An Interview with Johnny Winter And Rick Derringer

An Interview with Johnny Winter And Rick Derringer

The very idea of Johnny Winter playing with the old McCoys is a little unnerving. All trite considerations (i.e., “Two guitarists?”, “Rock and roll?”) aside, the essential question remained: What the hell kind of music could they make?

It turned out they could produce the most super-eclectic music in Amerika; like the Rolling Stones, they’re not afraid to attempt anything and, on record at least, they generally pull it off admirably. (Which is not so much to invite the obvious comparison between the two bands as it is to make it.)

Johnny Winter And, the name of the album and the name of the group, is the style of every prominent musical mainstream in rock fully assimilated and readily accessible.

Having heard the album somewhat prior to its recent release, it was only natural that we weathered two Winter weekends - Ann Arbor Blues/Gooselake and the Winter And performances at Detroit’s Eastown -to get this story.

Concisely, it went something like this:

Johnny and Steve Paul drift in for a couple of days of festing, bringing with them the first radio station copies of the album, which they decided to break a few days early in Detroit, on the “hip” stations, WKNR-FM, WABX, WXYZ-FM.

Johnny headed straight for Ann Arbor, went to the Blues Festival and stayed there, getting up at nine a.m. to see his fave performers, a practice which is definitely not part of his normal lifestyle.

Sunday, Johnny, after insisting for two and a half days that “they don’t need any modem blues up here”, got up on stage to jam with Luther Allison. It emerged as a killer competition, no one reaity yyinning but rather each man opening the Other’s, eyes (and, probably, blowing his mind).

The next weekend Johnny and the whole band came back (bassist Randy Hobbs was also in Ann Arbor for the Blues Festival) to play their Eastown gigs, both of which went off admirably. The crowd loved it, not in the usual slightly-jaded manner that that crowd loves things, but really loved it, got it on with the dudes and had a good time. Friday night Rick Derringer nearly stole the show with his number, singing lead and playing guitar in a competent, if not Winter-y fashion.

Sunday, the band drifted on out to Ann Arbor for a free concert on the Blues Festival site. (There’d been no advance publicity on this one because of the Eastown’s fears of loss of attendance.) Bob Sheff and hiS' Real Great Band opened the show, a little too obviously Leon Russell influenced but still, an adequate performance for a group which had only rehearsed three times in their lives.

Then Tin House, the crashing Florida based group that Steve Paul found in Orlando at the Wintersend Festival. They pulled together a surprisingly charming, if a tad too teenage show, considering that this was their first show outside of Florida.

Then Winter and the band stepped out on the stage and started to rock. Johnny was in superfine form (he ^caused/ Dave Marsh to blurt, at one point, “.I don’t believe he did that” which is remarkable only in that Marsh usually falls asleep during blues sets), Derringer, again, drew raves for his performance and in general it went down great. All 8,000 were on their feet by the end, yelling for more, and that’s a good testimonial for any group, at least in Ann Arbor.

We caught up with Johhny and Rick sometime in the middle of the afternoon, at their eastside Detroit Holiday Inn haven, sitting around rapping with Bob Hodge, Catfish’s massive lead singer, and Johnny B. and Boot Hill from Mitch Ryder’s band. Strangely enough, since Johnny’d only been out of bed for an hour, it came off quite well, we think.

JOHNNY WINTER AND . ..

CREEM: Johnny, how did you and the McCoys put this together?

JOHNNY WINTER: Well, that’s one thing I wish people would quit doin’ is callin’ it Johnny Winter and the McCoys, the old McCoys. Because it’s not the fuckin’ McCoys, it’s not. It’s two totally different things, a new band.

CREEM: It isn’t the McCoys?

WINTER: No, just the guitarist, Rick, and the bass player are from the McCoys.

CREEM: But didn’t the original band include your brother, Randy, on drums, Rick?

WINTER: Well, it could be everyone from the McCoys and it still wouldn’t be the old McCoys. It ain’t like I came in to be their front man. It’s a whole new concept and i-dea. It makes people think we’re professional musicians and I hired the old McCoys but it isn’t the old McCoys.

