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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  “Johnny wanted to play blues; he just had never been in a position to be able to,” said Turner. “The people in his band expected to make a living. We were the first guys that would go out on a limb with him and gamble for the future. Before that we were doing songs like ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix,’ ‘Lady Madonna,’ ‘Holiday,’ ‘Shadow of Your Smile’—we were a cover band.”

  To complete the rhythm section, Johnny and Turner traveled to Dallas to recruit Tommy Shannon, who was playing bass in a soul band. Shannon grew up in Dumas, Texas, and had moved to Dallas after he graduated from high school.

  “I knew Tommy would jump at the chance,” said Turner. “We were close friends and I knew he had the same desire to play blues as I did.”

  “I met Johnny at the Fog, at the same club where I met Stevie,” said Shannon, who later played with Stevie Ray Vaughan from 1981 to his tragic death in 1990. “I was playing eight hours a night in a band called the Young Lads, making really good money. Uncle John and Johnny came in one night and Johnny sat in. I had never seen an albino before. When he got up under the lights, with that long white hair he looked like some kind of god—I was mesmerized by him. I knew I was going to be starving my ass off but I had this feeling it was the right thing to do. I quit my band and joined up.”

  As a blues trio, their gigs were limited to weekend nights, and Johnny’s income immediately plummeted from $150 to fifty dollars a week. The band still couldn’t play all blues, but worked blues into their sets, which included Top Forty songs, as well as Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” “Manic Depression,” and “Fire.”

  “Even Muddy was restricted to the amount of blues he could play on his own jobs,” said Turner. “People didn’t like blues. So Muddy stood in the background and acted like he was playing the guitar, and the band played a bunch of soul songs. Then Muddy did about fifteen minutes of Muddy Waters songs at the very last part of their show.”

  Before they played their first gig, Johnny gave Shannon a crash course in the blues.

  “I didn’t know anything about blues when I first started with Johnny,” said Shannon. “I would look at a Cream album and see Robert Johnson and thought he was a friend of theirs. Johnny sat down with me one night and spent hours taking me all the way through the blues, from field hollers to the present. He had a wall of records and took me through his whole collection, playing and explaining each one. After that night, I understood what I was doing.”

  “Sometimes Johnny went through whole songs and taught Tommy the notes he wanted,” said Turner. “I knew everything Johnny did because I came from the same place, so it didn’t take long for all of us to create a tight musical chemistry. We were already listening to Jimi Hendrix, so it was pretty easy for all of us.”

  Once they got the band together, they needed a name and a gig.

  “At first, we tried to call it Winter: The Progressive Blues Experiment,” said Turner. “We tried to pattern ourselves after the Electric Flag: An American Music Band, a band with a subtitle. It sounds funny now, and of course it didn’t work. Johnny Winter was too powerful a star. It had to be just Johnny Winter. Jimi Hendrix had the Experience, but it was just Jimi Hendrix. He could play with anybody in his band.”

  The first gig the band played was at a club called the Plantation.

  “It was a gay bar with all these guys dancing,” said Shannon. “They hated us but they liked our roadie because he was good looking.”

  The band’s club circuit consisted of weekend gigs playing the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin, the Act III or the Love Street Light Circus in Houston, and an occasional gig in Dallas. Turner drove and booked the motel rooms, so Shannon dubbed him “Uncle John.” To haul their equipment, the band pooled their money and bought a mode of transportation that turned heads wherever they went.

  “We used to travel around in an old Packard hearse,” said Shannon. “It was weird, but we didn’t think it was weird then. Johnny would sit in the side seat behind the front seat. People would pull up at a light, look over and see a hearse, and see Johnny with pink eyes and white hair looking out. People would freak out.”

  The band’s attire added to their mystique.

  “We were pretty vain back then,” said Shannon. “We’d wear whatever we could find that was really cool. I had a purple velvet Nehru shirt.”

  “We were ridiculous copies of English guys,” said Turner. “There was a pseudo hippie joint in Houston, where we’d buy striped pants and stuff like that. We were flamboyant. We had our own cross to bear and were kind of asking for it, asking to be picked on.”

