Johnny Winter - Essential Texas '63-'68 - Extended Liner Notes
Johnny Winter - Essential Texas ‘63-’68 - Extended Liner Notes
The December 7, 1968 issue of Rolling Stone published an extensive feature on the wide-ranging scope of contemporary Texas music. The piece touted a newly unearthed young blues-rock guitarist whose insanely speedy licks were stirring up a veritable Lone Star tornado.
“The Rolling Stone article came out about Texas musicians, saying that I was the greatest thing in Texas still starving to death,” recalled the late Johnny Winter. “It was just about Texas people, how many good people had made it from Texas and how many good people there still were in Texas undiscovered. And there was a big picture of me, talking about how great I was. And overnight, people that wouldn’t even talk to me were calling me from New York, California, Europe, every place, man.
“So it was just at that point of checking it out and taking the best offer--not the most money, but the person who I really thought could do the most good. So it was great. Everybody wanted me, and I wasn’t under contract to anybody. I was lucky enough to be able to get a contract the way I wanted it, where I could put out the kind of music that I wanted completely.”
The following year, the flashy fleet-fingered axeman from Beaumont released a spectacular debut album on Columbia Records and blasted his in-your-face fretwork inside a host of major venues across the country. His ascension to stardom was nearly instantaneous.
Perhaps only his friends, family, and rabid fans back home knew that Winter had already amassed a sizable recording legacy over the previous eight years. He’d cut a stack of regional 45s ranging from lowdown Gulf Coast blues to brassy, soul-slanted R&B to crunching psychedelic rock for local producers, confirming over and over precisely how astonishingly versatile the guitarist was despite his tender years. When Johnny hit big, the tape vaults of the tiny labels he’d cut for underwent a thorough scouring so their contents could quickly be assembled on LPs attempting to cash in on Winter’s meteoric rise to fame.
Those vintage sides were totally undeserving of their obscurity, as this collection attests. Here we have two jam-packed discs, one primarily on a rock kick and the other concentrating more on blues material, though Winter blended the two genres so seamlessly that it’s sometimes difficult to tell which idiom predominated. If there was such a thing as a genuine prodigy capable of exploring any blues-rooted genre, Johnny surely fit the bill.
Born John Dawson Winter III on February 23, 1944 in Beaumont, Johnny and his younger brother Edgar (born December 28, 1946) were albinos, and Johnny’s eyesight was poor because of it. He didn’t grow up impoverished. First in Leland, Mississippi and from age four back in Beaumont, Johnny and his brother grew up in an upper middle-class environment. Their father had played banjo and ukulele and led his own band in college and sang in a barbershop quartet when Johnny was a lad.
Johnny’s own interest in music surfaced early. At age five, he was singing harmonies with his parents in the living room while his mother played piano (little Edgar joined in too), and his great-grandfather on his mother’s side bought him his first uke and guitar. The duo’s fast-blossoming talents got them a regular slot on a local kids’ television program, and they even auditioned for Ted Mack’s Amateur Hour in New York but weren’t chosen to be on the show.
Radio broadcasts beamed in from WLAC in Nashville and KWKH in Shreveport gave Winter an advanced education on blues heavyweights, including Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King, and Jimmy Reed. Closer to home, Gulf Coast blues guitarist Clarence Garlow, whose zesty “Bon Ton Roula” was a 1950 R&B hit on the Macy’s label out of Houston, hosted a daily deejay show that really grabbed Johnny’s ear.
“Clarence was just a good friend. Clarence was playing around regularly, and he was a disc jockey on Beaumont’s only black radio station, KJET. He had a show called The Bon Ton Show. Bon Ton means ‘good times’ in French. ‘Let the bon ton roula, let the good times roll.’ Clarence would play great blues records. He had a show from about three to six, and then he’d go from eight to 12, he’d play gigs. And he’d play a lot of his own records, and tell everybody where he was gonna be. And luckily, the radio station then was like two doors down from where my grandmother lived. So I’d be staying over at her place, and I could just walk over two doors and see Clarence.
