Johnny Winter: Return of the Screamin’ Demon via Crawdaddy Magazine "Great Interview!"

Johnny Winter is sitting on his tour bus. It’s a 40-foot monster that allows the band to have some creature comforts as they drive from venue to venue. “It’s a little harder to tour now,” Winter said, a trace of his Texas drawl still evident in his voice. “I’m older and I miss being at home. I never wanted to go home at all when I was younger.”

Today the bus is on the road driving from Portland, OR, to a gig in LA. Johnny’s hanging with his band—drummer Vito Luizzi, bass player Scott Spray, and Paul Nelson, who plays rhythm and lead guitar. Nelson also does double duty as Winter’s manager, producer, and financial advisor. After LA, they’re heading to a gig in Phoenix with Johnny’s brother, hard rock and blues veteran Edgar Winter, before they head out on the Rhythm and Blues Cruise with Los Lobos, “Honeyboy” Edwards, Elvin Bishop, and Irma Thomas. These days, Winter and Nelson share interview duties when they’re talking to the press.

Early in his career, Winter went from obscurity to superstardom, almost overnight. After a decade of touring, relentlessly playing in blues and rock bands, he was prominently featured in a 1968 Rolling Stone article about the rock scene in Texas. The photo that accompanied the story was one of a smiling Winter and his guitar. His long, pale albino face and long, white hair made him look like a stereotypical hippie. The Stone piece led to better bookings and a management deal with Steve Paul. Paul was then owner of the Scene, a hip New York City nightclub and a famous musician’s hangout. An opportunity to sit in with Mike Bloomfield (who was already touting Winter as an up-and-coming guitar hero) at the Fillmore East in December of that same year helped Paul negotiate what was then the biggest recording deal ever offered by Columbia Records: $600,000 to be paid out over a period of five years.

Winter became a rock star and indulged himself in all the excesses that went with the lifestyle. “It was overwhelming at first,” Winter recalled, “but I loved it. Over the years, it got harder and harder [to maintain].” His over-the-top behavior finally took its toll, and by the end of the ‘90s, a combination of drugs, alcohol, painkillers, methadone, and anti-depressants had severely impacted his musical, professional, and personal life. Meeting Paul Nelson, now his manager, was a turning point and led to his current rebirth as a touring act and blues icon.

 “I met Johnny eight years ago,” Nelson said. “He was recording at the Carriage House in Connecticut. I was writing and recording tunes for a project I was working on. Johnny heard me playing and asked me if I could give him a few songs for his new record. I wrote and recorded ‘I’m a Bluesman’ with him that same night. He asked me to play all the [supporting] guitar parts [on the track]. The song came out so good, it became the title of the album. Then he asked me if I’d like to play on the whole record. I wrote two more tunes: ‘Shakedown’, a slow blues and ‘Pack Your Bags.’ Later on, he wanted me to come on the road with him. We got along and he asked me to be his manager.

“It was quite an honor,” Nelson said. “I grew up listening to Johnny, ZZ Top, and Ted Nugent. I got into fusion with Jeff Beck and Tommy Bolan, but when I heard Johnny’s Captured Live album, that was it. I had all of his records and listened to more of him than even Jimi Hendrix. He had a rock edge I liked. He was a big influence, and now I get to play with him every day, doing tunes from his entire career and traditional blues tunes too. He likes having a manger that’s a musician.”

I’m a Bluesman got nominated for a Grammy, but all was not well with Winter. “I had been managing other artists,” Nelson recalled. “At first, I didn’t realize how bad off Johnny off was. His former manager didn’t want me to know what was going on with him. [Winter] was pumping himself full of stuff, his finances were shot, and he had no confidence in his playing. He was losing his chops, and if he did show up to play, you didn’t know if he was going to go on. I did some research and found out his old manager [Teddy Slatus] was also abusing drugs and alcohol.”

