Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  “Eddie Kramer was uppity in the studio; that’s why he got fired,” said Turner. “As to recording the rain, I donʹt know if it was Eddie Kramer who instigated that or us. I thought it was at our instigation, our psychedelic nature, that we recorded the rain. Eddie was very good. On the Johnny Winter album, Eddie was the one that got in there, set up the mikes, did the sound. I didnʹt like the sound he was getting, but it turned out to be real good. But he was uppity about the way he approached things. We could have got a lot more from Eddie. We looked at him as the opposition. We had our own big egos. That’s why we fired him on the second record. We thought we could do a better job and we couldn’t,” Turner adds with a laugh. “We fired him shortly into it. It was just a few days and we paid him off and sent him home. Eddie was a no-nonsense guy. I donʹt think Eddie wanted to record the rain; I think Johnny wanted to record the rain. We were all together on stuff like that—‘Yeah, let’s record a rainstorm, ha ha. Roll me another joint.’”

  The hip counterculture scene pulsated with psychedelics, lightshows, and lava lamps; and famed photographer Richard Avedon had begun experimenting with the Sabatier Effect, a darkroom technique also called solarization, to create hallucinogenic images. By partially developing a negative or print and then overexposing it to light, he could make the whites silvery, eliminate detail, highlight or darken shadows, and get a distinct black line around the edges. In 1967, he created psychedelic posters of the Beatles, and a solarized photo of John Lennon for the cover of Look Magazine.

  Avedon created a striking blue and purple cover for Second Winter; the front cover is a dramatic full-face headshot and a right profile of Johnny with his silky hair blowing in the wind. His hair from the cover shot flows onto the back of the album, where the tip of his nose is the only feature unobstructed by his tousled mane. Avedon captured the detail in his face and hair and used purple ink to fill in the shadows and create the solarized effect. The inside cover shot is a black-and-white group shot with all four musicians looking in different directions.

  “The picture on the cover was my idea,” says Johnny. “I liked the posters Richard Avedon had done of the Beatles; that’s why I picked him. It was done in his studio and it didn’t take long at all. We posed the way he told us to for the inside cover and he used a wind machine to get the effect with my hair.”

  Second Winter was a double album pressed on only three sides. Technology for recording on vinyl demanded wider grooves for louder volume; after about twenty-two minutes a side, squeezing more music onto a record could only be accomplished to a limited degree and at the expense of volume. The liner notes on that LP gave the following explanation:The original plan was to cut as much material as possible and pick the best of what was cut to make up a regular one-record album. After we finished, we found out that if all the songs were used we might lose some volume if only one record were used. Since it was very important to us that our album be as loud as is technically possible, we had a problem. We had to cut everything that we wanted to and everything we had planned on doing and we didn’t have anything else that we really wanted to do. We also really liked everything we’d done and didn’t want to leave any of the songs out. We couldn’t honestly give you more, and we didn’t want to give you less, so here is exactly what we did in NashviHe—no more and no less.

  “We didn’t have enough music to make four sides and we had too much to just do two sides,” says Johnny. “So we decided to make a three-sided record. I don’t know why CBS let us do it, but they did.”

  Columbia released Second Winter in late 1969, and by then more of Winter’s former managers had come out of the woodwork, trying to make a quick buck off of anything he had ever recorded, regardless of the sound quality. In August 1969, GRT Records released The Johnny Winter Story, an album of old material the label bought from Ken Ritter.

  “The music wasn’t all that great on that record,” says Johnny. “I had recorded it years before, somewhere around 1961 to 1964. They had a guy playing horrible slide on it but it wasn’t me because I didn’t even play slide back then. They overdubbed a whole band on some of the cuts. In one place, you could hear two drummers, and one was hitting the beat at [a] different time. It was awful. They were dumbasses; they didn’t know what they were doing.

  “Ken was my manager in Texas when I was about seventeen. He put out several singles on different labels, KRCO, Frolic Records—we weren’t on any major labels. We never did get any money; he said it wasn’t selling enough. Columbia was really good about The Johnny Winter Story coming out. Their lawyers never went after anybody because they said it wouldn’t be worth it.”