CREEM: At any rate, when you got together, Rick, you and all of the old McCoys were up at Steve Paul’s place in upstate New York, right? When was that, around the first of the year, something like that?

RICK DERRINGER: We went up there originally around Christmas, or right after Christmas, around the first of the year, I guess. We had just gotten released from our Mercury contract, which was a lot of work, and rather than just going to another record company and just getting into the same thing again, we were writing and rehearsing. Just taking a little time to think about it.

WINTER: At the same time, I was gettin’ kind of dissatisfied with what I was doin'. So I decided to break up may band but I didn’t have any idea, actually, where I was gonna find the people that 1 wanted. So they were lookin’ for something different and so was 1.

But we never even saw each other for a long time, because we were all practicin’ so hard on our own things; like, at first, I was tryin’ to make a last stab at trying to make the trio work. I’d written some new songs and we were tryin’ to see if we could make it come out. We eventually decided that we couldn’t but at that point we were practicin’ together, really hard, and they were practicin’ really hard tryin’ to do their stuff. So we really didn’t see each other much for awhile, or just to say “Hi”.

DERRINGER: Then all of us were jamming together for awhile, Tommy and Randy and Johnny and I; it was fun.

CREEM: But by then it had dissolved, the trio just wasn’t working out? WINTER: Well, we talked about it. When we started the band, see, it was a whole different thing. We were just playin’ real, raw, country-type blues. People misunderstood that whole band. I thought Tommy and John were real good for what they did.

It was supposed to be just me, it wasn’t supposed to be so much of a band. It wasn’t really supposed to be a pop-oriented rock and roll group at all. It was supposed to be just what it was, a coutry, raw-type blues thing. It wasn’t a Cream type thing where the drummer and bass player worked out; they were just there to play background, to play rhythm stuff. And I could’ve kept on doin’ that but I decided to go on and do other things, branch out. They didn’t write or sing and I wanted people to do that too. To make it easier on me and so it would be a more total participation thing. So it wouldn’t be just me. So I did that for a couple of years and that’s about long enough to do anything. To do my shit or other people’s shit. Now, we’ll put it together and make some different shit.

With Tommy and them, they didn’t sing or write or really do too much creatively, they’d just do what I told ’em to do. That was the way the band was set up. We worked up and recorded about four songs, the new kind of stuff that I wanted to do, and we all agreed that we just couldn’t work together, without being stagnant.

So we parted, regretfully, and split. CREEM: There was a second guitarist in the McCoys at this time?

DERRINGER: Not a guitarist, an organ/piano player, Bobby Peterson. He played with us for awhile but he got... He was pretty sick at the time and he went directly from Stattsburg to the hospital. And from there he went to Nantucket, working with a group in Nantucket. But I think he’s gonna leave that group and he’s gonna do something with this group of people from down South that Felix Pappalardi is interested in producing. CREEM: So how long was it before you got together to record and play live?

WINTER: Well, before I went to England, did the European tour, we all talked about it and knew that we weren’t gonna play together. We’d decided that, when we got back, they were gonna go where they wanted to go and I was gonna start lookin’ for people. We were just gonna break up the band completely, not accept any gigs and I was just gonna do whatever it took, take however long it took, to find the people that I wanted.

The McCoys were still there when 1 got back, so it just seemed natural to try to play together some. Because what I was lookin for and what they were lookin’ for, that seemed like about the same thing. We’d never played together before but we just started to work together. And it really seemed like there was somethin’ there. CREEM: Now, this is sometime last April, and you started recording sometime in May. So what had the McCoys been doing all this time, during and before that. You had “Hang on Sloopy” and Infinite and Human Bail but what was in-between, what was after?

DERRINGER: Well we did all that stuff on Bang, back then. We’d go work and ... I still can’t figure out where people got the image of the McCoys that they had.

CREEM: What was the image? DERRINGER: I can’t, figure out exactly what that image was either but it just wasn’t what we were. We’d go work someplace and people would either be pleasantly surprised and say “Wow, that’s not what we expected at all!”, or else they’d be angry and say, “What is this?!?” You know, “We didn’t hire you!” One way or the other. So we weren’t really sure ... I don’t really know. It was just a strange image that they had.

