“When the Beatles came out, we were already wearin’ clothes just like what they were wearing,” says Johnny. “Real nice iridescent gold clothes we bought in the South Side of Chicago.”
To meet the demand for danceable songs, the band’s set list consisted of rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and songs by Elvis Presley. “I couldn’t work any blues into the sets at Tony Paris’s Show Lounge,” Johnny says. “It didn’t have to be a twist song; but it had to be a twist beat, which gets pretty boring after a while. We played a lot of things like ‘Midnight Hour.’ I sang ‘Midnight Hour,’ but I can’t remember most of the songs I sang because I didn’t like them that much. We did some soul songs—“Out of Sight” and ”Barefootin’.”
Playing songs the club owners demanded gave the band steady work; they played Rush Street clubs six nights a week, at gigs that ran from 9 PM until 2:30 AM. When they got restless during the breaks, they did what they could to amuse themselves.
“Sometimes we’d go to a room upstairs,” said Drugan. “Johnny liked to bring his glasses up there. When we finished, we would smash them on the wall. Johnny thought that was fun. The bouncer would come upstairs and say, ‘I hear some noise up here.’ His name was Rico; he was about seven feet tall and weighed 300 pounds. He parked the Cadillacs outside and he’d let us sit in them and listen to the radio. We were kinda bored after a while—we didn’t know what to do in between sets.”
That problem disappeared when the proprietors, who owned both the Tony Paris Show Lounge and the Scotch Mist, decided to have the band play their other club during their breaks.
“On some weekends, we never got a break—just long enough to go to the other club,” said Drugan. “We played nonstop. They advertised continuous entertainment at the Tony Paris Show Lounge, so our band would play during the break time. The regular band was Bobby and the Troubadours (which featured keyboard player Barry Goldberg, who cofounded the Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield in 1967 after Bloomfield left the Paul Butterfield Blues Band). When we finished playing at the Scotch Mist, we’d go down the street and play during the break for the other band. We did that for about a month or so. It was tough. One of the owners said, ‘Anybody bothers you guys, you let me know about it.’ He looked like one of the Sopranos. There were a lot of Soprano-type guys around those places. Everything was ‘you guys better do it.’”
With the Rush Street gigs in such close proximity, it wasn’t difficult to move the band’s equipment from one club to another. One night things literally got out of hand.
“Johnny and I were rolling the amplifiers down the street from one club to another,” said Drugan. “We lost balance and it fell over and broke my toes and Johnny’s too. We hobbled down the street and played with broken toes.”
Playing six nights a week didn’t give Johnny much free time. He got home around 3 AM, listened to records to unwind, and slept until two or three in the afternoon. But he read about the Fickle Pickle, a coffeehouse on the North Side of Chicago managed by a nineteen-year-old blues fanatic and guitar player named Mike Bloomfield. Bloomfield would locate blues musicians from the ‘20s and ’30s, book them at the coffeehouse, and introduce them to a new audience of mostly young, white hippies. Artists included guitarist Big Joe Williams, harp player Jazz Gillum, guitarist Walter Vincson, and bass player Ransom Knowling, who played on Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s recording of “That’s All Right.” Hoping to hear and maybe jam with some blues legends, Johnny decided to check out the scene.
“I had heard Mike Bloomfield was a real good guitar player and had played with a lot of the black guys,” says Johnny. “So when we weren’t playin’ out, we went to the Fickle Pickle.”
Although disappointed most of the players were white on the night Johnny sat in and jammed with Bloomfield, Johnny was encouraged by Bloomfield’s heartfelt, “You play good blues, man.” That jam was a serendipitous stop on the road to Johnny’s destiny. Five years later, Bloomfield, who had become well-known playing in the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the Electric Flag, would rave about Johnny’s guitar playing to a Rolling Stone reporter.
The artists Johnny really wanted to see—Muddy Waters and Otis Rush—played clubs in the South Side, but neither Johnny nor Drugan would venture into that side of town after dark. Drugan had a bad experience in that predominately black neighborhood when he first moved to Chicago.
