Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (24 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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“He started wearin’ a rope around his neck,” says Johnny. “He thought he was Judas Iscariot. He thought he wasn’t a good person. He couldn’t eat or dress. He was always a little bit off, but it was so much different from anything he had ever done before—just changing clothes was hard for him. It came out of nowhere and he wasn’t doing any drugs.”
That wasn’t the only disturbing behavior band members witnessed. In January 1970, Johnny and Shannon attended Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies concert at Madison Square Garden, and were devastated to see him in such a state.
“I was at the Band of Gypsies concert when Jimi walked off the stage,” says Johnny. “I was backstage. It scared me to death that he would be fucked up enough to actually give up, to quit playing. It scared me to death. He just said, “I’m sorry—I can’t go on.’ I thought it was drugs but I didn’t think they’d kill him. Things might have turned out different if he got a little help. He had played so many good shows. He had good and bad shows—most of ’em were good—but he had his share of bad shows too.”
“I saw Jimi Hendrix about four times,” said Shannon. “I remember going to the Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix’s studio—we hung out there for a while. I saw him that night at Madison Square Garden too. He came out and did about three songs and he just broke down and sat down on the front of the stage, put his head in his hands, and started crying. Then he got up and just walked offstage. I remember Buddy Miles saying, ‘Jimi isn’t feeling too good right now, we’ll try to come back,’ but they never did come back. It was the last time I saw him.”
 
In the winter and spring of 1970, Johnny continued to tour with Shannon and Turner. The band’s itinerary included a European tour with appearances at the Bath Rock Festival and the Royal Albert Hall in England, the
Beat Club
TV show in Germany, the Isle of Wight Festival, and a benefit for Timothy Leary at the Village Gate in New York City.
“We did as much promotion and interviews as we possibly could for the European tour; there was a lot of interest,” says Johnny. “Steve Paul went with us to check everything out before we did it. The clubs in Europe were good-sized—we played both indoor and outdoor places. The
Beat Club
TV show in Germany was a live-performance show. We played two songs [“Johnny B. Goode” and ”Mean Town Blues“]; it wasn’t a whole set. Our first headliner was the Royal Albert Hall. That was something else. It was a full house. Somebody yelled, ‘Play the guitar, you faggot,’ he said with a laugh. “I loved it.... That’s the main thing I remember.”
In March 1970, Johnny had a gig at the Olympic Auditorium in L.A. Jim Franklin was in town to join Robert Crumb and other
Zap
Comix artists—Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, and Kim Deitch—to paint murals at the Whorehouse, a Santa Monica bar. They created quite a spectacle when Franklin brought the crew of underground artists to the Century Plaza Hotel, a nineteen-story luxury hotel, to meet Johnny and Edgar.
“We drove up a small hill to a horseshoe driveway by the front door, and pulled up under a canopy,” said Franklin. “We were in this funky old car full of beer cans up to the door sill. So when the doorman, who is dressed in a Beefeater costume, opened the door, a cascade of beer cans comes out and rolls down the driveway—and all these gangly artists, hairy creatures get out. It was really a scene straight out of a Freak Brothers comic.”
Johnny was taking a shower when they arrived, so they went to Edgar’s room and partied until it was time to go to the gig. “Everyone dispersed after the gig and I felt bad because they never got to meet Johnny,” said Franklin, who recalled another time when Johnny was literally hanging out in his hotel room, surrounded by guests.
“Johnny knew people were curious about if he has albino pubic hair, so he came out naked, and says, ‘There it is; that’s what it looks like,”’ Franklin said with a laugh. “I could tell he was practiced at it.”
Johnny also played at the May 1970 “Holding Together” benefit for Timothy Leary at the Village Gate. The benefit was to provide cash for Leary, who had escaped from a minimum security prison and was living on the lam in Algeria. Leary had been arrested for possession of two roaches of marijuana, which he claimed were planted by police, and sentenced to ten years in prison.
“I did the Village Gate benefit because Timothy Leary was a good guy to support,” says Johnny. “He got put in jail for almost nothing, and people didn’t think he deserved it. They threw him in jail just because he was a big guy in the drug scene and they didn’t like that.”
Despite the band’s itinerary that included concerts at festivals and prestigious venues across the U.S. and Europe, they returned to Austin to play a benefit for the owners of the Vulcan Gas Company, which was in rough shape financially and about to go out of business.
Shannon said they were happy to help because the Vulcan was “our old stomping grounds,” but Turner said their motivation to play the gig was not just based on purely altruistic reasons.
“We came back and played it to be triumphant,” said Turner. “We wanted to show off and say, ‘All you people who never came here to see us, you’re all here now.”’
Although the band reminisced about their early struggles and the roots of their success when they played the Vulcan gig, changes were brewing that would quickly lead to the dissolution of that lineup. Johnny was becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of reviews trashing his rhythm section.
“Reviewers seemed to feel like I was better than the rest of the band,” says Johnny. “Tommy and Red got a lot of that. I thought their playing was fine. The critics wanted fancier stuff. Tommy and Red were blues players and I think that hurt them. English critics were rougher on bands because they wanted a super group. We weren’t a super group; we were a blues band.”
“People misunderstood that whole band,” Johnny told a
creem
reporter after the band parted ways. “It was supposed to be just what it was, a country, raw type blues thing. It wasn’t a Cream type thing where the drummer and bass player worked out; they were just there to play background, to play rhythm stuff.”
Turner took the bad reviews in stride. “We quickly learned that the purpose is just to get your name out there,” he said. “Just getting them to talk about us is the important part.”