CREEM: How old were you then? DERRINGER: When “Hang On Sloopy” first came out, I was seventeen the drummer was fifteen, the bass player was sixteen. Some places it didn’t hurt at all. We worked some spade clubs, we worked the club in Chicago where Cannonball Adderley recorded his hit “Mercy, Mercy”, we played there in ’65. The whole group jammed and we went over really well.

We did some Murray the K shows where they had the whole Motown revue and we did a tour with the Stones. Like when we did the tour ith the Stones, we were the farthest out thing on the show, except for them and we still wore matching outfits.

Anyway we finally got away from Bang and went with Mercury. To kind of even the balance of the way things had been, we went clear to the other end of the spectrum, and did two pretty far out albums.., /

People' sure didn’t expect anything from the McCoys like that. They might have expected something but they sure didn’t expect that. A lot of people were surprised, again, in the right way, and some people were surprised in the wrong way. It just seemed to make things worse, it didn’t matter what we did, it just made it worse; if we woulda gone out and had a bubble gum hit after that, it probably would’ve made people even crazier. CREEM: Did you play the Scene a lot?

DERRINGER: Yeah, quite a lot. It was a nice place to play, because people didn’t really care about image. If they liked you they liked and if they didn’t they didn’t.

Steve wanted to manage us, in fact, when he decided to be a manager. It was almost a year before he met Johnny. We were working at the Scene and afterwards he told us that he’d decided to become a manager. And he tried to convince us about how good he’d be and how great a manager he’d be. He said, “I’m gonna ask you and Buddy Miles (who was jamming at the Scene then) and Larry Coryell.” And all three of us turned him down. We just said, “You’re real good, Steve, at what you do, but we don’t know if you’re gonna be a good manager.” And all three of us were in a position where we were looking to go to something better, not something where we would say, “O.K. you’re a good guy, maybe you’ll be a good manager.”

Thing is, it was right as we were going with Mercury that Steve offered to help us and one of the things he told us was not to go with Mercury. CREEM: Did he tell the same thing to Buddy Miles? DERRINGER: I think he did. (laughts) And we were both going to the same manager, Bob Fitzpatrick, also. We ended up with Bob Fitzpatrick managing us. CREEM: Is that like .the. junior Stigwood Organization in Amerika? DERRINGER: Sort of. But he was really,.. 1. found out later, sort of a road manager for Stigwood. And he told all the people he talked to that he was the manager of Cream and the Bee Gees. So Buddy Miles and our group and Mitch Ryder’s group and Strawberry Alarm Clock and Taj Mahal all signed with him. He signed everybody up.

I think what happened was, he was just working with Stigwood, and he was road manager for Cream when they did their biggest tour. And all of a sudden, he got these impressions of himself, as “Cream's manager”! And being the person who’s molded the Cream into the fantastic success that they were. And because he believed it, he was able to convince other people that he was.

He just didn’t know how to be a manager, he didn’t have the slightest touch on that part of the business. He knew nothing about it at all, but he could convince people that he did and that he had ULTIMATE POWER along those lines. Corporate ties. He tried to help you but there was just ^nothin’ he could do.

Anyway, all those groups just kind of stayed where they were dr drifted farther away from where they were. Except for Taj Mahal. Taj is still managed by Fitzpatrick but that’s because he's really his own manager. CREEM: So when you split with Mercury, you split with Fitzpatrick? DERRINGER: Yeah, right before that. Our contract was coming up anyway and I just called him one day and I said, “Uh, think I could get out of our contract just a little early?” And he said, “O.K. that’ll be all right”. So I said, “Thanks a lot, Bob.” He was very nice, ’cause eventually he realized what he could do and what he couldn’t. CREEM: ,. Those two Mercury albums really got much better response thanthey did sales, a lot of airplay here and a few other places, some go.od press, that sort of thing. ■

DERRINGER: Well, in our innocence we did lotsa things that most people just wouldn’t have the nerve to do. Like, on the first album, we started off with a kind of psychedelic song and then a seven or eight minute, slow, quiet, jazzy instrumental and followed that with a kind of country and western/Hawaiian song. Into a complete, far-out, kind of electronic music thing for aboqt four or five minutes.

