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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  With their live recording on its way up the charts, Johnny Winter And began a tour to follow up the release. In January and February 1971, they played concerts in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and England. During their off time in London, Johnny jammed with Traffic at a college gig. Two days later, Johnny celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday headlining the Royal Albert Hall.

  “The Royal Albert Hall show was like Oscar night with the red carpet,” said Caldwell. “Everybody who was in town came to see us that night: our competition, Johnny admirers, flaggers, whoever didn’t like us. It was a great show.”

  The band returned to the States in March for a three-night gig at the Fillmore East with the Elvin Bishop Group and the Allman Brothers. At Fillmore East, the Allman Brothers Band’s double album of that performance that earned a gold record and cemented that band’s reputation, was recorded at those shows.

  “The live At Fillmore East album gives you the impression they were headlining, but Johnny Winter And was the headliner,” said Caldwell. “That was probably the biggest rock show there outside of Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles at Shea Stadium. Bill Graham did a tremendous job. Believe me, when it’s time to go on, you better go on. It was run like a military operation.”

  Johnny’s touring schedule continued to be exhausting. He’d been playing a breakneck schedule of gigs and festivals since he moved to New York. “The first three years were pretty chaotic,” he says. “I was playing pretty much every night. We were busy all the time. We were always traveling—playing Europe and the States. Steve wanted us to work as much as possible and I wanted to play as much as I could.”

  Johnny needed drugs and alcohol to unwind and his drug use escalated with his fame.

  “After the gigs, we had parties in my hotel room,” he said. “We’d have psychedelic drugs and downs at the parties—usually Seconal—and I’d find a girl to go to bed with. The parties lasted three or four hours, just sittin’ around getting’ high, and talkin’. You’d be so keyed up from playing; it helped to take something to bring you down. You either drank or took a down. You get real anxious before you play, and it’s hard to calm down when you know you’re gonna be playin’ for a whole bunch of people. Believe me, if there’s not a bunch of people, I still get nervous. Even playin’ in small places. I was probably drinkin’ a fifth of Jack Daniels a night. When I did heroin, I wasn’t drinkin’ as much.”

  Caldwell remembers the tour schedule as grueling with added pressures hoisted on Johnny as the star.

  “We were playing three or four nights a week,” said Caldwell. “It was really grinding because we were travehng—going to the airports, then getting picked up, getting off the plane, getting into the cars, going to the hotels, from there getting to the gigs, doing sound check, coming back, meeting people. Johnny felt the pressure more. That’s the hook about being famous; the more people know who you are, the more demanding they are. You’re constantly being interviewed unless you’re in the car with the rest of the band or you’re home. I think Johnny felt that constant fishbowl thing in addition to traveling and playing.”

  With the continual touring and mounting pressure, Johnny viewed heroin as a harmless escape and made no bones about his drug use.

  “I didn’t hide it at all,” Johnny says. “I didn’t have any reason to hide it—I was real upfront about it. Everybody was pretty upfront about the drugs they did. They didn’t talk about heroin as much as I did—but everything else. People admitted their drug use more than they do now. People would tell me sometimes, ‘You shouldn’t be so open about this,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, why not?’ I didn’t realize it was different from pot or LSD or magic mushrooms or whatever. Steve Paul hated it; he didn’t want me to do it. He told me how bad it was and I said, ‘Yeah, maybe for some people but I’m smart enough to stay away [not get hooked] from it.’

  “Teddy Slatus didn’t like me doin’ heroin either. Nobody around me liked it. Edgar knew I was doin’ drugs—he did ’em with me but he stopped before it got too bad. When he knew I had a drug problem, he said he’d help in any way he could. I don’t think I would have ever wanted to do heroin if it hadn’t been for the fame. You just felt that lonely feeling; you couldn’t get away from it. With heroin, you didn’t feel bad about what was going on around you. Anybody that was trying to take advantage of you, you’d feel like you’re gettin’ what you wanted out of them. You didn’t care about what people were doin’ around you. You feel good within yourself and don’t care about anything else. Drugs are amazing—they help a lot of stuff. They just don’t keep lasting.”