“Even before I had the guts to go over there, I recorded one of his tunes on a tape recorder, and called him up and played it for him over the phone. And he always remembered me from that time on. I could call him up and ask him to play particular records for me, and he would. I could go out to some pretty rough gigs, and he’d watch out for me when I was a little kid to make sure nobody killed me. He was one of the first blues musicians that I actually got to see and watch close up and learn from. I’d had records since I was 11 or 12, but it=s not the same thing as actually goin’ to the clubs and watching somebody. And from the time I was like actually 14 or 15, I was goin’ out and seeing Bon Ton, seeing Clarence Garlow play, and listening to his show and his records. So he was a big influence.
“He was one of the first guys that ever told me about using smaller gauge strings and using an unwound third. Before Garlow, I was trying to play with these big gigantic huge strings that you couldn’t stretch. You couldn’t bend ‘em at all. I couldn’t understand how the guys on the records were getting all this. And Garlow said, ‘Well, you’ve got to use a second string there for your third, and put your first string on where the second goes, and then get a tenor guitar or banjo high A string for your first. Then you’ll be able to pull the strings.’ And that was a gigantic help. I never knew that before. That’s why he was such a great part of my early learning, because he showed me these things, and would tell me stuff that I just didn’t know from listening to the records. I was sittin’ there with a little Sonomatic Gibson and big E strings, trying to bend ‘em. It=s impossible, of course. But I had a lot of respect and love for Clarence.
“There were some great musicians down in that part of the country. It was just amazing. I never knew until I left how great it was. I kept wanting to come up (to Chicago), ‘cause all the records said Chicago on ‘em. I never realized what a great little scene it was. I just took it for granted, to meet people like Lazy Lester and Lightnin’ Slim and Lightnin’ Hopkins, Clifton Chenier and all those people.”
The first wave of rock and roll was exploding at the same time. “Good old-fashioned rock and roll, like Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis and Fats Domino, that’s what rock and roll is to me,” he said. “It’s just the kind of music that I grew up loving, and still love. Other people can tell the line between blues and rock and roll, but for me, it’s just the rhythm. I play the same kind of guitar. The bass and drummer just play a little heavier on the stuff that people say is rock and roll. But to me, the kind of rock and roll I play is just high-energy blues.”
At the tender age of 15 in 1959, Winter assembled his first band, Johnny & the Jammers, with Edgar initially on electric tenor guitar and later piano, saxist Willard Chamberlain, bassist Dennis Drugan, and drummer David Holiday. Their first and only record under that handle in early 1960, pairing the rocking “School Day Blues” and the gently rolling swamp blues “You Know I Love You,” was cut at Bill Hall’s Gulf Coast Recording Studio in Beaumont. It was the end result of an unusual contest.
“There was this rock and roll movie called Go, Johnny Go!” said Winter. “Chuck Berry and Jimmy Clanton were the stars. There were millions of rock and roll people in it from that period. And with the movie, as kind of a gimmick that went along with the movie, they had this contest called the Johnny Melody Contest. You couldn’t use a group; you had to get up there and just sing and play guitar. And the winner of this contest, the way it worked, the movie was shown, it was a midnight show. They showed the movie at midnight, and right before the movie, they had this contest. We all got up there, and the winner got a lot of records, some clothes, and won an audition for Beaumont’s only recording studio, Gulf Coast Recording Studio. So I won the contest, of course. There wasn’t anybody near as good as I was at that point. I mean, I really had it under control for that period. There really wasn’t much of a contest. But I was only 15. I’d never even been in a studio before.
“We were going to audition, supposedly. I had these two songs I’d written. And we played ‘em for Bill Hall. He said, ‘Great! We’ll record ‘em!’ We couldn’t even believe it. We thought they were just gonna say, ‘Great, kid.’ We really didn’t think we were gonna get a record deal out of it. We figured that was just kind of a little hype. And he said, ‘We’ll record ‘em!’
“My bass player had been playing for about three months, and Edgar had just started playing piano. He’d played everything else. It was my very first band, Johnny & the Jammers. We had been together about six months. So it was amazing for us. It just sounded so great, hearing your voice and guitar on tape for the first time. It was so exciting! But we cut those two songs that day, and in about a month, they released it. They pressed up about 300 records. It was on Dart Records, out of Houston. It was the greatest deal in the world to hear it on the radio. It got to be number eight in Beaumont and Port Arthur and the surrounding area, which was about 50 miles. But it meant so much. It did get a lot of play on the local stations, and it got us a lot of exposure that we wouldn’t have gotten. It got me started from that time on. I loved the studio things.
