Eight People Go Crazy at Same Time

EDGAR WINTER’S WHITE TRASH

Edgar Winter’s White Trash is probably the best evidence this side of Grand Funk that rock is not dead. An unbelievable bunch of Southerners who lived together for a year and a half polishing themselves, they have a wonderful ability to make people happy.

There are eight of them, or something, and they have three stars and they always get three or four encores, even though they’re not yet headliners. They have horns, guitars, drums and singers and their music is free American rock and roll.

Edgar has played in public since he was eight when he and brother Johnny, then eleven, played ukuleles together. “We used to do Everly brothers things like ‘Wake Up Little Susie’ — we did talent shows, went on tv but, we weren’t really serious about it.”

When Edgar was in New York years later, it occurred to him that he wasn’t having as much fun as he used to. “I used to just love to play. I just couldn’t wait to get to the job when I was young. Since those days, a lot of that had worn off and lost a lot. I don’t know why, but I just began to realize it one day and wanted it back. And the only way I could think to get it back, was to get back with the same people.” So White Trash was born/reborn.

A lot had happened in between. When Edgar was 11 and Johnny 14, they started a band with Edgar on piano, then drums.

“Then I decided I wanted to play saxophone and Johnny said, ‘I don’t want no saxophone in my band,’ so I said, ‘Alright, I’ll start my own band.’ ”

Later, Johnny went off to Chicago because an old bass playing friend had told him he could make a lot of money there. “He got more sophisticated,” Edgar remembers. “Before that he had worn his hair slicked back, with sunglasses and been Johnny ‘Cool Daddy’ Winter.”

When he came back, without much money, but with some new clothes, the brothers formed a band called the Black Plague and toured throughout the South, in Go-Go clubs in Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana. They did dance songs: Ray Charles, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding; “Land of 1,000 Dances”; and whatever else the people in the bars requested.

“I was never a singer in those days. Johnny did all tl\e singing — I-was just happy to play. I was playing lots of organ, saxophone, and just every once in a while, when I was in the mood, I’d sing one or two songs. We went on the road for a long time. We loaded and unloaded this trailer of ours a million times.”

They were booked by a semi-incompetent' named Johnny O’Leary from Atlanta. “We’d get stranded somewhere and we’d have to spend all the money we’d saved up to get home. Finally, the car broke down, and nobody wanted to buy a new one, so we broke up.”

Johnny then formed his blues band while Edgar went to Houston; he had decided to get into, experimental music, and go to college. He took a correspondence course to get his high school diploma.

Edgar had been interested in jazz from the time he was 15, when he had played clubs in Louisiana near the Texas border. . Liquor laws in Louisiana allowed drinking at 18 instead of Texas’ 21, so there were several clubs just over the border catering to young people. Anyway, Edgar then got back into such a band via Jerry La Croix.

Most of the other people in the band were music majors at LaMont College. Edgar started listening to Cannonball Adderley, John Coltrane and a host of others but decided not to go to college because the guys in the band told him he could learn as much playing. “That suited me fine. I had always hated school because my eyesight is bad and it was hard for me to do most of the stuff you have to do.”

Around this time, Steve Paul had made his legendary trip to Texas and “discovered” Johnny, brought him to New York, signed him to Columbia for a small fortune and started recording their first Columbia album.

Edgar was called to Nashville to play on the record, and do a few charts. He could easily deal with the music Johnny played (“I always like all kinds of music”) but his head was still in jazz.

“I wanted to make new sounds, invent new instruments.” He talked to Steve Paul* who suggested the possibility of recording an album. “I was very cautious; it sounded good on the surface but I was afraid that when it came down to it I wouldn’t have much freedom.” Steve convinced him a couple of months later when he called him to New York.

