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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  To the chagrin of those girlfriends, Johnny invited Susan to join the band for the initial leg of the Still Alive and Well tour. “That was kinda silly,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know why I wanted to do it, it was worse than Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney. It’s ridiculous how people can get that way. I thought it would be fun. She played tambourine and she played a beer can one night. The first night Susan played tambourine with the band, she was scared to death. She was supposed to just stand there and beat the tambourine. She finally realized she was gonna have to drink to do it. Susan played a few gigs with us. She played Midnight Special too. She wasn’t in the band very long. Two or three months, maybe.”

  Following the release of Still Alive and Well, Paul booked a coliseum tour of dates from March to June, with Foghat opening in April and May. That tour culminated at the June 16 show at Madison Square Garden. To create a look for that tour, Paul hired Bill Witten, a theatrical costume designer, whose musical clients included Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores, and the Jackson Five. During their initial meeting, Johnny demonstrated his own sense of style.

  “I’ll never forget the first time we went to meet Bill Witten,” said Susan. “We were meeting him and Steve at the 21 Club or Sardi’s. Johnny decided to wear a wraparound skirt I had made out of Indian material a couple of years before. I let Johnny walk ahead of me. I was so embarrassed; I had to walk about four feet behind him.”

  “I took the train from Connecticut to New York wearing that skirt and people laughed and said, ‘What are you advertising? What are you sellin’?’” Johnny recalls. “I had my fingernails painted different colors, and I was wearing cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a cowboy shirt, and a cloth skirt with a lot of different colors that hung down halfway between my knees and ankles. We took a cab from Grand Central to the restaurant. The driver didn’t say anything—as long as he got paid, he could care less. Bill Witten thought I was funny. He liked my outfit, but Steve just went crazy. He scrunched down in the seat as much as possible like he didn’t want to know me. I just wanted to freak everybody out, and it worked.”

  Witten designed costumes for Johnny’s touring band, which included Susan, Hobbs, Hughes, and Jimmy Gillan, his old drummer from the Act III, as a second drummer. “Jimmy was a friend and he needed a gig real bad at the time,” says Johnny. “So I used two drummers for that whole tour. He was a pretty good beater, but much too jazzy.”

  Johnny wore a black velvet cape with a red satin lining over a white spandex jumpsuit with silver-studded bellbottoms, suspenders, and a studded collar. His costume included an amethyst medallion that he wore on his bare chest and studded armbands adorned with silver streamers that draped down toward the floor. All band members wore a different colored spandex costume—Susan’s was pale blue and cut low in the front, Gillan’s was red and orange, Hobbs wore blue, and Hughes’s costume was green.

  “My jumpsuit was real stretchy, so it was pretty comfortable,” says Johnny. “We wore those outfits for about six or eight months. After I stopped wearing it, I gave it to the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur.”

  During that tour, Johnny was the consummate showman, playing on his knees, with his guitar held over his head, and behind his back. “Never learned how to play with my teeth though,” he says, and cites Mick Jagger as his main influence for showmanship. Although his stage antics were a guaranteed crowd pleaser, he admits to having mixed feelings about combining theatrics with his music.

  “Showmanship was a big part of it, but I didn’t want it to be a main thing,” he says. “Because I couldn’t play guitar as well when I was doin’ all that fancy stuff. It’s fun to do it once, but if you have to keep doing it over again, it quits bein’ fun. People expect it of you,”

  In 1973, late night TV shows featuring live rock ‘n’ roll performances debuted on two networks. Paul used his contacts in the industry—Don Kirshner and people involved with The Midnight Special—to hook Johnny up with what would be the precursors of MTV.

  On July 6, 1973, Johnny appeared on The Midnight Special, a weekly late night rock ‘n’ roll show that debuted that February. Catering to hip, young audiences, the show aired on NBC at 1 AM on Saturday mornings. Guest host Jose Feliciano performed a few songs, and introduced artists Savoy Brown, the Staple Singers, Stories, and Tower of Power. Johnny headlined that show performing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Rock & Roll.”