“I went to the South Side to see Muddy Waters in 1960, and got beat up and robbed,” he said. “I took a taxi cab down to Silvio’s with a friend from Texas. They let us out of the taxi and said, ‘Go right in that door.’ We went in that door and got beat up. It was actually the alley of the club and we thought it was how you got in the club. It was a horrible experience. That was the last time I went down there to see if I could find somebody in a blues club.”
Johnny and Drugan drove through the South Side during the day, checking out the posters outside the clubs—Pepper’s Lounge, Theresa’s Lounge, and the Blue Flame—as well as Silvio’s on the West Side. “We went to the South Side in the daytime, but not at night because it was dangerous,” says Johnny. “During the daytime, we looked to see if there was anybody good playin‘—we saw Muddy was playin’ at one club. We were the only white people there and it was a little scary, but we never had any trouble. We stayed in the car most of the time.”
When summer turned into fall and Johnny still hadn’t heard any of his favorite blues artists or had an opportunity to play blues, it was time to leave. “All the music I was hearing in Chicago was completely rock ‘n’ roll—that’s why I didn’t want to stay there too long,” he says. “I stayed about four months. I was tired of the music we had to play. I missed Texas and missed playin’ the songs we wanted to do.”
“Johnny left Chicago in late October,” said Drugan. “I drove him back, straight through from Chicago to Texas. He wanted me to stay so we could get a group together, but I liked Chicago. I just stayed there over the weekend and drove back.”
After Johnny returned to Beaumont, he immediately immersed himself in the music scene. He recorded Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love” and an original ballad entitled “Eternally” with Edgar on drums and horns. “Eternally” sold well locally on the Frolic Records label, so Atlantic Records picked it up for distribution. “That probably made it sell a little bit better,” says Johnny. “I don’t remember exactly how much it sold—it wasn’t real big though. ‘Eternally’ got airplay all over Texas and was big on the jukebox in a pavilion at Garner State Park.”
The 1964 release on Atlantic Records positioned “Eternally” on the A side and another Johnny original, “You’ll Be the Death of Me,” on the B side. “Eternally” began receiving airplay in Texas and Louisiana, and the band started getting opening act bookings at bigger venues. Billed simply as “Johnny Winter,” they opened for Jerry Lee Lewis at the Beaumont Civic Center and for the Everly Brothers at the Sam Houston Coliseum. The shows featured as many as twenty opening acts, playing one or two songs. Johnny’s band played “Eternally” and earned twenty-five dollars. The pay didn’t matter; the experience and the exposure made the gig worthwhile.
Years later, when Johnny was a rising star and ran into Jerry Lee Lewis at the Scene, a happening nightclub in New York City, he walked up to the legend and asked if he remembered him from that gig in Beaumont. “He was a real asshole,” says Johnny, laughing at the memory. “He said, ‘Boy, What are you doing with hair like that? That hair looks pitiful, boy.’ I said, ‘Jerry Lee, your hair was as long as mine is now.’ He said, ‘No, man. I never had hair like that.’ He liked me when I didn’t have long hair, and he was pissed off at me when I did.”
When Jerry Lee met Johnny in Beaumont, the Beatles hadn’t landed on American shores and Johnny’s slicked-back pompadour was still the rage. On August 3, 1963, the Beatles debuted on the U.S. Billboard charts with “From Me to You.” On January 18, 1964, “I Want to Hold Your Hand” topped the charts; “She Loves You” hit number one the following week. The
ir three appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964 changed the face (and the hairstyle) of American music.
Johnny remembers the first time he heard the Beatles on the radio. “I loved ’em as soon as I heard them,” he said. “I saw ’em on Ed Sullivan too. I liked what they were doing and thought it was the kind of stuff I’d like to do. It really turned me on; it was great music with only two guitars. The Beatles were also the first group that wrote their own songs. That made me want to write and play more of my own songs.”
