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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

Johnny’s introduction to the pleasures of the flesh began in the red light district of Beaumont, which like many Texas boomtowns, still had a thriving prostitution and gambling district in the late 1950s. Unfortunately for Johnny, it didn’t last long. In 1960, the Texas House General Investigation Committee uncovered evidence of open prostitution in Beaumont and nearby Port Arthur. In 1961, the James Committee, a five-man panel headed by Dallas representative Tom James, held three days of televised hearings exposing prostitution, gambling, bookmaking, narcotics trafficking, liquor sales to minors, and extensive payoffs to city officials. During those hearings, Beaumont County Sheriff Charlie Meyer admitted to accepting more than $85,000 in “campaign contributions” in five years and lost his job as a result of the investigation.

  Johnny remembers Meyer and Beaumont’s red light district from his visits there in 1959 and 1960.

  “There was a lot of prostitution and gambling in Beaumont—in the clubs, right in the open,” he says. “Gambling, anything you wanted, cards and roulette. Ole Pa was too old to go with me but he paid for me to go to the whorehouse. They were on Crockett Street—the buildings were fairly run down. They didn’t care how old you were. The men were all different ages. The women wore dresses and were fairly seedy. They were sitting around in front—you just picked your choice, paid five bucks, and went to a room upstairs.

  “I knew Sheriff Charlie Meyer—the sheriff that let everything go on—he was a pretty good guy. Ole Pa told him to take care of me if I had any trouble. Ole Pa really took care of me. He died when I was still in high school—I hadn’t made it yet. That was tough. They voted Charlie Meyer out about the time I started going out to the whorehouses. And soon as I got used to goin’ to ’em, they closed them down. Tom James came down from Dallas and stopped everything ; he screwed up our whole town. I don’t know why he picked Beaumont to come down on, but he certainly did. He messed up a lot of stuff.”

  Sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, and the groupies that accompany success as a musician hadn’t yet transpired for the young teenager, but he was on his way. Once he tasted fame and the spotlight—even in a small way—his days of paying for sex at brothels would be a distant memory.

  Winning the Johnny Melody Contest, having a record on the radio, and playing school functions changed the way Johnny was treated. He had found acceptance, but more importantly, he had broadened his circle of friends, and tasted the success that would inspire him to pursue a career in music.

  “Johnny didn’t have a lot of friends per se,” said Drugan. “His friends were musicians. People at school said things that hurt his feelings. Being an albino, he felt that he wasn’t accepted. But I didn’t see anything different about him. I was very open to bringing him into my web of friends, bringing him to their houses. Johnny was very shy and I broke him out of his shell by introducing him to my friends. He opened up and started talking to people when he went into rock ‘n’ roll.

  “His classmates didn’t talk to him much until he played a school function. We were accepted after we played at the school, a sock hop, or talent contest in the auditorium. We played ‘Johnny B. Goode’ and they were floored completely.”

  “Being treated badly in school changed as I got older,” says Johnny. “By the time I was in high school, things were different. I was playing in clubs and had a band. I wasn’t old enough to be in clubs, but I was going to clubs and had a whole different lifestyle. The high-school kids weren’t important to me anymore. Playing music was—playing gigs.”

  Music gave Johnny that aura of cool that had eluded him during his childhood. He and Drugan went to school dances with their hair slicked back in pompadours à la Elvis Presley, sporting the sunglasses they wore at their Beaumont Country Club gig. “We thought that was the cool thing to do—like we were the Blues Brothers,” said Drugan with a laugh.

  Determined to make his mark as a musician, Johnny promoted his new persona on band posters, calling himself Johnny “Cool Daddy” Winter. “As we grew older, he had this big pompadour, the sunglasses, the guitar, and the girls,” said Edgar. “Johnny was living proof an albino could be cool.”

  One of Johnny’s coolest gigs during that era was playing a drive-in theater in 1958 that featured the film Go Johnny Go. Large black letters on the drive-in marquee announced IN PERSON, JOHNNY WINTER along with the movie titles. It wasn’t quite Woodstock, but it was his first outdoor concert.

