Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (9 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 initially achieved his dream of playing onstage with professional musicians at the Red Lion Club, where he went to hear Clarence Garlow. Johnny had grown up listening to Garlow’s
Bon Ton Roulet Show
at KJET in the late 1950s and 1960s. Garlow promoted his own records on the show, as well as his upcoming club dates. A Louisiana Creole, he’s been described as a pioneer zydeco artist, a rhythm and blues and jump blues artist heavily influenced by T-Bone Walker. Garlow enjoyed national recognition with sales of his single “Bon Ton Roula” and played clubs in Texas and Louisiana.
Enamored by the Creole bluesman, Johnny made a tape recording of one of Garlow’s records, then called the radio station and played it to Garlow over the phone. KJET was close to Johnny’s grandparents’ house, so he often visited Garlow at the station and forged a friendship that inspired the budding musician. Johnny showed up at many of his gigs, and Garlow would call him up out of the audience and hand him his guitar.
“He’d bring me up and let me play,” says Johnny. “I was fifteen or sixteen and had a fake ID I got from some kid. It was a selective service card with somebody else’s name. They asked to see it once in a while; a lot of times they didn’t care. I was about 5’10”, my hair was white, and I looked older. Clarence liked it that some white kid was loving his music. He got off on it. We wouldn’t play together; I’d usually have to use his guitar. He had drums, bass, guitar, piano, and two saxes. He had a special introduction: ‘This is the boy that loves me.’ He wanted to make sure everybody knew I was in love with his style.
“Clarence told me about using small-gauge strings and playing with unwound thirds, when the third string of the guitar doesn’t have any winding on it. I found out it was easier to bend the string with an unwound third. It’s just easier to play.”
Prior to that, Johnny was using heavy-gauge strings that wouldn’t stretch and made it impossible for him to bend notes. Just listening to records, he had no idea how to replicate the sound he was hearing. Garlow took the time to mentor the young guitarist and show him how to create the sound he was searching for. It left an indelible impression.
Deeming Garlow “the main Texas guitar player that influenced me,” Johnny later paid his respects by covering Garlow’s “Bon Ton Roulet” on
Raisin’ Cain,
his 1980 Blue Sky LP, and “Route 90” and “Sound the Bell” on his 1985 Alligator Records release
Serious Business
. Johnny dedicated
Guitar Slinger
, his 1984 LP on Alligator Records, to Garlow.
Feeling Garlow never received the recognition he deserved, Johnny interviewed him in the 1980s for an article for
Living Blues
. The article was never published, an omission that still bothers him.
“I interviewed Clarence for a magazine but it never came out,” says Johnny. “Nobody cared about it, I guess. Nobody asked me to do it—I did the interview on my own. I just had it recorded on tape. They said it was too much trouble to put it on paper.”
B. B. King is another artist who influenced and encouraged Johnny as a teenager.
Jim Crow laws were very much in effect in Texas when Johnny met King in 1960, with Jefferson County segregated into black and white neighborhoods. But Johnny’s love of the blues overcame the culture of racism and drew him to clubs on both sides of town.
“When I was sixteen, there were two or three white clubs the band could play,” says Johnny. “The Black Cat Club and the Pleasure Pier Ballroom in Port Arthur, and the Red Lion Club in Beaumont. They were beer joints where they had fist fights and a few knives. They served Lone Star beer in longneck bottles. Later on, they passed laws where they could drink booze, but in those days, there wasn’t anything but beer.
“At the white clubs, the jukeboxes had a lot of country and western. Growin’ up in Texas, you had to play country and western music to get a job. I played whatever was popular on the radio at the time. I learned a few hillbilly songs—‘Fraulein’ was the big one that we played in white clubs.
“The Raven Club in Beaumont was a black club. Texas was definitely racist when I was growing up. Black clubs and white clubs were in separate parts of town and most people stayed in their own part of town. At the black clubs, the jukeboxes had Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker—the same music I was buying in the record stores.”
Determined to hear the music he loved, Johnny, Edgar, and his friends started frequenting the Raven Club, where they saw shows by Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Junior Parker, Al “TNT” Braggs, and B. B. King. Decked out in jackets, ties, and dress pants, the teenagers appeared older than their years and demonstrated respect for the artists by emulating the attire of blues bands of that era.
