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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  At the beginning of the service, Waters’s slide and vocals came alive over the sound system with “They Call Me Muddy Waters,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and “Got My Mojo Workin’.” The sermon unnerved Johnny as well.

  “Hearing Muddy’s music was strange,” he says. “It was so final. You know you’re not ever gonna hear him playing again. The sermon was pretty lame. The preacher didn’t talk about how Muddy got to be the person that he was. I don’t think he even knew him.”

  Johnny traveled to the cemetery for the burial, devastated by the loss of his friend and mentor. That feeling stayed with him for quite a while. “Muddy’s death affected Johnny a lot,” said Susan. “They were close; he was very upset. He really loved Muddy after working with him. Spend a little time with him and you can’t help but love the man. He was just a wonderful person.”

  Johnny eased his pain through music, appearing on Tribute to Muddy on MTV and playing several tribute shows, including a Lone Star gig with John Mayall and Canned Heat.

  1982 was hard on the blues and on Johnny. Earlier that year, he lost another hero when Lightnin’ Hopkins died at the age of sixty-nine. “Nobody sounds like Lightnin’,” says Johnny. “He really had a unique style. Lightnin’ didn’t like me too much. I did ‘That Girlfriend’ and he thought I was stealing his songs. That’s just the way he was—he was a character. So I didn’t ever really get close to Lightnin’ but I still respected him a whole lot.

  “When the older guys are gone, it makes it harder on the blues. So many of the good players have died. I don’t think people are as good today. Blues is a little more planned, not as spontaneous as it used to be. Not as real, not as much from the heart. It’s the way people go about makin’ their records; they’re more concerned with sales. If the blues is gonna live on, there has to be new people coming on. Like Derek Trucks—I played with him and I like him a lot; he’s real good.”

  Although Paul still wasn’t having much luck getting Johnny signed to a major label, he arranged Johnny’s appearance on MTV’s Tribute to Muddy, Late Night with David Letterman, and Nightline (with B. B. King), in the spring and summer 1983. Paul’s strategy was to showcase Johnny to wider audiences. “TV appearances are always good and those were good TV shows,” said Paul.

  “Steve wanted to get me as much TV coverage as possible,” says Johnny. “I thought it was good but to actually perform on a show is hard. You have to know how to talk to a host. I was expecting Dave Letterman to be real shitty, but he was real polite, nicer than I thought he would be. He wasn’t trying to make jokes about me or anything. I played ‘Johnny B. Goode’ with Paul Shafer and the band. Paul was always a real nice guy and his band was easy to play with because they were good musicians. Nightline was on a strange time at night, so you had a lot of night people on it and watchin’ it too. Me and B. B. played little parts together and talked about what it was like to play the blues. It was just the two of us—I played one of my songs; he’d play one of his. I don’t think TV appearances helped my career much. I still wanted to change managers ’cause Steve wasn’t gettin’ any record deals.”

  After Johnny fulfilled his Columbia contract, Steve Paul remained convinced that Johnny needed to play rock ‘n’ roll to get another record deal. Johnny reluctantly recorded five rock songs for a demo, which Paul shopped to various labels with no luck. “It’s not always easy getting a record deal,” Paul said. “Alligator Records is a great record label, but I still hoped we would get a deal with a major label.”

  “Steve wanted me to do more rock ‘n’ roll again but I didn’t want to,” says Johnny. “Nobody would let me do a straight-ahead blues album. Everybody wanted some kind of a modern, new improved Johnny Winter and that’s not what I wanted. I felt like I should be able to make it as a blues artist. Steve didn’t want to go to a blues label—he was waitin’ to get something better.”

  After Blue Sky dissolved, Steve Paul still managed several other artists and started producing off-Broadway plays. Johnny felt he was spreading himself too thin. “He had too many people and didn’t do enough work for his individual clients,” says Johnny. “It was just time for us to part. Steve didn’t really want to have another blues act; he wanted it to be bigger than that.”

  According to Steve Paul, “the relationship was no longer working,” and he stopped managing Johnny for “various” reasons. Yet the obvious (and unspoken) one was Johnny’s switch to blues, which would never give him the fame or income he made as a rock star. But Johnny didn’t care about playing coliseums or the money those gigs generated. He had loved the blues for nearly thirty years and it was time—once again—to follow his heart.

