Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (47 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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Nearly twenty years later, Johnny still harbors resentment about Manning. “Terry Manning was the worst—I never had a producer as bad as him,” says Johnny. “He knew exactly what I wanted but he didn’t want to do it. He was so bad; I almost got into a fistfight with him.”
Manning initially denied any problems in the studio, but when pressed about Johnny’s reference to a fistfight, he sighed and reluctantly shared his memories. “The fight was actually about pizza,” said Manning. “Johnny says he was so hungry he had to stop. I said, ‘No problem, what would you like?’ He said, ‘Pizza.’ We ordered pizza delivery, and I told him the pizza would be here in thirty minutes or it would be free. He said, ‘Great.’ About two minutes later, he stopped the next take of the song and said, ‘I’m hungry; I’ve got to eat.’ I told him, ‘I just said, we ordered pizza.’ He said, ‘No, you didn’t say anything about pizza.’ We calmed him down and told him pizza was on the way. We started doing another practice of the song, and he stopped again and said, ‘I’m hungry. We’re going to have to get some food. I can’t play another note.’
“We all tried to say, ‘No problem, the pizza is on its way, it’ll be here in a minute.’ He just went into a rage about being hungry and started grabbing instruments and throwing them around, and jumping at people and screaming horrible obscenities. Almost tore the studio up and made a big mess of the session. At that point, I came up to him and put my hand on his shoulder, and said. ‘The pizza is on the way. Take it easy, we will eat in a minute. Whatever it is, we’ll get through this.’ Then he started pushing and swinging. I don’t want to go too far with this....
“I firmly grabbed him under the collar, by the shirt, and held him up against the wall and said, ‘I don’t want any problems here. The pizza is on the way.’ He was shaking like a wild man and would not calm down. Everybody was trying to calm him down, and it wasn’t possible. So I said, ‘Session’s over. I’m done with this project. I can’t do this. This is not professional.’ I left and sent him back to the hotel.”
Manning waited it out at Ardent Studio, while Johnny tried to get out of the contract. The realization that Slatus had signed him to a record deal that wasn’t blues-oriented eroded Johnny’s trust in his manager.
“I wasn’t sure Teddy still wanted what I wanted, which was to be a blues artist,” says Johnny. “The record people convinced him he had to talk me into being more radio, become more of a Top Forty musician. I was willing to try it and he was sorry for that. I went up there in the middle of the night screamin’, saying I can’t stand this anymore. I ain’t gonna put up with this shit anymore. Teddy tried to get me out of it, but we made a deal so we had to perform.”
Three days later, Johnny called and apologized, ready to finish the album. “It may not have been the album Johnny wanted, but it was certainly the album his management wanted,” said Manning. “Ted brought in a list of pop songs and said, ‘We want the blues flavor in it, but we want pop songs.’ I had just done a total makeover of ZZ Top. The album before had sold 700,000 or 800,000 copies. After the full makeover, going harmonies, pop hooks, no real drums at all,
Eliminator
sold 15 million copies. I’m sure that was highly seductive to a manager who had an artist with a blues background. But all elements have to click and Johnny wasn’t prepared to quote—fully sell out. Not that he would or should, but I’m sure in his mind, it would be selling out to go to those lengths.”
 
After playing with Johnny for eleven years, Jon Paris left the band in 1989. According to Paris, it was to “concentrate on working with my own blues-rock group ... singing, songwriting, and playing guitar and harmonica.” Johnny remembers it differently. “We were having trouble that he played too loud,” he says. “We figured it would be best if we’d part company or things would have gotten worse. He’s still a good friend. I see him when I go into the city and he always comes out when I play.”
Jeff Ganz replaced Paris, playing his first gig in May 1989 after three weeks of rehearsals. Both Johnny and Slatus were familiar with Ganz’s chops, so he didn’t have to audition. Slatus had managed Roy Buchanan up to his death in August 1988, and Ganz had played in Buchanan’s band. A studio musician with a Broadway and jazz background, Ganz played fretless and fretted basses, including a six-string electric and an upright. He also sang a number of tunes on the road, including “Turn on Your Love Light,” “Can’t Judge a Book by Its Cover,” “Politician,” and “Born Under a Bad Sign.”
Throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s, Johnny played clubs in the U.S. and Canada, with occasional dates in Spain, Denmark, Germany, and London. He would tour for three weeks, take off for two or three weeks, and go back on the road for another three weeks. The band rehearsed when they weren’t touring.
“We traveled in a rock ‘n’ roll bus, but there wasn’t any ridiculous legendary stuff going on,” said Ganz. “We were just out there playing. Working with Tom Compton was great. Tom and Johnny were really locked in because they had already forged the dynamic of what they were doing in 1985. It took me a few minutes to figure out how I was supposed to play. I said to Johnny, ‘This section here feels like it’s rushing a little bit.’ He turned to me and said, ‘Well, I rush. If you’d be happier somewhere else...’ and I realized all bets are off. Just shut up and play; that’s why you’re here.”
Ganz’s collection of fretted and fretless basses was the perfect fit for Johnny’s system of tuning down a whole step from normal guitar tuning. “Instead of tuning to E, he would tune down to D,” Ganz said. “I had several Fender and Ibanez basses set up to that tuning. Johnny was intrigued with the eight-string bass, and loved the upright because it was closer to the roots thing.”
Johnny still got hassled by fans, so he didn’t go to clubs very often. But on July 13, 1990, he and Ganz stopped by Tramps to see Danny Gatton, a guitarist Johnny admired. Johnny met Gatton that night when he handed him his Telecaster and invited him to take the stage. “Johnny got up onstage and the audience went berserk,” Ganz said. “Danny is a master musician, but not an entertainer. Johnny was not as technically proficient, but he was the whole entertainment package.”
Johnny played B. B. King’s “You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now” to the delight of the audience. When Gatton returned to the stage, he said, “Now, ladies and gentlemen,
that’s
the blues.” The respect was mutual. “Danny Gatton was great,” says Johnny. “He played every style of music, a little bit of everything. He could play blues too. He played it pretty fancy, but he played everything.”
 