  Despite his mesmerizing performance, Johnny had been reluctant to perform that night because of technical problems at rehearsals earlier that day. “The rehearsal before the show was so terrible, I felt like walking out,” he says. “It’s hard to play on a soundstage with cameras and they just didn’t know what to do with us. They tried to get us to play quieter and we couldn’t play quieter. Midnight Special was a rock ‘n’ roll show—you thought they’d know what they were doing. But they didn’t know how to record people—how to get the sound right when you’re playing loud.”

  Johnny also appeared on Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert, a TV show that aired at 1 AM on Sunday mornings. Kirshner filmed Johnny’s appearance at New York’s Palace Theatre. That late night show included footage of rousing versions of “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Silver ‘Train,” and his trademark “Johnny B. Goode.”

  Although Johnny enjoyed having Susan on the road with him, there were obvious drawbacks to having his girlfriend in the band. “I couldn’t go out with other girls, and I couldn’t get any groupies,” he says. Eventually his touring schedule, with its late nights, and four weeks on the road for every week off, became too grueling. After six months on the road, Susan decided to stay in New York when Johnny was touring. Although they enjoyed their private time together, having Johnny leave to go back on the road bothered Susan a lot more than it bothered him.

  “I didn’t mind goin’ on the road ’cause I got to be with somebody else,” he says. “Usually I was with other people because I wasn’t used to being true to one person. It was something I knew I couldn’t do and I told her that. She put up with it for a long time.”

  Yet living with Johnny was not without its advantages. To escape the stifling temperatures of New York City summers, he always rented a big summer house with a pool in Westport, Connecticut for vacations and rehearsals.

  “We needed a place to practice and I thought it’d be a nice idea to get a band house, where the band could come up and stay and practice. They wouldn’t have to go back home every night,” he says. “It’s tough to stay in New York during the summer ’cause it’s so hot.”

  Johnny still has vivid memories of the night one of the Westport houses caught fire.

  “God, that was terrible. We had the fireplace lit, stayed up all night talking, went to sleep, and didn’t wake up till about three in the afternoon. Susan saw smoke and I threw a glass of water on it but the fire was huge. Flames were up into the framing, into the roof of the house. The fire department came in and said, ‘Get out of here, get the fuck out of here.’ We wanted to get our stuff but they said, ‘Get out of here now, don’t get anything, just get out of here.’ They stole some grass we had too, those mother fuckers. Stole my grass. Course they didn’t want us to take anything out of there—bastards.”

  That fall, after a successful Still Alive and Well tour that proved his hiatus hadn’t hurt his career, Johnny embarked on two projects, dividing his time between the Big Easy and the Big Apple. He produced and played on an album with Thunderhead and began work on Saints and Sinners, his last album on the Columbia label. He had agreed to help Thunderhead with its first LP, so when the band was ready to record, their manager Bill Evans sent Johnny a demo tape. Johnny liked what he heard, and two weeks later, Evans and Torello flew to New York to discuss the project. It was the first time Torello met his hero, and his eyes still light up when he talks about it.

  “When I first heard Johnny play, I knew I’m made to play with this guy,” said Torello, who later played on White, Hot & Blu
e and Raisin’ Cain and toured with him for many years. “When I first met him, he was like my long lost brother. Me and him clicked like I never clicked with anybody before. We’re still that tight. I liked everything he did, the way he went about things, his attitude, everything—even the male chauvinistic part of him. I liked it all.

  “When we were doing the Thunderhead record, we’d stay up, hang out, talk, and party all night long. We were out on this farm with nothing to do. We had a bow and arrow and Johnny says, ‘What am I going to shoot at?’ So I started running around, being a target, letting him shoot at me. We had some really good times.”

  The Thunderhead sessions were held in Evan’s studio in Bogalusa, an hour away from New Orleans. Johnny played guitar and produced the sessions; Edgar played piano and sang background harmonies. Although the entire band was thrilled with the sessions Johnny produced, politics came into play, and those sessions never made it onto the final record.

  “It was a typical industry scam,” said Rush. “We had a lawyer in California who represented artists. He began shopping the finished LP in L.A. and got ABC Records interested. He also represented a producer who produced the Osmonds and Cher. So he finagled a deal where he got us a record deal with ABC Records and brought in this other guy to produce the LP. They treated the album we had recorded as a demo, so we went back into the studio and rerecorded the entire LP.”

