Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (12 page)

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Authors: Mary Lou Sullivan

BOOK: Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)
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“We used to do ‘Honky Tonk,’ a Bill Doggett sax song that was probably one of the biggest instrumentals ever in the South. Johnny did a killer version of ‘Cryin” by Roy Orbison. We did a lot of the Beatles songs too. We did Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, James Brown’s ‘Out of Sight,’ and ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.’ We didn’t do much blues, honestly. The only traditional blues song was ‘Baby, What You Want Me to Do,’ the old Jimmy Reed song,” Edgar added.
“We played songs by the Rolling Stones—‘Satisfaction,’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown,’” says Johnny. “I picked the songs by what was on the radio and what albums were good. I made all the decisions—I was the leader and that was just the way it was. A lot of our songs were R&B. I liked R&B but I wanted to be playin’ blues— real blues. Most white people didn’t know what blues was, and if you didn’t play music the people wanted to hear, you wouldn’t keep the job very long.”
It didn’t take much to start a fight in a juke joint. Longhaired hippies and musicians were a prime target—especially musicians that wouldn’t take requests to placate drunken patrons.
“I used my white Les Paul to hit people,” says Johnny with a laugh. “I was lucky enough that it didn’t happen a lot, but it happened in a club in Galveston in the beach area. This big guy—he was built like a football player—wanted the same song over and over again. I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna wipe out the bandstand.’ I figured he could probably do it. He backed up and got ready to rush the stage and I wiped him out with my guitar before he could get the drums. He went down and didn’t get up. After that, his friends took him out to the car. My guitar had a bent headstock but I could still play it.
“A typical redneck didn’t like longhaired musicians. They were usually drunk—they drank a lot of beer down South. A lot of fistfights in the parking lots—mostly over girls. We got some of that—where they’d ask you to go out to the parking lot—but it usually started in the clubs.”
In Southern juke joints, it wasn’t unusual for unruly patrons to throw drinks at the stage. “A lot of guys didn’t like musicians because musicians get all the girls,” says Johnny. “I had people throw beers and drinks at me while I was playing. Throw it out of a glass, usually do it in a way that will juice it to you real good. We’ve played behind chicken wire like they did in
The Blues Brothers.
They do that all the time—mostly in Louisiana. They had chicken wire exactly like that to keep the bottles from comin’ up onstage. It was ‘play the song they want to hear, at the time they want to hear it, or they’d throw a bottle at you.’ So the club owners put the stage wire up.”
Art also imitated life during the scene when the Blues Brothers’ bar tab exceeded the band’s pay. “We did a good bit of drinkin‘—there were times where we drank more money on the bar tab than what we’d made,” says Johnny with a laugh. “That happened in Louisiana too. Instead of gettin’ money, you’d end up payin’ money. I was probably the biggest drinker in the band. But that didn’t happen very often ’cause I carried a bottle of Jack Daniels with me and used to buy Cokes.”
It was during the Deep South touring years that Johnny had his first taste of marijuana.
“We started doin’ grass when we were on the road in about 1965,” says Johnny. “We got it from another band. I was so high I couldn’t go out. I was wrecked; I had to lie down on the bed and listen to albums. I couldn’t stop laughing. That was the first time I smoked grass. After that, the whole band smoked it regularly—we usually bought it when we were home. It was twenty dollars an ounce, and five dollars for a matchbox—a small wooden box that stick matches come in. They had Southern sheriffs but they didn’t seem to bother anybody much. You’d smoke it in the back of the club or when you got home.”
Although they still worked for the Atlanta agency, Johnny and the band moved to Houston. Several band members had settled down and gotten married, so Johnny figured he’d give it a try. On February 28, 1966, five days after he turned twenty-two, Johnny married Mary Jo Beck, also aged twenty-two, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Beaumont, Texas.