  GRT Corporation, which wholly owned GRT Records and fifty percent of Janus Records, also bought twenty sides of Johnny’s old material from Roy Ames. Those cuts were released on Abont Blues on the Janus label in November. One month earlier, Buddah Records released First Winter, which contained four tracks from About Blues. Buddah president Neil Bogart said he bought his tapes from Huey Meaux, a Houston record producer. Johnny didn’t know about any of the unauthorized albums until friends mentioned seeing them in record stores.

  “About Blues was real old stuff recorded around 1961 to ‘63,” says Johnny. “It was all kinds of different music—some Bob Dylan, some R&B songs, some rock ’n’ roll tunes. I talked to Roy when it came out and he said it would help me in the long run. First Winter was tapes they bought from Huey Meaux, who got the tapes from Roy. Edgar was on some of them but the bands were made up of a lot of different people. The quality was not too good.”

  The influx of unauthorized Johnny Winter albums confused fans, who assumed they were buying his latest album. When an occasional fan told Johnny his latest LP wasn’t as good as his earlier ones, he’d discover they had purchased a bootleg record. Material he had deemed not even good enough for local labels competed with his Columbia releases and threatened to tarnish his reputation.

  “I felt very hurt when that happened,” Johnny says. “I hated it because it wasn’t nearly as good as the material I was comin’ out with. It just wasn’t the right thing at all—for that to happen to us. I didn’t make any money, and career-wise, it definitely wasn’t good. It was a real drag. There were so many coming out Rolling Stone gave me a chance to tell everybody they weren’t very good and not to buy them.” An April 16, 1979 article titled “Johnny Winter: It’s Just Bad Music” addressed the four unauthorized releases and explained why Johnny was more concerned about the quality than the lost royalties. “I just don’t want that bullshit out,” Johnny told the reporter. “It’s just bad music.”

  In December 1969, after the release of Second Winter, Steve Paul rented the second house in the quadrangle, and moved the McCoys to Staatsburg. Paul had met the McCoys—a band that included Rick Derringer on guitar, Randy Jo Hobbs on bass, Bobby Peterson on organ, and Rick’s brother Randy Zehringer on drums—when they wandered into the Scene and asked if they could play.

  “I thought they were really talented players and individuals, and were incorrectly perceived by some as a teen pop band,” said Paul. “People like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter surely appreciated just how good they were.”

  A teenage band from Ohio, the McCoys experienced short-lived phenomenal success and opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1965 American tour. Signed with Bang Records, their first single, “Hang on Sloopy,” hit number one on the Billboard charts. “Fever,” their second release, peaked at number seven two months later.

  Pigeonholed as a teenybopper band playing bubblegum music (their photograph appeared on the cover of 16 Magazine), the McCoys struggled after leaving Bang Records and signing with Mercury, where they released two albums. Poor record sales and the reactions of audiences wanting to hear “Hang on Sloopy” left the band between a rock and a hard place. Paul signed on as their manager, negotiated their release from Mercury Records, and invited them to Staatsburg to regroup and write new songs.

  The McCoys’ house was about one hundred yards
away from Johnny’s band’s house with the rehearsal room. When Johnny wasn’t practicing with Shannon and Turner, Derringer practiced his new material with the McCoys. The proximity of the bands’ houses naturally led to jams with both bands, as well as some really strange experiences for Johnny and his band members.

  “I didn’t know it, but Rick knew the whole band was crazy,” says Johnny. “One time, I was walkin’ on ice on the Hudson River in the middle of the winter. The river was partially frozen, and they were all walkin’ on the ice, so I figured it was safe and walked out there too. I figured they all lived up north and should know what they were doin’. But they didn’t—they were just crazy.

  “I fell in but Bobby Peterson thought I was walking on the water. I fell in up to my neck and got out real quick. Me bein’ as hot as I was and the water being cold, steam came up when I fell in. So Bobby thought I was God, and I walked on the water. He wasn’t doin’ much drugs; he was just crazy. After that he would follow me around the house, calling me God. He started watching me sleep. He would just sit there when I went to sleep. When I woke up, he’d still be sitting there. Having somebody like me is great, but watching me sleep is definitely too much. I thought it was crazy—I still think it’s crazy.”