“When I was making those early records at 15 and 16, I just knew someday you’re gonna be a star, and all this stuff is gonna be everywhere. So I was always doing the best that I could. It was so exciting, actually having that first record that came out under the name of Johnny & the Jammers. I think we sold probably about 300 copies, but still, I had my foot in the door, and I never looked back. I knew right from then on, that was what I wanted to do.”
That same year, Winter encored under his own name for KRCo Records, another Beaumont label owned by Ken Ritter, cowboy star Tex Ritter’s nephew and a longtime deejay on KFDM radio. “Creepy” was the instrumental side, a shimmering workout underscoring just how advanced the 16-year-old Winter’s guitar chops had become. The flip, “Oh My Darling,” was a slow atmospheric vocal. Johnny stayed on a ballad kick on his next KRCo platter, “One Night Of Love,” later that year; its B-side “Hey, Hey, Hey” was a self-penned rocker with a call-and-response chorus and a vicious guitar break. Winter’s band had been renamed the Crystaliers.
Ritter inaugurated another imprint, Frolic Records, for Johnny’s 1961 revival of Gulf Coast bluesman Elton Anderson’s swamp pop gem “Shed So Many Tears.” On its opposite side sat Winter’s own grinding shuffle “That’s What Love Does.” The single was cut at J.D. Miller’s fabled studio in Crowley, Louisiana, where a slew of swamp blues classics by Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim, and Lazy Lester were laid down. Lester was bailed out of a local hoosegow to blow pungent harmonica on “That’s What Love Does.”
1962 brought Johnny’s storming contribution to a worldwide dance craze with the horn-driven “Voodoo Twist,” also on Frolic. “Edgar played on most of the stuff. I had one other horn player, Richard Griffin, that played on a few things, and Willard Chamberlain. But most of the horn playing was Edgar,” said Winter. “Most of my groups I cut down to smaller groups, because I didn’t like to have to arrange everything, man. I liked the smaller group. You’ve got more spontaneity. All you’ve got to do is count it off and tell ‘em what key it’s in, and if they’re good enough, you don’t even have to do that. I like playing the same song differently every night. With a horn section, you can’t do that really so much. The larger a group you have, the less you can do that.
“But in Texas, there were a lot of big groups, and from time to time I would play with a band where Edgar would take care of the horns, and I would just do my own stuff, and he would fit the horns around it. I really enjoy doing that.” Winter also wrote the other side of the single, the lowdown blues “Ease My Pain.” Instead of summoning Lester again, this time he overdubbed his own mouth organ.
Johnny’s advanced guitar technique and uncommon versatility for someone so young kept him busy in Hall’s studio as a sessioneer. He played on a variety of Gulf Coast classics, including Rod Bernard’s “Colinda.” “‘Colinda’ was a little more really straight Cajun,” he said. “That was supposed to be. There weren’t that many studios around the Gulf Coast, and Bill Hall’s was one of the main studios outside of Houston or New Orleans. I mean, Beaumont wasn’t a recording center, but a lot of different people came down there. I did a lot of session work. Every week, I did at least two or three sessions. I played on a couple of hundred records.
“Tony Keys, Junior Cole, there were so many people. Benny Barnes, who was a country and western guy. Dickey Lee and Allen Reynolds. Most of the people were really just nobodies that came in and wanted to make a record, and had a manager with a little bit of money. And the record would come out on a small label. They’d press up maybe 500 or a thousand records, and that’d be it. But there were always big people coming through too. Like I did a session with Tex Ritter. That was so different. That was a gas. There was a lot of country music. There was every kind of music--a lot of Louisiana, a lot of straight country, a lot of good old rock and roll stuff.
“But it really helped my music immensely, because each session, you’d have to play whoever was producing it wanted to hear. They wouldn’t just say, ‘Take off and do whatever you want.’ They’d say, ‘Guitar player, play this. Do this kind of thing.’ And you’d have to learn what all their different words meant. They didn’t know what they meant. You had to figure it out. It was an invaluable experience, even though I think we made $2.75 an hour. But they would round off, so we always made at least 15 bucks a night. And some nights we’d come out with 35 bucks, 40 bucks. It wasn’t great money, but for those days it really helped a lot.