We weren’t trying to show anybody anthing, either, we were just sayin’ “O.K., we haven’t had any freedom up til now, we were completely restricted up til now”. We didn’t know what we were supposed to do or what was commercial. We just went with Mercury and they said, “O.K., you can do whatever you want.”

CREEM: Did they give you a producer or did you do ’em yourselves? DERRINGER: No, they wanted to give us a producer and we talked ’em into letting us produce ourselves. So here we were for the first time, completely without any producers ' where we’d only been at that time with the strictest producers.

CREEM: “Sloopy” was your first hit and undoubtedly the biggest. But what were some of the others?

DERRINGER: “Fever”, that was in the top three, we had one that was in the top twenty, I think it was 13,' called “C’Mon, Let’s Go.” And a few others.

CREEM: Had you been writing songs, were you fairly prolific songwriters in that period?

DERRINGER: All during that period we were writing, working and stuff. But we didn’t write any of our hits. Our producers wouldn’t let us even record any of our songs. So that’s why when we finally got the freedom to do it; we just went crazy. I mean, they had told us what notes" to sing, even told us what solos to play and stuff.

On our third single, “C’mon Let’s Go”, when we’d get a guitar solo, they’d say “You gotta play just a lotta loud stuff”. They’d be screamin’ and yellin’ and everything. And every guitar solo, no matter what kind of song we did, they’d say, “And now we’re gonna have a guitar solo and you gotta go RNNGGGG”. That’s all I ever heard from ’em. So that by about the time we got to the third record, I was gettin’ really angry. I can remember havin’ a really huge argument in the studio one day, when they were yellin’ at me to do that solo and I was just tellin’ ’em, “I’m not doing that solo. I’m not doing that solo one more time. I’ve done that solo on every record now and I’m not doing it again!” But I think they eventually got their way and we did pretty close to that solo. We were weak and they were strong; I guess we would have won out eentually but we were pretty young. CREEM: What was that guy’s name again, the owner of Bang?

DERRINGER: Bert Berns. He wrote “Twist and Shout”.

CREEM: Did he write “Brown Eyed Girl” for Van Morrison?

DERRINGER: I don’t think he wrote it, but he produced it. Bert was a good guy. He was a man’s man. He was really a far-out guy, he was like a guy you would see if you read Argosy, just caught a Buffalo, just killed a Buffalo, standing there, a big suntanned guy. CREEM: So are there any McCoys albums on Bang?

DERRINGER: Yeah we had two, two on Bang and two on Mercury. Hang on Sloopy was the name of the first album and the other one was C’mon Let’s Go.

CREEM: Didn’t the front cover of one of them have a real strange picture on it?

DERRINGER: Well, the first one had a front cover with a cartoon illustration of “Hang On Sloopy”. (laughs) It had “Hand On Sloopy” as a little girl, then it showed her father living on the other side of town. He had a bottle of whiskey in his hand, in the city dump. You can see the smell of rubbish and stuff. And in the next photograph it shows her and the guy together with the sun setting in the background or something like that.

On the back, there’s a picture of us on tour with the Strangeloves, in a big department store in Minneapolis and playing football. Just good Amerikan pictures. Havin’ a good time on tour, in Ma and Pa Kettle’s car and stuff like that. The Strangeloves took those pictures personally, with a Brownie Kodak camera. They really did. CREEM: Far out. Johnny, what was the story about the engineering on this album, how you changed it?

WINTER: Well, the Columbia studios are just extra-super, clean and neat and sterile. And that’s the whole problem with our records on Columbia, you could just beat your fucking brains out and they’d sound like they were done in a small jazz-club. We didn’t really know what to do about it so we thought we’d switch studios; before we had gone to Nashville, so we did this one in New York.

