He took the audience on a musical journey to the Mississippi Delta and his Texas roots with “Black Cat Bone.” Without missing a beat, he jumped back into rock with an elongated version of “Rock & Roll,” an original that fused a driving rock tempo with blistering Texas slide guitar. His hands slithered around the frets during the blazing solo on his version of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which appeared on Johnny Winter And Live, his first gold album. The Stones shared a mutual respect with Johnny, and had played one of his songs, “I’m Yours and I’m Hers,” for an audience of 250,000 at their Hyde Park concert in London on July 5, 1969. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, who leased rehearsal space next to his at S.I.R. (Studio Instrumental Rentals) in New York, had sent him two more songs for his latest album.
Columbia had released Still Alive and Well, his fifth album on that label, in March. The title track was his battle cry; the lyrics reflected the direction his life had taken in the past few years:“Did you ever take a look and see who’s left around?
Everyone I thought was cool is six feet underground.
They tried to get me lots of times and now they’re comin’ after you.
I got out and I’m here to say, ‘Baby, you can get out too.’
I’m still alive and well,
I’m still alive and well,
Every now and then I know it’s kinda hard to tell,
But I’m still alive and well.”
The aura of death and destruction from drugs, alcohol, and the rock lifestyle wasn’t about to leave him alone—within years, Hobbs would die of a cocaine overdose and Hughes would hook a hose to his car’s exhaust pipe and commit suicide. But tonight Johnny was ecstatic and drug-free, playing the music he loved to thousands of adoring fans who hadn’t deserted him.
After two heady encores, coaxed by the deafening sound of thousands of fans clapping their hands and stomping their feet, the lanky albino headed for the sleek stretch limo waiting outside. His manager Steve Paul and the Garden’s bouncers pushed a path through the crowd hovering by the exit and surrounding the limousine. Still reeling from the adulation of a standing ovation, Johnny settled in the white leather seat with Susan, a glass of Jack Daniels in his hand, and a Kool dangling from his lips. The crush of the mob began rocking the limo, signaling to the chauffeur it was time to depart. He gunned the engine as a warning and drove off into the night.
It had been an incredible performance and Johnny was back in the game. He had come a long way from Beaumont, Texas, and the journey had only begun.
PART I
1
ALBINO IN A REDNECK TOWN
“Beaumont is a workingman’s town where everything smells bad—it’s right in the middle of all these chemical plants, a great place to grow up. The population is about 100,000 to 125,000 people. Most of them work in the refinery. You can tell which way the wind blows by which kind of smell you’re getting. That direction over there’s a paper plant, over there’s a sulfur plant, and there’s the oil refinery. It’s glorious.”
—JOHNNY WINTER
Beaumont was built on a fifty-acre tract of land on the Neches River bluff in southeast Texas in 1835. The earliest industries were lumber, rice, and ranching. On January 10, 1901, a gusher on Spindletop Hill turned it into the world’s first oil boomtown. The Lucas Gusher was quickly joined by five more, and Spindletop’s production of oil outstripped the total yield of the rest of the world.
When Johnny was born in 1944, Jim Crow laws were still in effect across the South; Beaumont’s schools, buses, restaurants, restrooms, and water fountains were segregated. Blacks had their own stores, nightclubs, schools, neighborhoods, and social lives in another side of town. In fact, blacks were turned away from the 1944 Georgia Democratic primary polling booths and not allowed to vote. Drafted into the service during World War II, they were considered unfit for combat and segregated into all-black units.
By the time Johnny graduated from high school, the “Golden Triangle” region of Beaumont, Port Arthur, and Orange was the petrochemical complex of southeastern Texas. Beaumont’s economy was dominated by the chemical, petroleum, shipbuilding, and oil-drilling industries. But Johnny knew long before high school that his destiny would take him far beyond the refineries of Beaumont, Texas.
