Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [72]
Other than traveling to New York and California, most of Lightnin’s performance dates in 1961 were local and around Texas; he played the Rainbow Room and the Shriner’s Auditorium in Dallas, though he did go on the road with Clifton Chenier and his Zydeco band. Clifton was related to Antoinette, and Lightnin’ sometimes had Clifton’s brother Cleveland accompany him on rub board.
Back in Houston, Lightnin’ (with or without McCormick’s knowledge) made a largely acoustic folk-blues album that was issued the following year on Vee-Jay as Lightnin’ Strikes. It was an effective album, presenting some songs that he’d never recorded before, like the utterly rural “Coon Is Hard to Catch” and a rare nod to gospel music, “Devil Is Watching You.” The writer’s credit on all but two of the album’s songs went to Bill Quinn and Lola Cullum, who probably produced the album along with Houston country music kingpin H. W. “Pappy” Daily.81 (Daily released two of the songs as a single on his Dart label prior to the Vee-Jay album.) Andrew Brown speculates that both Quinn and Cullum “must have wanted to do something to re-establish themselves as Lightnin’s discoverers after he started to become famous again. Perhaps they both read articles or album liner notes that only mentioned Charters and McCormick and were miffed about not being credited for the major roles they played in Lightnin’s career. So they pooled their money together and paid him $100 a song, just like old times, and Lightnin’ did this for them as an expression of gratitude.” It was the last time Lightnin’ worked with Cullum, though he did apparently continue to have some contact with Quinn, whom Brown speculates probably engineered his Goin’ Away album in 1963.82
During the summer of 1961, Chris Strachwitz returned to Texas hoping to produce his own recordings, but it didn’t work out. “Well, I tried one night to record Lightnin’ [at a live club date],” Strachwitz says. “It was horrible sound…. The tape recorder was apparently overmodulating without indicating that this was happening. I used one of those little volume controls with two microphones, one for the singer and that electric guitar and the other for the drummer … but what I found out later was that the two microphones were out of phase with each other. That one night we tried to record Lightnin’, he got really pissed, ‘I gotta have my money, you know!’ Mack [McCormick] tried to explain to him that I had to see if this [the test recording] was any good or not, and Lightnin’ didn’t like that one bit. He said that anything he does is good. But he didn’t think about my being technically incompetent. You see, the previous guys he’d encountered, they all had good recording machines and they knew what the hell they were doing. I didn’t know nothing. So they almost started a fight outside this beer joint; I’ll never forget that. Mack and Lightnin’ were yelling at each other, and they were ready to punch each other in the nose, except there was both of us. So that didn’t really come about and then he left.”83
Frustrated, Strachwitz returned to California, and finally got the opportunity to record Hopkins in Berkeley on November 26, 1961, at Sierra Sound Lab. “He was already in California for a program,” Strachwitz recalls. “On October 20, Lightnin’ had appeared with Jack Elliott at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. While he may have gone back to Texas, it’s possible he stayed in California and went on to Oakland, where he had two cousins. He was probably booked at the Cabale.”84 The Cabale