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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  “I don’t consider myself ‘Texas blues,’ because I play a whole lot of different styles. Texas blues is influenced by country and western, jazz, and western swing. Generally, there are more instruments with Texas blues; but then again, there’s Lightnin’ Hopkins, and he plays mostly by himself. You can hear T-Bone Walker and Lightnin’ Hopkins and there’s no similarity between the two. There’s so many guitar players from Texas and none of them sound the same. Albert Collins doesn’t sound like anybody else; Gatemouth Brown didn’t sound like anybody else either. He played a lot of styles: blues, jazz, zydeco. His styles were different from anybody else; his tuning was much different from other people too. In his early records he sounded just like T-Bone—note for note. That changed as he learned how to play his own stuff.

  “T-Bone Walker played with a lot of horns. He’s the father of the electric-blues style ’cause he’s one of the first guys to play it. You could hear western swing and big bands of the ’40s in some of his records. He had a lot of different records; he recorded prolifically. T-Bone was one of the best guitar players around. He knew more chords than most of the Mississippi players and it gave him a broader influence. Mississippi players only had to know but one or two chords.

  “A lot of guys could play simple stuff that sounded great because it was very original. Like John Lee Hooker. You could always tell who John Lee Hooker was; he didn’t sound like everybody else. Muddy’s stuff was pretty similar. A musician doesn’t have to be technically great to be a good blues artist. John Lee Hooker isn’t a great guitar player but he’s a great blues artist. It doesn’t make much difference if a guy is technically good or not. You just gotta have feeling.”

  Feeling was the key element that attracted Johnny to the blues, a raw, earthy music that reflects the pain people endure as they experience the hardships life has tossed their way. A sensitive child, Johnny wasn’t immune to the pain that came from being different, and found solace in music. Rather than dwelling on being ostracized by his classmates, he spent endless hours in his bedroom, pouring his energy into learning to play the blues. The old adage “you’ve got to live the blues to play the blues” is an apt description of his life.

  “I’ve had enough blues in my life to where I don’t think I need anymore,” says Johnny. “Growin’ up was the hardest part. Growin’ up in school, I really got the bad end of the deal. People teased me and I got in a lot of fights. I was a pretty bluesy kid.

  “When anybody would say albino—it depended on the way they said it. In Texas, they always said it the same way. ‘You’re weird and we don’t like weird people here. Later for you.’ There was a period for a year or so where I was telling people I was from Venus. I didn’t know what was wrong—I didn’t know why I was different. I know my parents felt guilty. They seemed to feel like it was something they had done that was wrong. Even though they tried to not let that show, it still came across. Some people are born with no arms or blind or whatever. Everybody has some kind of a problem—even if it’s not something you can see. This is just one of the little problems life gives to you to see how you’re gonna handle it.”

  Having to endure the cruel taunts for being albino, he felt a kinship with black blues artists. “We both had a problem with our skin being the wrong color,” he says. “I never really wished I wasn’t albino. I guess I would have rather been normal, but it’s just one of those things you have to put up with. Edgar bein’ albino made it nice to have somebody else who had some of the same problems.”

  “Regardless of what we go through in life, I know Johnny will always understand how I feel,” said Edgar. “Stardom is a part of that because we experienced stardom in a different way than the average person. Growing up and in school, we both experienced the reaction of people for our unusual looks—as being albino. When we were kids, I remember him talking about how albinos were viewed in different cultures. In some primitive tribes, an albino might be killed as defective; in other tribes, an albino might be venerated as a god—all because of his unusual appearance. I’ve seen that demonstrated in everyday life. I have encountered people who thought I was beautiful and people who thought I was repulsive. When you have gone through that and suddenly become well known and respected, it is such a dichotomy. And it’s an experience we share—unlike anyone else.”

  3

  JOHNNY B. GOODE

  The alienation Johnny and Edgar felt was mirrored to some extent by adolescents across the country. Spurred on by the earthy rhythms of Elvis Presley and rebelling against the music of their parents’ generation, teenagers embraced the hot new phenomenon called rock ‘n’ roll. Johnny was twelve when radio turned him on to the raucous energy of this new musical genre.

