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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  “A typical redneck didn’t like longhaired musicians. They were usually drunk—they drank a lot of beer down South. A lot of fistfights in the parking lots—mostly over girls. We got some of that—where they’d ask you to go out to the parking lot—but it usually started in the clubs.”

  In Southern juke joints, it wasn’t unusual for unruly patrons to throw drinks at the stage. “A lot of guys didn’t like musicians because musicians get all the girls,” says Johnny. “I had people throw beers and drinks at me while I was playing. Throw it out of a glass, usually do it in a way that will juice it to you real good. We’ve played behind chicken wire like they did in The Blues Brothers. They do that all the time—mostly in Louisiana. They had chicken wire exactly like that to keep the bottles from comin’ up onstage. It was ‘play the song they want to hear, at the time they want to hear it, or they’d throw a bottle at you.’ So the club owners put the stage wire up.”

  Art also imitated life during the scene when the Blues Brothers’ bar tab exceeded the band’s pay. “We did a good bit of drinkin‘—there were times where we drank more money on the bar tab than what we’d made,” says Johnny with a laugh. “That happened in Louisiana too. Instead of gettin’ money, you’d end up payin’ money. I was probably the biggest drinker in the band. But that didn’t happen very often ’cause I carried a bottle of Jack Daniels with me and used to buy Cokes.”

  It was during the Deep South touring years that Johnny had his first taste of marijuana.

  “We started doin’ grass when we were on the road in about 1965,” says Johnny. “We got it from another band. I was so high I couldn’t go out. I was wrecked; I had to lie down on the bed and listen to albums. I couldn’t stop laughing. That was the first time I smoked grass. After that, the whole band smoked it regularly—we usually bought it when we were home. It was twenty dollars an ounce, and five dollars for a matchbox—a small wooden box that stick matches come in. They had Southern sheriffs but they didn’t seem to bother anybody much. You’d smoke it in the back of the club or when you got home.”

  Although they still worked for the Atlanta agency, Johnny and the band moved to Houston. Several band members had settled down and gotten married, so Johnny figured he’d give it a try. On February 28, 1966, five days after he turned twenty-two, Johnny married Mary Jo Beck, also aged twenty-two, at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Beaumont, Texas.

  “I knew Mary Jo for about six months before we got married and then we were married for about six months,” says Johnny. “Everybody I knew was gettin’ married, so it felt like the thing to do. We had a small wedding at my dad’s church. We lived with my folks when we were in Beaumont but we moved to Houston real quick. We had a second floor apartment with a bedroom, living room, and a small kitchen. She wasn’t workin’ but I made decent money with the band.”

  Throughout his life, Johnny has always lived with women; he very rarely, if at all, lived on his own. He also had a difficult time staying true to any one woman. Like many bluesmen before him, he always had at least one woman on the side. It didn’t take long for the bloom to fade on his impetuous first marriage and the concept of monogamy.

  “Married life was shitty,” he says. “I was always bothered all the time about one thing or another. She was always sure I was gonna be goin’ out with somebody else. I wasn’t goin’ out with anybody—not at first I wasn’t. She was just crazy. I got tired of hearing it and started going out with other people. We had a big screamin’ fight. She was tearin’ up my stuff, wreckin’ anything she could find, and I wasn’t gonna have that. I had my folks take her to Galveston and put her in a mental hospital, where she stayed about three weeks. She was gonna kill herself; she was that crazy.”

  Before she was discharged, Johnny moved his clothes and records to a friend’s apartment in the same building. “I knew she’d try to break up anything she could find of mine, so I took it all downstairs,” he said. “When I got the divorce she didn’t get anything because I didn’t have anything. It’s a good thing I got married before I made it. That was the only time I was married [prior to marrying his present wife Susan in 1992], but I lived with a lot of girls and always had girlfriends. I didn’t figure on getting married again—I hated it. Not for me. I figured I’d just live with people. It was too big a deal to get a divorce. I felt like I was real lucky to get out of the marriage as easy as I did.”