“I was about fifteen or sixteen when I first went to the Raven Club,” Johnny says. “I went with the guys in the band; we were the only white people there. We were a little bit scared, but we pretended not to be. I was sixteen the night I sat in with B. B.—that was a great night. I was there with Edgar, David Holiday, and probably Willard Chamberlain. It was a completely black audience. I wanted him to hear me—to let him know somebody else could play that music too. But he didn’t want to let me sit in.”
King had a strict policy of not allowing anyone to sit in unless he knew the musician and his level of expertise. But he was impressed that four white teenagers had ventured into the black part of town and had the chutzpah to ask. King thought about the dynamics of a white musician asking to sit in with a black band in a black club, and didn’t want his refusal to be construed as racist. He decided to let Johnny sit in, but for only one song.
“He didn’t know if I was any good or not, and didn’t want to take a chance,” says Johnny. “First he asked to see my union card. I showed it to him, and it surprised him that I had a union card. I said, ‘Please, let me sit in, Mr. King; I know your songs,’ and he finally let me play. I played his guitar Lucille. I played ‘Goin’ Down Slow’ just played the one song. He says he let me sit in for a few more songs, but he didn’t. He just let me sit in for the one song and took his guitar back.
“It was fun. He had three horns, drums, bass, guitar, and organ; it was the first time I played with such a big band. I got a standing ovation, and that surprised him. He said, ‘I’ll be seeing you down the line; you were great.’ That made me feel great. It meant so much to me to have a great bluesman, somebody who I always idolized, encourage me. I always knew I wanted to be famous and that was great—it made me feel like I can do this and have people like me.
“Later on, I heard B. B. was afraid we were from the IRS—that we were comin’ down to the club for his taxes. We all had on black trench coats—it was cold and nasty out—and most white people didn’t go to black clubs unless they had a reason to be there. I didn’t know he felt that way until later on when I heard him talking about it on an interview.
“We were treated real well at the Raven Club, but that changed when young black people started getting down on the blues. They felt like blues was the sound of the suffering of the black people, the music of the depressed era. People who liked it kept buying the records anyway, but they listened to it in the basement instead of in the living room. The younger black kids didn’t really like us coming to the black clubs. They’d say, ‘Hey, whitey,’ and things like that. I didn’t stop going but they made it uncomfortable.”
Johnny and Edgar also frequented the Tahiti Club, a black jazz club in Beaumont. Johnny wasn’t a jazz aficionado like Edgar, but was impressed with the musicianship of black players. “There was one jazz band that played in the Tahiti a lot,” says Johnny. “I’d go up all the time with Edgar and sit in. Not that jazz meant much to me, but I wanted to play with black musicians.”
“The Tahiti was the only place I could go and hear real jazz,” said Edgar. “It wasn’t supper-club jazz; it was fully extended jazz, really nice all out playing. I played the Tahiti maybe one night or a couple of nights. Johnny sat in too; everybody loved blues, even jazz lovers.”
Although Edgar loved jazz, Johnny preferred the primitive sounds of the blues and didn’t want the more sophisticated arrangements of jazz to affect his style. But when he wanted to learn how to play songs by Bobby “Blue” Bland, he let Edgar show him a few jazz chords.
“There were certain songs that had more chords in them than the normal songs—not just major and minor chords, but diminished and augmented chords,” said Edgar. “I showed him those chords and he learned them, just to be able to play those songs. As I got more and more interested in jazz, I tried to show him jazz chords. One time when I tried to show him a chord, he said, ‘I don’t want to learn that chord. If I learn it, I might start playing it.’ He could have played any of that stuff. I have heard him sit in with jazz bands and play solos and really complex chords just playing by ear. It’s so perfectly like Johnny in wanting to keep his style pure. If he learned that chord, he might start to use it and it might affect his changes and feel of his playing.”
A longtime admirer of Bland’s music and his musicians, Johnny not only added Bland’s songs to the band’s repertoire, he traveled to see him and other blues artists that had made a strong impression on him.
“I saw Bobby Bland at a club in Levelland, Texas,” he said. “I also went to the Pleasure Pier Ballroom in Port Arthur, which was right on the water, out on the pier on the Gulf of Mexico. I saw Lonnie Brooks, Lightnin’ Slim, and Lazy Lester there. I liked Lonnie Brooks the best. Port Arthur was about twenty miles away, so Willard, our saxophone player, usually drove. I drove once in a while, but I wasn’t supposed to because I couldn’t see well enough to drive.”