Nelson’s first step was getting Winter off the alcohol and painkillers that were affecting his playing. “It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but he knew it had to be done,” Nelson related. “We had moments where we butted heads, but when he saw results in his playing, it was easier to get him sober. I wanted to get him to the point where he could make his own decisions again. My philosophy was get the music back on track, get his body back in shape, and go out on tour and play gigs where the music was good and he’d be appreciated. I wanted him to have a good mix of home life and stage life. We do about 100 shows a year now. He’s stopped drinking, and he’s playing like he did when he was 20 years old. He sits down when he plays these days, but the playing and singing is strong.”

In addition to the substance abuse, Winter has been facing up to some serious health issues in the last decade. “I broke both of my hips at different times,” Winter said. “The first time, it took quite a while to heal; the second time it only took a month or so and I had to walk with a cane, but I kept playing. Then [in 2005] I got carpal tunnel in my left hand. At first, it used to come and go. Some days, it was so bad I could hardly play and some days, it didn’t hurt at all, so I kept putting off dealing with it until it got really bad. It started off with my hand getting numb and then it got to where I couldn’t play at all. It was scary. The doctors said I’d be able to play a couple of months after the operation. That just didn’t happen. It was about eight months before I could hold a guitar. I was afraid I’d never play again.

“These days, I play sitting down and I keep to the basics. I still use a ‘70s Music Man amp, like Muddy [Waters] and Bob Margolin had. I’ve liked it ever since I first tried it out. I have one chorus pedal; everything else I do by hand. About 10 years ago, I used a phase shifter, but I prefer the real sound of the guitar. I still have a 64 Gibson Firebird for my slide work and the Lazer for my regular guitar.”

Winter’s current setlist spans material recorded throughout the entirety of his career, but surprisingly, he doesn’t do any of the tunes he’s written over the years. “I like doing the old stuff, the music that inspired me when I started to play. Songs from my favorite artists, tunes I’ve played all along the way. I look for stuff I like, songs I wish I’d written myself, then I change it and do it my own way.”

Winter’s been doing it his own way ever since he was a boy. He grew up in Beaumont, Texas, and actually got his start by playing ukulele in a duo with his brother Edgar. “I learned to play the uke when I was four and kept at it until I was 11 or 12,” Winter recalls. “I hadn’t heard the blues at that point. My daddy sang harmonies with an amateur group and played banjo and sax in bands when he was in college, but he never tried to make a living at it. He taught [me and my brother Edgar] tunes from the ‘20s and ‘30s. ‘Sweet Sue’, ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’, ‘Shine on Harvest Moon’, and stuff like that. When Edgar got good enough, we played local talent shows and even won a few, but we didn’t make anything. We just did it for fun.”

When he was 12, Winter’s dad bought him an electric guitar, a Gibson ES 125. “As soon as I started playing it, I knew this was what I was going to do with my life. I never had any doubts. I was going to be in a blues band. I never considered playing solo or acoustic. I wanted to make records.”

When he was growing up, the South was still viciously segregated, but everyone could listen to the blues on the radio, regardless of their color. “I first heard the blues on the radio. KJET, a local station, had a DJ named Clarence Garlow, a Cajun man. Later on I met him and he gave me some guitar lessons. He was on in the afternoon, starting at five o’clock. I could also pick up KWHK in Shreveport. They had a show called Stan’s Record Shop that played a lot of blues. A Howlin’ Wolf song was the first blues I remember. It was the most emotional sound I’d ever heard. It had so much more feeling than any other kind of music.

“Chuck Berry inspired me to become a blues rock player. I started collecting blues records [45s] and albums and sat in my room playing along with them and figuring out the licks. From when I was 12 to about 15, I’d be in my room every afternoon, maybe four to six hours a day, just playing every chance I got. I bought the records from an Italian guy who owned a record store and supplied records to black juke boxes. He had black and white patrons. There were no problems between people in the store, but there was racial prejudice. People didn’t get beat up or hurt, but you could feel it in the air.”

Winter is an albino and legally blind, although it’s never slowed him down or cramped his style. “I don’t know the difference, ‘cause I’ve never seen any way but the way I do. If you’re completely blind, you can’t see at all, of course, but I’m not. I’m not color blind and I can read books or album covers, but I have to get ‘em very close. Luckily, there are no real health problems with being albino, just bad vision.”