  “The Big Bopper had a good blues show on KTRM, but he also played rock ‘n’ roll as J. P. Richardson,” Johnny says of the legendary Texas disc jockey. “He played Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and Sun artists—Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins.”

  Johnny loved the early rock ‘n’ rollers who captured the feeling of the blues. “I love Little Richard because it had a lot of feeling. I liked Fats Domino, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ by Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis too—he was a great musician, a good ole rock ’n’ roller.”

  Johnny watched American Bandstand, a live dance music TV show hosted by Dick Clark that debuted in 1957. But American Bandstand never featured Johnny’s favorite black rock ‘n’ roll performers. The show’s racial barrier wasn’t broken until 1960 with a performance by Chubby Checker, a nonthreatening black artist, whose stage name (a takeoff on Fats Domino) was suggested by Clark’s wife.

  The racism wasn’t lost on Johnny, who loved Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right Mama,” the 1954 Sun single Rolling Stone called the first rock ‘n’ roll record. The combination of the sound of the blues and the acclaim Elvis generated from fanatical and adoring fans heightened Johnny’s desire to live the life of a musician.

  “Elvis could play blues like ‘That’s All Right Mama’ and other songs that were bluesy because he was white,” says Johnny. “He could do that, get away with it, and have people love him—mostly white women.”

  Johnny got his first chance to play rock ‘n’ roll for a live audience in 1959, when Anchor Bay Entertainment released Go, Johnny, Go, an early rock ‘n’ roll film featuring performances by Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Richie Valens, the Cadillacs, Eddie Cochran, and others.

  Movie theaters across the country held “Johnny Melody” contests to accompany the release of that film. KTRM jumped on the bandwagon, offering a recording session and a record deal as first prize. Johnny entered the contest as a solo artist.

  “There were about ten of us; you could only play one song,” says Johnny. “I played ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ Me and this other guy were the best out of the bunch, so they had a contest for the two of us to fight it out for the best singer. I won the contest and won a session at Bill Hall’s Gulf Coast Recording Studio in Beaumont and a record deal for a single at Dart Records.”

  Johnny’s rendition of “Johnny B. Goode” impressed the judges enough to catapult him into his first record deal, but his victory was marred by the audience’s initial reaction. The crowd in the Beaumont movie theater laughed when he walked out onto the stage. That cruel reaction made a lasting impression, and he told the story almost twenty-five years later when he appeared on Late Night with David Letterman in May 1983.

  “I’ll never forget the first time I did ‘Johnny B. Goode’ for an audience,” he told Letterman after playing a rousing live version of the song with Paul Shaffer and the Late Night Band. “I’ll never forget walking out onstage and everybody laughed. Like, ‘What is it?’.... People didn’t know exactly what to think because there are not that many albinos around and especially that many years ago in the Deep South. Nobody knew quite what to think of us.”

  Now he’s a bit more philosophical when he talks about the contest. “They thought it was funny to see a white-headed p
erson up there, I guess,” he says. “It bothered me but what could I do? All I could do was get up there and play good. That wiped them out anyway—they were sorry they laughed.”

  In late 1959, shortly before the contest, he formed his first band, Johnny and the Jammers, with a lineup that included Edgar on tenor guitar (and later piano), Dennis Drugan on bass, and David Holiday on drums. Later, he added Willard Chamberlain on saxophone.

  “I wanted a band so I could play clubs,” he says. “David Holiday wanted to be a guitar player; he called me up and asked questions about playin’ the guitar. I didn’t need another guitar player, so he got a drum set and taught himself drums. Dennis Drugan, who’s still a good friend of mine, was my bass player. Dennis’s daddy taught guitar lessons at Jefferson Music where I was teachin’ too. He’d come down to see his dad and we got to be friends. We practiced once or twice a week in the room we had upstairs. My parents were great about it.”

