Alan Govenar by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life, Blues Page A

solo artist has little special things that they do. If they’re really artists, they can sacrifice some of those in the spirit of doing something new together. So he was able to do that.” 20
    Dane had performed with Hopkins at different times, both at the Ash Grove and the Cabale. “Whenever I was in the Bay Area,” Dane says, “I would play the Cabale with Lightnin’ or opposite Lightnin’.” For Dane, performing with Lightnin’ was “always a surprise and a joy. The guy was a great team player…. I’m not anywhere in the league of a guitar player as he was. I’m playing rhythm guitar, and all of the idiosyncrasies that he has in terms of rhythm and meter and everything when he’s playing with me … he’s right there with me…. It’s all improvised.” 21
    By the time Dane and Hopkins recorded together, they had already become good friends. “I had a personal relationship with him … hanging out back stage, or he’d come by my house. There’s a lot of that stuff in the songs. We’re jivin’ about one time he came over to my house all dressed up, and his cousin drove him over there. He knew I had to split from my husband. I guess he was hoping to see if there was any action there, whatever … it was natural for a musician, a guy on the road, to see how long the reception was; how can I put it? So he came by around dinnertime … I had three children, and … I was getting dinner ready, getting the kids ready for school…. So I kind of welcomed him in and he sat in the parlor. I use the word
parlor
because that’s exactly how it was treated, very formally, sitting on the edge of a chair, just paying a social call. And I told him I’m really busy. So he said, ‘That’s okay. My cousin’s waiting in the car for me anyway.’ So it was one of those situations where both parties were protecting their options and protecting their dignity. And he left appropriately.” 22
    Jesse Cahn, Dane’s son, remembered Lightnin’ coming to their house whenever he was in the Bay Area. “I don’t know how young I was when I first met him. I just remember Lightnin’ being around, but by the time I was about fifteen, he was staying at Carroll Peery’s house in Berkeley and so was I. And some situation had come up, as a crazy fifteen-year-old, I had hit a wall and broken a hole in the door. One of those jilted girlfriend situations or something like that, a typical thing. So I’ll never forget … Lightnin’ said, ‘When I gets like that, I hit the pillow,’ meaning a number of things behaviorally that are pretty obvious, but he was also saying if you want to play guitar, you better take better care of your hands.” 23 Cahn described Hopkins as a “complete gentleman,” who liked to dress well: “Lightnin’ had sweaters and that Mexican
chaleco
that he liked to wear. He wore dapper slacks, really nice shoes, polished Stacy Adams, classic, shined.” 24 On stage, Cahn felt that Lightnin’ played the role of a kind of “jester,” and was sometimes self-deprecating when he called himself “Po’ Lightnin’,” but musically, he was much more versatile than he usually let on. “I remember one time,” Cahn says, “I don’t know if it was during a sound check, but he was on stage. I was about fifteen years old and I used to clean the bathrooms and sweep up the inside of the Cabale. And I’m watching him, and he’s playing his usual blues thing, and I turn away and remember hearing these jazz chords, and I turn around and he’s playing these jazz chords and he’s looking dead pan right at me and then he goes back to his blues thing.” 25
    On the Arhoolie release, titled
Sometimes I Believe She Loves Me,
Dane and Hopkins engaged in a kind of blues dialogue, and “made up stuff, taking it