The house is an easy hour by car from the wall-to-wall insanity of midtown Manhattan, situated in one of the bedroom communities just over the Connecticut line. It’s not an especially palatial house — the wing which houses the indoor swimming pool cost as much to build as the main structure — but it’s certainly comfortable enough, and serves its function well. Its function these days is to accomodate a man who SB not so very long ago was at the center of the game of madness that lives across the bridge in New York,

But that game has a way of closing in for the kill on even the wisest and most experienced of players. The player in this instance is Johnny Winter, and perhaps the only thing that separates his story from those of a thousand other casualties is the simple fact that he’s still around to* tell it. For the last two years he hasn’t been around, but the story of those years^ is only the epilogue to a build-up of events and circumstances which began much earlier. In some ways, it was the only possible conclusion to the rock & roll myth we built for ourselves in the Sixties.

( For Johnny Winter, the pressure was on from the moment he signed his name to ^ contract. He’d had a Couple of minor skirmishes with the music industry big league — local singles that had been leased to Atlantic and MGM Vbut nothing to compare with the hoopla when he first hit New York.

People were throwing contract offers In his face before they’d even seen him perform. And when he did perform — p|impromptu ~janr|$ "the 1 with old friend Mike Bloomfield, — the offers juSt got crazier and Crazier. The bidding took the form of an interindustry war for awhile, and the label that finally won (Columbia) wasn’t even the highest bidder. Considering that Columbia promised a reported $600,000, the bidding must have been highly intense.

And for what? 1969 was the year of a thousand creative explosions—Jimi Hendrix, Cream and the Who were all peaking, and new sounds were coming from the direction of the MC5 and Creedence — but in the face of all this flash and experimentation you’d have had a hard time finding a man more basic or close to the rooks than Johnny Winter. Sure, he was every bit the guitarist they said he was, but at that time “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” was about as far out as he got.

Still, in a year of bizarre attractions, Johnny Winter seemed to fit the bill: an albino with flowing white hair and a way with the blues that could’ve made even the blackest practitioners of the genre green with envy. Granted that the white middle class infatuation with the blues was showing signs of wearing thin, but this guy seemed to be every record executive’s Great White Hope rolled into one. Problem was, by the amount of excitement arid attention manufactured to surround his name, most kids thought they were getting another Jimi Hendrix.

This colored a great deal of the reaction to his debut album for Columbia, and Johnny is the first to own up to it. “How can you invent the blues?” he asked in reference to that record. ‘You can’t, so I had to draw on influences that I already had. The album to me wasn’t low key at all; but it was to people who were expecting some new kind of rock form. I wasn’t trying to do that. I was trying to play real raw country blues in my own style, and that wasn’t at all what people were expecting.”

Things seemed to go a little easier live. Working only with a bassist and drummer as backup, the spotlight was shining directly on Johnny’s musical ego, something the Cream audience could relate to with ease. On his next album — Second Winter — he loosened up considerably, throwing in a couple of old rockers and a positively fierce interpretation of Dylan’s “Highway 61.” The initial gap between Johnny and his audience seemed to be narrowing at a smooth pace.

The smooth sailing didn’t last for long. Johnny was falling prey to new ideas; ideas that his sidemen didn’t seem capable of pulling off,. He wasn’t the only one who noticed it. “Tommy and Red had been getting bad reviews,” Johnny remembers, “things saying I was great and they were terrible. We tried cutting a few things I had written, and it just wasn’t happening. So one day we talked it all out — they had been feeling pretty much the same way I had — and decided that after a committed tour of Europe, they’d leave and do their own thing.” That may have been one step in the right direction for Johnny, but it still left him without a band.

Living across the street from his upstate New York retreat were the remnants of a band called the McCoys. An accidental teenthrob band a few years earlier with hit singles like “Hang on Sloopy” and “Fever,” they’d tried unsuccessfully to replace the bubblegum image with something a little heavier. According to Johnny, when the two parties got together on a couple of afternoons, “they seemed to fit almost exactly the idea of what I wanted. We started jamming and the pieces just fell into place. They were the perfect catalyst.”

