That was a wakeup call for Johnny. No longer able to dismiss heroin as a recreational drug, he knew the repercussions could be fatal. That incident led him to the methadone clinic in New York and caused him to make serious changes in his life. He set down rules he says he has stuck to since 1973. He never works more than four or five nights a week, and never stays on the road for more than four or six weeks at a stretch. Avoiding junkies was another critical decision.
“I decided to not be around people who were doing drugs and not to be on the road all the time,” he says. “With one-nighters, you gotta do so much travelin’, flyin’ from place to place. I just told Steve Paul how it had to be—whether he liked it or not, he had to do it.”
Before Johnny formed another band, he spent time on the West Coast, regaining his confidence by performing for large audiences. During July and August 1972, Johnny sat in on a couple of shows at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., jamming with friends eager to see him back in the spotlight. He sat in with Captain Beyond on July 23, when Caldwell’s band opened for Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” tour. Like his appearance with Edgar, the audience went wild when he walked out on the stage.
Johnny also sat in with the Allman Brothers at the Hollywood Bowl on August 6. He joined them for an encore, playing “Johnny B. Goode” and jamming with the band on Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom.” He was back in the game and ready to take the world by storm. But first he had to take care of some personal business.
When Johnny signed himself in to River Oaks Hospital, Carol Roma moved home to Nacogdoches and stayed with her mother. Johnny had kept his basement apartment in New York, but she didn’t want to stay there alone, so far away from Johnny, her family, and her friends. After living with her mother for a while, she moved to Houston, got an apartment with a friend, and went back to working as a hairdresser.
His infidelity had always been a problem in their relationship, and the personality and lifestyle changes that accompany heroin addiction didn’t help. As Johnny grew more and more dependent on heroin, drugs became the focal point of his life. He became isolated from Roma, as well as family and friends. He had to deal with the psychological stress of trying to rationalize and defend his drug use, and he experienced bouts of anger and depression as the heroin high became milder and more short-lived.
Johnny admits his addiction had an adverse affect on their relationship, but didn’t foresee any problems by his drug use or his nine-month stay at the hospital.
“I couldn’t put anything into the relationship because I was so unhappy about myself,” he says. “When she found out I was doin’ hard drugs, she didn’t like it but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She did it a little bit too, but not near as much. She never got strung out.”
With Johnny in the hospital, the possibility of a future together—at least to Roma—became nebulous. She turned to another man to meet her emotional needs.
“She didn’t know if I was gonna get out of the hospital or not,” says Johnny. “There wasn’t much of an understanding. We hadn’t really talked much about our relationship—I was too worried about myself. Everything was fine till I found out about the other guy. She had a thing goin’ with a guy in Nacogdoches, and she didn’t say anything when I was in hospital. I didn’t know till I got out and went back down to Houston.
“As soon as I got out, I went to Houston to see her and to get back into playin’. I went to her apartment—her roommate Nancy was there but she wasn’t home. I saw pictures of her and this other guy, and asked Nancy, ‘Who’s this?’ She said, ‘You don’t know about whatever his name was,’ and I said, ‘No, you better tell me.’ Carol came home when I was there and I tore up the place and broke up with her. She didn’t tell me she was seein’ anybody else; that’s what made me mad. I wanted her to stay true and I got real mad when I found out she was goin’ out with somebody else. I never told her to stay true—I just expected her to.”
Devastated by Johnny’s reaction, Carol tried to explain why she’d started seeing someone else, but it fell on deaf ears.
“I told her that was it,” says Johnny. “She cried a lot. She said she didn’t know if I was gonna stay alive or not—she was all by herself so she got involved with this other guy. That wasn’t a good enough excuse for me. She went along with me seeing other people, but she finally went out with somebody else and that’s what broke us up. I wasn’t gonna put up with it. But I still didn’t break up with her completely.”
Johnny makes no bones about his double standard. “That’s just the way it was,” he says without apology. His fame and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle attracted women who didn’t mind being one of many and the women he lived with tolerated his infidelity.
