Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (17 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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“I loved the Chelsea Hotel because when you walked in, there were girls sitting around and you’d say, ‘Do you want to come up to my room?’ and they would go up with you,” said Shannon. “There were always bands rehearsing on one floor, and other bands on another floor. It wasn’t a typical hotel; it was a real rock ‘n’ roll-type hotel. Whenever we came to New York City we would stay there. We stayed there two weeks one time... Uncle John and I shared a room.”
“When we started going into New York City, we stayed here and there—nicer places,” said Turner. “But pretty soon we learned that the Chelsea Hotel was the place for us to stay. It was run down but it was a musicians’ paradise. I remember seeing Jefferson Airplane there. The people in the Chelsea Hotel catered to artists and musicians. The bellhop had everything you wanted. He’d take you up to your room and ask you if you needed anything. He meant pills, drugs, alcohol, and women.”
Shortly after the move to New York, the band went into the studio to cut their first album. Before signing with Columbia, Johnny insisted on two prerequisites.
“I made sure the band went with me and I had total creative control,” says Johnny. “That meant I could do anything I wanted to do with the record—pick the songs, do the recording, and the producing.”
Johnny Winter,
released on April 15, 1969, is a seminal blues recording with appearances by legendary bluesmen Willie Dixon on bass and Walter “Big Walter” Horton on harmonica, as well as Edgar on horns and piano.
“It took several months to do that record,” Johnny says. “I picked Columbia’s Nashville studio because it was more laid back than New York.”
“We did it in Nashville because, according to Steve Paul, the New York scene had too many restrictions on working situations in the studio,” said Turner. “The union was heavy in New York. They would only work a certain amount of hours or they got paid double time. Steve Paul always saw angles.”
“I wanted to make an album that Johnny would believe in, and hopefully would introduce him for the fine musician and great artist he is,” said Paul. “Nashville was free from New York distraction and we could concentrate totally on the recording and good chicken and biscuits. It’s also a very musical town, which Johnny and I had respect for. Eddie Kramer [who was credited as production consultant] is a great engineer, producer, and photographer, and helped us make a good record.”
The craft of songwriting doesn’t come easy to Johnny, but Paul encouraged him to write several for
Johnny Winter.
“I usually can’t write enough songs for a whole record—I usually write two or three songs,” Johnny says. “I wrote ‘I’m Yours and I’m Hers,’ ‘Back Door Friend,’ ‘Leland Mississippi Blues,’ and I wrote ‘Dallas’ from my experiences there with Red and Tommy.”
Johnny was referring to the gig at the Phantasmagoria in Dallas, but Turner remembered another incident that made Johnny reluctant to play that town.
“Our second job in the world was in Dallas,” Turner said. “Me and Tommy had been playing at the club for a year or two before that. Our tradition was to go out and eat at the same restaurant after the gig, so we brought Johnny with us. It was his first time there. I remember coming back from the bathroom and seeing Johnny with his back up to the wall and his feet up, defending himself against two rednecks who decided to attack him. They were fighting but there wasn’t a lot of leg room in the booth, so he was between the wall and the booth with his feet up kicking. For a long time Johnny just thought Dallas was a big redneck place.”
Johnny played a Fender Mustang on
Johnny Winter,
and was thrilled to perform a song with Dixon and Horton on that recording. “Willie Dixon played acoustic bass on ‘Mean Mistreater,ʹʺ says Johnny. “Big Walter Horton played on that song too. We had a hard time getting just one cut out of him. He was interested in playing with a water glass and I hated it. He’d move the glass around in front of the harmonica to make a vibrato. I had never seen anybody do that and I hope I never see anybody else do it either. It’s terrible. He wouldn’t let me record anything more than once, so we had to keep on coming up with different songs for him to play on. Finally he got tired of playing with a glass and we got through ‘Mean Mistreater’ with him playing okay. He laid down one real good track and we were happy to get one track out of him. Edgar played piano on one track and horns on another.
Johnny Winter
sold a couple of hundred thousand copies. For a first record, that was pretty good.”
“Willie Dixon spent his time sort of hustling Johnny,” said Turner. “He spent most of the time trying to sell Johnny some more of his songs. He had a whole briefcase full of songs, trying to get Johnny to do some of them. Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton was an ornery old dude; we finally had to do whatever he wanted to do. He wanted to use a glass like a wah-wah pedal on his harmonica. Of course, we didn’t want that. We wanted him in his blues glory. Eventually we had to get him to start a song and play along with it.”
Shannon missed a take at that session and Johnny’s offhand remark about it became part of the album. “Right before ‘Leland Mississippi Blues,’ Johnny says to me, ‘Don’t mess up, Slut, and I won’t either,’” said Shannon. “Slut was my nickname, and I screwed up the take before that, so he said, ‘Don’t mess up, ‘Slut.’”
Steve Paul is credited on the liner notes of that album (and several others) as “Spiritual Producer.” In a decade that extolled the virtues of peace, love, freedom, and happiness, Paul said it seemed appropriate at the time, but it never made sense to Johnny, who produced the LP.
“That was his thing,” says Johnny. “He wanted to be a spiritual producer. He wasn’t a spiritual person but he thought he was. I just wanted him to put manager because that’s what he was; he wasn’t a spiritual producer.”
“Spiritual producer is the name he gave himself,” added Shannon. “He was the furthest thing from spiritual I have ever seen.”
Spirituality didn’t appear to be a guiding force for
any
of Johnny’s former managers and producers. After the glut of publicity that resulted from his deal with Columbia Records, his past came back to haunt him. Josey had kept a copy of the Vulcan Gas Company tapes, and had already pressed several hundred records on his own label. In fall 1968, he began selling
Progressive Blues Experiment
in a plain white jacket for six dollars a copy at Phil’s Record Shop on West Twenty-Fourth Street in Austin. By the time the ink had dried on Johnny’s Columbia contract, Josey sold the LP to United Artists, which released it on Imperial with the same title and a distinctive Burton Wilson cover shot of Johnny wearing a cream-colored satin Nehru shirt and love beads, staring at his reflection in the back of his National guitar.