Everything was going good, we got the whole album recorded and we mixed half of it and took it over to Edgar’s house and played it on a record player over there and it sounded terrible. It didn’t sound anything close to what we’d done in the studio. No balls at all! A lotta bass and a lotta treble, which seemed like it’d be real nice, with a lotta highs and lows but no midrange at all. DERRINGER: Yeah, they have the highs and lows attenuated so much in the mix-room that when you get home you just have way too many highs and way too many lows and you can’t hear anything in the middle. It makes a real weak sounding record instead of a strong, great sounding record like they would hope it would sound like. And as good as many of their records are, like Taj Mahal, who makes really great, funky records, when you take ’em home and play ’em, it’s the same thing; all highs and lows and no mid-range. WINTER: They figure well, we’ll just give you exactly what’s there, no hype at all, and when you cut it, it’ll sound better on record players. And it isn’t realistic at all to what it’s gonna sound like.

So we were gonna kill ourselves, we didn’t know what to do. It sounded horrible. We took it back in and told old Roy, the engineer, and he says, “I know that Columbia’s studios are good studios, they’re realistic studios, I’ve worked here for a hundred and sixty five years.” He just wouldn’t believe us. He said, “You want to cut the record to where it’ll sound good on Edgar’s stereo?” and went through all this screaming and everything. So finally we just said, “Just come listen to the record on anybody’s record player you want, just any record player, the way that they would normally set their record player.” And we went through about two hours of arguing, back and forth.

He said, “I’m not gonna give you the satisfaction of even coming. I don’t want you to think for a second that I think there might be a chance that I’m wrong.” So we said, “Roy, we’ll do anything, we’ll buy you a studio, anything, anything you want man, just come listen.” So finally after two hours we bugged him so much that he decided that just to get rid of us he’d do it. So he went in to listen to it and he said, “Yeah that’s o.k. but the bass and treble is turned up and you’re still wrong.”

So he split and went back to the studio and we started talkin’. We decided what we could do to make the record the way we wanted it. Because we didn’t have to listen to Roy. If we went in and said, “Do this”, he’d do it. So we started talkin’ about how we were gonna compensate for the mixing room, to make it sound the way we wanted to. We got in the next night and decided pretty much what we’d agreed to do and Roy already had the board set up just that way. Without even talkin’ to us. He didn’t even talk to us and he had everything the way it was supposed to be.

We mixed the whole thing and right towards the last he came in, real excited and he said, “Y’all know, I think I’ve solved Columbia’s contemporary music problem. This is it man, this is it!” We just said, “Yeah, Roy, you’re doing a good job, man, we think you have. You got it down. brother, that’s it.”

But he was a good engineer. He tried to help us get what we wanted and he was really frustrated with himself. We come in there, to one of the nicest studios of the world, and tell him we want a dirty crappy grungy sloppy sound and he just couldn’t understand it.

CREEM: Do you think that’ll change because of this record?

DERRINGER: I doubt it. If it were a company that had one mix room and one engineer, Roy, if he were that engineer, would do those things to compensate, but it’s not.

CREEM: And if you’re signed to Columbia, you’ve gotta use their studios?

WINTER: You have to but they’re getting better about that. I was afraid of that when I went to Columbia at first but I figured, a studio’s a studio and you can get whatever you want out of it. But we just figured out what the program was, this time. DERRINGER: Well, the ideal situation is to use a proven good studio, with a proven good engineer with a proven good producer. Like Glyn Johns, Jimmy Miller and Olympic Sound in London. And the artist wouldn’t have to worry about the sound because Glyn Johns and Jimmy Miller would know how to make any person sound like they sound, in that particular studio. They know how .to work there and they’re both completely skilled in what they’re doing. Course, they can’t do what they can’t do.

CREEM: You two produced this one though?

WINTER: We looked for a producer but . . .

DERRINGER: We looked real hard. There are some great producers but because there are so few they’re all really busy.

CREEM: Who were you looking for, specifically?

WINTER: We had a lot of people who we would have liked to have gotten. We’d have liked to have gotten Sly Stone, Jimmy Miller, maybe Felix (Pappalardi). But all of ’em were really busy. We just couldn’t find anybody available that we were confident could do a better job than we could. Before we used ’em we had to be sure, right out in front, that they could do a better job than us.