With or without Carol in his life, Johnny never had a shortage of women eager to get to know him better. He met his next significant other as soon as he flew back to New York. Susan Warford, Paul’s new driver, picked him up at the airport. Susan was living in Miami when she met Edgar’s fiancée Barbara in Coconut Grove.
“I was a hippie,” Susan said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I was just lying around doing whatever came along. When Barbara, who became Edgar’s second wife, was down from New York, I met her in the park and we became friends. She said she was going to marry Edgar and she’d give me a call. About a year later, in 1969 or 1970, she called and said, “We’re married, and he’s going to do a show with Johnny in Miami.”
Susan was nineteen when she met Johnny and Edgar in Coconut Grove, where they were staying at a friend’s apartment. She thought he was “nice and sweet,” and didn’t become dazzled until she saw him at a large outdoor festival in Dania.
“I always tell people time stopped for a second—everything froze,” she said. “There was some kind of connection there. I always remember that moment where time froze and Johnny came onstage.”
Johnny doesn’t remember much about their meeting in the apartment but has a vague memory of meeting her. “I remember thinking that Susan was kinda cute but I didn’t really think a lot about it,” he says.
Determined to see more of Barbara and Edgar and to work in the music business, Susan traveled to New York in 1972. “I came up to visit Barbara at her house in the country, and we drove into the city and had dinner with Steve, Rick and Liz Derringer, and Barbara and Edgar,” she said. “Steve was looking for somebody to work for him, and they talked him into hiring me. I went back to Miami, got my stuff together, and two weeks later I was back working for Steve. I did everything—I was like a Girl Friday. I drove him everywhere, I made all his appointments, I picked up things for him—a little bit of everything.
“Steve was intimidating; he had a caustic mouth and I was always afraid he was going to turn on me. I lived in his house in Rye, New York. Living there was part of the job; otherwise I don’t know what I would’ve done. I didn’t have any money. I got stuck on the third floor in an attic room. I was working for Steve a couple of months before Johnny got out of the hospital and came up from Texas. When I picked him up at the airport in Steve’s blue Lincoln, Johnny was very talkative; he was excited about starting new projects. He was crazy, but so was I, so we got along real good.”
“I remembered Susan when she picked me up at the airport,” says Johnny. “I thought it was a good thing she was Steve’s driver—I’d probably put the make on her.”
Getting a band together and recording a new album were Johnny’s priorities, so he didn’t stay in New York long. Derringer had joined Edgar’s White Trash and Caldwell had Captain Beyond. Hobbs had just drifted, and met up with Johnny as soon as he got out. Despite Johnny’s decision to steer clear of drug users, he quickly enlisted Hobbs for his new lineup.
“I stuck with Randy ’cause he was still my good friend,” says Johnny. “He was takin’ drugs, though. I wondered if it would affect me, but it didn’t. But eventually he got so bad I had to let him go.”
Johnny’s contract with Columbia called for two albums a year, but his yearlong
hiatus didn’t jeopardize the agreement. Although it would have been quicker to cut a new album with studio musicians, Johnny didn’t want the clean sound of seasoned professionals. He wanted a trio that would play with wild abandon, so he traveled to Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to audition musicians. With Steve Paul giving him free rein over his choice of musicians, and cautioning him not to rush into anything, Johnny stayed at the Continental Hyatt House in L.A. for several months while he was auditioning players. He put up a notice at Musicians Equipment Rentals and held auditions at Studio Instrument Rentals.
“I always liked getting my own band,” says Johnny. ‘Studio musicians are too clean, and I wanted guys who can bash their instruments. I put advertisements in trade magazines and auditioned hundreds of people. It’s hard to find people just out of nowhere. Sometimes they aren’t any good; sometimes they’re too good and don’t fit in the way I want them to. I got a lot of crazy people and didn’t find anybody I liked. They played pretty good but not what I wanted. They were more rock ’n’ roll—I didn’t get anybody who could play good blues.”
