Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (4 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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Despite his hostility toward the choir, Johnny still attended church every Sunday until he was nineteen years old. “I think it helped us, that we got something out of it,” he says. “I believe in God. I’ve always believed there’s something out there, something bigger than just people.”
 
Johnny grew up with a small extended family. George Holland Jr., his mother’s brother, never married, and his father’s two sisters, Roberta Winter and Mary Castleman, lived out of state, as did his fraternal grandmother, also named Roberta Winter. His childhood influences came from his mother’s side of the family, particularly his great-grandfather George Holland Sr., who doted on him from the minute he was born.
“My grandfather was just wild about Johnny,” remembered Edwina. “He loved him dearly. He always carried him around and talked to him.”
“Ole Pa was in his nineties,” says Johnny. “He didn’t have a musical background but he tried to help me get into music. When my rabbit died, he bought me a ukulele to make me feel better. He bought me my first guitar, and started giving me money to learn particular songs. He really was a big force in me learning to play different kinds of music. I named my corporation after him—Ole Pa Enterprises. He was my businessman hero.”
His grandfather Edgar Holland, who he called “Bompa,” played bluegrass music on the violin. He played “Turkey in the Straw” and other bluegrass classics for Johnny and Edgar when they visited.
Although he never met John Dawson Winter Sr., his namesake and grandfather on his father’s side, he has fond memories of his fraternal grandmother. “Daddy’s mother was sweet, and real prim and proper,” Johnny says. “She was born in Berryville, Virginia. We went down there for vacation—it was a long way from Beaumont— a three-day drive. We saw her in the summer and I got to know her pretty well. She was a sweet old woman.”
John Jr.’s older sister, Roberta Winter, was a drama instructor at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, Georgia. The college named a theater after her, but Johnny wasn’t a fan.
“She was an old school marm—I think she was an old dyke really,” says Johnny. “She didn’t have any kids. I remember not likin’ her at all; she tried to control us and that really made me mad. She threw a glass of water on me when I was just a little kid. I told her God didn’t let her have kids because she didn’t have sense enough to have any—to treat them like that. Instead of pickin’ the glass up, I was slidin’ it across the table. She threw it at me and she didn’t have any business doin’ that. It was in my parents’ house, but they stayed out of it. That made me mad at them too. They should have said something to her.”
Johnny had another aunt and three cousins in Kingsport, Tennessee. He didn’t see them often, but when he spent time with them during a family vacation, his older cousin Tommy made a lasting impression.
“Daddy’s younger sister, Mary Castleman, was real sweet,” he says. “Aunt Mary had three children. I saw them for a month one summer when Aunt Roberta rented a beach house in Florida. There was one kid named Tommy who played the trombone. He was about twelve when he played it for us. I couldn’t believe it. I loved it.”
With the magic of Tommy’s trombone still vivid in his memory, Johnny was captivated by
Pete Kelly’s Blues,
a film he saw with his parents while vacationing in San Antonio. Released in 1955,
Pete Kelly’s Blues
was a musical action drama about jazz musicians who have violent run-ins with mobsters while playing a speakeasy during prohibition. Set in Kansas City in 1927, the film starred Jack Webb as a cornet player in a struggling jazz band, and featured musical performances by Ella Fitzgerald and Peggy Lee. That film proved to be a turning point in Johnny’s life.
“I remember that movie making me want to be a musician,” Johnny says. “It was real bluesy music with songs I could relate to, a lot of the songs I had grown up singing. I didn’t like Pete Kelly’s part so much; the shootin’ part of the movie didn’t appeal to me. It was the music that got me. I didn’t feel like I had a way to express myself, but after seein’ that movie, I knew I could do it through my music.”
Johnny’s belief in himself and in his ability to do whatever he wanted to do was stronger than any liability fate had sent his way. Fearless as a child (a trait he never lost), Johnny never let his limited eyesight deter him from using a bicycle to explore his neighborhood, ride to school, and visit his grandparents, who lived about a ten-minute car trip from his home.
Johnny always had red bikes, but his favorite was “a real fancy red bike with chrome fenders.” That bike could have cost him his life; instead it opened his eyes to an adult world of wives, girlfriends, and payoffs.
“My bike was in my friend’s front yard and a guy who was drunk ran over it,” he recalls. “The guy went up the front lawn, right over my bicycle, and up the front steps of the house. We went to the movies; if we’d been playin’ in the yard, we would have been run over. That’s why he paid me a good bit of money for wrecking my bike. The guy had a girlfriend in the car with him and it wasn’t his wife. So he was willing to pay anything because he didn’t want to get in trouble.”
Johnny grew up in a big house on 275 West Caldwood Drive with a spacious yard, a double swing on the porch, and swings in the backyard. He remembers climbing high up a mulberry tree to play in a tree house his father built. During their early years, he and Edgar shared a small bedroom, where they slept in yellow bunk beds.
“I picked it so I was on the top bunk,” says Johnny. “Edgar and I got along real fine. We’re different and we had that in common. As kids, we played mostly music and cowboys. I was the good guy. At the movies, we’d see cowboy and Indian movies. Roy Rogers was my favorite. We played cowboys, space people, and pirates. Anything we wanted to be, we’d dress up like it. We’d put on cowboy hats one day, pirate outfits another day, and spacemen outfits another day.”
Because of Johnny’s fascination with space travel, his grandfather built him a spaceship. Constructed of plywood and shaped like a pyramid, the spaceship had portholes in the sides and radio equipment Johnny and Edgar used as a control board.