  “We played on top of the drive-in theater—above the concession stand—before the show started,” said Drugan. “We had to push all our amplifiers up there. Johnny had a very heavy amp and I remember getting all the stuff up on a ladder to get on top of there. They had speakers set up so people could hear us, and everybody got out of their cars and came over to watch us play. It was a big thing—we got a lot of publicity.”

  As leader of Johnny and the Jammers, Johnny fronted the band on vocals and guitar, booked the band, and handled the finances. “If we were lucky, we got ten dollars a man—five pieces—fifty bucks,” he said. “In 1959, that wasn’t bad.” It was a natural position for him and the other band members were comfortable with that arrangement.

  “Johnny was a very dominant personality and a natural leader and was always the bandleader,” said Edgar. “Johnny also had ambition. He dreamed of being famous from an early age. He always wanted to watch American Bandstand and I would want to watch Frontier Theater and cowboy movies.”

  Johnny had plans for his band and—even at fifteen—knew that stage presence and a flashy appearance would translate into more gigs. He held onto a portion of the band’s income so they could dress like professional musicians.

  “He’d just tell us how much we made,” said Drugan. “I don’t think anybody ever asked how much the whole job paid. At the end of the night, Johnny would always figure out how much money he had in the kitty. He’d say, ‘You get two dollars.’ I’d say, ‘How much is left?’ and he’d say, ‘Don’t worry about that—that’s for our shirts,”’ Drugan said with a laugh. “In those days you wore uniforms, the same colored shirts. We went to a place called ‘The Crack in the Wall,’ a store in Beaumont that was about ten or twelve feet wide. They had the best lively colored shirts in town. We got fire-engine red shirts and gold shirts; Johnny liked flashy stuff—the flashiest shirts he could find—with black dress pants. We were real class.”

  Inspired by photographs of Muddy Waters, B. B. King, and John Lee Hooker, Johnny and Drugan went down to Gordon’s Jewelry in Beaumont to buy flashy jewelry to complete the look. Johnny made an initial fifteen-dollar down payment on a diamond ring he still wears nearly half a century later.

  “I had to pay it off while I was wearing it.” Johnny says. “It took me a long time; about a hundred years to pay it off,” he adds with a laugh.

  With the wardrobe and the bling, Johnny and the Jammers moved up from school functions to clubs and roadhouses. The band’s first gigs for adult audiences were at a roadhouse in Beaumont known by two names—Lucille’s and Tom’s Fish Camp. The band played a ninety-minute set, followed by a twenty-minute break, and an hour-long closing set. Johnny knew how he wanted each song to sound and paid close attention to every note.

  “If he didn’t like the notes you played, he’d turn around and give you a dirty look,” said Drugan. “He was pretty strict with his brother too. If he did something he didn’t like, Johnny would give him a whack with his guitar. Edgar would say, ‘I’m gonna tell Momma on you.’ We did Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say,’ which was very popular at the time. Edgar played a Wurlitzer keyboard and kept tuning it because Johnny would go crazy if something wasn’t tuned right.

  “We played Lucille’s every Friday night. After a while we played every Friday and Saturday. We were underage, but it was a backwoods thing and people didn’t care. We weren’t allowed to drink but we played until about eleven o’clock.”

  Although patrons may have been skeptical when they noticed the age of the musicians, their skepticism dissolved once the Jammers began to play.
Texans were used to hearing country music; the music Johnny played didn’t fit into that mold. “They were amazed,” said Drugan. “There were a lot of country and western bands, but as far as blues and rock ‘n’ roll, it was just getting started.”

  Johnny remembers Tom’s Fish Camp as a rowdy roadhouse that served beer and all you can eat portions of fried catfish and frog legs. He was fifteen and Edgar was only twelve, so it took a little convincing to get their parents to allow them to play the club.

  “Our drummer’s daddy was a patron of Tom’s Fish Camp,” says Johnny. “That helped them let us play there. My parents didn’t like it, but they finally let us play. Dave’s daddy was supposed to be lookin’ after us but he wasn’t really. He was just drinkin’.”

  “Tom’s Fish Camp was owned by an old couple, Tom and Tiny,” said Edgar. “Tiny was a 250-pound lady. They had sawdust on the floor and people came in to drink and dance. We had four pieces— guitar, piano, bass, and drums. Sometimes I played the tenor guitar and then we had two guitars, bass, and drum.”

