JOHNNY WINTER

JOHNNY WINTER

He comes on stage, guitar slung low, all in black — ready to rip off some of the meanest, most aggressive, music imaginable. It’s blues, it’s rock, it hardly matters. The proportions of the man aren’t measured categorically. The past must’ve been intense, it must’ve have seared him .... a freak when that wasn’t stylish, when that was horrifying. And in the south.

He was born there, in Beaumont Texas. Febuary 23, 1944. A Pisces. Frequent zodiacal place of habitation of freaks of one sort or another. Later that year, the war coming to an end, his father moved the family to a cotton plantation in Leland, Mississippi. The irony is obvious, especially to Johnny. It’s been the source of some criticism; the plantation owner’s son, an albino at that, growing up digging the blackest music there was. But he can still laugh about it. “Daddy didn’t make it in Leland, though, so he gave up and we moved back to Beaumont, where Mom’s family lived. Dad’s a realtor now and still sings.

His parents initiated the musical background of Winter. His mother played piano, his father banjo and sax. “Soon as I could walk and talk, I was singing and playing. My dad always encouraged my kid brother Edgar and me. When I was eight, Dad taught me the ukelele. I learned the guitar when my hands got bigger.”

By the time he was twelve he’d discovered a radio show with a disc jockey named John R., coming in on the night airwaves from Nashville. “They played a lot of great records,” he remembers. “Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf and so on. But it was all “race music” not rhythm and blues at all. You couldn’t go out and buy those records in the small towns but the stations in Nashville came out with album offers so I bought every one that I could get my hands on.”

By the time he’d reached high school he and Edgar, who had picked up saxophone and drums and organ, formed a couple of rock groups. One was called It and Them; later they changed it to Johnny Winter and the Black Plague. There was no money in it, they just played local clubs and they didn’t play blues. “At that time I couldn’t imagine playing blues for people. In Beaumont, nobody knew what the blues were, let alone liked them.”

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So, when he graduated he went on to Lamar Tech, a local business college, traveling fifty miles or so every weekend into Louisana, to play music. But he didn’t want business, he wanted music. So off he went to Chicago. “I didn’t know it at the time but I

played with a lot of good people . . . played with Barry Goldberg. He was an organist with a group called Robbie and the Troubadours. And Mike Bloomfield. Mike had a club called the Fickle Pickle on State Street. He booked in people that nobody else would touch. Big Joe Williams . . . Little Brother Montgomery. As a result he wasn’t making any money. I walked up and started blowing my harp. I didn’t know anybody to talk to, so I figured if I started playing, somebody would come up and talk to me. I saw him sitting there and figured it was Mike Bloomfield and walked blowing my harp, and he said, ‘sit down’. I came in every time I got a chance for a couple of weeks. Then I went back to Texas...” They didn’t see each other until one night this past winter, at the Fillmore East. It was a pretty historic gig. Overnight, it seems Johnny had become a star. But it wasn’t all that simple.

From Chicago it was back to the South, to Atlanta this time. He began playing the “Atlanta-Birmingham-Pensacola circuit” with a large touring group of entertainers, kind of media gypsies, of which his rock group was only a small part. “We traveled with kids, wives, baby cribs, everything. It was like a gypsy caravan and it was getting to be too much hassle. Besides we weren’t able to play too much blues. Whatever was happening musically at the time, we played it. Whatever the drunks wanted to hear.” Somehow, after all those years of not being able to play blues, he’s come on strong to show us that he can play 'em . . . and well too. Even then, though, he recalls, “we liked to sneak in a tiny bit of blues.”

He left, though, for what he called, “A real good gig in Texas. Happened to keep getting a lot of good gigs in Houston.” So he stayed. But the staying wasn’t without its problems. “The people are belligerent and there’s places that you really can V go. Somebody’ll come up to you and say, ‘Whar’d you git that long hair, boy? Look lak a queer t’ me. I’m gonna kill ya.’ Or else the cops’ll put you in jail.”

He continued, “I really don’t like violence but in Texas you have to live that way. I’m glad to get out — really glad.” If it’s that bad for people with long hair, think what it must be like for albinos with long hair. It’s very little wonder that Johnny was eager to get on out.

So eager that he cut his first album for Imperial without a contract. He was hardly satisfied. “I was making money but not doing what I wanted to do. People were forcing me to do music and things 1 didn’t even feel I could do as well. I just wasn’t being true to myself.”

He’s not easy to satisfy; he recognizes the need to progress, the integral part change plays in his music. He has no plans to wither or stagnate. “I have things to say but if you say the same things over and over you’re not getting anywhere. Now here I am and I either have to make something good out of it or fuck it up . . . It’s hard. I’m doing it right now, the only reason I’m still trying is to see if it’s still possible to survive financially and still do honestly what I feel is right. I’m an honest person myself but I know how to deal with dishonest people. I had to deal with a lot of that in previous years.”

Especially with recording companies. GRT has recently released an album, The Johnny Winter Story, which must be an embarassment to both Johnny and everyone connected with him. The album, to begin with, features Johnny on the cover with a flattop haircut which makes him look like a concentration camp refugee. And the music is abysmal; Steve calls it an attempt to make Winter over into a style that is sort of “Louisiana pop.” Worst of all, Johnny will never see any bread at all from that record.