Johnny’s parents, Edwina Holland Winter, a native of Orange, Texas, and John Dawson Winter Jr., a Leland, Mississippi native, met on a blind date arranged by a mutual friend.
“John was in the Army National Guard,” said Edwina Winter. “We hit it off pretty well. I was twenty-five and he was thirty-three when we got married about a year later on February 5, 1943. The National Guard was activated early in World War II but John did not go overseas until late 1943.”
Edwina describes herself and her husband as “Americans” but Johnny delves deeper into the family genealogy. “Winter is English, German, and Scottish,” he explains. “My father’s family was from Mississippi as far as I can go back. Daddy was a cotton broker in Leland and my grandfather was too. He bought the cotton from the farmers and sold it to the cotton merchants in Manchester, England. It was my grandfather’s company. Daddy wasn’t very old when he started doing brokering. He did it for a while, then went to college at Virginia Military Institute and went into the army.”
The Winters lived at Fort Sill in Oklahoma before John Jr. was sent overseas.
“John went from Oran in South Africa to Italy and then to Manila in the Philippines before he ever got home,” Edwina said. “He was a colonel in the field artillery until he went overseas; then he was a quartermaster of black troops. John was not prejudiced because all his officers were black and he always had a very good relationship with them. Of course, John grew up in Mississippi, where most of the coloreds chopped the cotton. In fact, you didn’t have help at certain times of the year because all the help went to chop the cotton. It was a different kind of life from anything you have now. Southern white people and black people have, as a rule, always had a very special relationship. There were bad white men who didn’t treat their servants well, but the majority had very good relationships because they were in your home all the time.”
Born John Dawson Winter III in Beaumont on February 23, 1944, Johnny was twenty-one inches and weighed a little over seven pounds. “Daddy was in the military when I was born, so my mother had to live with her parents in Beaumont,” remembers Johnny. “It was just Momma, my grandfather Edgar Holland, my great-grandfather Ole Pa, and my great-grandmother. We lived in Ole Pa’s house. My grandfather and Ole Pa were both lawyers.”
When John Jr. was discharged from the service, he moved his family to Leland, Mississippi and worked as a cotton broker. The Winters lived in Leland about a year before buying a house and settling in Beaumont. For many years Johnny thought he was born in Leland; he wrote and recorded “Leland Mississippi Blues” on Johnny Winter, his 1968 debut album on Columbia Records. But he only lived in Leland for a brief period of time.
“We moved back to Beaumont when I was about four,” says Johnny. “Daddy worked at an appliance store, and then he worked with a contractor, learned what the guy knew, and went out on his own. Most of the time I knew him he was a contractor who built houses—he had three or four people workin’ for him.
“Daddy wasn’t prejudiced. He told me he had a black guy working for him who got the clap and he talked to him about it. He’d had the clap a couple of times. Daddy asked him why he kept gettin’ the clap and he said, ‘Colonel Winter, I can stop doing a lot of things but young girls and women is one thing I can’t stop, so I’ll just keep gettin’ the clap.’”
Edwina sent her husband photographs of Johnny when he was overseas, but the elder Winter didn’t know his son was an albino. “Johnny was born after John Jr. was sent overseas, so John didn’t see Johnny till he was over two years old,” she said. “I can’t imagine what he thought.”
“Daddy didn’t know I was albino till he came home from the service,” says Johnny. “He still didn’t know what I was. He could te
ll I wasn’t completely normal but he didn’t know what it was or why I looked different. I don’t think he had a problem with it—what could he do?”
The doctors told the Winters the chance of having another albino child was one in a million. So Edwina became pregnant again shortly after her husband returned to the States. Edgar was born on December 28, 1946.
“I was almost three when Edgar was born,” says Johnny. “I remember eating downstairs and Momma being upstairs in bed and wanting her to come down. I was jealous, but I didn’t try to hit him or anything, not yet—that was later on. When they discovered he was an albino too, they didn’t know what to do about it.”
