved down his boot. He had those dark sunglasses … he played that old Gibson, or a Stella, or a black Stratocaster … he wore a cowboy hat and he was the first blues guy I saw wearing cowboy boots.”35
Anson Funderburgh, another aspiring white blues guitarist, saw Lightnin’ for the first time in 1974 at Mother Blues when he was about nineteen years old. “I was awestruck. Lightnin’ had on a brown suit and a brown hat and had a fifth of whiskey in his coat pocket wrapped up in a brown paper bag. He had like a big gold-colored medallion around his neck with a lightning bolt on it.” On stage, Lightnin’ was in complete control, but it was obvious that he hadn’t rehearsed with his sidemen, or perhaps even met them, until he showed up at the gig. “He had a bass player and a drummer playing with him,” Funderburgh says, “and by the second set, the bass player was gone. He fired the bass player. Both of them were white. But the drummer stayed. Lightnin’ made his music go where his vocals were going, and where his singing was going. Lightnin’ went right where he wanted to go, and he expected anyone that was with him to follow him…. He was the one who was making the rules.”36
Three years later, Funderburgh understood even more clearly what it was like to play with Hopkins when he was invited to perform with him on stage at the Granada Theatre in Dallas on August 27 and 28, 1977. “I was scared to death,” Funderburgh says, “because I was such a big fan.” For the show, the promoter Danny Brown put together a group of musicians to accompany Lightnin’ on stage that included Funderburgh and Marc Benno playing rhythm guitar, Doyle Bramhall on drums, and Larry Rogers on bass. “At the rehearsal,” Funderburgh recalls, “we were set up, and they had a piano on stage, because evidently he had requested a piano. Well, we were just sittin’ around talkin’ and the piano tuner came and he got it all tuned up. And after a while, they brought Lightnin’ in and he hit one chord on the piano and he said, ‘That goddamn piano’s out of tune, I can’t use it.’ And he didn’t play it all night.”37
Prior to the show, the band had very little interaction with Lightnin’, who seemed to be reserved and a little withdrawn before he went on stage. Funderburgh, Benno, Bramhall, and Rogers were the opening act, and at the appointed time, they started a song. Lightnin’ came on, and “evidently,” Funderburgh says, “we weren’t doing it exactly the way he wanted to, and I remember him turning to Marc Benno and saying, ‘I told you, you were going to do this to me.’ Well, I was nervous as a cat. But he always seemed to like what I did. I just turned