  Redoing the album without Johnny and Edgar and with a different producer resulted in a recording that didn’t capture the band’s sound, and created bad feelings all around. “When we had to do it over, we couldn’t get Johnny back down again and Edgar was busy touring,” said Rush. “The first LP was all original tunes we had written together; they had us do some cover tunes on the second album. If you listen to the first non-album, it’s pretty big sounding, real rock sounding, typical of the band. You listen to the ABC-produced LP and the guy buried everything in reverb. It sounded like he was doing another Cher or Osmond Brothers album.”

  Torello blames the band’s naivete for ending up with a record and a deal that didn’t include Johnny in the producer’s role or any of the sessions with Johnny and Edgar.

  “Johnny played on the Thunderhead demo; he was totally instrumental in getting our deal and they screwed him out of that,” said Torello. “Thunderhead signed the wrong damn contract and Johnny ended up not being the producer. He got knocked out by the money people and he was doing it all for nothing. He didn’t even charge us because he was good friends with us. It was a hell of a time. We didn’t talk for a while because they screwed him. Later we got back together and talked about everything and he realized it wasn’t our fault; we were just stupid idiots and signed the wrong deal.”

  In the winter of 1973-1974, Johnny returned to the Hit Factory to cut Saints and Sinners, which was recorded quickly and released by Columbia in February 1974. Derringer produced the album (“I thought he was a good guy to produce it because he knew what I wanted”), which included Johnny on guitar and vocals; Derringer on guitar; Dan Hartman on piano, bass, and guitar; Edgar on keyboards and sax; Bobby Caldwell and Richard Hughes on drums; Randy Brecker, Alan Rubin, and Lew Del Gatto on trumpet; and Jeremy Steig on flute.

  The album included two of Johnny’s originals (“Bad Luck Situation” and “Hurtin’ So Bad”), and veered away from blues with songs by Chuck Berry, the Stones, Van Morrison, Leiber and Stoller, and Alan Toussaint. “That album had more of a soulful direction because I wanted to try something a little different,” says Johnny. “It didn’t get a great response.”

  Before Johnny embarked on a coliseum tour to promote Saints and Sinners in late 1974, he recruited a second guitarist.

  “Johnny auditioned seven guys,” said Brockie. “After the last one, he turned to Richard and said, ‘Should we audition Dougie?’ I had an old Les Paul, with those old soap-bar pickups—the Gibson P-90 pickups that were predecessors to the PAF humbuckers. I knew all the material and Rick had shown me many tricks when he jammed with me in Cobalt. I got the job ’cause I played ‘I Love Everybody’ at the audition. Johnny had forgotten the tune, and said to me, ‘What’s that song?’ I said, ‘It’s yours.’”

  When Johnny hired Brockie, he had an unusual way of letting him know. “What did he say when he hired me?” said Brockie with laugh. “He said, ‘Fuck you, Dougie.’ That’s what he always used to say. He was a really funny guy. He’d be leaving the room, and he’d turn and give you the finger, and say, ‘Hey Dougie, fuck you.’ He was twenty-nine, and I was nineteen. We were both really young guys.”

  Brockie moved into the Westport, Connecticut mansion Paul had rented for the band. “We rehearsed in the mansion in October, November, and December 1973,” said Brockie. “Living in that house was amazing. Some days, Johnny and me would be in the living room, taking solos in our underwear, jumping from couch to couch. It was the greatest; we had so much fun together. It was a family type thing; hangin’ out and playin’ at the house in Connecticut.”

  The Saints and Sinners tour ran from February through June 1974, and included sold-out coliseum shows in major cities in the United States and Canada. It was a big adjustment for a nineteen-year-old to go from small clubs and school dances to sold-out coliseums.

  “The night before my first coliseum gig with Johnny, we did a huge club in Jacksonville just to loosen up,” Brockie said. “To go from a club to a 30,000-seater is pretty scary. They had to give me a sedative so I wouldn’t jump out of my skin. It was funny, because Johnny was as calm as could be. It was nothing to him; he was never nervous. Never. He wasn’t doing much in the way of drugs at that point. Johnny drank a lot of booze and smoked a lot of weed but that was about it. Man, he could put down booze. He could put down a fifth a night before hitting the stage and play perfect.”