Johnny’s parents, like parents of most children born with albinism, had normal hair, skin, and eye color. There was no history of albinism in either family, but they both carried the recessive gene that gave them a one in four chance each child would be born with the condition.
Johnny has oculocutaneous albinism and little or no pigment in his eyes, hair, and skin. He was born legally blind, with blue eyes, white hair, and milky white skin. The vision problems associated with albinism are due to the lack of pigment in the retina, and an abnormal pattern of nerve connections between the eye and the brain. Doctors in Texas in the mid-’40s knew little about albinism, and neither did the general public. NOAH, the National Organization for Albinos and Hypopigmentation, an information and support organization, wouldn’t be founded for almost forty years.
“None of the doctors even knew what the word albino meant,” says Johnny. “They just knew we had some problems. They told my parents there wasn’t anything that could be done about it. My mother had looked it up in our medical reference books, so she knew more about it than the doctors did.”
“With albinism, the optic nerve does not develop properly,” explained Edwina. “When your optic nerve is not developed, your sight is short circuited. In addition to the lack of ability to see, it results in a lateral astigmatism and they have trouble focusing. It wasn’t a condition that there was any hope of improvement. In truth, Johnny and Edgar have done remarkably well. They both took art lessons and could go through a magazine and tell you every car in it. Whatever they saw wasn’t what you and I were seeing, but they interpreted it so they knew what it was. We always hoped there would be glasses or something developed to give them more normal eyesight. But the glasses that have been developed have been so cumbersome.”
Born with 20/400 eyesight in one eye and 20/600 in the other, Johnny has vivid memories of how his limited eyesight affected his years at Longfellow Elementary School. It was an all-encompassing handicap affecting his ability to complete assignments, take tests during class, fit in, and make friends.
“I couldn’t even see the E on the eye chart unless I got right up on it,” he says. “I tried eyeglasses but I hated them, so I didn’t wear ’em.’ I’d always lose them because they gave me headaches and they didn’t help that much. I had to hold something close to read it. At school, I couldn’t see the blackboard. I’d tell the teachers, but they didn’t want to hear it. They’d just tell me to get up real close and copy it. When you had tests, teachers would usually write the questions on the board. Some teachers would give me the questions written out for me and some of ’em would let me get up in front of the whole class and read it. I got in everybody else’s way; they’d be screamin’ at me to sit down and I couldn’t sit down. It was a big mess. I was a mediocre student because I couldn’t see the blackboard.”
Johnny attended Dick Dowling Junior High School, but transferred to Ballard Stevenson School in the eighth grade to take special-education classes.
“They used a special big-print book and they didn’t do any board work at all,” Johnny explains. “They were teaching a wide variety of ages and it wasn’t just for people who couldn’t see. They had a lot of different things: some spastics, some people that were slow. It was real weird; they put everybody in one room. Mostly it was people who had problems gettin’ the work in regular school. I made great grades in that school but didn’t like it. You’d go to dances and people would say, ‘What school do you go to?’ and I’d tell them the name of the school and they’d say, ‘I never heard of that school.’ I wouldn’t volunteer any more information than that.”
When Edwina took Johnny and Edgar to Belk Burns, a psychologist in Beaumont, to test their learning ability, she was relieved to learn albinism didn’t affect intelligence. They took standard IQ tests, and both registered in the genius range.
“They never told me my IQ,” says Johnny. “They said me and Edgar had the intelligence of the top ten percent. I can believe Edgar had it but I can’t believe I was smart. I never felt very smart; I never made great grades in the regular schools.”
Children are known for being cruel to anybody that is different and the children in Texas were no exception. Besides struggling with his vision and schoolwork, Johnny had to deal with the taunts of schoolmates and children in his neighborhood.