  Heroin was considered to be just part of the scene. The band knew Johnny and Hobbs indulged, but had no idea of the extent of Johnny’s growing addiction.

  “It was common knowledge,” said Caldwell. “He certainly wasn’t trying to hide it from anyone in the band, and there was little made of it. No one had a problem; it was really a recreational drug, as dumb as that sounds. It was complete and total ignorance. I know Johnny didn’t realize the ramifications of it.”

  In April, Johnny Winter And played the Fillmore West and the Fillmore East. In May, Johnny appeared at Liberty Hall in Houston with Willie Dixon and the Chicago All Stars, which included Willie Dixon on bass and vocals, Lee Jackson on guitar, Lafayette Leake on piano, Big Walter Horton on harmonica, and Clifton James on drums. Although he was probably delighted to play with those blues icons, he has no memory of that show.

  Johnny Winter And played the Spectrum with the Allman Brothers Band and the Detroit Rock Revival with them as well as Edgar Winter’s White Trash, Bob Seger, and the J. Geils Band. They flew to London for another show at the Royal Albert Hall on June 22. When the band played a show at the Fillmore East two days later, the musicians had no idea it would be their final gig.

  “We were tearing it up—all the way to the point where he decided he had to go in to rehab,” said Caldwell. “If he had been completely straight, he would have been playing one hundred times better—but nobody in any rock ‘n’ roll band was straight. I don’t think Johnny was in that bad a shape—any better or any worse than most people—he was just a part of it.”

  Derringer was also taken by surprise when Johnny went into rehab. “We thought Johnny pretty much had it under control,” he told Muise. “Obviously, he was dabbling with heroin. But that’s all we thought it was. Just dabbling. We didn’t see it excessively, hardly at all. It wasn’t until he announced to us that he had a problem and he was going to stop the band and check himself into a hospital that we knew the problem was to that extent.”

  Johnny was in worse shape than he let on. Although he avoided overdosing by always letting somebody else shoot up first, within six months of mainlining every day, he had become a full-blown junkie.

  “I tried to stop, but it was very hard—almost impossible,” Johnny says. “I didn’t think it would happen to me. I thought I was keepin’ it under control. I didn’t think I was doin’ enough to get hooked. You started not being able to function correctly without doin’ some heroin. If you didn’t do it, you just didn’t feel good at all—you’d feel real emotionally messed up. Physically it was even worse. I had the shakes. If you did more heroin, you’d just get normal but it didn’t last very long. I was still playin’ out and I remember goin’ to California for the Fillmore West show and thinking, ‘What am I gonna do here? I don’t have any heroin and I gotta find somebody with some.’ I felt terrible. Physically and mentally. You just felt bad, felt like nothing else would help to get you back on track but doin’ some heroin. You hated yourself. As soon as that started to happen, I wanted to get away from it, but I couldn’t get away from it on my own.”

  In early July, Johnny’s management team told the band Johnny would be taking a break.

  “When Johnny went into the hospital in the summer of 1971, Johnny Winter And broke up,” said Caldwell. “There was talk of him taking a break or us taking a month off. It was rather sudden, but it wasn’t like any major calamity or anyt
hing. The band was blazin‘—we were having a good time but there was always some high drama. Everything is high drama with Johnny. It was like, ‘If there wasn’t a problem, let’s create one.’ That’s how it was with Steve Paul and Teddy running the ship. Steve slave-driving Johnny for his own end, and Teddy seeing the same movie as Steve.

  “This had been brewing for six weeks—we’d had a week or two off when they decided to pull the trigger. Teddy called and says Johnny’s decided he’s going to go in a hospital in New Orleans, we’re gonna take a break, we’re gonna send you a week or two weeks’ pay; or some crap. The obvious question for everyone was, ‘How long is he gonna be gone; how long is it gonna take?’