“The Nashville people would come down every once in a while and check to see if we were playing below scale. We really didn’t have any choice, because if you bitched about it, they would just use somebody else. So if you wanted to work, everybody was getting the same money. So you really didn’t have any bargaining position unless you wanted to go to Houston or New Orleans and try to work. I was still a kid in school, so it was great for me.”
Johnny “Guitar” Watson had waxed his first version of the swaggering self-authored “Gangster Of Love” for Los Angeles-based Keen Records in late 1957 and revisited it for King in the spring of ‘63, although the Cadets beat Johnny onto the shelves with their early ‘57 version for Modern (future Coasters bass vocalist Will “Dub” Jones fronted it). Johnny’s 1963 reading of “Gangster” on Frolic rivaled any and all of those versions, its bright horn section and Winter’s slashing guitar solo midway through accenting one of his best vocal efforts of the early era.
“I really love that,” said Winter. “That particular song I love. That=s Dickey Lee, the guy who had out a song called ‘Patches’ years ago, he sang in the background chorus on that song.” Scarcely less impressive was its flip side, the irresistible R&B number “Eternally,” which was another of Johnny’s own compositions. Once again, the horns were prominent, echoing the sound Duke/Peacock Records A&R man Joe Scott laid behind Bobby Bland and his labelmates in Houston. Atlantic acquired “Eternally” for national consumption in late summer of ‘64, though the New York R&B giant paired the slinky theme with the more rock-oriented “You’ll Be The Death Of Me,” penned by session pianist Bobby “Fats” Mizzell.
“I had a song called ‘Eternally’ that did real well locally, and Atlantic picked it up and didn’t promote it at all, so it kind of died. It was funny though, because I was on Atlantic and they dropped me after the one song. And just like three years later, they were offering me almost a million bucks to re-sign with ‘em!” Johnny laughed.
Other than his ever-reliable brother, horn players didn’t rate all that highly on Johnny’s personal scale. “The horn players have always been different from sidemen to me, because they were always frustrated in the old days,” he claimed. “All the horn players you’d get would say, ‘Man, I’m just playing this stuff, this blues or rock and roll or soul, whatever, I just play this for the money, man. I want to be playing jazz!’ Everyone, man, wanted to be a jazz player, and most of them weren’t good enough to actually do it. But they knew they were never gonna get a chance to anyway, so they could always bitch about it.”
Ritter remained in the producer’s chair for Johnny’s frantic remake of Bo Diddley’s hard-charging “Road Runner” in the spring of ‘63, but instead of issuing it on Frolic, he dealt the master to Paul Cohen’s Todd Records in Nashville. “Ken Ritter was my manager, and he would lease the records,” said Johnny. “I never made a penny. I don’t know how much Ken made, but he’d always get a little money in front. He’d say, ‘Well, I’ve got a lot of expenses, kid.’”
The rolling piano anchoring “The Guy You Left Behind” on the flip of his Todd 45 gave the self-scribed number a delightfully breezy R&B flavor. “There’s a real distinctive New Orleans, Louisiana thing, and that’s what ‘The Guy You Left Behind’ was,” noted Johnny. “It was a stone New Orleans-type song.”
After his 1963 high school graduation, Johnny decided to check out the hometown of his heroes Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. It proved a temporary move as the pompadoured, shades-wearing Winter played Twist music with a local band, the Gents. “I had gone to Chicago, lived for about eight months, and then decided to go back to Texas ‘cause I just liked the music. I was playing on Rush Street in Chicago, and there wasn’t any blues scene on Rush Street.”
Back home, Johnny and Edgar were more accustomed to playing R&B and soul. “We were being booked out of Atlanta, Georgia, and we were playing gigs in Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and Alabama--all over the south. I had gone back to Texas, and Edgar’s band had auditioned for this agent out of Atlanta. But they were playing mostly jazz, and he didn’t want a jazz band. But he told ‘em if they could get a leader that would do rock and roll stuff, that he could book ‘em. And about that time, I came back from Chicago, so it was perfect.” The band Johnny and Edgar so tirelessly toured with across the South also encompassed bassist Ikey Sweat and drummer Norman Samaha. They performed as It and Them for a time, later changing their moniker to the Black Plague.