Johnny also watched the Rolling Stones make their U.S. TV debut on The Hollywood Palace in June 1964 singing “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” a song written by Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon. “I liked the Rolling Stones and I liked their image,” he says. “When I saw them on TV, I couldn’t see how they made it—they dressed so horrible. And they had girls—I thought that was pretty good. They played good blues. The style of blues they played was not as authentic as the blues I played, but I was glad they were doin’ it.”
Shortly after the Rolling Stones appeared on The Hollywood Palace, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law, prohibiting discrimination against black men and women in public facilities, in government, and in employment. House and Senate votes were divided by region, not by party, with the majority of Southern Congressmen and Senators voting against the bill. Enforcement powers were initially weak and many Southern states simply refused to comply with the law.
“Back then, Beaumont was still segregated,” says Johnny. “Schools weren’t integrated yet. They had all-black and all-white water fountains. A lot of restaurants, too. Black people sat in the back of the bus. White people figured they were better than black people. It pissed me off. We had some black people at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. They went to the early service, but they still went to a white church. There weren’t any black people at Momma’s Baptist Church. I felt like black people were as good as white people and there shouldn’t be any segregation anywhere. I wasn’t inclined to be prejudiced. I figured black people were playing the best music, so I couldn’t be prejudiced against them.”
Johnny’s parents never objected to him and Edgar frequenting black clubs. In fact, Johnny never got any flak from anyone for playing with black artists because race didn’t seem to matter when it came to music. But socializing with black musicians outside of the clubs had its drawbacks.
“We had a black singer in a band for a while and we went out to eat at a drive-in restaurant, where you drive in front of the restaurant and carhops come out and take your order,” says Johnny. “We were all kinda scared about it because we had a black person in a car with us. We were goin’ to a white restaurant where we had been a lot of times before, but we knew people weren’t gonna like it. So he got down in the backseat of the car so nobody would see him. It was embarrassing, I guess. That’s the way it was back then.”
While Johnny was playing clubs in Chicago, Edgar, who was still in high school, continued to play gigs with the rest of the Jammers. Determined to expand his club circuit beyond Texas, Edgar took the band to Atlanta to audition for the Johnny O’Leary Booking Agency.
“After the audition, Johnny O‘Leary agreed to put us on tour,” said Edgar. “We were planning the tour when Johnny came back from Chicago and said, ‘Hey, I want to do that.’ I was relieved—‘Thank God I don’t have to be the frontman and sing the songs.’”
Stylistically, Johnny’s music would be an easier sell because Edgar’s original idea was to play jazz, which had a smaller market. “What people really wanted to hear was more exciting—R&B, rock, and blues, which was what Johnny was doing,” Edgar said. “That band started as It and Them and later became the Black Plague.”
Johnny remembers things differently. “When I was in Chicago, Johnny O’Leary’s agency called Edgar and said if you ever get a real leader, we’d like to use you guys,” says Johnny. “I was their leader, so when I came back, we all moved up to Atlanta and started working for that agency.”
Although the band’s name changed frequently, the lineup remained the same with Johnny on guitar and vocals, Edgar on keyboards and saxophone, Ikey (Isaac Payton) Sweat on bass, and Norman Samaha on drums. “We had different names for the bands,” says Johnny. “We’d get tired of one name and call it something else. If we didn’t have a big enough following on one name, we’d change names, try something different, and see if we could get a better following. Sometimes it helped. The Crystaliers was a name I thought up—that was after Johnny and the Jammers. It and Them was after I started playing Louisiana. We didn’t know anything about Them, Van Morrison’s band at the time. I was It and they were Them. Johnny Winter and the Black Plague was another one I made up. Called it the Black Plague because we all wore black—collarless coats and black turtlenecks.”
“I was in my last year of high school when Johnny and I went on the road with It and Them,” said Edgar. “Then it became the Black Plague and we played for the Southern club circuit doing the Whisky a Go Go in New Orleans. We were doing all the Whisky a Go Gos—Atlanta, New Orleans, Mississippi, Florida, all through the South.”