Eventually, Winter started taking guitar lessons from a local country picker named Luther Nallie. He was soon good enough to start giving lessons to other aspiring players. “I was about 15 and had about 10 or 12 students, all guys. There weren’t a lot of women guitar players in those days. One afternoon, Clarence Garlow came into the store to buy some strings [for his guitar]. I recognized his voice from the radio. He used to play my requests on his show. I introduced myself, and he showed me some of the licks he knew.”

Winter was already playing in a band he’d put together with his brother Edgar, Johnny and the Jammers. “We started playing when I was about 14, and once I had live gigs, I started learning really fast. We had bass, drums, sax, and Edgar on tenor guitar and piano. It was just local people I knew. We played high school dances and clubs and bars on the weekends, despite the fact that we were all underage. Nobody seemed to care. We only made 10 bucks a night a piece, but it was nice to have some spending money. High school was a drag until I started the band, then it changed, as did my whole life. I finally had girlfriends.”

Johnny and the Jammers made one record, “School Day Blues”, a hybrid of rockabilly and R&B. It became a local hit and helped the Jammers get better gigs. Winter and his bandmates also liked to hang out at the black blues clubs in town. “We’d get up on stage and sit in. We never had any problems [because we were white]. One night B.B. King was headlining the Raven [a local black blues bar] and I bugged the hell out of him to get to play. He didn’t know if I could play or not, but he did finally give in. He just let me play one song, on ‘Lucille,’ which was very nice of him. I got a standing ovation and he told me, ‘You keep doing this, you’ll be successful someday.’”

Despite his local success, Winter was hungry for some “real blues” experience. When he graduated from high school, he moved to Chicago and got a job playing in a trio called Jimmy and the Gents. [The guitarist he replaced was Jim Guercio, later the producer of the Buckinghams and Chicago.] “It was my first real professional gig, playing six nights a week from 10pm to 4am. It was a trio—guitar, bass, and drums, playing mostly rock and twist music for the dancers. I made 50 bucks a night, compared to 10 at home, but I didn’t enjoy the music. There wasn’t enough variety; besides, I wanted to play the blues. I stayed about four months and then went back to Texas.”

 

Winter went back home and started a blues band, but he also took any freelance guitar gig he could get. For the next four years heplayed in blues and R&B cover bands. “Music is more important, but I developed my showmanship too. I played behind my back, stood on the tables near the stage, anything to entertain people.” Winter kept cutting singles, including a one-off for Atlantic called “You’ll Be the Death of Me”, but he never made any money. “I figured [a record] would help me make it and help get gigs. I liked hearing myself on records. I never forgot how exciting it was the first time I heard ‘School Day Blues’ on the radio, but I never saw a penny for any of ‘em, or from the reissues either.”

In the late ‘60s, Winter put together the Progressive Blues Experiment with Uncle John Turner on drums and bass player Tommy Shannon, who later played with Stevie Ray Vaughan in Double Trouble. Regular headlining gigs at the Vulcan Gas Company, the now legendary Austin club, and venues in Houston and Dallas led to a 1968 album on Sonobeat Records, The Progressive Blues Experiment. “We recorded at the Vulcan Gas Company after hours. During the day, it was Bill Josey’s office and it was his record company. We set up on stage and cut it live in two days… all gathered around one mic. We played just like we did if the club was full. I’d written some songs that I wanted to do and some covers. We’d been playing most of ‘em for a good while, so we did [the album] quick.” The record is one of Winter’s favorites, but again, he didn’t see any money.

Later in 1968, the Rolling Stone article that featured Winter’s picture appeared, and within a year, his Columbia debut, Johnny Winter, had made him a star. For his third Columbia album, Johnny Winter And, he recruited Rick Derringer who contributed the hit “Rock and Roll Hoochie Coo.” The tune made Winter a rock star, but it also created some problems. “During that period, I was on heroin,” he states plainly. “I used it for two years, then I went to rehab and got off.”