According to Wilson, when Josey hired him, he specifically asked for a series of standard promotion shots against a seamless white paper with Johnny in “various hippie costumes” with his guitar. Johnny brought four or five outfits to the shoot and as many guitars. Wilson shot several rolls of film following Josey’s directive, but when Johnny picked up his National guitar, he became creative.
“With only one exposure left in my camera, I decided to do my own thing,” he said in
The Austin Music Scene Through the Lens of Burton Wilson,
an impressive book of music photography that spans three decades. “I asked him to hold it so his face reflected on the back of the guitar and I snapped the photo.” Josey sold all of Wilson’s photographs to United Artists; the label used four additional photos on the back cover.
The release of
Progressive Blues Experiment
came as a complete surprise to Johnny. “I didn’t know the record was coming out and didn’t have much say about it, but they left it pretty much the way I recorded it,” he says. “I never made a penny off of it. How they got away with that, I donʹt know, but they did. Bill Josey had the tapes and he got the money. Even now when they sell that CD, I don’t get any money. I was used to that. When I talked to a lawyer, he said it wouldn’t be worth pursuing.”
Prior to that, the band didn’t have any reason to distrust Josey, so were taken aback by the release of the LP. “We broke down one time, and Bill Josey came sixty miles out of town to get us so we thought he was pretty nice,” said Turner. “But he was not a nice guy—he stole money from us. As the publicity came out on the first Columbia record, he took advantage of that by releasing it to Imperial/United Artists. That hurt us because we had a record on the charts at number twenty-four and another record on the charts at number fifty-two-both at the same time. We felt that if Bill Josey hadn’t done that, we would have busted the Top Ten on the
Johnny Winter
record. Bill Josey took advantage of us—he never paid us anything, and he put his record out and used the CBS/Columbia advertising campaign to his advantage. Today, I play that record and like it a lot, but was disappointed at the time at how he did it.”
Josey was the least of Johnny’s worries. Roy Ames—who managed him during his early years in Texas and haunted him throughout his career—sold his three-year-old recording contract with Johnny to Atlantic Records. Atlantic had lost in the bidding war, but now claimed it, and not Columbia, had Johnny under an exclusive and valid recording contract. According to reports never confirmed by Atlantic President Ahmet Ertegun and Vice President Jerry Wexler, the label paid $50,000 for the contract. Ames sweetened the pot by including enough old masters and tapes for two “vintage” Johnny Winter LPs.
“I worked with Roy Ames right before I went to New York,” says Johnny. “He was my manager but he never got anything done as far as my career; he just got a percentage of the records. Roy was also a pornographic artist—he took pictures of little boys to sell to perverts. He did that all the time, even when he was doing records. I don’t think he ever stopped taking pictures. We recorded some songs for Roy but never made a penny. He said he was putting too much money into promotion and wasn’t recouping enough back. And he said he wasn’t making any money off our royalties. I talked to a lawyer about him too, but he said you couldn’t do anything about it.”
Meanwhile, Ken Ritter, another one of Johnny’s early managers, jumped on the bandwagon and tried to make money off of Johnny’s newfound celebrity.
“When Johnny started making it big, Ken Ritter, who was the mayor of Beaumont, had his old contract, which was about four or five pages long and had Johnny’s signature on the last page,” said Turner. “He took the staples out of the contract, typed up a new contract, kept the back page, put the staples back in, and sued Johnny for breach of contract. Johnny talked to his New York lawyers about the possible potential of a lawsuit. They told him Ken was Tex Ritter’s nephew, the mayor of Beaumont, and you’re just a longhair hippie. You won’t have a chance—donʹt even think about it—weʹre not interested. There wasn’t anything he could do about it; if he tried, he would have lost. That’s pretty high handed, though, to take the staples out and forge a contract. And the back page was decidedly more yellow than the ones on top of it.”
As Johnny’s star continued to rise, he discovered fame had many drawbacks. He soon found out friendship and a private life doesn’t come easy to artists living in the spotlight. The more successful he became, the more people demanded and expected.
“People started to know who I was as soon as I came up to New York and started playing at the Scene regularly,” he said. “We played a lot of festivals that summer, which helped to make me fairly big. Being a celebrity was real different. I guess I did like it because we had tried to make it for a long time. There were some things I didnʹt like about it, but I’d been trying to get there for so long, I wasnʹt gonna admit I didnʹt like it. For a while I did like it, but I ended up hatin’ it. People liked you because you were famous and not because you were a nice guy or anything like that. You couldn’t trust anybody. You didn’t even have a chance to get to know anybody—everybody wanted something. I didn’t feel like I had any friends anymore. It was no fun at all.”
Johnny’s celebrity and the ongoing publicity about his “record-breaking” advance affected the way critics and even some fans perceived him. Journalists called him the “Great White Hype” and enjoyed trashing the man who appeared to be an overnight success rolling in money.
“People like you on the way up and don’t like you when you’ve made it—thatʹs what it seemed like to me,” says Johnny. “Once you make it, people expected more beyond what you could come across with. Getting good reviews was easy when I just started and it got harder. They expected more of me. I couldn’t imagine having too much publicity because before I had none. But obviously it wasn’t a good thing because it hurt us.
“I read the bad reviews but it didn’t affect my playing. Then there were good reviews that only mentioned me and didn’t say anything good about Red and Tommy. That made them feel bad because they were working as hard as they could and nobody was saying anything good about them.”

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