Drugan still has vivid memories of the day Chamberlain let Johnny drive. “He was driving down the street on the wrong side,” said Drugan with a laugh. “He had to drive on the wrong side of the road so he could see the curb. Johnny says, ‘Why can’t I do this? There’s no cars in the way. That’s the only way I can drive ’cause I can see the curb over here.’” It was a little too much for Johnny’s friends to handle, and it didn’t take long for Chamberlain to take the steering wheel and relegate Johnny to the passenger’s seat.
Johnny enjoyed playing gigs for live audiences, but knew he had to cut records to achieve success as a musician. Despite “School Day Blues” reaching number eight on the Beaumont charts, Hall was reluctant to record another single.
“I heard Bill didn’t think I was gonna be any good because I was an albino,” says Johnny. “That it was gonna stop my career from being really successful. I don’t know if that’s true but I heard that from one of his other artists. It really pissed me off. If you asked him, he would have denied it. Even if he said, ‘Yes, because he’s an albino,’ I don’t think anybody would do anything about it. That was a normal thing. I could understand it, but there wasn’t anything I could do about it. All I could do was get mad.”
Although Hall didn’t want to record Johnny as an artist, he was savvy enough to use the young guitarist to back up other artists he produced. “I still played as a sideman for him on other people’s records,” says Johnny. “Rod Bernard and a lot of people—there were so many different ones, I don’t remember who they were. We made $3.75 an hour. I knew it was because they didn’t have to look at me. But I didn’t say anything because he was the only act around.”
Johnny still yearned for the spotlight and it didn’t take long to find a producer with a record label willing to record him as a headlining artist. In 1960, he met Ken Ritter, nephew of Tex Ritter, the country and western singer and star of cowboy movies in the 1930s and 1940s. Ken Ritter owned the KRCO Record label and was eager to produce and record him. He became Johnny’s manager (although Johnny insists he never signed a contract) and took him into Hall’s studio to record a number of singles.
“I did several records for Ken Ritter,” says Johnny. “The first three records or so I paid for and after that he started paying for ’em. ‘Creepy’ was on KRCO. It was a pretty good blues instrumental I wrote. I also wrote a ballad, ‘Oh My Darling,’ for the flip side. He charged me about $150 to press a couple hundred records. We used money from the gigs. It cost him the same amount that he charged me; he didn’t make any money off it. We’d usually sell 200 to 300 copies a record. I didn’t make any money on records back then and I never did make any money on records with Ken.”
“Creepy”/“Oh My Darling” was released in 1960. Johnny also wrote two songs for his second single for KRCO Records, “Hey, Hey, Hey”/“One Night of Love,” released later that year. Edgar played keyboards on “Hey, Hey, Hey,” and most of Johnny’s early singles.
In 1961, Johnny cut “Shed So Many Tears”/“That’s What Love Does” for the Frolic label. It was recorded at the J. D. Miller Recording Studio in Crowley, Louisiana. Miller was a songwriter and producer with a studio known for Cajun and swamp pop releases, and records for the Excello label by Lightnin’ Slim, Lazy Lester, Lonesome Sundown, and Slim Harpo, Lightnin’ Slim’s harp player.
“That was a better studio than the Bill Hall one,” says Johnny. “We had Lazy Lester playing harp on ‘That’s What Love Does’—we had to bail him out of jail. He was in jail for drinkin’, I think. J. D. Miller knew where he was, so we bailed him out, took him to the studio, and he played just fine.”
In 1962, Johnny returned to the studio to record his next single on Frolic Records, “Voodoo Twist”/“Ease My Pain.” “‘Voodoo Twist’ was a twist song with a lot of horns,” says Johnny. “‘Ease My Pain’ was a blues song I wrote and dubbed harmonica on. It was more bluesy than any other song I recorded back then. Slim Harpo had a hit with ‘Rainin’ in My Heart’ so Ken wanted harp on one song. I also played a Marine Band harmonica on a song with Ronnie Bennett called ‘Travelin’ Mood’ on Floyd Soileau’s Jin label.”

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