“I knew Mary Jo for about six months before we got married and then we were married for about six months,” says Johnny. “Everybody I knew was gettin’ married, so it felt like the thing to do. We had a small wedding at my dad’s church. We lived with my folks when we were in Beaumont but we moved to Houston real quick. We had a second floor apartment with a bedroom, living room, and a small kitchen. She wasn’t workin’ but I made decent money with the band.”
Throughout his life, Johnny has always lived with women; he very rarely, if at all, lived on his own. He also had a difficult time staying true to any one woman. Like many bluesmen before him, he always had at least one woman on the side. It didn’t take long for the bloom to fade on his impetuous first marriage and the concept of monogamy.
“Married life was shitty,” he says. “I was always bothered all the time about one thing or another. She was always sure I was gonna be goin’ out with somebody else. I wasn’t goin’ out with anybody—not at first I wasn’t. She was just crazy. I got tired of hearing it and started going out with other people. We had a big screamin’ fight. She was tearin’ up my stuff, wreckin’ anything she could find, and I wasn’t gonna have that. I had my folks take her to Galveston and put her in a mental hospital, where she stayed about three weeks. She was gonna kill herself; she was that crazy.”
Before she was discharged, Johnny moved his clothes and records to a friend’s apartment in the same building. “I knew she’d try to break up anything she could find of mine, so I took it all downstairs,” he said. “When I got the divorce she didn’t get anything because I didn’t have anything. It’s a good thing I got married before I made it. That was the only time I was married [prior to marrying his present wife Susan in 1992], but I lived with a lot of girls and always had girlfriends. I didn’t figure on getting married again—I hated it. Not for me. I figured I’d just live with people. It was too big a deal to get a divorce. I felt like I was real lucky to get out of the marriage as easy as I did.”
After his divorce, Johnny briefly lived at his parents’ house during a break in the band’s schedule. Restless when he wasn’t touring, he found gigs for the band in his hometown. As soon as the agency called, they were back on the road, living the life they loved.
“You’d see different girls, different clubs, different towns; there was always something different about it to make it fun,” says Johnny. “The band got along pretty good. Sometimes we’d get on each other nerves—have money arguments like, ‘Why ain’t we making more money?’ I made a little bit more, but they knew I should be makin’ more money because I was doin’ everything. We all wanted to be makin’ more money, but we were doin’ as good as we could. I think we stayed together so long because we liked each other and we liked the music. I love playin’—nothing ever made me want to stop touring. It never seemed like a job—it always was fun to me.”
Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist everything except temptation.” Johnny had a lot of temptation on the road, and followed Wilde’s philosophy. “I was just an asshole,” Johnny says with a laugh. “I didn’t want to resist.”
Among the temptations was the lure of married women, and Johnny had more than his share. “With married women, you don’t have as much to worry about,” he says. “They’re already married so they’re not gonna pester you much. It gives you freedom.”
But when the woman was married to a close friend and musician in his band, it had a chilling effect on their friendship. “I once went with Ikey’s wife,” says Johnny. “I wanted his wife—because it’s really something to get somebody else’s wife. Sometimes it’s just that—wantin’ to be with somebody else’s wife. I still played in the band with him. One night we were out eatin’, and he told me, ‘I know you fucked my wife.’ I said, ‘Ikey, how do you know that?’ He said, ‘I just know.’ I don’t know how he knew; maybe she told him. I felt bad about it. But they had [been] broken up for a while; they weren’t living together when I went to bed with her. They were broken up and got divorced after that.”
Johnny carried a gun and a knife when he toured the Deep South. That and his penchant for messing around with married women led him down a dirt road that could have been his last.
“I never used my gun but came close to it once,” he says. “I was about nineteen or twenty, in a car with some friends. I had a guy coming after me. I had gone to bed with his wife and he was following me down some back roads. We finally stopped—I had a .22 Derringer in my pocket and he had a gun too. I didn’t know whether I should shoot. He had his gun out and every time I’d get my hand close to my pocket, he’d say, ‘Keep your hand away from your pocket.’ I couldn’t have gotten to my gun quick enough, I don’t think. He finally started crying and left.”