  After his divorce, Johnny briefly lived at his parents’ house during a break in the band’s schedule. Restless when he wasn’t touring, he found gigs for the band in his hometown. As soon as the agency called, they were back on the road, living the life they loved.

  “You’d see different girls, different clubs, different towns; there was always something different about it to make it fun,” says Johnny. “The band got along pretty good. Sometimes we’d get on each other nerves—have money arguments like, ‘Why ain’t we making more money?’ I made a little bit more, but they knew I should be makin’ more money because I was doin’ everything. We all wanted to be makin’ more money, but we were doin’ as good as we could. I think we stayed together so long because we liked each other and we liked the music. I love playin’—nothing ever made me want to stop touring. It never seemed like a job—it always was fun to me.”

  Oscar Wilde said, “I can resist everything except temptation.” Johnny had a lot of temptation on the road, and followed Wilde’s philosophy. “I was just an asshole,” Johnny says with a laugh. “I didn’t want to resist.”

  Among the temptations was the lure of married women, and Johnny had more than his share. “With married women, you don’t have as much to worry about,” he says. “They’re already married so they’re not gonna pester you much. It gives you freedom.”

  But when the woman was married to a close friend and musician in his band, it had a chilling effect on their friendship. “I once went with Ikey’s wife,” says Johnny. “I wanted his wife—because it’s really something to get somebody else’s wife. Sometimes it’s just that—wantin’ to be with somebody else’s wife. I still played in the band with him. One night we were out eatin’, and he told me, ‘I know you fucked my wife.’ I said, ‘Ikey, how do you know that?’ He said, ‘I just know.’ I don’t know how he knew; maybe she told him. I felt bad about it. But they had [been] broken up for a while; they weren’t living together when I went to bed with her. They were broken up and got divorced after that.”

  Johnny carried a gun and a knife when he toured the Deep South. That and his penchant for messing around with married women led him down a dirt road that could have been his last.

  “I never used my gun but came close to it once,” he says. “I was about nineteen or twenty, in a car with some friends. I had a guy coming after me. I had gone to bed with his wife and he was following me down some back roads. We finally stopped—I had a .22 Derringer in my pocket and he had a gun too. I didn’t know whether I should shoot. He had his gun out and every time I’d get my hand close to my pocket, he’d say, ‘Keep your hand away from your pocket.’ I couldn’t have gotten to my gun quick enough, I don’t think. He finally started crying and left.”

  By 1966, all four band members had their fill of touring; some had wives and children and no longer wanted to live their life on the road. The band’s car had broken down and they couldn’t afford to buy a new one.

  “We had done that circuit several times,” said Edgar. “Everybody was pretty tired and exhausted and wanted to take a break and settle down for a while. We had a car, were pulling a U-Haul trailer, and loading and setting up all our gear. We were responsible for everything and it gets to be a pretty demanding pace, to be out there continually like that.”

  Settled in Houston, Johnny focused his energy on recording. He had never stopped making records. On a break that took him back to Beaumont in 1964, Johnny cut “Gone for Bad”/“I Won’t Believe It,” recorded on Frolic and leased to MGM. Johnny considered it his last stint as a studio musician and last recording for Ritter. A handshake a
greement ended their four-year relationship, but Ritter wasn’t about to go away. He would later resurface and lay claim to Johnny’s music.

  While living in Houston, Johnny met Roy Ames, a twenty-nine-year-old independent record producer who entered the record business in 1959. Ames started Aura Records (which evolved into Cascade Records) in the early 1960s, and was working as a record promoter/distributor for Don Robey’s Duke/Peacock label when he met Johnny in 1966. Seeing potential in the young guitarist, Ames tried to lure him away from Ritter with the promise of a record deal with Duke Records.

  “Duke was a black label out of Houston and Roy knew I liked working with black people,” says Johnny. “He figured it would be a good way to talk me into signing with him. But Bill Hall tried to say I was signed with Dart Records. He said he bought my contract from Ken Ritter but he never did. He never took me to court but he tried to say I had not been fair to Ken Ritter. I didn’t see how I could be unfair when I was supposed to get royalties and had never gotten a penny from anybody.”