  A raucous backwoods club located next to a swamp, Tom’s Fish Camp attracted patrons that often drank to excess. Drugan remembers one night that had the band scrambling to get out as quickly as possible.

  “There was a big fight, but we never told Johnny’s parents because that would have been the last time we played there,” he said. “One night a couple who had just gotten married came there for their wedding night. The bride was dancing with another guy and the husband was chasing him around with a baseball bat. Then everybody started fighting, and a girl started tearing the bride’s wedding dress all up.

  “Johnny was handing the instruments out the back window saying, ‘Let’s get out of here.’ It was a swampy area so you couldn’t run too far in the back without being eaten by alligators. Johnny’s going, ‘My amplifier is still in there—we have to get it out.’ The bottles started flying out the windows, and I said, ‘I’m not going in there.’ It was a mess, but by the next week, it was cleaned up and we played again.”

  Even then, Johnny took his gigs very seriously. He was committed to playing both sets, no matter what condition his musicians were in.

  “One time we were fooling around outside,” said Drugan. “I was shooting off fireworks and one of ’em went off in my hand. I said, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to play, Johnny. My hand is really smarting.’ Johnny was so mad, he said, ‘Oh yes, you are.’ I wound up playing anyway.”

  Johnny was the only band member with a fake ID, but as long as the band drew a good crowd, it was never an issue. “They never questioned our age,” said Drugan. “I can’t ever remember police coming there or anybody checking people who went in there. It was a local sheriff and he probably looked the other way. I remember Tom and Tiny said, ‘You boys really play good guitar—keep playing like that and you’ll be here every week.’ We played there for awhile.”

  Johnny and the Jammers had an extensive repertoire of songs, including blues, R&B, and rock ‘n’ roll. Ray Charles, a favorite of both Johnny and Edgar, was well represented, as were songs by Buddy Holly, as well as the Crickets, including “Peggy Sue,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Oh, Boy,” and “Maybe Baby.” They always played Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll anthem, a song Johnny would call his own for nearly thirty years.

  “‘Johnny B. Goode’ was always one of my favorite songs,” says Johnny with a laugh. “I got a lot of leverage out of that song.”

  Although Johnny was the lead vocalist, Edgar would pitch in on vocals. “I would sing maybe three or four songs a night,” said Edgar. “Johnny would sing the lead and I would find the harmony part; we would work up the songs and the arrangement that way.”

  Johnny’s innate feel for music allowed the band to play the latest rock ‘n’ roll hits on the Billboard charts, as well as songs by classic blues artists.

  “We had about fifty songs when we first started playing because of Johnny’s ability to learn songs so fast,” said Drugan. “He probably knew at least one hundred songs by the time he was nineteen. He was very good at remembering songs. If he didn’t, he put his own lead or whatever he needed in there. We’d get calls for Elvis Presley songs—that was one of Johnny’s favorites. We played ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ once because a guy gave us ten dollars to play it. Johnny saw the ten-dollar bill and said, ‘We know that song.’ It was amazing the amount of songs Johnny could come up with. When somebody wanted country and western songs I’d never heard of, Johnny could play them just from hearing them on the radio. He’d pick up the melody and that was that.”

  Johnny initially achieved his dream of playing onstage with professional musicians at the Red Lion Club, where he went to hear Clarence Garlow. Johnny had grown up listening to Garlow’s Bon Ton Roulet Show at KJET in the late 1950s and 1960s. Garlow promoted his own records on the show, as well as his upcoming club dates. A Louisiana Creole, he’s been described as a pioneer zydeco artist, a rhythm and blues and jump blues artist heavily influenced by T-Bone Walker. Garlow enjoyed national recognition with sales of his single “Bon Ton Roula” and played clubs in Texas and Louisiana.

  Enamored by the Creole bluesman, Johnny made a tape recording of one of Garlow’s records, then called the radio station and played it to Garlow over the phone. KJET was close to Johnny’s grandparents’ house, so he often visited Garlow at the station and forged a friendship that inspired the budding musician. Johnny showed up at many of his gigs, and Garlow would call him up out of the audience and hand him his guitar.