  Unhappy with Paul, Johnny asked Teddy Slatus, his road manager and Paul’s right-hand man, to manage his career. “I got real upset with Steve Paul because he wasn’t doin’ anything,” says Johnny. “I’d been trying to get Teddy to be my manager for a long time and he couldn’t break off from Steve. He felt like he owed a lot to Steve Paul, but finally he realized Steve was holding him back and wasn’t doin’ anything for me. He saw Steve pretending he wasn’t there every time I came to the office. Steve knew what I wanted and he didn’t want the same thing, so he’d hide. Steve was trying to make me a big star; he wanted me to be the American Rolling Stones. I didn’t want that—I wanted to be a great bluesman. So Teddy quit workin’ for Steve and started working for me. Teddy made my career as a bluesman, instead of a rock ’n’ roller.”

  Although Slatus was reluctant to leave Paul, who had taught him everything he knew, he too wasn’t happy with the situation. “Steve somehow screwed over Teddy and they were both mad at him,” said Susan.

  Working out of a phone booth for the first few months, Slatus allowed Johnny to call the shots. “Teddy worked real hard but he was scared of doing everything on his own,” says Johnny. “He never had been a manager before, but he’d been around Steve a lot so he picked it up pretty quick. I had a better personal relationship with Teddy because he cared. He really tried to make things work for me. Steve didn’t.”

  The timing couldn’t have been better. In 1983, Stevie Ray Vaughan crossed over to the rock charts with “Pride and Joy,” a Top Twenty hit from Texas Flood. Vaughan’s success with that debut record ignited a blues revival and made Johnny more determined than ever to make another blues record.

  “Stevie was like a one-man blues revival,” said Iglauer. “Between the era of Butterfield and Mayall and Johnny, there was nobody new who was bringing blues and blues-based music to a rock ‘n’ roll audience. There was this huge gap of time—literally ten, fifteen years—when blues was totally on the back burner in the rock ‘n’ roll world. When Stevie emerged, it was a huge breath of fresh air.”

  “Stevie’s success showed there was still a market for blues,” says Johnny. “Stevie being relatively young helped introduce younger people to the blues because they could identify with him. I’d been thinking about signing with Alligator for a while because they were the best blues label around. Finally I told Steve if he didn’t call Alligator, I’d do it myself. The last thing Steve did was negotiate my Alligator contract.”

  11

  THE ILLUSTRATED MAN AND THE ALLIGATOR

  Once Paul made the initial contact with Iglauer, Slatus became the point person and demonstrated his reputation as “the crusher” when he negotiated Johnny’s record deal.

  “The meeting in New York with Steve was sort of odd,” said Iglauer. “He was arrogant and pushy, very full of himself. I negotiated the deal with Teddy. I was very nervous; I knew this could be a big deal for me. The only other white guy I ever recorded was Johnny Otis. I bent over backward to make sure it was gonna happen and I should’ve fought a little harder. If I realized how eager Johnny was to do it, I wouldn’t have been so flexible.”

  Iglauer described Slatus as an insecure man with “artificial friendliness” that catered to Johnny. “He would always ask me how my mother was,” Iglauer said. “You could tell right away he didn’t give a shit. Te
ddy always asked me how he looked. ‘Do I look okay?’ I’ve never seen a guy so insecure in my life.”

  While Slatus was working on his record deal, Johnny began his lifelong love affair with tattoos. With his opaque, translucent skin, Johnny was a tattoo artist’s dream. He became intrigued when he watched Keith Ferguson get inked by Spider Webb. When Webb told him his tattoos would be more vibrant because it would be like drawing on white paper instead of brown, he was hooked.

  “I was about to turn forty and wanted to do something different that wouldn’t be destructive and tattoos seemed like the best thing. I figured I was old enough—it wouldn’t be like getting one ’cause you’re young and stupid—it would be more like old and stupid,” he says with a laugh.

  Johnny asked Webb to do a few lines without ink to see how it felt. When “it didn’t really hurt much,” he had several stars and starbursts tattooed on his right arm. The most painful was the multicolored dragon—the “Screamin’ Demon”—covering his chest. He found inker Kevin Brady at Sunset Strip Tattoo, across the street from the Continental Hyatt House on Sunset Boulevard. A favorite haunt of rock stars, the hotel became known as the Riot House after Led Zeppelin rode Harleys down the hallway, tossed TVs out the windows, and hosted orgies with drugged-out groupies.