“Kids teased me in school for being albino,” he says. “They called me ‘Cotton’ and ‘Whitey.’ There was a little kid in our neighborhood that ran around saying, ‘You’re an albino. You’re an albino.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not.’ I had never heard that word before. When I went and asked my parents about it, they said, ‘Yes, you are an albino.’ That they knew there was a word for our problem, for what we were. They used the word albino to describe me. It was really bad to find out about it in that way—to hear it from a neighborhood kid bothering me about it. I got in a lot of fights with kids for callin ’ me an albino. People bothered Edgar too. My parents tried to stay out of the way and let me be responsible for myself but they were always real supportive.
“It was kind of a drag that I couldn’t fit in. I didn’t really care about fitting in so much, but I didn’t like not being liked. I guess I just wanted to be left alone and not bothered. I didn’t have any idea why people had a hard time accepting anybody different from them—it’s crazy, but it’s a fact.
“They were pretty good at church; they didn’t bother me as much. Having a brother who was also albino helped. I had somebody else who could understand what it was like to go through that. My parents would tell me I just had to put up with it. That I was okay being different and not to worry about it so much—that kids were just that way.
“I had some friends at school but not a whole lot. They didn’t treat me well, so I didn’t bother with them. People didn’t know anything about it [albinism]. Sometimes people on the street treated you differently too. It never affected the way I felt about myself but it sure affected the way I felt about other people.”
Johnny had a loving relationship with both parents, who were supportive and compassionate and provided their children with all the benefits of growing up in an upper-middle-class family—art classes, dance lessons, diction lessons, swimming lessons, summer camp, music lessons, as well as a playhouse in their backyard. Although Johnny’s father didn’t quite understand what it was like growing up as an albino in a redneck town, music forged the link that kept them close together.
“I had a pretty good relationship with my father growing up,” says Johnny. “I always felt like he didn’t know exactly what our problems were like, what it was like to be one of us. Sometimes he had a little problem with knowing how to relate to being an albino. I talked about it too, but it was hard to explain to somebody what it’s like not to be able to see. Music definitely played a part in keeping me and Daddy close. We did a lot of musical things together.
“Daddy played saxophone, banjo, and ukulele, and had his own band in college. He stopped playing when he got out of school but still sang in barbershop quartets. The barbershop quartet practiced at our house, singing songs like ‘Ain’t She Sweet’ and ‘Bye Bye Blackbird.’ Daddy sang hymns in the Episcopalian church choir too; he sang in the choir until he died. I don’t think me and Edgar would have become musicians if it hadn’t been for Daddy. He helped us but he didn’t push us. I don’t think he wan
ted us to be musicians; he wanted us to be doctors or lawyers—something like that. I really loved music from a very early age; there was never a point that I didn’t want to be a musician. When I told them [my parents], they said they’d do anything they could to help out. They didn’t think it was a great idea but they weren’t gonna try to push us away from it either.”
Like many first born sons, Johnny shared a special bond with his mother, who offered understanding, encouragement, and unconditional love. “I had a real good relationship with Momma,” he said. “I was a lot closer to my mother than I was to my father. If I got into trouble at school—mostly doing things kids do, like flushing firecrackers down the toilet—I’d go to my mother because I could talk to her easier.”
A ritual that strengthened the bond between Johnny and his mother was the time she spent reading to both sons before they went to bed. Not school textbooks, but books that touched their imaginations and expanded their horizons far beyond the city of Beaumont. She selected books that required a higher comprehension than typical children’s books because she knew both boys had an understanding well above their grade level.
“Momma read to us all the time,” Johnny says. “She read the Hobbit books—Lord of the Rings. The Wizard of Oz and the whole series of books about Oz. She usually read to us when we were goin’ to sleep. She’d sit on the bed and read to me and Edgar.”
Johnny also listened to “Talking Books,” which his mother ordered from the Library for the Blind. “We got books on records,” says Johnny. “Fairy tales, Disney stories. We got them until I was fifteen or sixteen. They came regularly in a pack. My mother told them what categories we liked, and they’d send us books—records—from that category. We had all kinds of different books. Me and Edgar listened to them when we were goin’ to sleep.”
Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) Page 2