  “Johnny got offers to play different functions, so he put the band together,” said Drugan. “By then he had quit taking lessons with my father and pretty much picked up a lot himself by listening to records. He had hundreds of records in his house. He’d hear new songs on the radio and say, ‘Let’s learn these.’ By the next week, he’d have ’em all down—memorized and then he’d play them in his own style. He was a quick learner.”

  Edgar always played in Johnny’s early bands, but it wasn’t because they were siblings.

  “I always included Edgar in bands and on records because he was one of the few guys that could play everything,” says Johnny. “Not because he was my brother; it was because he could play a lot of different instruments.”

  “I played bass for a while, drums, piano, even before electric piano,” said Edgar. “In Johnny and the Jammers, I played a tenor guitar that was like a four-string electric, like the top four strings of the guitar. I played drums for a short while in Johnny and the Jammers—between David Holiday and Melvin Carpenter. That was when the band changed its name to the Crystaliers and we were playing the Black Cat Club in Port Arthur. I saw the movie The Gene Krupa Story and had to have a set of drums. I got Slingerland drums—champagne sparkle—and set them up in my room.”

  By then, Johnny and Edgar had their own bedrooms. Their parents had renovated the attic into a bedroom for Edgar and a family room for rehearsals.

  “We used to rehearse in the garage when we had bands,” Edgar said. “When we started to have electric instruments with amplifiers, my parents decided to remodel the attic because everything was getting too loud and driving everybody crazy.”

  Johnny and the Jammers had only been together six weeks when they went into Bill Hall’s Gulf Coast Recording Studio to cut their first record. Hall, a music producer, promoter, and publisher, had booked and eventually managed country artist George Jones. He had produced the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” in 1958, and later joined forces with Sun Records engineer Jack Clements to form the Gulf Coast Recording Company.

  Johnny penned two songs for his first record: “School Day Blues,” a rocking number, and “You Know I Love You,” a ballad for the flip side. Hall produced that single, with Johnny on guitar and vocals, Edgar on piano, Chamberlain on sax, Drugan on bass, and Holiday on drums.

  The recording studio was primitive by today’s standards, with egg crates on the walls to reduce the echo, and a mixing board in the same room where the musicians were recording. Still, it was a heady experience for Johnny and his band.

  “I was pretty excited to be able to play in a recording studio,” says Johnny. “We didn’t go through the songs very many times—we got ’em pretty quick.”

  “They set up the players on the floor and microphones all over the place,” said Drugan. “In those days, they just put a microphone in front of your speakers and adjusted it. They didn’t record separately—everybody played at the same time. We did about five different takes. The mixing board was behind a glass in the same room. They’d open the door and holler out, ‘Okay, take one,’ and close the door. You’d watch ’em in the window but couldn’t hear them; they’d make faces and point. When they point, you start playing. Then they’d play it back through a little radio to see how it would sound. We thought we were real big time—making a record already.”

  Recording his brother’s original songs, as well as spending time in a studio with a well-known engineer and professional musicians, made a strong impression on Edgar, who was twelve.

  “Recording ‘School Day Blues’ was certainly a memorable experience for all of us,” said Edgar. “At that time, I didn’t know Johnny could write. I was so impressed when he came up with that song. I was amazed. All we had done was copy other people’s music and when he came up with ‘School Day Blues,’ it was a real song. It was very exciting for a little kid—actually being in a recording studio and being able to listen back to what we had played.”

  Johnny’s single was released on Dart Records, a small label in Houston owned by Pappy Daley. Although the record wasn’t distributed to a broad market, it was available in all the Beaumont record stores and several stores in Houston.

  “It was great seein’ it in stores and hearin’ it on the radio,” says Johnny. “Ridin’ around town with the radio blastin’, playing your own music—that was great. I didn’t make any money on my record. I only sold 200 copies, and we got twenty-five free copies. Ole Pa was real happy when I came home with the record. But my parents didn’t want me to get into it too much. They wanted me to be sure to keep school first.”