CREEM: You know, Columbia has never had a goup quite like yours before.

WINTER: Columbia, I don’t think, knows exactly what to do with us. They got terrible studios for what we do and they got a real jive p.r. department. They’re a good label, they’re nice people, they’re fair people, they really work hard on the records and that’s what’s good about Columbia. But they don’t know what they’re doin’ with their contemporary groups. I mean, the kind of music they know how to handle is something like Blood Sweat and Tears.

DERRINGER: The thing Johnny was tellin’ you about their studios, you hear a Chicago album and the sound they have is so typical of what any record that comes out of their studios will sound like. If you go in there and mix something the way you would like it to sound, it’ll come out sounding like that. They un-hype your so much so that by the time you get the record sounding good in the mix room, when you get it home it sounds too good. You can only, take so much of a good thing when it's not good.

CREEM: What’s the reaction been to this band?

WINTER: I don’ really consider it that big a change. The band’s a big change but the music’s not that much different. It’s just a little more involved and better. More goin’ on that’s all. And we do the slow blues thing that we did before, we do “Highway 61” like we did before, right now we’re only doing two things off the new record.

People are gonna kinda have to get used to us before they’ll want to hear the new stuff more. Though I guess people think it’s kinda funny that I’m playin with another guitarist. But we really haven’t had any bad reactions at all.’People were used to seeing Edgar and I together and I thought they might miss that, but they don’t seem to.

CREEM: Do you get any response from the hard core McCoys fans? DERRINGER: Not really, the only thing we get is to make us realize how fickle this whole business is. Because the McCoys had really a hard time of it and now every place we play, somebody’ll come up and say “Oh, yeah I remember you, I used to tell all my friends how good the McCoys were. And I used to try to talk ’em all into buyin’ McCoys records.”

CREEM: But isn’t it a little strange to be the second guitarist in a band with Johnny Winter?

DERRINGER: Really, I was kinda surprised when it happened because the only time I ever heard it mentioned was when our organist, Bobby Peterson, one night said to Steve, ’cause we had heard that Johnny was looking for more mature musicians and he was gonna have to blow some gigs, “Tell Johnny, that if he needs a group on those jobs, would it be possible for us to help him out until he gets a group together?” And Steve said, “No I don’t think that would work out because I don’t think that personally Johnny would like to work with another guitar player.” And a little later, he said that he didn’t think that Johnny would want to work with a piano player.

WINTER: I couldn’t imagine how it could happen because I really thought their band was excellent and I couldn’t imagine how I would fit in, I play get it on, sloppy, kind of unorganized music and the McCoys sounded so tight and perfect and clean that I thought, “Well, what could I do with that band, man?” I mean, it’s just so strange because everything fit so perfectly. I thought, well there’s just no room. I thought that I couldn’t possibly help.

DERRINGER: I remember, you came in and had a talk with me one day about why we would want you to play with us.

WINTER: I thought, there would be the band over there, all together and there I’d he, just kinda stuck in the middle. Just kind of playin’ my shit rather then have it fit together as a unit. But it didn’t work out that way at all.

What happened was that their organization really helped, because Rick and Randy and Randy had been workirf together and had a real right rhythm section goin’ and I just kind of added excitement to what they were doin’ and they added a little order to what I was doin’.

CREEM: Still, the fact remains that most people just couldn’t see Johnny Winter in a band with a second guitarist. It seems strange to me. WINTER: I never had worked with another guitar player but I knew that I wouldn’t mind it if we would do it right. Two guitar players, a lotta times, is just a big ego clash.

DERRINGER: Or else it’s one where they have to work everything out. WINTER: And I didn’t want to have to do that either. I didn’t want to ge into any intricate arrangements. The only thing that could have worked is what happened. We just got up and played and worked out.

CREEM: Has Edgar done any playing with you?

WINTER: Right at first, we played together for awhile. Then we decided that what Edgar needed was a separate band. He was gonna try to fit in this band because he wasn’t really ready to try and get a band together of his own. But we jammed together and there wasn’t any room for Edgar. He was takin’ really the wrong direction. CREEM: And your brother left, too, in the last month or so, under strange circumstances, right Rick? DERRINGER: Yeah, he didn’t feel like things were right so he checked himself into a hospital.