Johnny recorded under a couple of aliases in 1964. He waxed a 45 as Texas Guitar Slim for Diamond Jim Wheeler’s minuscule Diamond label, and his scorching instrumental treatment of Chuck Berry’s “Reeling & Rocking” hit the shelves in the autumn of ‘64 on Bill Hall and Jack Clement’s Hall-Way logo as by Neal and the Newcomers. Along with Johnny and Edgar, that fictional aggregation also included bassist Ikey Sweat and keyboardist/Gulf Coast Recording Studio engineer Bobby Mizzell, who cut his own 1962 instrumental, “Soul,” for the Philips logo with Hall and his partner Jack Clement producing.
“We used to go in the studio with this piano player, Bobby Mizzell, from Sylacauga, Alabama. And he had been all over, traveled around. They got him to work at the studio. And he really taught me a lot about recording. He showed all of us a lot, ‘cause he’d worked at studios before,” said Winter. “We’d go in the studio--he had a key, and sometimes he’d let us go in and record for nothing after the boss went home.”
The times were changing fast in 1965. The British Invasion had swamped the U.S. airwaves the prior year, countless garage rock bands springing up like weeds across America that rendered guitars a hotter commodity than ever and relegated saxes and pianos to the sidelines (Farfisa organs, however, were a welcome sight). Johnny’s musical concept began to change as well. The smoldering “Gone For Bad,” written by Winter and his future producer Roy C. Ames, was the first entry in that regard from Johnny; producer Ritter initially issued the single on Frolic before licensing it to M-G-M. The label upgrade failed to translate into a national hit.
For every coupling Ritter pressed up on one of his own labels or licensed to a larger one, he consigned scads of splendid Winter performances to his tape archives. Johnny had a knack for crafting catchy guitar-led instrumentals that was reminiscent of another Lone Star notable, Freddy King; “Ice Cube,” “Five After Four A.M.,” and the super-rare “Moth Balls” brilliantly showcased his blazing fretwork.
On the vocal side, Johnny took Ray Charles’ gospel-charged ‘56 Atlantic single “Leave My Woman Alone” for a rampaging ride. The Midnighters’ 1958 Federal label outing “Stay By My Side,” written by lead singer Hank Ballard and group guitarist Cal Green, was transformed into a duet by Johnny and Steve Highfield, who also had his own Frolic 45 with the amusingly named Liverpool Five behind him. When Winter hit big at decade’s end, many of those archived tapes popped up on various albums covering Johnny’s early days that he was none too thrilled by (some songs had been marred by superfluous instrumentation added long after the fact).
Under the supervision of Ames, who worked as a promo man for Duke/Peacock and apparently had dangled a possible deal with Don Robey’s Houston-based labels as incentive to sign with him, Winter shifted his attention to the rock demographic. Things get a little confusing here, since well-known Texas producer Huey P. Meaux, colloquially known as “the Crazy Cajun,” also briefly got involved in Johnny’s career during this period. Meaux was headquartered in Pasadena, Texas, producing the Sir Douglas Quintet’s ‘65 smash “She’s About A Mover” as well as countless Gulf Coast rock, soul, and blues classics for his own labels when he wasn’t licensing them to bigger concerns.
“Huey has recorded everybody in that part of the country,” said Johnny. “I never was actually with Huey, but for about a year, I was with this guy named Roy Ames. And Roy worked with Huey, did stuff at his studio. Roy didn’t know it, but Huey had made copies of everything that Roy had done at his studio. And when I made it, both guys were putting out the same songs on different labels at the same time. Maybe they’d even change the names of the songs. And at the same time, Huey would have an album out on me called something, and Roy would have an album out on me called something else, and they’d be the same exact song.”
One Winter single did come out on the Crazy Cajun’s Pacemaker imprint (he was credited as its producer). Cut August 22, 1966, “Birds Can’t Row Boats” rang with jangly guitar, Winter’s Dylanesque vocal sounding like nothing he’d released previously. The backing track was also used with different lyrics for “You Were Once A Man” by Johnny’s labelmates, the Greek Statues (that version was archived). The organ-laced ballad “The World Turns All Around Her” hailed from the same bountiful session but wasn’t issued at the time (the psychedelic “Take A Chance On My Love” displays a similar sound). Dylan’s influence was even more pronounced on the parodistic “Avocado Green,” a November 9, 1966 effort cut at Pasadena Sound Studios that was belatedly released when all those LPs flooded the market during Johnny’s emergence.