  Drugan remembers hearing the single on KTRM radio, which included it on the station’s favorite songs listing in February 1960.

  “They put out a survey of ‘Favorite Fifty Songs’ with a lot of famous artists on the list,” he said. “Ray Charles was number eleven with ‘My Baby’ and Johnny was number eight with ‘School Day Blues.’ For us to get number eight, we were on top of the world. We had made it already. We were also listed in ‘Country Song Roundup,’ a national country list that came out that July.”

  Their excitement at fever pitch, the teenagers began promoting their record at local radio stations. Sax player Willard Chamberlain drove the band to the stations.

  “As soon as we got some extra records, we got in Willard’s car and went around to the radio stations,” said Drugan. “That’s how you had to get your record played—you had to go to the stations and ask them to play your record. We knocked on the door, told ’em who we were, and asked them to play our record. They’d say, ‘No problem,’ and we’d sit down and talk on the radio for a while. Outside the radio station, there was a big tower broadcasting maybe eighty or one hundred miles around. The station would play our record and I’d run out to the car to see if it was on. We were so excited to hear our record played on the radio. As soon as we’d get on one station, another station in the local area would pick it up. Those were exciting days—the infancy of rock ’n’ roll.”

  The airplay proved to be advantageous to Johnny’s band. “When the record hit number eight on the Beaumont charts, we got a few more bookings and could make a little more money,” says Johnny. “There were bigger bands in Beaumont, but we started getting a few jobs at dances.”

  To promote their gigs at dances and other school functions, they had posters printed and placed them around town. The posters read: JOHNNY AND THE JAMMERS—FEATURING GUITARIST AND THE VOICE OF JOHNNY WINTER, BEAUMONT, TEXAS’S OWN JOHNNY MELODY. PLAYING THE BEST OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, RHYTHM ‘N’ BLUES. Lines for “Place” and “Time” were printed at the bottom so the band could customize the posters for specific shows.

  “We’d go around three or four hours after school putting posters all over town, at where we were playing the next time, different soda shops and places where the kids would see them,” said Drugan. “The more people we’d draw, the more money we’d make. In those days, they had a thing called the kitty. You’d put a box out and people would come up and request songs and put a dollar in the kitty. You’d also ge
t money at the door—they’d charge maybe fifty cents. What you made depended on how many people came through the door rather than getting a set amount.”

  Early in their career, Johnny and the Jammers played social clubs and semiformal dances as the Johnny Winter Orchestra. They played a homecoming dance at the St. Anthony’s High School auditorium, and a graduation dance at St. Ann’s High School. Their first gig, a social event at the Beaumont Country Club, featured Johnny on guitar, Edgar on tenor guitar, Chamberlain on sax, and Drugan on “silent guitar.”

  “That was my first job with Johnny,” said Drugan. “Johnny was in junior high. He didn’t have a bass player and there was no keyboard at that time. We wore white sports coats, black bow ties, and sunglasses. There was a group called the Shades at that time and they wore sunglasses. I wasn’t quite good enough to play, so I played silent guitar. I was hooked up to an amp but didn’t have any volume. He said, ‘Just stand up there and look good.’ He paid me for it too; he said, ‘I’ll give you five dollars for that job because you weren’t hooked up.’ They turned the volume up as I got better.”

  “I had him play silent guitar just for fun because I liked him,” says Johnny. “He learned to play bass later on and really played in my band.”

  After the country-club gig, and Drugan’s switch to bass, the band started playing more school functions, as well as teen dances called canteens, including several dances at the Park District Canteen.

  “We played a lot of school functions—after the basketball games, sock hops, stuff like that,” says Johnny. “They always liked us pretty good. Kids usually brought liquor into dances. The band drank too and we got away with it. We drank everything—vodka, Jack Daniels. I started smokin’ cigarettes when I was fifteen too. I had different girlfriends—it was probably easier being in a band. I didn’t date a lot in high school—it was more fucking than dating.”