  Hall’s interference blocked Johnny’s deal with Duke Records but that didn’t deter Ames. He produced a single by Johnny and Edgar under the artist name of “Insight” for his Cascade Records label. Capitalizing on the holiday season and the Winter brothers’ exquisite harmonies, Ames released “Please Come Home for Christmas” with their rendition of James Brown’s “Out of Sight” on the flip side in 1966.

  Johnny’s only authorized project with Huey Meaux, another producer with a studio in Houston, was a single on Pacemaker Records with “Birds Can’t Row Boats” as the A side and “Leavin’ Blues” on the flip side, recorded in 1966 and released in 1967.

  “‘Birds Can’t Row Boats’ was a song makin’ fun of Bob Dylan,” he says with a laugh. “‘Leavin’ Blues’ was the first song I ever played slide on—it was pretty decent. I’d only been playin’ a few months. It didn’t sell great, but it sold as well as anything else I put out.”

  Johnny was living in Nacogdoches, a town 140 miles northeast of Houston, playing with a band called Amos Boynton and the ABCs. “I played with them when I first went to Houston,” says Johnny. “They had a black singer named J. J. Johnson and played R&B, with Amos Boynton on drums, Charlie Wheeler on bass, and me on guitar and vocals. We changed the name to the Great Believers just for one record, ”Coming Up Fast” on the Cascade label.”

  Although the stint in the band was short-lived, it introduced him to Carol Roma, a woman who would be his live-in partner for the next five years. “I met Carol when I was playing with Amos,” says Johnny. “She was from Nacogdoches in East Texas. Carol had been goin’ out with Amos for a year when I met her. He was married, but he went out with her. She was nineteen or so back then—I was in my early twenties.

  “I wasn’t married to Carol Roma, but we lived together a long time. We first got together when she moved to Houston, where she was a beautician. I liked smart girls and skinny girls and Carol was both. I took her out a couple of times and was living with her within a month. I went out with other girls too. I didn’t want to be true to Carol; I felt like I needed to go out with other girls. It made it hard for the relationship.

  “Carol went to my gigs pretty often at first—I was playing soul music at the Hit Factory club with Edgar, Ikey Sweat, and Norman Samaha on drums. When we first started living together, I was making real good money at the Act III, $150 to $175 a week. But when I started playing blues, my money was definitely not as great. For a while there I wasn’t makin’ anything. She didn’t mind—she was supportive of my music.”

  Johnny’s band played six nights a week at the Act III, a Houston club located at a major intersection. The band played in front of a large picture window, flanked by go-go girls in mini dresses and short white boots dancing in elevated cages behind them. Although the club pushed the mid-’60s envelope by flaunting go-go dancers in the window, management demanded songs that made the charts. The owner told Johnny what songs to play and which tunes he expected them to learn by the following week. Johnny learned most Top Forty songs by listening to the radio, and only occasionally had to buy the record.

  In 1967, Johnny also performed briefly with the Traits, a Houston-based band, and played on “Tramp”/“Parchman Farm,” a single with a pressing of 300 records on the Universal label. He joined the band after vocalist Roy Head left, which was shortly after the release of the band’s hit single “Treat Her Right.” A popular road band, the Traits played clubs throughout Texas and Louisiana.

  Although Johnny couldn’t play blues at the clubs, living in Houston allowed him to see and meet musicians that shared his passion. He heard his first live performance by Lightnin’ Hopkins, a Texas country bluesman, in that city.

  “I heard Lightnin’ when I was still in Houston,” says Johnny. “He made his living playin’ on street corners in Houston—he played whorehouses too. They had a room downstairs where people would congregate and choose their girl and they had bars where you could drink and listen to music. Lightnin’ also played on buses. He had a friend who was a bus driver, who would take him to the liquor store and buy him a bottle of booze. He’d stay on the line for a while and play for the people who got on the bus. He got tips. He was playin’ at clubs at that time but he liked playin’ in the street too.”