Winter re-evaluated his career after rehab and signed Muddy Waters to Blue Sky Records, the label run by his manager, Steve Paul. Winter produced four albums for Waters; Hard Again, I’m Ready, and Muddy Waters Live—all of which won Best Traditional Folk Album Grammys—and King Bee. The albums revitalized Waters and introduced him to a large, new, young audience and were praised for the raw, live quality of the recording. “I put one mic in the center of the room to catch everything that was going on,” Winter explained. “I mic’ed each individual musician too. I knew Muddy was a great talent and cut everything live, no overdubs. It sounded great in the studio, and I hoped that everybody who heard it would realize how good the music was.”

Playing with Waters on the album and on the tours to support the records sent Winter back to the blues. On his album Nothin’ But the Blues, the Waters band backed him up. The record got rave reviews, and Winter started playing the blues full time again. “It probably hurt me financially, but I didn’t care,” he said philosophically.

In the ‘80s and ‘90s, Winter made some great albums, but his drinking and dependence on painkillers prevented his career from progressing. He was missing gigs and playing badly, and he didn’t kick his bad habits until he hired Paul Nelson to be his manager in 2004. “The pills were better than being depressed, but I stayed on ‘em too long,” Winter said. “It took a year for me to get off everything I was using.”

 In the ‘80s, Winter also became a pioneer in the field of body art. There are several iconic images of a shirtless, laughing Winter holding his Lazer guitar with a huge, full-color tattoo of an Asian dragonhead that covers most of his chest. Winter’s albino skin makes the dragon look like it’s jumping out of his chest. His tattoos got him a cover story in Easy Riders: Tattoo Magazine of Skin Art in 1989. “I got my first tattoo when I was 40,” he recalls chuckling softly. “I wanted to do something outrageous that wasn’t self-destructive, or at least not too self-destructive. I wasn’t young and stupid anymore, maybe just old and stupid. It was just before the MTV video days, so it was good timing. I had friends that had tattoos and I liked the way they looked. When I was living in New York, I got a couple of stars on my right arm to get me started. I drank while I was getting ‘em, so it didn’t hurt too bad. When I got the dragon, I drank a lot because it was so big. I woke up the next day and didn’t know why I had a big bandage on my chest. I got so drunk, I didn’t even remember getting [the tattoo].” 

After Nelson took over, Winter got back on track. He collaborated on a tell-all autobiography with Mary Lou Sullivan called Raisin’ Cain, and with Nelson’s help, put together the ongoing Johnny Winter Live Bootleg Series. “I know there are Winter fans out there who like real albums with liner notes and good photographs,” Nelson said. “I decided to out-bootleg the bootleggers. In the attic of [Johnny’s] old manager, we found a stockpile of tapes: Old masters, studio out-takes, live performances. There was enough stuff for six CDs with no repeats and we have lots more. There have been six volumes so far, and the first five made the Top 10 on the Billboard Blues Chart. Johnny got an award from Billboard for the series. We’re working on another batch of CDs that will be called Gems From the Attic. We’ve recovered live band recordings from Europe and Canada.”

Winter recently signed a two-album deal with Megaforce, with the records set to hit in 2011. He’s also working on a series of duets with the working title of Roots. “It’s going to be a collection of old blues songs,” Winter said. “It’s still in the formative process, but Billy Gibbins (ZZ Top) said he’d do it.” Nelson elaborates. “We have a few other guests lined up. The idea is to have each musician pick a blues standard and play it with Johnny. There will be 13 tracks and we’re in the process of looking for a producer. Warren Haynes is offering to work with us, so we’ll see. For now, Johnny’s living for the road. He can’t stand up and play anymore, but the fans have no problem with it. They’re just happy to see him not be humped over or sickly. He’s able to walk on stage by himself, before he sits down. He’s about the same age Muddy [Waters] was when he was sitting in a chair. His hips are healed, and what’s coming out of him now is amazing.”

Watch Johnny Winter, “Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo”

via crawdaddy.com

 

Posted via email from In2TheBlues Posterous