 
By 1966, all four band members had their fill of touring; some had wives and children and no longer wanted to live their life on the road. The band’s car had broken down and they couldn’t afford to buy a new one.
“We had done that circuit several times,” said Edgar. “Everybody was pretty tired and exhausted and wanted to take a break and settle down for a while. We had a car, were pulling a U-Haul trailer, and loading and setting up all our gear. We were responsible for everything and it gets to be a pretty demanding pace, to be out there continually like that.”
Settled in Houston, Johnny focused his energy on recording. He had never stopped making records. On a break that took him back to Beaumont in 1964, Johnny cut “Gone for Bad”/“I Won’t Believe It,” recorded on Frolic and leased to MGM. Johnny considered it his last stint as a studio musician and last recording for Ritter. A handshake agreement ended their four-year relationship, but Ritter wasn’t about to go away. He would later resurface and lay claim to Johnny’s music.
While living in Houston, Johnny met Roy Ames, a twenty-nine-year-old independent record producer who entered the record business in 1959. Ames started Aura Records (which evolved into Cascade Records) in the early 1960s, and was working as a record promoter/distributor for Don Robey’s Duke/Peacock label when he met Johnny in 1966. Seeing potential in the young guitarist, Ames tried to lure him away from Ritter with the promise of a record deal with Duke Records.
“Duke was a black label out of Houston and Roy knew I liked working with black people,” says Johnny. “He figured it would be a good way to talk me into signing with him. But Bill Hall tried to say I was signed with Dart Records. He said he bought my contract from Ken Ritter but he never did. He never took me to court but he tried to say I had not been fair to Ken Ritter. I didn’t see how I could be unfair when I was supposed to get royalties and had never gotten a penny from anybody.”
Hall’s interference blocked Johnny’s deal with Duke Records but that didn’t deter Ames. He produced a single by Johnny and Edgar under the artist name of “Insight” for his Cascade Records label. Capitalizing on the holiday season and the Winter brothers’ exquisite harmonies, Ames released “Please Come Home for Christmas” with their rendition of James Brown’s “Out of Sight” on the flip side in 1966.
Johnny’s only authorized project with Huey Meaux, another producer with a studio in Houston, was a single on Pacemaker Records with “Birds Can’t Row Boats” as the A side and “Leavin’ Blues” on the flip side, recorded in 1966 and released in 1967.
“‘Birds Can’t Row Boats’ was a song makin’ fun of Bob Dylan,” he says with a laugh. “‘Leavin’ Blues’ was the first song I ever played slide on—it was pretty decent. I’d only been playin’ a few months. It didn’t sell great, but it sold as well as anything else I put out.”
Johnny was living in Nacogdoches, a town 140 miles northeast of Houston, playing with a band called Amos Boynton and the ABCs. “I played with them when I first went to Houston,” says Johnny. “They had a black singer named J. J. Johnson and played R&B, with Amos Boynton on drums, Charlie Wheeler on bass, and me on guitar and vocals. We changed the name to the Great Believers just for one record, ”Coming Up Fast” on the Cascade label.”
Although the stint in the band was short-lived, it introduced him to Carol Roma, a woman who would be his live-in partner for the next five years. “I met Carol when I was playing with Amos,” says Johnny. “She was from Nacogdoches in East Texas. Carol had been goin’ out with Amos for a year when I met her. He was married, but he went out with her. She was nineteen or so back then—I was in my early twenties.
“I wasn’t married to Carol Roma, but we lived together a long time. We first got together when she moved to Houston, where she was a beautician. I liked smart girls and skinny girls and Carol was both. I took her out a couple of times and was living with her within a month. I went out with other girls too. I didn’t want to be true to Carol; I felt like I needed to go out with other girls. It made it hard for the relationship.

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