  “Curiously, I had gotten a telegram from a couple of guys in Iron Butterfly who wanted to put a band together with me. The timing couldn’t have been better. I went to L.A. and started Captain Beyond, a progressive-rock band, with the guys from Iron Butterfly [guitarist Rhino a.k.a. Larry Reinhardt and bassist Lee Dorman] and the original singer [Rod Evans] for Deep Purple. Rick moved over to play with Edgar and Randy just hung out and didn’t know what to do—poor guy.

  “Had Steve Paul and Teddy any brains and come to everybody and said, ‘Johnny is gonna take six months off or nine months off. Do whatever you got to do—we’ll put you on some kind of retainer so when Johnny’s feeling better, we can reconvene and get back to it.’ But because they were so opportunistic, greedy, and shortsighted—and so, ‘I can fix, replace anybody, anytime,’ they just missed the whole deal. Imagine if they had treated everybody right and that band had stayed together four or five years. It would have been a historical band; Johnny would have been worth a gazillion dollars and so would I. But they didn’t have the foresight to see that would have been the smart way to do it.”

  Derringer has also expressed resentment about the way that band dissolved, as well as doubts about the extent of Johnny’s addiction.

  “I still don’t think the problem was as drastic as he let on,” he told Muise. “I believe that what happened ... we were in England, touring. And he got a chance to see how they dealt with their drug addicts in England. They put them on a maintenance program. They allowed them to come and pick up their drugs, at cheap prices, from a pharmacy. Johnny returned from that trip to England and he said, many times, ‘Man, that looks great. You never have to worry about dealing on the street with people. You can just go and the government’s gonna give you the drugs for the rest of your life.’ He said, ‘Boy, that’s what I would like.’ So, in effect, I don’t think he had as much of a problem as he let on at that time.”

  To deny the extent of Johnny’s drug addiction or to believe he faked it to get on a methadone program demonstrates the bitterness some musicians still harbor against him for giving them a taste of success and then moving on without them. And also suggests just how close mouthed Johnny was with anyone who wasn’t an old friend from Texas.

  Despite the doubts of band members, Johnny was in rough shape, physically and mentally. Traveling with Roma, who was also frightened by his addiction, he went home to Texas to try to sort things out. Johnny saw what drugs had done to Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and knew that he, too, had lost control of his life.

  “You can’t make a career out of drugs, and they tried to,” Johnny says. “I did too. But I went for help because I didn’t want to die. I don’t think Jimi or Janis wanted to die, but I don’t think they wanted to admit they needed help. They probably didn’t think anybody could do them any good. You do have that feeling like the psychiatrists don’t know what they’re talking about. You’re smarter than they are—a lot of people have that idea that it just wasn’t gonna help. But I knew it was something I had to try before dying.”

  Johnny traveled to Beaumont to tell his mother he wanted to die and just couldn’t handle his lifestyle anymore. His parents suggested therapy with Dr. Burns Belk, the psychiatrist who had conducted his IQ tests when he was a child. “I had great parents; they wanted to help me and did what they could,” says Johnny. “They didn’t know what to say, really—it was so far beyond anything they could imagine.

  “Just trying therapy made things a little bit better. I went for sessions and talked to him but not for very long. It didn’t take too long before they put me in the hospital—they could tell I was suicidal. I was thinkin’ of how to do it. I thought I’d probably overdose on downs. I went through my first withdrawal right before I went in the hospital in Beaumont. They tried giving me tranquilizers, and I had sessions and group meetings. It helped, but not as much as I wanted it to—I still wanted drugs. They gave me antidepressants in the hospital and they just didn’t do much good.”

  Johnny stayed at the Beaumont Neurological Center for six weeks, but it became obvious the center wasn’t equipped to deal with heroin addicts. Dr. Belk researched other options and decided Johnny had a better chance at recovery as an inpatient at River Oaks Hospital in New Orleans.

  Pat Rush, a guitarist Johnny met during his stay at the New Orleans hospital who later joined him for the Nothin’ But the Blues tour and the recording sessions for White, Hot & Blue, remembers Johnny’s state of mind when he decided he needed help.

