Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (45 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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Johnny’s video is filmed in color in a Western bar; it changes to sepia tones when the scene flashes back to the Old West. Barechested with his multicolor “Screamin’ Demon” tattoo and his trademark cowboy hat, Johnny sends cowboys flying into the wall with killer guitar riffs and brands barmaids with a touch of his hand.
Iglauer solicited friends and actors from ImprovOlympic for his cast. “One of the bar girls was Nora Dunn, who was later on
Saturday Night Live
[a regular cast member from 1985 to 1990] and plays a reporter in the
Three Kings
movie,” said Iglauer. “The famous acting coach Del Close played the drunk, and the bartender was one of the ImprovOlympic guys.”
“The video for MTV was something else,” says Johnny. “I didn’t know what I was doin‘—I didn’t have any confidence at all. I didn’t know about making videos, so I went along with what Bruce had to say. You usually don’t make videos for blues, so I was glad to be doing one. They shot it in Deadwood Dave’s, a biker bar outside of Chicago. Bruce came up with the script. The video was a little corny but it wasn’t bad. They had us walkin’ around doin’ dumb things. Spinning around onstage, ripping off my shirt.”
By the end of the video and the recording of
Guitar Slinger,
Johnny and Iglauer had resolved their differences. But Johnny’s reluctance to promote the record, teamed with Slatus’s unwillingness to take a stand with his client, hurt their rapport. Slatus had been a gofer for Johnny when he worked for Steve Paul, and still played a subservient role.
“It was frustrating working with Johnny and Teddy on the promotion of the record, because Johnny would make commitments to do interviews—either live or on the phone—and break them,” said Iglauer. “Teddy, rather than confronting Johnny and saying, ‘You can’t do this to the media, it’s insulting,’ would just make excuses. So we got tired of asking. There was so much more we could have done to advance Johnny’s career if Teddy had been willing to act as an authoritative manager. But Teddy absolutely would not confront Johnny about anything. He would apologize for Johnny over and over again. Teddy was Mr. Apology.
“We had a big interview for Johnny in the Japanese
Guitar Player
; the guy was calling from Japan to do a phoner with Johnny. Johnny was home and the guy in Japan had screwed up on the time change and called at the end of the two-hour block of time. Teddy told me Johnny sat and listened to the guy on his answering machine but didn’t pick up the phone because he wasn’t calling at the right time. He never did the interview. Johnny is a kid; he has never grown up. In some ways, he’s very spoiled.”
Unlike major record labels, Alligator has a limited number of releases, and works their records to radio and the press for a considerable time. Even when the records are no longer getting airplay, Alligator promotes its artist’s gigs to generate coverage on radio and in the print media. “We commit to working with an artist’s career, not just the record,” said Iglauer. “Johnny was an absolute priority for us. He was our bestselling artist at the time and I was proud of the records. But Johnny was problematic. At a gig in Chicago, he wouldn’t do any interviews before the show because he was getting ready for the show. After the show, he wouldn’t do any interviews until after eight. We wanted him to greet some store people, and by the time he was ready to greet, everybody had left. That was real typical. People would want to meet him, even if it was only a minute, and he was resistant to that. So we had a real hard time getting media things going.”
Despite Johnny’s reluctance to do interviews,
Guitar Slinger
earned a Grammy nomination and made the
Billboard
and
Cashbox
charts. It reached #183 in
Billboard
in August 1984 and was on the charts for four weeks. “It sold about 100,000 copies,” says Johnny. “It did better than
Raisin’ Cain.”
 
In June 1984, Johnny played with Waters’s Legendary Blues Band at the first Chicago Blues Festival, which was established to honor the memory of Muddy Waters. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. Although Iglauer sent the band a tape of
Guitar Slinger
specifying the songs Johnny would play, they never bothered to learn them.
“I remember the band not being very good because they didn’t know my songs at all,” Johnny says. “They thought they were too good to have to learn anything; figured it was all blues and they could do it. I didn’t want to use them. I wanted to use my own band, but they wanted me to use the Legendary Blues Band.”
Understandably miffed, Johnny initially refused to go onstage. “Johnny was very angry and basically barricaded himself in the dressing room,” said Iglauer. “The Legendary Blues Band did its own set; maybe thirty minutes before Johnny came out. The stage manager comes out to get Johnny, and Teddy is standing by the door. ‘Johnny’s not coming out.’ Maybe Teddy groveled, or I groveled, or we all groveled, and he eventually came out. Johnny was rightfully pissed because when he tried to do ‘Mad Dog’—with totally regular changes—they screwed it up. It was very disrespectful.”
Once Johnny got onstage, drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith played off of the beat and ignored Johnny’s tendency to push the front of the beat and his signals to pick up the tempo. “Johnny kept looking around at us, giving us the body language to urge Willie, to push him,” said Jerry Portnoy with a laugh. “I looked around and saw Willie—he knew what was going on—he had his head up, his eyes forward, and he wouldn’t look at Johnny. Willie Smith is probably
the
most obstinate man on the face of the Earth. Once he makes up his mind, there’s just no moving him.”
Disgusted with the way he was treated, Johnny left immediately after his set. “I was too pissed off to ask them why they didn’t listen to the record,” he says. “I didn’t want to scream at ’em, so I got out of there.”
In 1985, Johnny went into the studio to record
Serious Business
with Gayden, Jones, Saydak, and Paris on harmonica. “Murdering Blues” and “Unseen Eye” had been recorded during the
Guitar Slinger
sessions; Paris’s harmonica parts were dubbed onto the existing tracks.