Reviews that trashed or ignored the rhythm section cut Shannon to the bone, but he feels that now, with the passing of time, people have come to respect and acknowledge the power and talent of that lineup.
“That hurt, that really hurt,” said Shannon. “But once we got up there and saw how these great musicians did it, we started to step up to the plate. We were playing our ass off. I feel vindicated now because people look at that band as the combination, especially after listening to the live recording of the show at the Royal Albert Hall. That Sony Legacy remastered edition of Second Winter in October 2004 was great because it included the concert at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s incredible; we were on fire.”
“If it had been released in 1970, it would be revered today as one of the greatest live rock albums of all time, on a par with the Who’s Live
at
Leeds, the Rolling Stones Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, and the Allman Brothers Band Live at
Fillmore
East,” writes Andy Aledort in the liner notes. “The fact that Johnny’s biggest-selling record is
Johnny
Winter And Live only serves to strengthen the case.”
“Live
at Royal
Albert
Hall
is a magnificent release,” agreed Turner. “We went into that European tour wanting to show our concept of the blues, as people who had grown up in an environment where blues is not a state of mind but a fact of life. The energy level is incredible; we are driving the music hard, right on the cutting edge.”
Regardless of how well they played in retrospect, the blues wave that had started in the mid- to late ’60s was starting to subside. Paul envisioned Johnny as a rock star and wanted powerful players who could back him up.
“Steve Paul was pushing me to make the break with Red and Tommy,” says Johnny. “He convinced me I couldn’t make it doing blues that I had to get into more rock ’n’ roll, more rocking blues. Some record labels don’t mind letting you have your way playing blues. But lots of ’em just want the records to be stone rock ’n’ roll. They’re not gonna stay with you if you don’t do something that’s gonna really make it. I think Columbia wanted me to go more rock ’n’ roll.”
Johnny reluctantly agreed to go into a more rock-oriented direction, and tried to bring Shannon and Turner along. He wrote new material in the rock ‘n’ roll vein and the trio practiced and recorded four songs. But it didn’t come together the way Johnny had hoped it would.
“It was easy for me to cross from blues to rock ’cause I was used to playing both,” Johnny says. “Red and Tommy were more used to playing blues than rock ’n’ roll. I tried to use them in some rock ’n’ roll stuff and they just didn’t fit in quite right.”
He wanted musicians who could write and sing and become a dynamic part of a band, rather than just being sidemen. It all went back to the critics demanding a supergroup. Paul’s push to move Johnny in a new direction with a different band was upsetting to Turner and Shannon, but it didn’t come as a surprise. Before they left for the April 1970 tour of Europe and England, that included that Royal Albert Hall show, Johnny told the band they would have to go their different ways.
“Steve Paul never really wanted me and Tommy; it wasn’t like we were so stupid we couldn’t see that,” said Turner. “He always had it in his mind to get us out of the picture. He wanted to find new musicians for Johnny. He brought Rick Derringer and the McCoys up to his house to start jamming with Johnny. Steve Paul treated Johnny well but he always wanted to get rid of us, always. He was the kind of guy who always had a strategy, an underhanded strategy. He was a bit of an unsavory person.”
“Steve was trying to get rid of us from the start,” agreed Shannon. “I think a lot of it was that Johnny loved us and we loved Johnny, and he wanted Johnny to himself. He was feeling like if he could get Johnny alone, he could control him more because Uncle John and I would always give him [Johnny] an earful. He had big plans of making Johnny a rock star and talked him into branching out away from the blues. Johnny didn’t feel real good about that, but he thought that would be the best thing for him because Steve Paul kept shoving it down his throat all the time. But Johnny loved blues and I think the whole thing with the new band was a little awkward for him at first.”
Having to fire friends who had been with him from the beginning, and had lived like paupers so the band could fulfill its dream of playing blues, wasn’t easy for Johnny.
“I had to tell them,” says Johnny. “I told them I loved them and I hated to do it but I needed a band that could play more rock ‘n’ roll. I didn’t want to be a nobody; to be a group that nobody cared about. I wanted to do something people would like. I didn’t want to be another Ultimate Spinach because they were a perfect example of a band that made it, had one hit record, and nothing else after it.
“Steve Paul didn’t want to be there when I told them. He didn’t want to have to tell them. What made it so hard? I loved them. They had helped me make it, man. When we were really trying and nowhere, they were still there with me. I hated to have to see them go. I told them I was gonna try to do more rock ‘n’ roll and they said, ‘Okay—we understand.’ There were no hard feelings. I still loved them and they understood it completely. They formed a band called Krackerjack in California—a rock-blues band. Tommy finally ended up in Double Trouble with Stevie Ray Vaughan. When Tommy started playing with Double Trouble, Uncle John started playing with several different bands.”
Getting fired by their old friend from a band they helped create and which, in retrospect, has been credited by some critics for creating Johnny’s greatest recordings (
Progressive Blues Experiment
,
Johnny Winter
, and
Second Winter
) was rough on Shannon and Turner, emotionally and financially. The original plan was for Johnny to get fifty percent and Shannon and Turner twenty-five percent each, but when the break came, they only received a severance pay of $2,000 each, with the explanation that the band was still financially in the hole. Yet the love between the three musicians runs so deep, the breakup of the band never got in the way of their friendship.
“Johnny says, ‘I’m going to do something new here, I’m going to try and play with this other band, the McCoys; I hate to let you all go but I’m going to have to,’” said Shannon. “We knew it was coming, we knew it when he first started going down there jamming with them. After he told us, we stayed there maybe another week and then we went back to Dallas.

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