  Their outlandish outfits, as well as their long hair, often got them into altercations when they played rednecks bars in Texas. But Johnny didn’t mind a good fight if he was provoked.

  “I knocked down a guy in Dallas,” says Johnny. “I was playing with Tommy and Uncle John in a club called Phantasmagoria. He said he was an off-duty detective. He was comin’ out with all this anti-longhair stuff and I hit him and knocked him down with my fist. When he finally got up, the guy behind the bar—he was a friend of ours—had a big stick. He said, ‘You get out and don’t come back.’”

  That incident left a lasting impression on Ferguson. “We used to call him the Stork,” Ferguson said during an interview for the Dallas Observer. “Nobody messed with him. One night he knocked out an off-duty cop for callin’ him a girl. I saw Johnny Winter fight many times; he was real strong and mean. He’d go until you quit breathing and couldn’t hurt him anymore.”

  The Vulcan Gas Company and the Love Street Light Circus attracted a mellower clientele. The band members loved the laid-back atmosphere.

  Johnny remembers the Vulcan as a “hippie club” that held about 300 people and didn’t have a beer or liquor license. The club, which was at 316 Congress Avenue and Third Street, catered to a younger clientele in their late teens and twenties, sold juice and other soft drinks, and charged a cover at the door. Divided into two sections, the Vulcan was comprised of a smaller room with tables and chairs and a juice bar, and a large open room with a stage at one end, a large backstage area, and an open space where people stood to watch the bands.

  “The Vulcan was the first place we started playing the blues,” said Shannon. “The Vulcan was the coolest club I’ve ever played. It was more like a family thing than a club, because I slept there a lot after the gig. Sometimes Johnny and Uncle John would go back to Houston and I’d stay and sleep in the back on floors and pool tables, whatever. Or we would all stay in one room at the Austin Motel.”

  Opened in October 1967, the Vulcan Gas Company was the brainchild of Houston White, Gary Scanlon, Don Hyde, and several other artists and musicians, who originally called themselves “the Electric Grandmother.” The majority of the posters and handbills for the club were created by Gilbert Shelton (who later created the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics) and Jim Franklin, a friend of Johnny’s who became the Vulcan’s artist in residence. Franklin later gained notoriety for Armadillo Comics and his posters and murals for Armadillo World Headquarters, the psychedelic club that filled the void when the Vulcan closed in the mid-1970s. He stayed in touch with Johnny over the years, traveling to Johnny’s New York apartment to paint his portrait, which hangs in the South Austin Museum of Popular Culture, along with a portrait of Johnny, Shannon, and Turner painted at the Vulcan in 1970.

  The creativity and camaraderie of the crew at the Vulcan Gas Company, teamed with the easy access to pot and hallucinogenic drugs, made Austin the place to be in the late 1960s.

  “Austin was a virtual paradise to us,” said Turner. “Hippies everywhere smoking pot, in the open, out in their backyard.”

  “It was literally paradise,” added Shannon. “Smoking pot was against the law but it never stopped anybody. That was one of the cool things about it; it wasn’t repressive. In the back of the Vulcan, they had this hole in the floor, a concrete cistern. We’d take acid and climb down a ladder into the cistern. Jim Franklin had all these weird Eastern i
nstruments, and we’d get down to the bottom of the cistern and start chanting and echo, reverberate our voices off the wall.”

  “I had conga drums, a sitar, and some flutes,” said Franklin. “It was a marvelous chamber, because you could be sitting right next to someone, and if you hit the note, it would resound off the wall. You don’t hear it coming from the person; you just hear it coming from the wall.”

  “The Vulcan was a hippie family, and the cistern was like a hippie tearoom,” added Turner. “We had great experiences.”

  The first time the trio experimented with LSD together, they used Timothy Leary’s guidebook, Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, which included “instructions for an actual psychedelic session, under adequate safeguards.”

  “The three of us took acid together in our hotel room in Dallas,” said Turner. “It was the room we always got—it had three single beds. Tommy had Timothy Leary’s book, a great book to guide you through a pleasant, rewarding experience.”

  Although the band was having the time of their lives, they didn’t have much in the way of income. Shannon and Turner crashed from place to place; Johnny shared an apartment with Carol Roma.