“Leavin’ Blues,” the flip side of “Birds Can’t Row Boats,” was another kettle of fish altogether. For the first time, Johnny’s predilection for straight blues was fully showcased on record, as well as his previously unrecognized slide guitar mastery. “It’s the music that I love, and it’s songs that I really want to do,” said Johnny.
A bluesy aura also informed Johnny’s tough rendition of pianist Mose Allison’s signature theme “Parchman Farm.” Winter cut the droll prison lament three times, including on August 22, 1966. He would also wax the number with the Traits, limber singer Roy Head’s horn-leavened outfit; that version was released on the tiny Houston-based Universal logo backed with their rendition of Lowell Fulson’s “Tramp” (Roy obviously wasn’t on the date). Speaking of Head, he cut a driving version of “Easy Lovin’ Girl” for Meaux at Pasadena Sound in February of 1967, but Johnny beat him to it on December 20, 1966. Winter all but invented heavy metal at a January ‘67 session with his pulverizing “Livin’ With The Blues,” equally effective in vocal and instrumental forms.
Band names were entirely interchangeable as far as Ames was concerned. The Winters were on an ebullient cover of James Brown’s dance workout “Out Of Sight” that emerged in 1966 on Ames’ Cascade label under the handle of The Insight. Cut the following year, “Comin’ Up Fast,” which saw light of day on Cascade in two-part form, was credited to the Great Believers. Winter, who played blasting fuzz guitar on that in-your-face number, was joined in its composition by the band’s lead singer, Dave Russell, and drummer Amos Boynton (Sweat and organist Harold Fulton rounded out the band). The same explosive backing track was also used on two other Ames-helmed Winter sides, “Don’t Hide It” and “Ballad Of Bertha Glutz.”
“Bad News” had been around the block a few times by the time Johnny committed it to tape on March 23, 1967. Country songsmith John D. Loudermilk wrote and cut it for RCA Victor in ‘63, and Johnny Cash checked in with a version the next year on Columbia that cracked the C&W Top Ten. Winter imbued the tune with a driving Texas rock feel, a keening harmonica winding around his sly vocal. That same session spawned the marvelously laidback blues “I Had To Cry,” penned by producer Ames, with Winter fluidly accompanying himself on acoustic axe.
Johnny’s priorities were shifting. “We traveled around until about ‘66,” he said. “We started out like just five single guys, and after a few years we all had wives, and most of us had kids. We had baby buggies and dishes and shit, and it just got too hard to keep traveling. So we decided we were gonna have to settle down someplace. It was either Atlanta or Houston, so we picked Houston and worked there for a couple of years, just doing commercial music.
“And about this time, it was like ‘67, and the blues thing was starting to happen with white guys. You know, Bloomfield was out there and had already been, and Cream and Hendrix were popular. This drummer who I’d kind of grown up with, Johnny Mack Turner, came in the club one night. He’d been in Dallas. He had beads and long hair and everything. And he said, ‘You know, man, you’ve always been diggin’ blues. If you got out of here, man, and come to Dallas and start playing straight blues, you could really make a fortune.’ I said, ‘Well, if we were in California, New York, or Europe maybe. But in Texas, there’s no way in the world we’re ever gonna do it with a bunch of white kids playing blues.’ And he said, ‘Man, just give it a try!’
“Before, I had to play commercial music, because we had families to support. And this was the first time that I ever had a guy say, ‘I don’t care whether we starve for awhile. I’ve got a lot of faith in you. Let’s try it.’ And the chick I was living with was a beautician, so she was making some money. The drummer was living with his parents, so he didn’t have to make a lot. And we called this guy Tommy Shannon, who Red--Johnny Mack Turner--who he knew, and Tommy said that if we’d give him a place to stay that he=d try it for awhile. And at that point, there we were with our blues band, and no place to play.