Edgar’s first album, Entrance, was a total concept, big production neo-jazz work that turned a few people on very much but sold very little. “I felt a little bad about making it, because it was never a commercial attempt. I never intended to perform the music in it.” He went to the studio every day for five weeks. “I’d get there about seven and wouldn’t leave until four or five — it was like a day gig.” He had never done string arrangements before but he picked it up. “I’ve always been able to do things the first time,” he grins. “The only problem was, it got to be kind of antiseptic doing everything by myself; after it was over, I wanted to do things with other people.”

Before he had cut the album, Edgar had toured with Johnny which turned him onto big crowds and ovations for the first time. (“I thought, this is really cool.”) It also gave him some necessary experience. “I really enjoyed playing in that band. Johnny had a good energy level, and was playing real good.”

The other guys in Johnny’s band, old friends of his from Texas, were too one dimensional to allow much growth. “They tried hard,” remembers Edgar, “but they just weren’t good players.” Johnny broke up the band around the time Edgar cut Entrance. ^

While Edgar finished his first album, Johnny was teaming up with the McCoys — Ric Derringer, and his tight but directionless group who years before had a hit with “Hang On Sloopy” and later became an esoteric delight of Steve Paul’s The Scene during the last year of its dominance of NY’s innest rock circles.

Now Edgar had time to grow. He started looking for musicians. “I looked everywhere; I spent a bunch of money going to California, Florida. I looked in New York, and looked in Las Vegas and Nashville, and I just couldn’t find anybody I liked. Of course, it was a weird situation. I was sayin’ — ‘I’m gonna have this great band. And we’re gonna play great music and make everybody like it. The pay is $50 a week and a place to stay and after about a year — maybe two years — maybe there’ll be a raise.” Edgar giggles. “I couldn’t find anybody I liked who wanted to play in it and I suddenly realized that I was gonna have to go back with some people I’d played with before who I had never thought I was ever gonna see again. I had thought there would be great musicians in New York, and I didn’t find anybody I liked!”

He went back to New Orleans and (the first person he called was Jerry La Croix, whom he had always loved playing with in the old days.

He and La Croix wrote a batch of songs together and started trying out more musicians. After six or seven months they had assembled a band, mostly from people who had played with them in the past.

The drummer, Bobby Ramirez had been in one of the old bands. Jon Smith, the tenor sax man, had played with Jerry and Edgar had known him, “It was really hard trying to form the band. Everybody had to be into the same thing — all bands don’t have to be that way, but that’s what I wanted this band to be. That’s what l like about this band.”

But they didn’t have a specific idea of what they were going to be. “I just wanted it to be a band where everybody in it lived together, did the same stuff, just came down and practiced any time. Everybody adding to what’s going on. None of that, ‘You play this you play that’ stuff. I wanted to give everybody a chance to do everything they could in the band, to get as much good stuff into it as possible. I tried to find the best people that I really liked, enjoyed and respected and who still really wanted to turn people on. It’s hard to find good musicians who don’t just want to play music for themselves. Trying to communicate with people — that’s what I’m trying to do now.”

That’s one reason why they’re fortunate in being managed by Steve Paul. “Steve doesn’t relate, to the music itself,” says Edgar, “he’s more into, like what we should wear, what order to do the songs in, how to act on stage. He always tells us, ‘It’s not just enough to make good music, you’ve got to make people like it.’ ”

Rick Derringer, who’s recently joined the group since Johnny broke up Johnny Winter And and went into a hospital, agrees, “I hate to admit it, but I know if we played the same exact set note for note but didn’t move around at all, just sat still, we wouldn’t get anywhere as much applause. The main thing in our popularity is not the music — it’s that we jump around and go crazy and get it on. The music is a factor, it helps people justify that they like to see us jumping around.

“Another thing about this band,” Derringer continued, “compared to like, Johnny’s band, is that there are so many people in it. It’s an awful lot of energy cornin’ out when eight people go crazy at the same time on stage.” The music certainly doesn’t hurt though, whether it’s the dixieland rock sound of the horns or Edgar’s one and only vocals mixing a screech with smooth singing — and what a screech! It’s the most distinctive since Joe Cocker left the scene. There’s also Jerry La Croix’s sections of the show, which are handclapping soul rock things, and Rick’s sexy rock idol lead guitar solos. “There’s no doubt about it,” Rick says, “this band is getting better responses than Johnny’s did, in many instances.”