  “Red’s mother owned a beauty shop and we would practice there on the nights we weren’t playing,” says Johnny. “Red and Tommy were sleeping on couches, floors, at the beauty shop, friends’ houses—wherever they could. I did okay because I was living with Carol.”

  “I slept on floors, lived at Uncle John’s mother’s house in Houston,” said Shannon. “We were so hungry we’d go down to the fried-chicken place and eat all the fried batter they threw out.”

  “We really didn’t have any money,” said Turner. “We got paid about sixty bucks a piece a night, and Johnny got eighty dollars. We played two nights a week. And that wasn’t every week. I lived on about $300 a month. We played hippie joints where if people liked what you did, you could play anything. By then, our set was all blues and Jimi Hendrix. We played just about all of Jimi’s songs.”

  Another counterculture club that allowed the band to play blues was the Love Street Light Circus and Feel Good Machine in Houston.

  “Love Street Light Circus was similar to the Vulcan Gas Company—they didn’t serve beer, we made about the same money, and it was about the same size,” says Johnny. “You had to walk up some stairs to get to it—stairs on the outside of the building. They had go-go girls there too. We usually went on at nine and played two hour-and-a-half sets. There was always pot and chemicals, strobe lights and lightshows. It was great!”

  “I remember the Love Street Light Circus,” said Shannon. “I had this big bass amp and you had to carry your equipment up four flights of stairs—it was hell getting your equipment up there. I can’t believe we actually hauled that gigantic bass amp up and down those stairs. We can’t even get the one we use now into the car anymore. Now if I walked up to that, I’d go, ‘Fuck it, I ain’t playing.’ We never really thought about it back then, we just did it. That was miserable, but the club itself was cool.”

  Although the club had seating to the left of the stage, the floor directly in front of the stage was lined with rows of pillows with wooden headrests so patrons could lie down and watch the show, which included psychedelic images projected onto the wall.

  “The whole club was rows of pillows and pads with a backstop for a headrest,” said Turner. “You laid down on the floor and watched the band play. They had go-go dancers too. Diana, one of the dancers, was Johnny’s girlfriend. She danced behind the screen in the corner by the band, right behind him.”

  “Diana was cool, but a little wigged out,” added Shannon. “He made her get tattooed. By the time he got through, she was tattooed all over.”

  “She got a bunch of tattoos—had ’em on her chest and groin,” said Turner. “A whole lot of girls would have his autograph tattooed on their ass. Once they did that, the relationship was doomed. He had conquered the girl, and that was the vanquishing ritual. For them to get a tattoo of his signature that would be on their ass for the rest of their life signified they were weak.”

  Although Johnny loved women and psychedelics, his burning desire was a recording contract to extend his career far beyond the reaches of Texas nightclubs. Determined to have originals for a demo tape, Johnny started writing songs that would eventually end up on Progressive Blues Experiment.

  “I wrote ‘Tribute to Muddy’ where I kind of linked songs Muddy did; I tried to take credit for it, but didn’t get away with it,” he says with a laugh. “I wrote ‘Bad Luck and Trouble’ and ‘Mean Town Blues.’ I didn’t write about any particular experiences, just life in general. I wrote ‘Black Cat Bone’ for that record too—a black cat bone is supposed to be good luck.”

  Progressive Blues Experiment, one of Johnny’s most powerful and critically acclaimed blues releases, was recorded at the Vulcan Gas Company. Along with Johnny’s originals, the band played blistering versions of blues classics by his favorite artists: Muddy Waters’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” Slim Harpo’s “Got Love If You Want It,” Sonny Boy Williamson II/Willie Dixon’s “Help Me,” Blind Willie McTell’s “Broke Down Engine,” B. B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault,” and Howlin’ Wolf’s “Forty-Four.”

  Although the club was closed, Franklin projected a lightshow to set the mood and the band put on a show worthy of a full house. Bill Josey, who owned Sonobeat Records, produced and recorded the tape. Josey had approached Johnny at a club about recording for Sonobeat and signed a contract with him for one album and one single. Josey promised to pay him twenty-five cents a record, but Johnny never earned a penny on anything he recorded for Josey, including Progressive Blues Experiment.