Disappointed, but undaunted, Johnny returned to New York still searching for the perfect players to continue his musical journey.
PART II
8
BACK WITH A VENGEANCE
While Johnny was in California, Derringer traveled to the Jersey shore to see Cobalt, a Johnny Winter cover band managed by his banker. “Our manager kept bugging Rick about jamming with us,” said Doug Brockie, Cobalt’s lead guitarist. “Rick finally gave in and came out and jammed.”
When Derringer brought Johnny to see Cobalt at a dance in New Jersey, he was blown away. “It was amazing,” Johnny said in an interview for Play:Back, published by Columbia Records. “Out of the fifty songs they knew, forty-five of them were mine. I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.... I grew up copying Ray Charles, and these guys were growing up doing me.”
The minute Johnny heard Cobalt’s drummer, his search was over. “Richard Hughes was a basher, a crasher, and could play anything I needed,” he says. “He played real well, he played all my songs, and he was a good guy.”
Formed by Brockie when he was sixteen, Cobalt was based in Point Pleasant, Mantoloking Bay Head on the Jersey shore. “I found Richard at a gig at my church, playing with Jim Bentley from the 1910 Fruitgum Company,,” said Brockie. “He didn’t know any Johnny Winter material when I met him. I taught Richard all of the Johnny Winter material because I was a Johnny Winter freak. At fifteen and sixteen, Johnny was like my Robert Johnson.”
As soon as he auditioned and hired Hughes, Johnny went into the Hit Factory in New York City to cut Still Alive and Woll. After nine months in the hospital and even more time away from his music, Johnny was elated to be back in the studio cutting an album. “It felt great because it’s something you love that you’d given up for a while,” he says. “We cut seven songs in a row on the first take on the first night.”
Released in 1973 on Columbia Records, Still Alive and Well was the perfect anthem for Johnny’s triumphant comeback. Derringer wrote it as a member of Edgar Winter’s White Trash, which released it on Roadwork the previous year.
“Everybody thought he wrote it for me, but that wasn’t true,” says Johnny. “Rick wrote it for himself—he was bragging he was still alive and well. I recorded it ’cause I thought it was a good song and I was ‘still alive and well.’ I wrote ‘Rock & Roll’ and ‘Too Much Seconal’ for that album.”
Johnny wanted the sound of a power trio so most songs featured Hobbs and Hughes, with Johnny on vocals, guitar, slide guitar, and mandolin. But he also used several guest artists, including Derringer on slide guitar on “Silver Train,” electric guitar on “Cheap Tequila,” and pedal steel and click guitar on “Ain’t Nothing to Me.” Todd Rundgren played a Mellotron on “Cheap Tequila,” Mark Klingman played piano on “Silver Train,” and Jeremy Steig played flute on “Too Much Seconal.” “I had heard his album, Jeremy & the Satyrs [a 1968 Reprise release],” says Johnny. “I liked Jeremy and liked the way he played. He was a famous jazz flute player who played real bluesy.”
“Mick Jagger and Keith Richards gave me ‘Silver Train,’” Johnny says. “They hadn’t recorded it yet. I did ‘Let It Bleed’ on that album too—they’d already recorded that. I always liked the Stones’ sound; they did a good job of writin’ blues songs that were hits too.”
Johnny was loose during those two-week-long sessions, tossing off asides that would amuse fans but make the FCC wince. At the end of “Let It Bleed,” Johnny says, “God damn it. Did that get it or what?” and prefaces the intro to “Still Alive and Well” with “I’m hungry—let’s do this fucker.”
Still Alive and Well was rereleased on CD in 1994, and included the previously unreleased tracks “Lucille” and “From a Buick 6.” Neither song had lead guitar tracks, so Johnny wasn’t pleased when he discovered their inclusion. “They weren’t ready to be added,” he says. “They should have talked to me, but of course they didn’t. Both of those songs were just rhythm tracks. They never told me they were gonna put them on the CD because I would have said something. I didn’t want them on ’cause they weren’t complete.”