  Johnny also met Keith Ferguson, a musician who shared his love of the blues and later played bass in the Fabulous Thunderbirds. Johnny was playing in the Phil Seymour Band at an afterhours gig at a gay club when drummer Eddie Rodriguez introduced the two likeminded musicians.

  “Eddie played that gig and he knew I loved blues and he knew Keith loved blues and he got us together,” says Johnny. “We were about the same age and we both liked the same music. He had a big record collection, a lot of 78s that his Daddy gave to him and he was sellin’. He was the only white person I knew in Houston that was into blues.”

  Through Ferguson, Johnny was introduced to Cactus Records on Alabama Street, where Keith’s father, John William Ferguson, worked as a classical music buyer. The elder Ferguson was also a musician; he had been a concert pianist with the Chicago Symphony.

  “I bought a lot of records in Keith’s father’s store,” says Johnny. “It had a better selection—a lot of the old reissues on albums, 45s made into albums. I had a Philco set with six- or eight-inch speakers. I listened to records all the time, straight blues and a few of the hippie records like Firesign Theatre and Psychedelic Lollipop by the Blues Magoos. I usually bought records I couldn’t hear on the radio. I bought Hendrix—the first records—Are You Experienced. I bought Bob Dylan albums—electric and folk—I liked Dylan a lot.”

  Ferguson, like many of Johnny’s close friends and fellow musicians, died young. He died of liver complications at age fifty on April 29, 1997, but talked about his initial meeting with Johnny in an interview the previous year.

  “Since blues was all Johnny liked, these local musicians thought it would be hysterical if we got together: ‘Let’s put these two freaks, these two mutants, together,’” said Ferguson. “Johnny flipped out; he never saw that many 78s in his life. He had records too, but I had more.” Ferguson recalled being dazzled by his new friend’s virtuosity and said he had to remind himself not to stare when Johnny cranked out a scorching solo in the middle of a song.

  It wouldn’t be long before Johnny dazzled a much wider audience.

  5

  THE LEGEND BEGINS

  The year 1968 was one of tremendous turmoil and change. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated; and within two hours, 125 cities across the U.S went up in flames. Dr. Benjamin Spock was convicted for counseling and aiding draft evaders, and the death toll in Vietnam skyrocketed to more than 30,000 young Americans. Presidential hopeful Senator Robert Kennedy was shot to death in California, and riots broke out during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

  The winds of change also permeated America’s airwaves, as progressive FM rock stations lured listeners away from Top Forty AM stations. The Supreme
s and the Beach Boys were losing their stronghold on the top of the charts, while the Doors, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, and Jefferson Airplane emerged as America’s answer to the British Invasion. The Rolling Stones and Cream sold millions of records covering the songs of American blues artists, and Johnny knew it was time to return to the music he loved.

  He was still playing soul music six nights a week at the Act III, when Uncle John “Red” Turner, a drummer from Port Arthur, Texas, approached him about forming a blues band.

  “In Port Arthur, our background was blues,” said Turner. “The jukebox at the hamburger juke joint where the juvenile delinquents hung out by my house had Muddy Waters, Little Walter—all those kinds of people. We didn’t know much about the Beach Boys and Pat Boone, but we knew about Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Lazy Lester, and Jimmy Reed.”

  Turner started on guitar in 1957, switched to bass, and was playing drums in a band called the Nightlights when he first met Johnny. “I met him in 1960,” said Turner. “We crossed paths when we were sixteen and our respective bands were playing at a kids’ Christmas party put on by the OCAW [Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers] union.”

  By 1968, Turner had migrated to Houston, where Johnny hired him to replace a drummer who almost cost him his gig.

  “Jimmy Gillan was perpetually late, and the club owner told Johnny, ‘If you’re late again, you’ll have to fire the drummer or I’ll fire you,’” said Turner. “Sure enough, Jimmy was late and I got the job.”

  Johnny had mixed feelings about playing soul music because his heart was in the blues. “That’s when Uncle John talked to me,” he said. “Nobody had before because they weren’t willing to take that cut in pay. Uncle John said we might not make much money at first but he thought it would work out in the long run.”