  Johnny’s resolve to stay away from hard drugs led to an increase in his drinking, so there are some events where he has very little recollection. One was the February 12, 1974 grand opening of the Bottom Line in Greenwich Village, which celebrated its debut with a jam that included Johnny, Dr. John, and Stevie Wonder.

  “I don’t remember much about the grand opening—I was drinkin’ a lot back then,” he says. “I drank a lot of different things. Gin, peppermint schnapps, scotch. Scotch is nasty tasting—I drank a lot of nasty tasting things because I figured I wouldn’t drink as much. I drank bourbon and grapefruit juice. That must have been the worst possible combination of anything, and I still drank a lot of it.”

  Rush remembers a wild night in New Orleans when he and Johnny attempted to sit in with a band at the Ivanhoe at the corner of Toulouse and Bourbon Street.

  “We’d been out partying and had drank quite a bit of Chivas before we went to the bar,” Rush said. “We sat at a table and Johnny leaned over and said, ‘Pat, no matter what, don’t let me get up and play. I’m too drunk—I can’t stand up.’ We’re there five minutes, and the band sees Johnny and calls him up to play a song. Johnny stands up, ‘Yeah!’ I pull him back in the chair and say, ‘Johnny, no. You’re too drunk; don’t do it.’ He said, ‘Come on, Pat, just one song. I’ll sit on a stool and sing, and you play guitar.’ So we got up and he sat on a stool. He had his top hat on and his fringed jacket. He leaned back to hit a note, the stool fell backward, and he fell into the drums and knocked the drums over on top of the drummer. I had to pick him up off the floor and take him out of the place—it was hilarious. We had some pretty amazing adventures in New Orleans.”

  Johnny had grown up watching Superman on TV, so when the plane from that series became available, he couldn’t resist.

  “We had a small plane, and then we got a big plane,” said Brockie. “The engine caught on fire on the little plane. The pilot’s name was Johnny Walker. Johnny couldn’t see, so I told him, ‘You better tell Walker to keep the plane on the runway ’cause the engine’s on fire.’ Johnny says, ‘Ah, shit!’ and we didn’t take off. Then we got the old plane from the original George Reeves Superman TV series. Grand Funk had owned it and
then Steve Paul leased it. We could run laps in that plane. Sometimes we didn’t know if we’d get off the runway.”

  Hughes recorded the shows every night during that tour. The band listened to the tapes on the plane on the way to the next gig, and Johnny didn’t always like what he heard.

  “As soon as my solo came up, Johnny would come down to where I was sitting, jumping up and down, going, ‘You’re fired!’ said Brockie with a laugh. “I played my ass off and he fired me every night and hired me the next day. It was constantly a terrifying, scary experience. He had a great sense of humor but he was being serious too. He let you know when you’re doing too much. He went through that with Rick too. He would jump up and read you the riot act and let you know: this is the Johnny Winter band and you can get yourself in trouble. Rick and I were on-fire type guys. You’re only as good as the players you’re with. If you had great guys around you, it makes you play better.”

  A highlight of that tour was Johnny’s second sold-out appearance at Madison Square Garden. “Hearing all those people screaming was amazing,” said Brockie. “Johnny was wearing that silver shirt with one sleeve over the shoulder, a scarf, and big high-heeled boots. We all wore scarves on our belts. I had on a rainbow-checkered shirt with leather pants. I remember Jon Lord from Deep Purple coming backstage. He had his dB-level recorder with him and came back and said, ‘Johnny Winter’s band is now officially the loudest band on Earth.’ Richard recorded it, but unfortunately he left the cassette backstage.”

  During that tour, two shows were recorded for the King Biscuit Flower Hour, a nationally syndicated radio program of live concert performances that debuted the previous year. The shows included a gig at Toad’s Place in New Haven, Connecticut, and a gig at the Long Beach Arena in California. Johnny didn’t like the New Haven performance because the band was too conscious of being recorded, but they tore it up at the Long Beach show.