Lightnin' Hopkins by Alan Govenar

Author:Alan Govenar [Alan Govenar]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

8

An Expanding Audience

By the mid-1960s, Lightnin’s audience was growing to include rock ‘n’ roll fans. The folk revival was fading, while the blues scene among white audiences was gaining strength. However, the enthusiasm for bluesmen like Lightnin’ among rock ‘n’ rollers wasn’t completely new. Ringo Starr of the Beatles, for example, recalled that as a teenager in the late 1950s, he was “trying to immigrate to Houston, Texas, because Lightnin’ Hopkins, the blues player, lived there,” and that he was still into the blues: “Lightnin’ is still my hero…. We just wanted to be around Lightnin’…. It would have been interesting if that ever happened.”1

Lightnin’s recordings with electric guitar, bass, and drums, particularly the Herald sessions, intrigued young white rockers. But it wasn’t only his music that made him an icon. His lanky, mysterious appearance, his sunglasses, and the way he presented himself as a bluesman made him especially appealing. Lightnin’ was never a hippie, but hippies were fascinated by him.

From September 21 to 26, 1965, Lightnin’ was the headliner at the Matrix in San Francisco, which had opened about a month earlier with the Jefferson Airplane as its house band. Initially the Matrix was a folk and blues club, but it soon became synonymous with “The San Francisco Sound” in psychedelic rock music. Once again Lightnin’ was in unfamiliar territory, but he was treated as a star, and apparently adapted well to an ever-changing audience. Lightnin’ was invited back the next month to perform with Jean Ball and J. C. Burris, and over the next two years, he shuttled back and forth to San Francisco, appearing at the Matrix and the Fillmore, where he even appeared on October 21 and 22, 1966, with the Grateful Dead and Loading Zone. During this period, Lightnin’ was greeted with anticipation wherever he performed, whether it was at the Matrix, the Fillmore, or the Berkeley Blues Festival, Sylvio’s in Chicago, the Longhorn Jazz Festival in Austin, or the Ash Grove, where he was a regular, appearing with groups as diverse as the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and the Lydia E. Pinksham Superior Orchestra.

In the mid-1960s, aspiring filmmaker Les Blank frequented the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, where he heard Lightnin’ for the first time and got the idea to make a documentary about him.2 Blank was making a living doing industrial and corporate films, and one of his clients, the Gulf States Tube Company, sent him to Texas. At the time Blank was thirty-three years old; he was originally from Tampa, Florida, where he grew up in an upper-middle-class family. He attended Tulane University, where he received a BA in English literature and an MFA in theatre. Then, in 1967, after two years in a PhD film program at the University of Southern California, he left college and began doing freelance work. In Texas, Blank met Skip Gerson, the son of a ladies shoe manufacturer who had grown up on Long Island, outside of New York City. Gerson was in his early twenties and was also trying to figure out how to become a filmmaker.

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