So perfect, in fact, that this aggregation — billed as Johnny Winter And — recorded their first album after only two weeks together. Stylistically, it was something of a shocker: for the first time, Johnny was one functioning part of a real band. It was also the first time that Johnny had worked with another guitar player, and Rick Derringer’s multi-talents (singer, songwriter, guitarist) almost matched his own. One of Derringer’s foremost talents, however, was in knowing what it takes to make a good band run, and his most important contributions were of a supportive nature. Johnny was the star, but he wasn’t the whole show.

Johnny Winter And, which still stands as one of the best examples of American rock & roh in the last four years, should have revealed Johnny Winter to a whole new audience. I say should have, because it didn’t. It flopped. Plain and simple: nobody wanted it. It seems that people were just getting comfortable with him as a blues flash, and weren’t willing to look at him in a different light. Everybody had their own explanation for why it failed, but one fact was unavoidable: for the first time since he had hit the big time, Johnny Winter was a failure.

Johnny’s solution to the problem of breaking Johnny Winter And was to take ihe time-honored path: put it on the road and^ keep it there until it breaks. This strategy was perfectly correct on one hand, but perfectly destructive on the other.

First the positive side. Being that Johnny Winter And was an excellent performance band, if you put it in front of people long enough there’s no way they could have gotten around noticing it. This is precisely what happened, though the process was helped along by the release of Johnny Winter And: Live, which, coming on the heels of his greatest commercial failure, was ironically his greatest commercial success.

The negative side rears its head because, quite simply, they didn’t know when to stop. “With that band,” Johnny remembered without a moment’s hesitation, “we’d been on' the road for a year-and-a-half. Maybe we’d have two weeks off every six or eight months, but most of the time, it was five or six nights a week and we were sick of the road. Sick of having no home, no identity, no chance to get away from it.” There’s very little security in even the greatest stardom, and the pressure of not knowing how long it would last kept Johnny pushing. The push led to heroin.

“At that point, heroin was the only way we could stay on the road and make it, the only way we could do it. And we thought that what we were doing was important enough to warrant taking the drug. Well, we were wrong.”

Wrong enough, eventually, to lose control of the situation, have that situation control them, and in the enddestroy what they were using the drug to preserve. When the reason for the drug crumbled, however, the drug didn’t go with it. '“I’d tried for a month or two to quit taking dope by myself,” Johnny recalled of the time following the band’s dissolution, “but I was always around people that had it and it was too much of a temptation. I had to completely quit taking it, and the only way to do it was to lock myself up.”

And that’s exactly what he did, spending the next nine months within the walls of .the River Oaks Hospital, a private institution located a safe distance from New Orleans. The cure was not an overnight proposition. “I could never have done it without being locked up. I thought about drugs the first few -months, and I’d have done it. I didn’t have control of myself.

“Most of the time I was in, I hated music. I didn’t want to touch a guitar or sing a song those first few months. I felt entrapped by music; I felt that music was controlling me instead of being something that I loved. I loved it a lot better in the hospital just being a person. People have always related to me on that level . . . music ... in the hospital, people related to me as a person and not as a fucking jukebox. I was alive again.”

With that, he slumped back into his chair and looked through the window into the late-winter New England afternoon. He thought for a minute, and when he spoke again, his words came slowly and deliberately. “I’d always said that being a rock & roll star wasn’t going to change me at all. But I’ve changed my mind; it has changed me. I’ll try to keep living the same life I was living, but as long as I can have peopje around me that I like, I’ll hide from everybody else. That’s something I never wanted to do before, but I will.

“When I go out on tour, I’m gonna hide. Because those people can’t relate to me as a person, it’s bevond their capabilities. They’re not the people that like me, because most of the people that like me would be too afraid to actually come up and say hello. I’m talking about the assholes — the groupies and the hustlers — that hang around backstage. The ones that have to suck up your energy because they have none of their own. They’re not the people in my audience. Those people have paid a lot of bread to come and see me, and I’ve gotta be able to do the best I can for ’em. And I can’t with those people backstage drivin’ me crazy.”

