Johnny Winter played with Hendrix, appeared at Woodstock, and nearly lost his life amid rock excess. He’s back.
Beaumont, Texas, circa 1959, was a rough town populated mainly by oilfield wildcatters and dock workers that had two very distinct communities – black and white.
Beaumont had been home to one of the worst race riots in American history a decade and a half earlier when a white woman accused a black man of rape and a mob of 4,000 people formed, burning down more than 100 homes in the black section of town. Tensions between the two communities had simmered ever since.
So when two rail-thin little white kids started showing up in the black section of town, haunting the music clubs and record stores and even the all black radio station, KJET, they were treading on tenuous ground. And these kids were extremely white: both 15-year-old Johnny Winter and his 12-year-old brother Edgar were albinos.
But there was something special about the Winter brothers: they had the blues. Ever since Johnny had discovered Howlin’ Wolf at the age of 12 – back when he had played the ukulele and he and Edgar had been featured on a local kids’ show – he just couldn’t get enough of it.
Such is the power of music that the black community welcomed Johnny with open arms.
“I never had any trouble going to black clubs. I always felt welcome,” Winter said in an interview this week. “But there was a lot of racism those days in Texas.”
In particular, a deejay, guitar player and singer named Clarence Garlow took an interest in Johnny. He’d let Johnny sit in and play, sometimes, and he tipped him off to rural blues and Cajun music. But so color-blind are Winter’s recollections of those days that what he carries with him is a simple, but technically significant memory.
“He taught me to use an unwound third string,” he recalled. “Before that I was using a wound third string, and you couldn’t bend it at all. And I sat in with him a couple of times, or I’d call him and he’d play records for me. He was just a real nice guy.”
When Winter was 17, B.B. King came to town. He was playing at a club called the Raven. The kid was beside himself; he got it in his had that he just had to play with B.B.
“We was there to see him and I really wanted to play with him so I just kept bugging him,” Winter said. “He thought we were from the IRS – we were white people come to get him about his taxes. Then he was so happy we weren’t I think he was ready to let me play. He didn’t know if I could play or not – if I was any good – but it was unbelievable, he actually let me play.”
Winter took the stage and cut loose, unleashing the signature fiery sound that would later become one of the most famed sounds in the history of blues music. The crowd went wild; he got a standing ovation. King – who’d handed the kid his own guitar – took his guitar back. What happened would occur again and again over the next decade: at first, people were drawn to the spectacle of this dramatically skinny albino guitar player. But what they would remember later would be that wild, unruly, almost dangerous sound.
Winter wouldn’t be formally discovered until later that decade, when the legendary guitarist Michael Bloomfield (of the Butterfield Blues Band and Bob Dylan fame) asked him to sit in at a Fillmore East concert. His playing caught the attention of the Rolling Stone magazine and record company executives alike. In 1968, was the subject of the biggest bidding war at that point in music industry history, winning a $600,000 advance and a record deal with Columbia Records.
“I couldn’t believe it,” Winter said. “I’d worked such a long time to make it and all of a sudden it just happened. I was 24. I’d been playing since I was 15.”
So began his whirlwind rock ‘n roll days. He played with Jimi Hendrix and appeared at the Woodstock festival, the former who he remembers as a guy who kept to himself but “really loved to play the guitar” and the latter which is mainly a memory of mud.
“That was pretty unbelievable, really,” Winter said. “That is exactly what it was: mud and rain. It was a great festival, but it was really a mess.”
He became a genuine rock star. He made a genuine and lasting contribution to musical history: as much as any guitarist who ever lived, he brought a raw blues sound to a rock audience. People somehow have forgotten, but when the Allman Brothers recorded their famous Live at the Fillmore East album, they were the opening act for Johnny Winter. He was similar to the Allmans, in a way – he possessed a deep soulful voice like Gregg’s, albeit with more of a Texas growl, and he had the ethereal guitar chops of Duane.
He broke ground in other ways – he was among the first rock stars to admit to heroin addiction, way back in 1973. But he rebounded and in the middle of the 1970s he was asked to join blues luminary Muddy Waters’ band. He ended up producing four albums for Waters that stand out as among the finest blues ever captured on record. Winter’s ripping guitar and his high energy yelps can be heard on the records, urging Muddy on to new heights.
Winter is still more proud of those records than anything else in his career.
“Playing with Muddy was the best,” Winter said. “He was just great. It was easy, and it was fun. I knew Muddy’s music really well. He was making some crappy records before that and I just got him to sound more like he did back in the 1950s.”
“Johnny being asked to play in Muddy’s band – I mean, nobody was asked to do that,” said guitarist Paul Nelson, who now plays with Winter. “Muddy was the guy all those guys grew up on, Clapton, Beck. For Johnny to be asked was kind of like Muddy and music saying, ‘Johnny is the guy.’”
Winter was a vibrant artist through the 1980s, when he left the rock music scene for good and returned to his first love, cutting four beautiful solo blues albums for Alligator Records. Then came his lost decade. Somewhere along the way, Winter began to fade away.
Nelson recalls meeting Johnny in 2000. Winter’s manager, Teddy Slatus, had asked Nelson to join his band as second guitarist. Almost immediately, Nelson realized something was not right. Winter was imbibing a strange stew of anti-depressants, methadone, and straight vodka. He weighed about 90 pounds.
“I was like, ‘What’s wrong with Johnny?’ I stayed on just to see what was going on and slowly I began to realize he wasn’t being managed correctly as well,” Nelson said.
Nelson overheard Slatus insisting, with a doctor, that Winter be kept on the anti-depressants against the doctor’s better judgment. He convinced Johnny to break away from his manager and took over himself, weaning Winter from the drugs and drink and nursing him back to health. Winter emerged from the fog like a man who’d drifted to another realm. By 2004 he was back up to 140 pounds and released a Grammy-nominated record called I am a Bluesman.
Throughout it all, Winter had never stopped playing. But now his fire came back. He had managed to practice a musical resurrection.
“You know, the time he was around lot of crap went down, Woodstock and the drugs and that stuff,” Nelson said. “He is the only one that really survived out of all that. Most of his cohorts kicked it. And he pushed the envelope…This is the thing: music put him in the state he was in, and music got him out of it.”
Winter no longer is able to stand, and he looks a bit worse for the wear. But he is still able to sit in his chair and rip a clear blue streak. He is still a force to be reckoned with, a last link to the likes of both Muddy Waters and Jimi Hendrix.
“He is our living Hendrix, period,” Nelson said. “You got him, you got B.B. King, you got Clapton. But as far as the heads of state go, he is the guy…He was being written out of history because he wasn’t there to tell his true story. He was slipping through the cracks. When people see him now, they’ve got to realize, this is the guy.”
The Johnny Winter Band plays Brixton Friday night. See www.johnnywinter.net for more info. ER