Johnny had written five songs for
Serious Business,
but only “Good Time Woman” and “Serious as a Heart Attack” made it onto the album. “I wrote those two in my hotel room in Chicago,” says Johnny. “It didn’t take too long to write those songs. Sometimes if you’re in the right frame of mind, they just come out. I wrote the music in my room and wrote the words after the band recorded the song. It was easier to write that way.
“Bruce didn’t like any of my songs. He didn’t want to use ‘Serious as a Heart Attack’ because of the line, ‘I’m gonna make your blue eyes black.’ He didn’t like it because it was an anti-woman, anti-female song. I worried a little that it might be perceived as violent, but I wrote a lot of violent songs,” he says with a laugh. “On that song, I was goofin’ on the ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ song.”
Iglauer understood the humor, but felt the song also had a darker side. With “Murdering Blues” already slated for that LP, he was concerned about adding another song about violence toward women.
“Bruce didn’t mind saying what he felt,” says Johnny. “I didn’t like it but I felt I had to give him some leeway because he owned the label.”
“It was on
Serious Business
that we really fell out,” said Iglauer. “He discovered I’m hardheaded and strongly opinionated. I like things my way and he does too. I’m not a flexible guy, and in those days, I used to have a really bad temper, and was much worse. Part of it was I used to drink a lot of coffee, and late at night I drank alcohol. I never drank in the studio because it would affect my judgment, but I drank afterward. So I was always going up or going down.”
“I didn’t have as much creative control at Alligator as I wanted to have,” explains Johnny. “Bruce was very critical—that was his style. He didn’t seem to like anything I did. It’s always been hard for me to take orders from other people. He knew I had been a producer of all my records before that but he thought he knew more than I did.”
Johnny also dubbed it as a personality conflict escalated by what he perceived as Iglauer’s constant criticism. “I’m fairly easygoing but I sure wasn’t with him. Bruce’s criticism made it harder to play. I would talk to Dick and say, ‘Bruce probably wouldn’t like this.’ I would get down on him before I even knew whether he would like it or not. I expected him not to like stuff. That can happen when somebody’s always putting you down.”
“I’m very controlling, and it was hard for him to share control,” said Iglauer. “Johnny was used to being in charge of his own records. Most of the artists on my label had not worked with real producers, or were fine because they knew me better, or just thought, ‘It’s his record company; he’s the producer.” Most would have said, ‘This is a break for me; I’m stepping up in the world.’ Johnny was slumming; he was coming down in the world. Although we sold more records than his last few Columbia records, I didn’t have the kind of experience he did.”
As bad feelings intensified, it didn’t take much to start a conflict. “We had gotten to the point where we were looking for excuses to argue,” said Iglauer.
While dubbing the vocals for “Route 90,” they argued about the way Johnny pronounced El Paso (he put the enunciation on the third syllable rather than the second). During most of the disagreements, Shurman took Johnny’s side.
“I loved working with Dick because he knew how I wanted things to sound and always agreed with me,” says Johnny. “I think Dick understood my music more than Bruce. Dick said, ‘Johnny’s from Texas, he says it the way somebody from Texas would say El Paso, so why ya bitchin’ about the way he’s saying it?’ Bruce finally gave up but he didn’t like the way I was saying El Paso.”
Iglauer became the scapegoat no matter how hard he tried to put Johnny at ease, even when he wasn’t the guilty party. “We’re doing a tune, and the vodka is just starting to kick in, and Johnny says, ‘Bruce, which way do you want me to do this one?’” recalled Shurman. “Bruce says, ‘I just want you to feel comfortable with it.’ Johnny goes into a big rant about comfortable: ‘Look who we got here. Bruce Freud, comfortable.’ We actually had to stop for a while because Johnny was so pissed off.”
During preproduction, Shurman made a tape of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s version of “Broke and Lonely,” rather than the one Johnny recorded in 1963 as Texas Guitar Slim. That sent Johnny into a rage against Iglauer. “But it was me who had done it, not Bruce, and it wasn’t an insult,” said Shurman. “But Johnny would stew about stuff all the time because he thought Bruce was too critical and it made him doubt himself. Johnny thought Bruce didn’t like anything he did and Bruce didn’t intend to convey that. Their musical values were very close, but they just didn’t connect.”
Despite the tension, it took only five days to record
Serious Business,
and ten days to mix it. The final nail in the coffin came during the mixing stage, when Johnny and Iglauer battled over bass and snare drum sounds. “Bruce wanted a lower drum sound and I wanted a higher one,” says Johnny. “We didn’t agree on how we wanted the instruments to sound. We ended up giving in just enough where neither one of us was happy with any of it. It sounded harsh—real trebly—it didn’t have enough bass to it. I didn’t like the way it sounded and was determined not to work with Bruce anymore,”
“Johnny and I were hearing the record differently,” said Iglauer. “My perception was he won those arguments; the record didn’t come out sounding like I wanted it to sound. I always thought
Serious Business
sounded thin. It was a very odd little rollercoaster. Some of it was my fault; some of it was his fault.”
The battle continued over the photograph for the album, when Johnny, who had photo approval, wouldn’t let Iglauer use the photo he wanted. “The cover shot I wanted is an inside shot in the
Deluxe Edition
package,” said Iglauer. “Johnny hatless with his knee cocked, very cool shot. We designed the album cover around it and he said, ‘Why would you pick a picture without my hat?’ And I thought, if you wanted a picture with your hat, why did you sit for fifty pictures without your hat? We would have sold more of
Serious Business
with a better cover.”
Despite the battles, Johnny still wanted to record on Alligator and Iglauer picked up his option for a third album. But Johnny refused to let Iglauer coproduce.
“I wanted to stay with Alligator because they kept their records out there,” says Johnny. “But Bruce wanted to control everything, so I told him I didn’t want to use him anymore. It shook him up a little bit, but he said ok.”

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