  “It was a Riot House,” says Johnny with a laugh. “A lot of artists stayed there. Girls and guys coming around all hours of the night, dope dealers, throwing TVs out the window. I just happened to see Sunset Strip Tattoo when I was staying there. I’d heard of Kevin Brady before and seen his work in tattoo magazines. He designed it for me; I thought it was cool lookin’. It took two days—one day to do the outline and the next day to fill it in. About five hours each day—with breaks. You had to take breaks in between ’cause it hurts like hell. I drank vodka and smoked when I was gettin’ it—that helped.”

  Johnny’s recollections in an interview for the Summer 1989 issue of Easy Riders: Tattoo Magazine of Skin Art are more vivid. “Man, it really fuckin’ hurt,” he said. “The second day it did. I was so drunk the first day I didn’t know what it was. He put on Vaseline and all this shit, put the bandage on, and I woke up and didn’t know what the fuck it was.... What the fuck did I get? Am I gonna like this?”

  Although his signature has been tattooed on the breast and/or groin of several girlfriends through the years, he never had a woman’s name tattooed on his body. His reasons for getting new tattoos are based on his mood and location. He started with six in 1984; his latest tattoo makes a total of nineteen.

  “I kept getting them ’cause it reminds you of where you were at the time and it’s fun getting ’em,” he says. “You feel like you’ve done something when you go through the pain. I got tattoos in Australia, Sweden, Germany. New Jersey, San Francisco. I’ve gotten ’em all over. I got the state of Texas with the yellow rose of Texas tattoo in Austin. The one I got in Sweden is an off-the-wall tattoo. The tattoo guy designed it; it took about four hours. It’s my guitar cord and a bunch of different things and the end of it is a dick,” he says, proudly displaying the artwork on his arms.

  Most tattoos hurt for several days after the inking. “The one on my chest hurt the most though because it was right there on the bone,” he adds. “Getting tattoos is kind of a macho trip; I’ve always wanted to do it just to see if it would hurt.”

  His parents took his newfound hobby in stride. “Momma thought it was pretty strange but she knew I was strange all the way around so it didn’t surprise her too much,” says Johnny. “Same thing with Daddy. I think they both wondered why I wanted to do it but they didn’t ask.”

  In 1985 Guitar World ran a photo essay of Johnny, Dickey Betts, and Brian Setzer displaying their tattoos. Johnny’s photo also graced the cover of Easy Riders: Tattoo Magazine of Skin Art in 1989. Getting tattooed exposed Johnny’s skin, and his music, to a new audience.

  “A lot of bikers like my music now that didn’t before I got tattooed,” he says. “More bikers bought my records because they identified with me.”

  A line drawing of Johnny’s Lazer guitar, a streamlined instrument that resembles a Steinberger bass, accompanied the 1989 interview “Rockin’ Tattoo Blues.” He bought it from luthier Mark Erlewine in the early 1980s, but didn’t start playing it until 1984, when he broke a string on his Firebird.

  Erlewine, who made the Automatic guitar for Johnny’s friend Billy Gibbons in ZZ Top (as well as Don Felder of the Eagles and Mark Knopfler from Dire Straits), brought a Chiquita, a guitar about a foot shorter than a Stratocaster, to Johnny’s gig at the Austin Opry House. Johnny liked the Chiquita. The following year, Erlewine showed him a Lazer, a lightweight full-scale guitar, and Johnny bought a black model.

  “I remember trying it and liking it,” says Johnny. “It feels real good and it s pretty lightweight. The Lazer is a little bit easier to play than the Firebird. The action is as high, but the strings pull easier. It sounds close to a Fender. It’s a better sounding guitar than the Firebird; it’s more biting and has more of a treble sound. But I still use the Firebird on slide songs; the slide still sounds better on the Firebird.”

  An instrument Johnny refers to as “the closest thing I’ve found to sounding like a Strat and feeling like a Gibson,” the Lazer is thirty-one inches long and weighs only five-and-a-half pounds. A headless guitar, it has a single-coil pickup, a humbucker, and neck-through-body construction. With twenty-four frets, compared to the Firebird’s twenty-two, the Lazer’s design extends the range from a D to an E, and makes it easier to play the high notes.