  Peterson’s bizarre behavior continued to escalate, attracting the attention of the local sheriff and almost landing the band in the slammer.

  “One night Bobby went out in the woods and tried to hang himself,” said Turner. “It was a rainy evening, and when he came back, he had a broken rope around his neck. He found it in the garage, hooked it around his neck, jumped off, and broke the rope. He came in with that rope and a red mark around his neck and said, ‘I hanged myself, Johnny.’ We didn’t know what to think about that—it threw us for a loop.”

  “Bobby Peterson hung himself on a tree in the backyard,” says Johnny. “The rope broke and he said, ‘See, the tree doesn’t even like me—the tree threw me out.’ We took him to the hospital and all they wanted to do was to call the cops and put him in jail. I was screamin’ at ’em, ‘He’s not taking anything—he’s just suicidal.’ They thought he was on drugs and the poor guy was just fucked up.”

  “You know the song ‘The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)’ by Bob Dylan?’” asked Shannon. “He’s an actual sheriff up there. He came to our house when Bobby Peterson tried to hang himself. Somebody freaked out and called the police. The sheriff came out to the house and we got worried he was going to bust us. To get out of that, we went over to one of the Vanderbilts’ houses—she was living up there too, in the same part of the country. We played acoustic guitar, and sang all these sad songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” on her front porch to get her to tell him to back off.”

  After that evening, Peterson’s behavior continued to become more and more erratic.

  “He started wearin’ a rope around his neck,” says Johnny. “He thought he was Judas Iscariot. He thought he wasn’t a good person. He couldn’t eat or dress. He was always a little bit off, but it was so much different from anything he had ever done before—just changing clothes was hard for him. It came out of nowhere and he wasn’t doing any drugs.”

  That wasn’t the only disturbing behavior band members witnessed. In January 1970, Johnny and Shannon attended Hendrix’s Band of Gypsies concert at Madison Square Garden, and were devastated to see him in such a state.

  “I was at the Band of Gypsies concert when Jimi walked off the stage,” says Johnny. “I was backstage. It scared me to death that he would be fucked up enough to actually give up, to quit playing. It scared me to death. He just said, “I’m sorry—I can’t go on.’ I thought it was drugs but I didn’t think they’d kill him. Things might have turned out different if he got a little help. He had played so many good shows. He had good and bad shows—most of ’em were good—but he had his share of bad shows too.”

  “I saw Jimi Hendrix about four times,” said Shannon. “I remember going to the Electric Ladyland, Jimi Hendrix’s studio—we hung out there for a while. I saw him that night at Madison Square Garden too. He came out and did about three songs and he just broke down and sat down on the front of the stage, put his head in his hands, and started crying. Then he got up and just walked offstage. I remember Buddy Miles saying, ‘Jimi isn’t feeling too good right now, we’ll try to come back,’ but they never did come back. It was the last time I saw him.”

  In the winter and spring of 1970, Johnny continued to tour with Shannon and Turner. The band’s itinerary included a European tour with appearances at the Bath Rock Festival and the Royal Albert Hall in England, the Beat Club TV show in Germany, the Isle of Wight Festival, and a benefit for Timothy Leary at the Village Gate in New York City.

  “We did as much promotion and interviews as we possibly could for the European tour; there was a lot of interest,” says Johnny. “Steve Paul went with us to check everything out before we did it. The clubs in Europe were good-sized—we played both indoor and outdoor places. The Beat Club TV show in Germany was a live-performance show. We played two songs [“Johnny B. Goode” and ”Mean Town Blues“]; it wasn’t a whole set. Our first headliner was the Royal Albert Hall. That was something else. It was a full house. Somebody yelled, ‘Play the guitar, you faggot,’ he said with a laugh. “I loved it.... That’s the main thing I remember.”

