Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (13 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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“Carol went to my gigs pretty often at first—I was playing soul music at the Hit Factory club with Edgar, Ikey Sweat, and Norman Samaha on drums. When we first started living together, I was making real good money at the Act III, $150 to $175 a week. But when I started playing blues, my money was definitely not as great. For a while there I wasn’t makin’ anything. She didn’t mind—she was supportive of my music.”
Johnny’s band played six nights a week at the Act III, a Houston club located at a major intersection. The band played in front of a large picture window, flanked by go-go girls in mini dresses and short white boots dancing in elevated cages behind them. Although the club pushed the mid-’60s envelope by flaunting go-go dancers in the window, management demanded songs that made the charts. The owner told Johnny what songs to play and which tunes he expected them to learn by the following week. Johnny learned most Top Forty songs by listening to the radio, and only occasionally had to buy the record.
In 1967, Johnny also performed briefly with the Traits, a Houston-based band, and played on “Tramp”/“Parchman Farm,” a single with a pressing of 300 records on the Universal label. He joined the band after vocalist Roy Head left, which was shortly after the release of the band’s hit single “Treat Her Right.” A popular road band, the Traits played clubs throughout Texas and Louisiana.
Although Johnny couldn’t play blues at the clubs, living in Houston allowed him to see and meet musicians that shared his passion. He heard his first live performance by Lightnin’ Hopkins, a Texas country bluesman, in that city.
“I heard Lightnin’ when I was still in Houston,” says Johnny. “He made his living playin’ on street corners in Houston—he played whorehouses too. They had a room downstairs where people would congregate and choose their girl and they had bars where you could drink and listen to music. Lightnin’ also played on buses. He had a friend who was a bus driver, who would take him to the liquor store and buy him a bottle of booze. He’d stay on the line for a while and play for the people who got on the bus. He got tips. He was playin’ at clubs at that time but he liked playin’ in the street too.”
Johnny also met Keith Ferguson, a musician who shared his love of the blues and later played bass in the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Johnny was playing in the Phil Seymour Band at an afterhours gig at a gay club when drummer Eddie Rodriguez introduced the two likeminded musicians.
“Eddie played that gig and he knew I loved blues and he knew Keith loved blues and he got us together,” says Johnny. “We were about the same age and we both liked the same music. He had a big record collection, a lot of 78s that his Daddy gave to him and he was sellin’. He was the only white person I knew in Houston that was into blues.”
Through Ferguson, Johnny was introduced to Cactus Records on Alabama Street, where Keith’s father, John William Ferguson, worked as a classical music buyer. The elder Ferguson was also a musician; he had been a concert pianist with the Chicago Symphony.
“I bought a lot of records in Keith’s father’s store,” says Johnny. “It had a better selection—a lot of the old reissues on albums, 45s made into albums. I had a Philco set with six- or eight-inch speakers. I listened to records all the time, straight blues and a few of the hippie records like Firesign Theatre and
Psychedelic Lollipop
by the Blues Magoos. I usually bought records I couldn’t hear on the radio. I bought Hendrix—the first records—
Are You Experienced.
I bought Bob Dylan albums—electric and folk—I liked Dylan a lot.”
Ferguson, like many of Johnny’s close friends and fellow musicians, died young. He died of liver complications at age fifty on April 29, 1997, but talked about his initial meeting with Johnny in an interview the previous year.
“Since blues was all Johnny liked, these local musicians thought it would be hysterical if we got together: ‘Let’s put these two freaks, these two mutants, together,’” said Ferguson. “Johnny flipped out; he never saw that many 78s in his life. He had records too, but I had more.” Ferguson recalled being dazzled by his new friend’s virtuosity and said he had to remind himself not to stare when Johnny cranked out a scorching solo in the middle of a song.
It wouldn’t be long before Johnny dazzled a much wider audience.