  Some of Johnny’s fans aren’t too thrilled with his switch to the Lazer, and believe it can’t compare with the sound of a Firebird. Johnny takes it in stride. “People have gotten used to the Firebird and want it. I’ve had people that are really angry that I started playing a different guitar. People see something up there onstage, and it’s like a member of the band. ‘Don’t use a different guitar,’” he mimics in an affected voice. ‘We know that one, we’ve seen it before.’”

  Johnny was excited about working with Iglauer and recording on Alligator, but was adamant about retaining creative control. “I was surprised because Bruce tried to get me to do more commercial stuff, more rock blues actually,” he says. “I think he figured if I did something more like ‘Highway 61’ it would sell better. I had to tell him it wasn’t what I wanted to do; I went to Alligator so I could do blues.”

  Johnny flew into Chicago before the sessions, and met Iglauer at Shurman’s house to discuss the songs and musicians for the first record. “Johnny wanted to make a real blues album with real blues players and not with rock players playing blues,” said Iglauer. “We sat and discussed songs at length, throwing around ideas, and we all came up with songs. It was a great learning experience in terms of learning what Johnny knew. I wasn’t used to somebody knowing songs I didn’t know, much less Dick didn’t know. He’s a real encyclopedia.”

  Iglauer chose Albert Collins’s rhythm section—Johnny B. Gayden on bass and Casey Jones on drums—as the core of Johnny’s studio band. After two rehearsals at the Dress Rehearsal in Chicago, they went into the studio. Iglauer also brought in Ken Saydak on keyboards; Gene Barge, a former studio musician at Chess Records, on tenor sax; the Mellow Fellow Horns; and harp players James Cotton and Billy Branch.

  Branch played harmonica on “Iodine in My Coffee” but Cotton’s performance never made any of the early Alligator recordings. He played harp on “Murdering Blues,” but it was remixed for Serious Business, with Paris redoing the harmonica part. Cotton also played on “Nothing But the Devil,” on Deluxe Edition, a compilation CD released by Alligator in 2001.

  Johnny’s touring band, consisting of Paris and Tom Compton on drums, took a break while Johnny made his Alligator recordings. Johnny hired Compton when Torello left. Despite the band’s great chemistry, Johnny was happy to use studio musicians on his Alligator recordings. “I thought those guys were probably better for a blues feel,” says Johnny. “I’d heard the Ice Breaker
s play with Albert and I’d seen Ken Saydak playing with Lonnie Brooks. I liked Ken Saydak. He wasn’t more powerful than Dr. John but he was good. We used horns for songs that needed a Gulf Coast sound. It was hard to find players that could play blues with power without gettin’ in the way, but Bruce did it. That record went pretty quick because the group was so good.”

  Johnny’s first Alligator sessions were held at Red Label Recording Studio in the mansion of Dick Meyer, a Jovan CEO who lived in a North Shore suburb of Chicago. Iglauer didn’t like the physical limitations of the basement studio but booked it to work with Fred Breitberg, the house engineer who had designed the studio. Iglauer and Shurman had worked with Breitberg before and he knew how to get the sound they wanted. Unfortunately, booking a studio in someone’s home would prove to be damaging to Johnny and Iglauer’s budding relationship.

  “Bruce got us kicked out the second night,” says Johnny. “Dick Meyer didn’t want us there anymore. He had brought us some champagne he wanted everybody to share, and Bruce said, ‘This isn’t a party—it’s a recording session.’ Bruce didn’t want us to stop. He felt like it was his money and his time. He was being a real asshole about it. I can see where he wanted to get things going, but it wouldn’t hurt to take fifteen minutes off and drink champagne with the guy. The next day, Bruce told me we were kicked out of the studio. It was my first session with Alligator and I was kinda pissed off. We were gettin’ used to the place and he gets us kicked out.”

  Iglauer remembers the situation differently. “We didn’t get kicked out—I left,” he said. “I got in an argument and stormed out. It was at least the third night. Normally, you book the studio, and essentially you own your section of the studio. It’s your time, it’s your space.

  “The owner came down in the middle of our struggling to get a Magic Sam song that wasn’t coming off right. He didn’t buzz down and say, ‘When you’re taking a break, I’d like to come down and have champagne.’ He just appeared. I was really tense because the song wasn’t happening and he was a convenient target because he was walking into my space. So I exploded at him and it escalated from there.”