  “We had been playing together about a year and wanted to put out a record,” says Johnny. “It took two nights to record the album, about four hours a night. It was just the band, Bill Josey, and the people who lived near the Vulcan. We used a four-track reel-to-reel recorder—and just played. I played a Fender Mustang because it had a bigger sound. For slide, I played a Gibson twelve-string with six strings on it. I strung it that way because I liked the sound. I got my first National [Resonator] guitar when I was about twenty-five and played slide on it for that record too. I like the sound of a National—it’s trebly and nasty-sounding—raw. The recording technology in those days wasn’t as good as it is now, but in a lot of ways I liked it better. The sound wasn’t as neat and clean—it was nice and funky.

  “I played mandolin on ‘Bad Luck and Trouble’ because it was a real country-blues instrument. I never did play electric mandolin—it was always acoustic mandolin. I still play it once in a while.”

  “Progressive Blues Experiment is still my favorite record out of all of them,” said Shannon. “We just set up at the Vulcan Gas Company. We didn’t go through any mikes; we had one overhead mike for the whole band. We weren’t on the stage. We just put our amps in a circle in the middle of the concrete floor and played a set of songs.”

  The Vulcan Gas Company wasn’t a blues club, but the owners hired blues artists such as Jimmy Reed, Freddie King, and Muddy Waters along with their schedule of psychedelic bands. When the club’s manager booked Waters for August 2 and 3, 1968, Johnny was the opening act.

  Bill Bentley, who worked in promotion/publicity for record labels and artists throughout his career, remembers that fateful night.

  “Muddy’s band pulled up in front of the Vulcan in a station wagon with Illinois plates,” said Bentley. “When they walked into the club, they were in shorts and high argyle socks. It’s so hot in Texas in August—it’s at least one hundred degrees every day, some days it’s 105. When they came out, they were in slick pants and silk shirts—it was too hot for them to be in coats and ties.”

  Thrilled to finally meet his musical hero, Johnny brought a camera to the shows and set up a small reel-to-reel tape recorder on the stage to tape Muddy’s performance.

  “It was great to open for him—that was the first time I
ever saw him live,” says Johnny. “We played every other set. We went on, Muddy went on, we came back, and Muddy played the final set. We talked a little after the show and he said he liked my music. We mostly talked about music and he asked me about my National guitar ’cause he had played one too. We didn’t play together that night. I felt honored just to meet him because he had been my idol since I was eleven or twelve years old.”

  “Johnny was like a kid in a candy store,” said Shannon. “He was right in front of the stage and had his little tape recorder playing on the stage at Muddy’s feet. He was like some groupie type guy you would see at any club, standing right there in the front.”

  Muddy and his band were backstage when Johnny and his band played, although a band member would occasionally come out to check out the show. Even Muddy—impressed by what he heard—went to the front of the club to watch Johnny play. Muddy recalled that evening in an interview with Tom Wheeler for Guitar Player shortly before his death in 1983: ʺI said, ‘That guy up there onstage—I got to see him up close.”

  Hearing and seeing Johnny was a revelation for both Muddy and Paul Oscher, who played harp in Muddy’s band. Johnny’s pale complexion and white hair, as well as his playing, amazed the elder bluesman.

  “Muddy didn’t realize albinos were white as well as black,” said Oscher. “He thought Johnny Winter was probably black. Muddy thought he was a good musician and was very impressed with his slide playing. Muddy said, ‘That boy can play!’ or something like that. Johnny could play in Spanish tuning. ‘Kind Hearted Woman.’ Very few people knew how to do that at the time, at least white musicians. I hadn’t seen many white musicians play Muddy’s style on slide, so I thought that was pretty impressive. Johnny may have played ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” that night. Something like Muddy because Muddy said that [his playing] was pretty close to him.”

  Johnny also didn’t fit the image of blues musicians of that era, black or white.

  “A lot of white blues musicians had a hipster image—with a goatee or greased hair—kind of a jazz image,” said Oscher. “When I started with Muddy’s band [February 1968], you had to wear a black suit with a crossover tie—one of those ties Frank Sinatra made famous. Later Muddy bought us red Nehru jackets and white turtle-neck shirts with cufflinks that we wore with black pants.”