“We played some of the same gigs that we’d been playing before, and they wanted to hear Wilson Pickett and Otis Redding and the regular songs, and they hated us doing blues. So we figured, ‘Well, there’s an audience somewhere. Where is it?’ There was one place called the Love Street Light Circus and Feelgood Machine. It was a hippie club in Houston. And we went up there. You know, I didn’t know nothin’. I mean, I had long hair and I’d smoked grass, but I didn’t consider myself a hippie at all. I was a productive capitalist, man. I worked hard, and I didn’t like those long-haired kids sitting around doin’ nothin’--flower power and all that crap.
“But we went over there and talked to the guy that ran the club, and said, ‘Well, look—we’ll play for you once to see if these people like us. And if they do, you know, maybe you can get us a gig.’ So he couldn’t turn down a free band. Everybody loved us, so they started giving us gigs regularly. And there was another club, the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin. And we made some friends with those guys, and they gave us a job about twice a month. So we worked at Vulcan twice a month and Love Street twice a month, and then there was a couple of places in Dallas and Corpus Christi. I was making about $300 a week before for myself, and I went down for the blues band, I was making about $40 or $50 a week. So it was really heavy as far as starving, but people were loving us. We really felt we were just about to make it. People were loving us all over.”
The recordings Johnny made for Ames in 1968 reflected that major shift in repertoire. Whether he was turning in riveting solo performances of Robert Johnson’s “32-20 Blues” and “Kind Hearted Woman” and St. Louis Jimmy Oden’s “Goin’ Down Slow” or easily overcoming a time-challenged percussionist on fellow Texan Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Pneumonia Blues,” Winter had absorbed his blues lessons extraordinarily well.
There was also a torrid electric blues session that provided a vivid blueprint of how Winter would achieve overnight stardom in the very near future. A solid rhythm section backed him on revivals of B.B. King’s “Be Careful With A Fool,” Jimmy Rogers’ “Sloppy Drunk,” and “Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone” (known as “Oh Baby” when Little Walter cut it for Checker in 1954), Johnny unleashing the red-hot lead guitar that would soon drive stadiums full of rabid fans into a frenzy and exhibiting an aggressive vocal attack to match. “Hook You” was a departure from the strict blues menu, a stomping rocked-out instrumental with Sweat on bass and Turner on drums. Winter’s distorted lead guitar created a hypnotic trance until he broke out a screaming high-end solo halfway through.
A new and infinitely more rewarding chapter in Winter’s life was just around the corner. “Everything happened at once,” he said. “I decided that we were definitely great, and that we should be up there. So I decided to go to England. I’d already tried every place in the United States. So I went over there, and after a week of nobody even listening to me, finally the guys--the Vernon brothers, Mike and Richard Vernon, who had all the English blues bands at that point--heard my demo, the thing that came out as The Progressive Blues Experiment, which wasn’t a record yet. It was just a demo. And they liked it, and we had a verbal deal where I would move the band to London, and we would record and work out of England. So I went back to tell the guys in the band to pack up.”
That overseas trip never took place because American labels came calling. “They were making offers that the guys in England couldn’t even come close to,” said Johnny. Ultimately, Columbia Records corralled Winter. His first eponymous album for the major label was a career maker (it included another version of “Be Careful With A Fool”), and stardom on an epic scale was his for the taking. “If you=re copying somebody else, it=s just copying somebody else,” Winter noted. “That=s what blues is. You’re saying what you’re feeling from your heart, and you can’t do it like somebody else would do it. It’s Johnny Winter music. It’s Johnny Winter blues.”
Even though they proved less than lucrative, Winter retained a fondness for his early recordings. “You play a gig, and no matter how good you played, when it’s over, all you’ve got is fond memories,” he said. “But if you make a great record, it lives after you die. That’s always meant a lot to me. Even back there when I was 15, I had that feeling--when it was on tape, you’re playing for eternity. You’re not making just one record. I really felt like, you=re playing for everybody--God and everybody. It’s gonna last forever.”
--Bill Dahl
SOURCES
Billboard, January 2, 2008: “Country Promoter/Producer Ritter Dies,” by Ken Barnes: HYPERLINK "https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/1314755/country-promoterproducer-ritter-dies" https://www.billboard.com/articles/business/1314755/country-promoterproducer-ritter-dies
45cat website: www.45cat.com
Raisin’ Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter, by Mary Lou Sullivan (Milwaukee, WI: Backbeat Books, 2010)
Wikipedia website: www.wikipedia.org