WINTER: He said that we would make him drink water and if he drank water he’d get ugly. And we wouldn’t like it if he cried on stage. Those were the two reasons.

DERRINGER: And then he said, “Take me to the hospital.” So we checked him into the hospital and they wouldn’t take him, they said he was saner than the rest of us.

CREEM: After that song he wrote on the new album? (“Am I Really Here?”)

DERRINGER: (laughs) He writes a lotta songs like that. He wrote some songs ... He wrote some strange songs. WINTER: He writes such weird songs. I heard that song and thought, “Well, this is ok” at first. Then the further we got into it, I thought, “No, 1 don’t really think this song’s gonna be right.” When it came time to do the record, though, Rick wanted to put in on there. Well, I said, “Maybe, man, but I don’t really think that I’m gonna like that song on my album.” Finally it started catching on in my head and I thought, “Maybe, since Randy’s in the band and he’s got a tune there, we should show as broad a scope as possible, what everybody can do.” And we put it on there and we started listening to it . . . Now I love it! It’s strange, it’s a mood song, it really creates a mood. Randy’s songs seem to always do that.

CREEM: So when Randy Z. left, you went down south and found Bobby? (New drummer Bobby Caldwell) WINTER: Well, we were playin’ down there, doin’ two weeks in Florida and Randy just decided that he was gonna drink water and cry on stage, so lie had to leave. Edgar was the only person who knew the songs but Edgar’s not a drummer.. He said he’d help us out though, til we got somebody. By the time he was done his hands were all wrecked and bloodied, just a mess. But we’d already decided that since we had a week or so off we’d take a look around for some new people.

Now Steve had just signed up this Florida goup, Tin House, and we talked to a bunch of people at their house about being our drummer and one of ’em was Bobby. We played a gig with him, down around Tampa.

But we still had quite a few people in mind. So we got Tin House to lend us their house to try people out and one of them was Bobby, again. Right away, we were all sure that Bobby was the right person.

DERRINGER: He’s only about nineteen or twenty and he didn’t even know he was tryin’ out.

WINTER: That was weird too. I thought he knew he was tryin’ out. I started askin’ him if he was free, if he wanted to play and he didn’t wanna say no because he wanted to do it and he didn’t want to say yes because all his friends were in the room and if it didn’t work out, he didn’t want everybody else in his band to get all pissed off at him so he went “Uh . . . well . . . hmm . . . uh, well ...” He didn’t know what to do. (At this point the phone rings, Johnny answers. It’s for Bob Hodge. Johnny returns.)

CREEM: But it must be a real surprise to hear a Johnny Winter record with actual songs on it, for a lot of people? WINTER: Yeah, always before we just jammed around. We just jammed om this one too except that we had more planned boundaries. You know, “Here’s a song, we’ll jam on this one” rather than just “Here’s nothing, let’s jam.” Rick puts most of the control in there though. I don’t want to have to control myself too much. It’s just instant control without even having to have it. It’s just right there.

CREEM: Are you getting much static from old blues freaks and the like? WINTER: Well, at this point not all that many people have heard it. But it would seem like anybody who liked music would like this album. Unless they were crazy, freaky, esoteric purists. I’m not playing any different than I ever played. That’s what’s so ridiculous, the only difference between blues and rock and roll is the beat. I’m playin’ exactly the same kind of guitar. The only people who could complain are people who just don’t like nothin’ \ but a three chord progression; people who just don’t like those other chords.

You know, I hate lines, I just want to make music. Everyway I want to play it. Not playin’ this or that because it’s pure. You should do whatever turns you on or whatever turns people on. People just go, “You’re a this, you can’t do anything else.” 1 thought about that lofsa timeswhen we were doin’ this album and by the time-we were done with it. I was positive that it was what 1 wanted to do. No matter how it turned out, I’d be being untrue to myself if I didn’t go ahead and do it. Just not worry about what people think about it. So we did.