  “He’d bring me up and let me play,” says Johnny. “I was fifteen or sixteen and had a fake ID I got from some kid. It was a selective service card with somebody else’s name. They asked to see it once in a while; a lot of times they didn’t care. I was about 5’10”, my hair was white, and I looked older. Clarence liked it that some white kid was loving his music. He got off on it. We wouldn’t play together; I’d usually have to use his guitar. He had drums, bass, guitar, piano, and two saxes. He had a special introduction: ‘This is the boy that loves me.’ He wanted to make sure everybody knew I was in love with his style.

  “Clarence told me about using small-gauge strings and playing with unwound thirds, when the third string of the guitar doesn’t have any winding on it. I found out it was easier to bend the string with an unwound third. It’s just easier to play.”

  Prior to that, Johnny was using heavy-gauge strings that wouldn’t stretch and made it impossible for him to bend notes. Just listening to records, he had no idea how to replicate the sound he was hearing. Garlow took the time to mentor the young guitarist and show him how to create the sound he was searching for. It left an indelible impression.

  Deeming Garlow “the main Texas guitar player that influenced me,” Johnny later paid his respects by covering Garlow’s “Bon Ton Roulet” on Raisin’ Cain, his 1980 Blue Sky LP, and “Route 90” and “Sound the Bell” on his 1985 Alligator Records release Serious Business. Johnny dedicated Guitar Slinger, his 1984 LP on Alligator Records, to Garlow.

  Feeling Garlow never received the recognition he deserved, Johnny interviewed him in the 1980s for an article for Living Blues. The article was never published, an omission that still bothers him.

  “I interviewed Clarence for a magazine but it never came out,” says Johnny. “Nobody cared about it, I guess. Nobody asked me to do it—I did the interview on my own. I just had it recorded on tape. They said it was too much trouble to put it on paper.”

  B. B. King is another artist who influenced and encouraged Johnny as a teenager.

  Jim Crow laws were very much in effect in Texas when Johnny met King in 1960, with Jefferson County segregated into black and white neighborhoods. But Johnny’s love of the blues overcame the culture of racism and drew him to clubs on both sides of town.

  “When I was sixteen, there were two or three white clubs the band could play,” says Johnny. “The Black Cat Club and the Pleasure Pier Ballroom in Port Arthur, and the Red Lion Club in Beaumont. They w
ere beer joints where they had fist fights and a few knives. They served Lone Star beer in longneck bottles. Later on, they passed laws where they could drink booze, but in those days, there wasn’t anything but beer.

  “At the white clubs, the jukeboxes had a lot of country and western. Growin’ up in Texas, you had to play country and western music to get a job. I played whatever was popular on the radio at the time. I learned a few hillbilly songs—‘Fraulein’ was the big one that we played in white clubs.

  “The Raven Club in Beaumont was a black club. Texas was definitely racist when I was growing up. Black clubs and white clubs were in separate parts of town and most people stayed in their own part of town. At the black clubs, the jukeboxes had Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Bobby Bland, Junior Parker—the same music I was buying in the record stores.”

  Determined to hear the music he loved, Johnny, Edgar, and his friends started frequenting the Raven Club, where they saw shows by Bobby “Blue” Bland, Little Junior Parker, Al “TNT” Braggs, and B. B. King. Decked out in jackets, ties, and dress pants, the teenagers appeared older than their years and demonstrated respect for the artists by emulating the attire of blues bands of that era.

  “I was about fifteen or sixteen when I first went to the Raven Club,” Johnny says. “I went with the guys in the band; we were the only white people there. We were a little bit scared, but we pretended not to be. I was sixteen the night I sat in with B. B.—that was a great night. I was there with Edgar, David Holiday, and probably Willard Chamberlain. It was a completely black audience. I wanted him to hear me—to let him know somebody else could play that music too. But he didn’t want to let me sit in.”

  King had a strict policy of not allowing anyone to sit in unless he knew the musician and his level of expertise. But he was impressed that four white teenagers had ventured into the black part of town and had the chutzpah to ask. King thought about the dynamics of a white musician asking to sit in with a black band in a black club, and didn’t want his refusal to be construed as racist. He decided to let Johnny sit in, but for only one song.