5
 
THE LEGEND BEGINS
 
T
he year 1968 was one of tremendous turmoil and change. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; and within two hours, 125 cities across the U.S went up in flames. Dr. Benjamin Spock was convicted for counseling and aiding draft evaders, and the death toll in Vietnam skyrocketed to more than 30,000 young Americans. Presidential hopeful Senator Robert Kennedy was shot to death in California, and riots broke out during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
The winds of change also permeated America’s airwaves, as progressive FM rock stations lured listeners away from Top Forty AM stations. The Supremes and the Beach Boys were losing their stronghold on the top of the charts, while the Doors, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane emerged as America’s answer to the British Invasion. The Rolling Stones and Cream sold millions of records covering the songs of American blues artists, and Johnny knew it was time to return to the music he loved.
He was still playing soul music six nights a week at the Act III, when Uncle John “Red” Turner, a drummer from Port Arthur, Texas, approached him about forming a blues band.
“In Port Arthur, our background was blues,” said Turner. “The jukebox at the hamburger juke joint where the juvenile delinquents hung out by my house had Muddy Waters, Little Walter—all those kinds of people. We didn’t know much about the Beach Boys and Pat Boone, but we knew about Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lazy Lester, and Jimmy Reed.”
Turner started on guitar in 1957, switched to bass, and was playing drums in a band called the Nightlights when he first met Johnny. “I met him in 1960,” said Turner. “We crossed paths when we were sixteen and our respective bands were playing at a kids’ Christmas party put on by the OCAW [Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers] union.”
By 1968, Turner had migrated to Houston, where Johnny hired him to replace a drummer who almost cost him his gig.
“Jimmy Gillan was perpetually late, and the club owner told Johnny, ‘If you’re late again, you’ll have to fire the drummer or I’ll fire you,’” said Turner. “Sure enough, Jimmy was late and I got the job.”
Johnny had mixed feelings about playing soul music because his heart was in the blues. “That’s when Uncle John talked to me,” he said. “Nobody had before because they weren’t willing to take that cut in pay. Uncle John said we might not make much money at first but he thought it would work out in the long run.”
“Johnny wanted to play blues; he just had never been in a position to be able to,” said Turner. “The people in his band expected to make a living. We were the first guys that would go out on a limb with him and gamble for the future. Before that we were doing songs like ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Holiday,’ ‘Shadow of Your Smile’—we were a cover band.”
To complete the rhythm section, Johnny and Turner traveled to Dallas to recruit Tommy Shannon, who was playing bass in a soul band. Shannon grew up in Dumas, Texas, and had moved to Dallas after he graduated from high school.
“I knew Tommy would jump at the chance,” said Turner. “We were close friends and I knew he had the same desire to play blues as I did.”
“I met Johnny at the Fog, at the same club where I met Stevie,” said Shannon, who later played with Stevie Ray Vaughan from 1981 to his tragic death in 1990. “I was playing eight hours a night in a band called the Young Lads, making really good money. Uncle John and Johnny came in one night and Johnny sat in. I had never seen an albino before. When he got up under the lights, with that long white hair he looked like some kind of god—I was mesmerized by him. I knew I was going to be starving my ass off but I had this feeling it was the right thing to do. I quit my band and joined up.”
As a blues trio, their gigs were limited to weekend nights, and Johnny’s income immediately plummeted from $150 to fifty dollars a week. The band still couldn’t play all blues, but worked blues into their sets, which included Top Forty songs, as well as Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” “Manic Depression,” and “Fire.”
“Even Muddy was restricted to the amount of blues he could play on his own jobs,” said Turner. “People didn’t like blues. So Muddy stood in the background and acted like he was playing the guitar, and the band played a bunch of soul songs. Then Muddy did about fifteen minutes of Muddy Waters songs at the very last part of their show.”
Before they played their first gig, Johnny gave Shannon a crash course in the blues.
“I didn’t know anything about blues when I first started with Johnny,” said Shannon. “I would look at a Cream album and see Robert Johnson and thought he was a friend of theirs. Johnny sat down with me one night and spent hours taking me all the way through the blues, from field hollers to the present. He had a wall of records and took me through his whole collection, playing and explaining each one. After that night, I understood what I was doing.”
“Sometimes Johnny went through whole songs and taught Tommy the notes he wanted,” said Turner. “I knew everything Johnny did because I came from the same place, so it didn’t take long for all of us to create a tight musical chemistry. We were already listening to Jimi Hendrix, so it was pretty easy for all of us.”
Once they got the band together, they needed a name and a gig.