When White Trash first got together the musicians were all coming from different directions. Drummer Ramirez had been working the Copacabana with “a Hawaiian Tom Jones named Dick Jensen.” Jerry had been playing commercial dance music in a club in New Orleans, doing Blood Sweat and Tears and Chicago imitations. Edgar had been playing in an awful club in Houston.

“I had decided I was tired of playing rock and roll for awhile — figured I’d get me a cocktail job and have a rest while I decided what to do. So I got booked in this club called the Golden Fleece. It had a chorus line called the Golden Girls, and we were the Goldenaires. And they also had a country and western vocalist who’d come on before us sometimes. The bandstand was shaped like a Viking ship, with an air conditioning duct that went up to the ceiling in the shape of a yellow sea serpent. We played all kinds of music — jazz, Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley stuff, psychedelic music, old blues, everything.”

Though the band is getting demands for encores, and the record is starting to sell, Edgar sees no major changes. “We’re just getting to the point now where we feel like we have enough momentum to survive for a few months. We don’t have really enough money to operate; we don’t have our own P.A. system and with all our people, our sound gets ruined in most places. They just don’t know what to do with so many of us.

“We’re really just a bunch of Texas and Louisiana guys,” he continues. “None of us have any idea what we’re doing. I just try to think of it in an overall sense — and of course, there’s always Steve telling us what ‘a band should be . . . ’ ”

Somehow, between Steve’s show-biz instinct, and Edgar’s and the band’s musical talents, White Trash has evolved as an incredibly high energy entertaining, unique rock show. It’s hard to think who to compare them to — their image is more authentically funky, dirty and spontaneous than almost anyone since the early Stones and Animals. They’re really in their own world.

Despite the raves, Edgar’s not satisfied. “I want the band to keep changing,” he says. “I don’t know if we want to play bangy crashy music forever.

“I worry that we’re not putting enough into our shows. And we’ve been playing too loud — we’re not only a loud guitar band.” Edgar is always first concerned about the music, a rare priority for an up-and-coming star. He created the band to bring back his love for music, and so far he says he is happy with things. White Trash is totally unique in their concept — the Airplane and Dead and lots of others have made rock bands out of a living together-love for the music situation, but White Trash is the first such endeavor to come out of the traditional southern rock and roll scene.

The White Trash house, located in upstate New York, houses th$ eight musicians and their friends — about 15 people. Jerry is married with three children and he and his family live in a cottage near the main house. “It’s weird living with all the guys. If one of us gets sick, we all get sick; everybody knows what everybody else is doing.' People start hating eac other.”

Sometimes Edgar takes a position of leadership, but he usually prefers to let things happen spontaneously. Often people come to his wife Barbara with thier problems and she does her best to arbitrate. “Barbara gets blamed for lots of the bad things that go on, so she feels like White Trash is her band too,” smiles Edgar1.

Meanwhile, Edgar’s just been talking to Johnny on the phone. “He sounds a lot happier than he has in awhile. I think it’s really good that he stopped what he was doing and broke up the band when he did, ’cause he really wasn’t happy with it. He’s home now, relaxed, and he said he’s been playing the guitar again, writing songs and thinking about starting a new band.”

Edgar is trying to learn as much as possible from his brother’s mistakes. He spent a lot of time watching how successful bands ruined themselves one way or another, and he’s doing his best to avoid the most obvious pitfalls.

Patti Smith, in her liner notes on the White Trash album, says it all:

White Trash:

arms of an angel face of a saint mouth of a bandit the coyote with spread teeth good and evil shake from their prison like a trembling bird like a shrieking eagle like all energy forces shooting hard like love like light. W?