But even an audience with the best of intentions can close its jaws unintentionally. “They tend to look at you as some kind of fucking God, which I’m not. I play guitar and sing. Real. good. At least I think it’s real good; it’s the best I can do. But when people relate to me as something more, I don’t know how to handle it.

“The first rush of stardom was gigantic for me, but it didn’t change what I am on the inside. I acted differently, but I had to. When I was nobody, I could talk to anybody and everybody on the street, and I’m sure to those people I’ve changed somehow. But it got so ridiculous . . . people would be at me every time I went out of the house. There was no room for me to be me, I had to be Johnny Winter. Being a rock and roll star made it harder to be me.”

The late Sixties, however, was a time for refinement of the machinery which packages and sells mechanical talent as super-human artistry. “It’s a strange thing,” said Johnny with more than a hint of resignation in nis voice, “I never wanted to be involved in the music business, but here I am in the middle of it anyway. And it does affect you, because you know that people are spending their money on you, giving you advances, and they’re not doing it because they think you’re a good guy or because you play nice guitar. They’re doing it to make money, and it’s a pressure you can never really get away from.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 76.

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45.

“I always knew, even when I was a little kid, that I had more musical talent than most people. It might sound horrible to say, but I always figured that I’d become some kind of star. I couldn’t believe it when I got to be 25 and hadn’t been. But the thing is that I was willing to be a musician without being a star and still am. Because my music is more important, in the end, than any rewards that might come from it.

“There are always people who are willing to kill themselves to make it; who are obsessed with making it. And the audience loves it. They love to see somebody who’s willing to kill himself for them. I think sometimes that they like to see that destructive thing, they want to see somebody up there wiping himself out. And there are always those people who are willing to wipe themselves out . . . to.make it. But I’m not one of those people any more.”

Johnny grew up playing more kinds of music than you’ve ever heard, and what he’s doing now is only one small part of what he’s capable of. So if you’ve got a nice comfortable category worked out for Johnny Winter, you’d best be prepared to see him render it obsolete. “I want to do a lot of different things,’ he fantasized. “I’d like to do a tour with a sequined suit, you know, doing a.country & western gig. I’d like to play the Grand Ole Opry. And do a rock & roll show, and do a blues show. But people at this point aren’t ready for that. They put you in a category and lock you in there.”

He’s also given thought to producing. “Nobody’s making blues records the way they used to make them. The post-war stuff that was on Chess, Checker, Cobra and a lot of those small labels out of Chicago; those were really ballzy records. But because of advanced recording techniques, the same musicians and engineers can get together and the records won’t sound the same. It’s a real mono sound; instead of having separate instruments on separate channels, everything comes out together. It’s just one big ball of sound hitting you in the face.

“I’d love to produce some of those old blues people, or maybe even some of the old rockers. A lot of those old people just don’t know what to do. But I’ve made both kinds of records, and I know how to talk to those old people because I’ve grown up playing with them. And a big part of it is just being able to make them feel comfortable in these new surroundings. It’s just something I feel that I can do in a way that nobody else could.”

Judging by the way things have been going of late, it looks as though Johnny might have the commercial mobility to do all of those things — and more — sooner than he expects. His new album — Still Alive and Well — has been applauded by the critic and consumer alike, and he’s now in the midst of a tour which should solidify those gains.

What’s most important, however, he’s got the lessons of that first goround safely under his belt. Not only have those lessons been learned, they're branded on his memory and can be seen in every move he makes. Yet you have to marvel at how naturally he carries his changes, seemingly free from the doubt and paranoia that experiences like his might well have fostered. His life has been changed by the last four years, but his experiences are worn as instinct as he prepares to do rock & roll battle for the second time.

“I think I’ve gained enough insight to be able to tell when it starts to get destructive,” he said as he picked up his guitar and made ready for one more self-imposed practice session. “I thought I would be able to see it before and I blew it, so I guess it’s possible that I could blow it again.” As he disappears through the door and is gone, though, you can’t help but feel a difference in the man. Confidence, awareness, experience; call it what you will, but make no mistake about what it means: Johnny Winter is back on top. ^,