  In March 1970, Johnny had a gig at the Olympic Auditorium in L.A. Jim Franklin was in town to join Robert Crumb and other Zap Comix artists—Gilbert Shelton, S. Clay Wilson, Spain Rodriguez, and Kim Deitch—to paint murals at the Whorehouse, a Santa Monica bar. They created quite a spectacle when Franklin brought the crew of underground artists to the Century Plaza Hotel, a nineteen-story luxury hotel, to meet Johnny and Edgar.

  “We drove up a small hill to a horseshoe driveway by the front door, and pulled up under a canopy,” said Franklin. “We were in this funky old car full of beer cans up to the door sill. So when the doorman, who is dressed in a Beefeater costume, opened the door, a cascade of beer cans comes out and rolls down the driveway—and all these gangly artists, hairy creatures get out. It was really a scene straight out of a Freak Brothers comic.”

  Johnny was taking a shower when they arrived, so they went to Edgar’s room and partied until it was time to go to the gig. “Everyone dispersed after the gig and I felt bad because they never got to meet Johnny,” said Franklin, who recalled another time when Johnny was literally hanging out in his hotel room, surrounded by guests.

  “Johnny knew people were curious about if he has albino pubic hair, so he came out naked, and says, ‘There it is; that’s what it looks like,”’ Franklin said with a laugh. “I could tell he was practiced at it.”

  Johnny also played at the May 1970 “Holding Together” benefit for Timothy Leary at the Village Gate. The benefit was to provide cash for Leary, who had escaped from a minimum security prison and was living on the lam in Algeria. Leary had been arrested for possession of two roaches of marijuana, which he claimed were planted by police, and sentenced to ten years in prison.

  “I did the Village Gate benefit because Timothy Leary was a good guy to support,” says Johnny. “He got put in jail for almost nothing, and people didn’t think he deserved it. They threw him in jail just because he was a big guy in the drug scene and they didn’t like that.”

  Despite the band’s itinerary that included concerts at festivals and prestigious venues across the U.S. and Europe, they returned to Austin to play a benefit for the owners of the Vulcan Gas Company, which was in rough shape financially and about to go out of business.

  Shannon said they were happy to help because the Vulcan was “our old stomping grounds,” but Turner said their motivation to play the gig was not just based on purely altruistic reasons.

  “We came back and played it to be triumphant,” said Turner. “We wanted to show off and say, ‘All you people who never came here to see us, you’re all here now.”’

  Although the band reminisced about their early struggles and the roots
of their success when they played the Vulcan gig, changes were brewing that would quickly lead to the dissolution of that lineup. Johnny was becoming increasingly concerned about the impact of reviews trashing his rhythm section.

  “Reviewers seemed to feel like I was better than the rest of the band,” says Johnny. “Tommy and Red got a lot of that. I thought their playing was fine. The critics wanted fancier stuff. Tommy and Red were blues players and I think that hurt them. English critics were rougher on bands because they wanted a super group. We weren’t a super group; we were a blues band.”

  “People misunderstood that whole band,” Johnny told a creem reporter after the band parted ways. “It was supposed to be just what it was, a country, raw type blues thing. It wasn’t a Cream type thing where the drummer and bass player worked out; they were just there to play background, to play rhythm stuff.”

  Turner took the bad reviews in stride. “We quickly learned that the purpose is just to get your name out there,” he said. “Just getting them to talk about us is the important part.”

  Reviews that trashed or ignored the rhythm section cut Shannon to the bone, but he feels that now, with the passing of time, people have come to respect and acknowledge the power and talent of that lineup.

  “That hurt, that really hurt,” said Shannon. “But once we got up there and saw how these great musicians did it, we started to step up to the plate. We were playing our ass off. I feel vindicated now because people look at that band as the combination, especially after listening to the live recording of the show at the Royal Albert Hall. That Sony Legacy remastered edition of Second Winter in October 2004 was great because it included the concert at the Royal Albert Hall. It’s incredible; we were on fire.”

  “If it had been released in 1970, it would be revered today as one of the greatest live rock albums of all time, on a par with the Who’s Live at Leeds, the Rolling Stones Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, and the Allman Brothers Band Live at Fillmore East,” writes Andy Aledort in the liner notes. “The fact that Johnny’s biggest-selling record is Johnny Winter And Live only serves to strengthen the case.”