Johnny ran into Stevie Ray Vaughan on the road, and one night they got together to compare their versions of “Boot Hill.” Vaughan recorded “Boot Hill” several times but never included it on his albums; he recorded it again in 1989 during the sessions for
In Step,
but again, it didn’t appear on that recording. Although unreleased until the posthumous
The Sky Is Crying
in 1991, Vaughan told Johnny about the recordings. Eager to compare it to his
Guitar Slinger
version, Johnny invited him to his hotel room.
“I wanted to show him mine was better,” says Johnny with a laugh. “He played me his version and I thought it was not as good as mine. When I played him the final version from my record, he said, ‘That’s real nice, man,’ but he didn’t admit it was better.”
“Stevie and Johnny met up several times,” remembered Shannon. “Johnny listened to the killer version we did on
In Step
, and they were both kind of battlin’ there.”
Their rivalry tended to be playful, so Johnny was crushed when he heard Vaughan deny knowing him. Artist Jim Franklin, who was in New York to paint Johnny’s portrait, remembers his reaction vividly. “I think this was the same year Stevie Ray died,” said Franklin. “Johnny was listening to him on a blues show in New York City, and the guy asked Stevie Ray about the influence Johnny had on him. Stevie Ray said he didn’t know who Johnny Winter was. That tore Johnny up; he was hurt. I could see Johnny was shaken by that when he was telling me about it. Tommy was in Stevie’s band, he’s got a trio playing power blues just like Johnny, and Johnny was well established when Stevie started coming to Austin. Johnny couldn’t understand why he would not own up to knowing him. This was a real blow.”
In late June 1990, Johnny suffered another emotional blow. Ikey Sweat was found dead in his own garage in Fort Bend, Texas with a gunshot wound through his left temple. Sweat, who was forty-five, had been Johnny’s bass player from his early years in Texas, and one of the true friendships—like that of Turner, Shannon, and Franklin—that helped Johnny stay grounded.
The initial ruling of suicide didn’t fit the evidence. Sweat was right-handed and police found his .25-caliber automatic, keys, and sunglasses by his left hand. An autopsy showed no evidence of gun-powder residue on either hand. Although Sweat had always talked about committing suicide, his wife Sharon Sweat was indicted and arrested on a murder charge.
“I took his death real hard,” says Johnny. “I loved Ikey. He was one of my best friends. He was there from the beginning. I went down to see him in Texas pretty regularly. He used to threaten to kill himself all the time so nobody believed him too much. He said, ‘I think I’m gonna have to kill myself—I can’t stand this any longer.’ He had a nonspecific urethra infection—now it’s called Chlamydia. But in those days they called it NSU because they didn’t know what it was. He got where he couldn’t get hard anymore unless he did cocaine. With cocaine, he could get a hard-on. He left a note that blamed his doctor for not knowing what the hell he had—for not being able to get rid of it.”
Johnny went to Texas for Sweat’s funeral services, but did what he called a “deposition” over the phone from his attorney’s office in New York City. “My lawyer listened to the conversation to make sure I wasn’t incriminating myself in any way,” says Johnny. “They asked me if he had ever talked about killing himself, and I said, ‘Yeah, all the time.’ I heard him talk about killing himself a lot, so I just don’t know.”
In March 1992, prosecutors dismissed the murder charges for lack of evidence. “The investigators ended up letting her go—which I hated—because everybody down there thought his wife had killed him,” says Johnny.
The circumstances surrounding Sweat’s death were custom made for tabloid television. Sweat had filed for divorce shortly before he died and had a long-term affair with a younger woman. According to his wife, his oldest bass guitar, which he wanted Johnny to have, disappeared from a shed outside his home around the time of his funeral. Sweat’s son contested a 1989 will leaving everything to his stepmother, calling it a forgery. The courts issued a temporary restraining order and froze the estate. Six months later, a fire nearly destroyed Sweat’s home.
“It was on
Entertainment Tonight
or
Access Hollywood,”
says Johnny. “You know how those shows are—anything they can get that’s crazy and fucked up, they’ll jump on it. He’d tried pills and they didn’t work, so he used something he knew would work. A gun is messy but it works.”
Despite his loss, Johnny buried his feelings and carried on. “Johnny wasn’t a screamer and a crier but it was obvious it affected him very deeply,” said Ganz. “As close and as friendly as we were, he could still be a fairly stoic guy.”
Meanwhile, Slatus had begun negotiations with Pointblank, a blues-oriented subsidiary label of the then-London-based Virgin Records Ltd. Started by John Wooler in 1989, Pointblank was working on a deal with John Lee Hooker. After the fiasco at MCA, Johnny was reluctant to sign with another label, but Wooler, who had always been a fan, convinced him he would have total control.

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