  “When Johnny was on the road with Derringer and those guys, they all were trying to see who could do the most dope and still play that night,” said Rush. “But Johnny was really getting tired. He was calling Steve up and saying, ‘I’m doing drugs to wake up, drugs to go to sleep, drugs to play, drugs for everything, I’m touring, and touring, and touring. I need time off.’ Steve would say, ‘Well, you’re gonna be off the road for a month when you’re in the studio.’ Anybody in the business knows that off means off, not working in the studio. He finally got fed up, so he checked himself into River Oaks. I thought that was pretty amazing—that he did it himself.”

  Steve Paul remembers it differently. “I remember him expressing unhappiness, but don’t recall him seriously speaking of suicide,” Paul said. “At one point I called his parents and asked them to put him in rehab. I cancelled a virtually sold-out arena tour, and my only concern was that he get better.”

  Celebrities being treated for addiction and hospitals focused on addictive disorders were not an everyday occurrence in 1971. Many publications reporting Johnny’s hiatus referred to River Oaks as a mental hospital; a 1972 Rulling Stone article described him as “Johnny Winter, frail Texas albino bluesman/turned/rock superstar/turned/ mental hospital inmate.”

  “River Oaks was completely drug free and I thought I’d give that a try,” says Johnny. “They took in heroin addicts and a lot of different kinds of addicts—speed and everything else. I was in that hospital for nine months without doing anything at all. There were several floors and had eight people in a room. The people always changed—people got out and new ones came in. They had all kinds of manic depressives, people who had drug problems, any kind of mental problem you can imagine. It was all mental stuff. There were both girls and guys in the hospital—girls had their own rooms.”

  Withdrawal symptoms, which begin from six to forty-eight hours after stopping habitual heroin use and subside after a week, include dilated pupils, diarrhea, runny nose, goose bumps, abdominal pain, fever, physical and mental agitation, nausea, and vomiting. Kicking a long-term habit is also accompanied by a feeling of heaviness, cramps, cold sweats, chills, and severe muscle and bone aches. Quitting cold turkey causes muscle spasms in the legs and increases the intensity of withdrawal symptoms, including drug cravings, headaches, sleeplessness, confusion, depression, and anxiety.

  According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, heroin literally changes the brains and behavior of users because the body adapts to the presence of the drug. Heroin withdrawal can’cause serious physical and emotional trauma, including stroke, heart attack, and even death. To avoid that risk, conventional treatment uses drugs such as methadone or valium to wean addicts off of heroin in a controlled environment. But the River Oaks Hospital staff decided Johnny could withstand withdrawal without me
dical intervention, and made him kick heroin cold turkey.

  “They didn’t give me any drugs for withdrawal; you just had to make it on your own,” says Johnny. “I felt horrible for three months, mentally and physically. I thought I would die. Physical withdrawal lasted a couple of months—you can’t sleep and you can’t eat. I started to feel a little better after three months because I could finally sleep. But it went beyond physical addiction; it affected you long after the physical withdrawal. The mental part was the worst part; psychological addiction was the hardest part to get rid of. When you’re tryin’ to get off of heroin, it messes with your head. It’s horrible, just horrible. There’s no way to explain how bad it makes you feel. You just don’t feel like you have any control over anything. Things you would normally love, you don’t care about anymore. It’s the worst feeling in the world and you can’t make it go away. Except without doing more drugs.”

  Johnny couldn’t have visitors for the first six months at River Oaks Hospital. He didn’t mind the isolation; he was committed to cleaning up his act.

  “At first I didn’t like havin’ people visit me,” says Johnny. “I was trying to get rid of my drug problem—I didn’t want to have people comin’ in and tellin’ me what they were doin’. I was in the hospital six months before Carol could come see me. That first visit was real nice. She’d come down every once in a while after that—some of my friends came to see me too. Uncle John and Keith Ferguson. Nobody from New York came to visit—not Steve Paul, Teddy, or Rick Derringer—just my friends from Texas. Steve and Teddy called so it didn’t bother me they didn’t visit.”

  Like most inpatient facilities, the days were structured between individual counseling sessions, group sessions, recreation, and personal down time.