“At first, we tried to call it Winter: The Progressive Blues Experiment,” said Turner. “We tried to pattern ourselves after the Electric Flag: An American Music Band, a band with a subtitle. It sounds funny now, and of course it didn’t work. Johnny Winter was too powerful a star. It had to be just Johnny Winter. Jimi Hendrix had the Experience, but it was just Jimi Hendrix. He could play with anybody in his band.”
The first gig the band played was at a club called the Plantation.
“It was a gay bar with all these guys dancing,” said Shannon. “They hated us but they liked our roadie because he was good looking.”
The band’s club circuit consisted of weekend gigs playing the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin, the Act III or the Love Street Light Circus in Houston, and an occasional gig in Dallas. Turner drove and booked the motel rooms, so Shannon dubbed him “Uncle John.” To haul their equipment, the band pooled their money and bought a mode of transportation that turned heads wherever they went.
“We used to travel around in an old Packard hearse,” said Shannon. “It was weird, but we didn’t think it was weird then. Johnny would sit in the side seat behind the front seat. People would pull up at a light, look over and see a hearse, and see Johnny with pink eyes and white hair looking out. People would freak out.”
The band’s attire added to their mystique.
“We were pretty vain back then,” said Shannon. “We’d wear whatever we could find that was really cool. I had a purple velvet Nehru shirt.”
“We were ridiculous copies of English guys,” said Turner. “There was a pseudo hippie joint in Houston, where we’d buy striped pants and stuff like that. We were flamboyant. We had our own cross to bear and were kind of asking for it, asking to be picked on.”
Their outlandish outfits, as well as their long hair, often got them into altercations when they played rednecks bars in Texas. But Johnny didn’t mind a good fight if he was provoked.
“I knocked down a guy in Dallas,” says Johnny. “I was playing with Tommy and Uncle John in a club called Phantasmagoria. He said he was an off-duty detective. He was comin’ out with all this anti-longhair stuff and I hit him and knocked him down with my fist. When he finally got up, the guy behind the bar—he was a friend of ours—had a big stick. He said, ‘You get out and don’t come back.’”
That incident left a lasting impression on Ferguson. “We used to call him the Stork,” Ferguson said during an interview for the
Dallas Observer.
“Nobody messed with him. One night he knocked out an off-duty cop for callin’ him a girl. I saw Johnny Winter fight many times; he was real strong and mean. He’d go until you quit breathing and couldn’t hurt him anymore.”
The Vulcan Gas Company and the Love Street Light Circus attracted a mellower clientele. The band members loved the laid-back atmosphere.
Johnny remembers the Vulcan as a “hippie club” that held about 300 people and didn’t have a beer or liquor license. The club, which was at 316 Congress Avenue and Third Street, catered to a younger clientele in their late teens and twenties, sold juice and other soft drinks, and charged a cover at the door. Divided into two sections, the Vulcan was comprised of a smaller room with tables and chairs and a juice bar, and a large open room with a stage at one end, a large backstage area, and an open space where people stood to watch the bands.
“The Vulcan was the first place we started playing the blues,” said Shannon. “The Vulcan was the coolest club I’ve ever played. It was more like a family thing than a club, because I slept there a lot after the gig. Sometimes Johnny and Uncle John would go back to Houston and I’d stay and sleep in the back on floors and pool tables, whatever. Or we would all stay in one room at the Austin Motel.”
Opened in October 1967, the Vulcan Gas Company was the brainchild of Houston White, Gary Scanlon, Don Hyde, and several other artists and musicians, who originally called themselves “the Electric Grandmother.” The majority of the posters and handbills for the club were created by Gilbert Shelton (who later created the
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers
comics) and Jim Franklin, a friend of Johnny’s who became the Vulcan’s artist in residence. Franklin later gained notoriety for
Armadillo Comics
and his posters and murals for Armadillo World Headquarters, the psychedelic club that filled the void when the Vulcan closed in the mid-1970s. He stayed in touch with Johnny over the years, traveling to Johnny’s New York apartment to paint his portrait, which hangs in the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture, along with a portrait of Johnny, Shannon, and Turner painted at the Vulcan in 1970.

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