Their father bought a small standalone store that had gone out of business and moved it into the backyard as a playhouse. When Johnny was about ten or twelve, he formed a club called the Texas Golden Eagles; the playhouse became their clubhouse. As leader and president of the club, he made up “weird initiations” for new members and banned girls from joining.
As the oldest and more dominant brother, Johnny ruled the roost. He picked the games they would play and made the rules. He always won at Monopoly and other board games; chess was the only game where Edgar could beat his older brother.
Due to the lack of pigmentation characteristic of being albino, Johnny was told to cover up and stay out of the sun. But he never heeded that advice.
“There were a lot of beaches in Beaumont,” he says. “Although I wasn’t supposed to, I played outside in the sun anyway and went to the beach all the time. I’d get real red, real burned. I didn’t blister though—just burned. We fished a little bit too. Me and Daddy fished off the pier in the Gulf of Mexico.”
Another pastime Johnny shared with his father was learning how to shoot a gun, a rite of passage in Texas. Johnny remembers his grandfather and great-grandfather always keeping a gun handy, both in the house and in the glove compartment of their cars.
“Learning how to shoot a gun was the normal thing to do—people carry guns there a lot,” says Johnny. “I was twelve when Daddy taught me how to shoot. I always had guns—shotguns and pistols too. We had a farm where we’d shoot beer cans in the water. We had a manmade lake and we’d throw them in and shoot at them.” It would be another seven years before Johnny realized how dangerous carrying a gun could be.
During the summers of 1955 and 1956, Johnny spent five weeks each summer at Camp Rio Vista in Texas Hill Country near the Guadalupe River.
“It was a long time to be away from home,” he says. “The first year I went by myself; I got homesick but ended up having a pretty good time. The second year Edgar went to the same camp with me, but was in a different age group. We played, went swimming, rode horses; they had all different games you could play.”
Johnny’s close friends, family, band members, and crew are well aware of his proclivity to go
au naturel,
but his tendency to sleep in the nude didn’t go over well with the counselors at Camp Rio Vista.
“I don’t usually wear a lot of clothes around the house,” he explains. “When I was in school, in my mother’s house in the winter, I’d do my homework without my clothes on. I’d keep the heater on in the bathroom to keep the room warm. When I was goin’ to summer camp, they made me run around the whole track naked because I did the Pledge of Allegiance without any clothes on. I was late wakin’ up and just ran out. They said their way of curing me was to make me run around the track. But that was fine with me. I’m more comfortable that way—) just don’t like to wear clothes.”
Johnny loved to swim. He had taken private lessons and lessons at the YMCA, so he enrolled in advanced swimming classes at summer camp.
“I started takin’ lessons when I was a kid; I was seven or eight years old. I’m a pretty good swimmer—I used to swim for hours.”
Summer camp gave Johnny the recognition and acceptance he craved. During his second year, he won two awards; one for musical talent and the other for popularity. The latter award touched his heart.
“I won one for singing two Homer and Jethro tunes. They were a country and western comedy team. I did ‘Two Tone Shoes,’ makin’ fun of ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Heartbreak Motel’ instead of ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ I also won the Golden Arrows Award for getting along with everybody else, and being one of the most liked people. It was great because I wasn’t liked in school at all.
“I was one of the most popular people at summer camp, but back in school I was a total reject. I couldn’t play football or baseball. There wasn’t anything I could do to be one of the gang. But in summer camp, I was one of the gang. I was liked a lot ’cause I could do things. They had archery, high jumps, broad jumps, the one-hundred-yard dash, boxing, canoeing, bowling—things I could do as well as anybody. I enjoyed summer camp a whole lot.”
Although Johnny’s limited eyesight affected his ability to play sports at school and made him feel like an outcast, he didn’t let that discourage him.
“I made up my mind at a real early age, that things were gonna be real hard for me and I was gonna have to fight for anything I wanted to get,” Johnny says. “Edgar was always more willing to sit back and observe what was goin’ on. I wanted to jump right in the middle and feel what was goin’ on.”
Johnny broadened his social outlets by joining the Cub Scouts and the Boys Scouts, where he earned badges, went on camping trips, and achieved the rank of second-class scout.
“I never did get to be Eagle Scout,” he says with a laugh. “You had to learn Morse code, and I just couldn’t learn Morse code to save my life. That was the one thing that kept me from getting to be a first-class scout. What I remember most about the camping trips is being cold. Freezing my butt off. It was cold in the middle of March in Texas. We had campfires at every campsite and they put me in charge of keeping all the fires goin’ for about two hours at a time. I could not keep all the fires going at once and I got whipped for that. I didn’t think I did too badly, but I got whipped anyway. They hit ya in the butt.”
When the South Texas State Fair came to Beaumont every October, Johnny and his friends breezed through the livestock and poultry exhibits and spent the day and their allowances on the carnival midway, eating candy apples and cotton candy, and going on all the rides. But even then, he was smart enough not to waste his money on carnival games that were rigged. His albinism had taught him the ways of the world at an early age, but it also gave him compassion for other people who didn’t quite fit into society.
“I used to go to the freak shows with my friends,” he says. “You’d go in a tent and they’d have gorilla man—a guy who had hair all over his body—tattooed men and women too, bearded lady, midgets. I felt sorry for them because I could relate to the people who were in there. I could do more where I wouldn’t end up in a sideshow, but I definitely felt sorry for the people who had to go through that.”

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