From 1964 to 1966, the band toured the Deep South, playing upscale clubs that held 500 people in Shreveport, Bossier City, and New Orleans, Louisiana; Birmingham, Alabama; Savannah and Atlanta, Georgia; and Pensacola and upstate Florida. The agency provided steady work as soon as they moved to Atlanta.
“I would call up the agency and they’d tell us where we were going next or that we were going home,” says Johnny with a laugh. “That was the worst possible thing to hear—‘You don’t have any jobs; go back home for a while.’ Sets were forty-five minutes on, fifteen off—10 to 2 AM, and sometimes 9 to 3 AM. The band members made twenty-five bucks a night, and I made fifty dollars because I was the leader. The agency took twenty-five percent. We got paid once a week. We didn’t make much money, but enough to get by. We were young and having a good time.”
The band rented a U-Haul trailer for their equipment and hitched it to the back of Ikey’s car. “We could’ve bought two or three real nice trailers for all of the rent we paid,” says Johnny. “We really never got far enough ahead money-wise to buy the things most bands have. We had a homemade PA set, U-Haul trailers, and old cars.”
Yet the excitement of being away from home for the first time, traveling to new cities, and playing clubs for appreciative audiences—especially women—was ample compensation for any sacrifices the band made.
“Down South we had a pretty big following,” says Johnny. “We had groupies and I did as good as anybody. If you brought ’em back to the room, somebody would go in another room for a while. It wasn’t an overnight thing.”
Edgar was the first band member to start growing his hair long and combing it into bangs; Johnny and the rest of the band quickly followed suit. Unfortunately, it didn’t bode well with Southern audiences and club owners. The band’s set list remained the same—predominately soul and R&B, with songs by James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. But the long hair, black turtlenecks, iridescent bluish-gold collarless suits, and suede low-heeled boots caused them to lose a lot of gigs.
“None of the club owners were honest, really—just some of ’em were better than others,” says Johnny. “I played one club for a week—five days straight—and didn’t get paid. That’s the only time that’s ever happened. The only reason he didn’t pay us was because we had long hair. The audience seemed to like us better when we had short hair combed back. He paid us when we had short hair, but said with long hair, ‘It’s not workin‘—I’m not gonna pay you.’”
As songs by British artists started climbing the charts, the band incorporated them into their set list. “We played everything on the radio, and all of the British Invasion—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, Dave Clark Five,” said Edgar. “We played everything out there. ‘Midnight Hour,’ ‘Knock on Wood,’ ‘Hold On, I’m Coming,’ were right up there.
“
We used to do ‘Honky Tonk,’ a Bill Doggett sax song that was probably one of the biggest instrumentals ever in the South. Johnny did a killer version of ‘Cryin” by Roy Orbison. We did a lot of the Beatles songs too. We did Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, James Brown’s ‘Out of Sight,’ and ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.’ We didn’t do much blues, honestly. The only traditional blues song was ‘Baby, What You Want Me to Do,’ the old Jimmy Reed song,” Edgar added.
“We played songs by the Rolling Stones—‘Satisfaction,’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown,’” says Johnny. “I picked the songs by what was on the radio and what albums were good. I made all the decisions—I was the leader and that was just the way it was. A lot of our songs were R&B. I liked R&B but I wanted to be playin’ blues— real blues. Most white people didn’t know what blues was, and if you didn’t play music the people wanted to hear, you wouldn’t keep the job very long.”
It didn’t take much to start a fight in a juke joint. Longhaired hippies and musicians were a prime target—especially musicians that wouldn’t take requests to placate drunken patrons.
“I used my white Les Paul to hit people,” says Johnny with a laugh. “I was lucky enough that it didn’t happen a lot, but it happened in a club in Galveston in the beach area. This big guy—he was built like a football player—wanted the same song over and over again. I said, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Well, I’m gonna wipe out the bandstand.’ I figured he could probably do it. He backed up and got ready to rush the stage and I wiped him out with my guitar before he could get the drums. He went down and didn’t get up. After that, his friends took him out to the car. My guitar had a bent headstock but I could still play it.
Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) Page 8