The Imperial album is better on all fronts; musically, though it isn’t what Johnny wanted, and financially. It doesn’t measure up to Winter’s standards in that area either however. “Everybody said ‘Yeah sure, we’ll let you do what you want, but the contract has to be worded like this because they all do it and everybody knows it’ but they never follow through on it. It was always like that. We’d get offered $5000 or $6000 but I’d been jacked around so long that I made up my mind that I’d wait until the perfect deal came along or just do it all myself.”

At the time the Imperial album was cut Johnny wanted something just to show producers what he was capable of doing, given the opportunity. “So I went over to England and had a deal with Blue Horizon Records over there and they were going to give me a little advance and let us do exactly what we wanted to do.”

But by the time he’d returned to the States, Rolling Stone had done a story on Texas blues which touted him as a future star, complete with pictures.

He split for ’Frisco, the band played the Matrix and was greeted with enthusiastic receptions but the media stayed deaf. Returning to Texas, he garnered an offer from Mercury but with neither the money or the control he desired.

Enter Steve Paul, a man who has been described as “more of a star than Johnny Winters.” The owner of the Scene, one of New York’s top rock clubs (until it closed this summer due to the pressure of other commitments, i.e. Johnny Winters), Paul convinced Johnny that he was the man to manage him.

But they signed no contract. Winter, having been burnt before, was undoubtedly wary. But he sees Paul differently now. “I really respect him a whole lot”, Johnny explains. “He can do things I don’t understand and can’t do. And I can do things he can’t do. He doesn’t try to tell me what to do.”

There is no denying that Steve was probably drawn to the situation by the bizarreness of it; he happens to know how to treat bizarreness in a highly profitable way, both for the bizarre person/thing and for himself. His nightclub, The Scene, was located in Times Square. It wasn’t the ideal location for the traditional rock audience but, because of that, it drew in some strange rock people. Out of the Scene emerged Tiny Tim and the Kokaine Karma duo of Rudnick and Frawley. It was where The Doors played their first New York set. Steve Paul does things properly.

Johnny’s skepticism was all alleviated when Steve negotiated a $600,000 contract that was exactly what Johnny’d wanted. When Steve took over, so did the p.r. Paul again proved himself a master of publicity. Johnny realized the difference, “It was all jam off the top of my head and yet there was always fantastic reviews that I knew I wasn’t getting for myself, like out in California.” Thus after signing the Columbia contract, Johnny signed with Steve Paul for personal management.

The latest addition to the Winter story is brother Edgar’s joining the group. Edgar has been playing organ, piano and saxophone and, according to some sources will soon begin playing drums. He’s an extremely good electric saxophone player and his own album on Epic should bear out his talent, too.

Johnny’s bowlegged stance reinforces the cowboy image; He’s kind of the spritely ghost of a skinny sharecropper, a withered specimen of what living the life of a southern bluesman can do. At twenty-five, Winter occasionally looks a withered forty. His straggly hair falling back from his face, face upturned to catch the light, body poised. He glides about the stages, stalking the next instant and the peak it will bring. Winter never moves with the beat but always with the undercurrent of the energy flow. He’s in constant motion and what you see is the surplus of his creation. It’n not feedback from the music hecreates but a byproduct of the music itself. Like pacing as you talk, striding with the urge to push it out, all the way, to push expression over the edge of the possible into the realm of the perfect.

The eroticism of dance is not his possession. Rather, he assumes another art, that of the artist so deeply immersed in his music that outside stimuli are of only cursory interest or noticed not at all. As his energy ebbs and flows, peaks and surges Winter slinks and glides, his gangly limbs the perfect extensions of his guitar. Unlike his peers his involvement is not with his own virtuosity but rather with the guitar as an adjunct to his body.

His singing is a hillbilly banshee shriek, nearly a black man’s field holler. He appears to be either dying or approaching orgasm. Head thrown back, Winter shouting over the super-amplified guitar “A-weeeellll”. That country inflection is the essence of his style.

The clarity of the music is one of its finest points. In large part this is due to the incredible technology of the p.a. the Winter group possesses. Piloted from the back of the auditorium, the engineer twists dials, sets switches, wrenches knobs to achieve the perfect blend between Winter’s ringing guitar, Edgar’s piercing saxophone, the crashing drums and the droning bass. Steve Paul watches it all like the overseer on Daddy Winter’s plantation.

It’s guitar wizardy; occasionally the distance between the man and what, he forces out of his amplifiers is so great as to become wholly separate. Like two shows for the price of one. The audience becomes a collection of gibbering pawns, pawing the air for still more even after he’s left the stage.

Then he returns for the encore; an Elmore James slide run or a Chuck Berry tune which seems outside his repertoire becomes the most fitting climax for a charismatic performance. Quickly then it’s over, he smiles, thanks the people, and grins wide enough to split his skull. Assuredly, this white man can play the blues. And since there’s no one whiter, that should settle the question.

Dave Marsh