The inside sleeve of the album contains a black-and-white photo of Johnny with the words THANKS, SUSAN in the lower right-hand corner. That simple message reflected how quickly their relationship had evolved. “Living in the same house with Susan in Rye helped me to get to know her,” says Johnny. “It made it a lot easier because she was always there. It was really pretty country and we did a lot of talking outside. I stayed up all night and she stayed up all night with me, so something was bound to happen.”
When Johnny began seeing Susan, he was still involved with Carol Roma in Texas and had a few more women on the side. He still had feelings for Carol, who wanted to get back together. “It was still a big deal to break up with Carol, so I had her come up to New York to see how I felt about her, to see if we could get back together,” he says. “When she came, Susan took off. I loved Carol in a way too. I didn’t treat Carol very good but she really did love me. I just couldn’t get close to her after she’d been out with somebody else. I didn’t think I could ever live with her after that. Even though I was going out with other people, I wasn’t going to put up with her going out on me. So I sent her back home and stayed with Susan. I still saw other people but Susan didn’t.”
Carol returned to Houston, and within a year or so, began dating Edgar, who was also living in that city. “Carol first met Edgar in Houston years ago when he was playing with me, and Edgar had been in love with her for the whole time,” says Johnny. “He always liked her, but he said he didn’t do anything about it because she was with me. When he first started seeing her, he told me he had been in love with her and hoped I didn’t mind. I said, ‘No, we broke up. You can do anything you want to.’ They were goin’ out awhile, but not too long, before they got married. I didn’t go to his wedding. I’m not sure how long they were married. They broke up ’cause she was goin’ out with other people and he found out about it. I never did think she loved Edgar—I thought she did it just to get back at me. She never did treat him right.”
“Carol wasn’t as loyal and dedicated to Johnny as other girls who were fixated on him,” said Turner. “Her marriage to Edgar lasted a few years. It was fascinating to Johnny that his little brother had married his old lady. Like the rest of us, he thought it was really weird. He said she couldn’t have him, so she took Edgar. It was the next closest thing.”
After the final split with Carol, Johnny invited Susan to live with him in the basement apartment they had shared on Eighty-Fifth Street. She was still working for Steve Paul, but quit shortly after she moved into the City.
“We were living together real quick,” says Johnny. “First at Steve’s house, then in my apartment in New York. The more I lived with Susan and was around her, the more I got to where I really felt strong feelings for her. She was real sweet, not aggres
sive at all, and she didn’t seem like she wanted anything from me. She seemed like she was being completely honest, and really true to me. A real, real person.”
Within two or three months Johnny knew he was in love, but he waited to express his feelings. “I knew Susan probably six months when I told her I loved her,” he says. “We were walkin’ down the street, going to one of our favorite Italian restaurants and I told her I loved her. She said, ‘I love you too.’ It was pretty unbelievable that it happened that quick.”
Although Johnny was busy with rehearsals and recording sessions, they savored their time together to enjoy their budding romance. “We went to plays, restaurants, movies, clubs,” he remembers. “It’s nice when you’re first getting to know somebody. We’d go see plays on Broadway—going to the theater was Steve’s idea. We saw Grease; we saw Equus with Richard Burton. I loved that; it was great. Steve always traveled in an entourage—he always wanted to have a lot of people around. Steve went with whatever friend he was courting at the time. Buster Poindexter would go sometimes. We’d go to Max’s Kansas City, where Steve had his own table. He liked being a big shot and wanted everything his own way. He’d send back food if it wasn’t to his specifications. I didn’t like him—it was uncomfortable when he was like that.”
Once Johnny and Susan became an item, they traveled south to meet his and her parents. “We went down to Cutler Ridge in Florida to meet Susan’s folks and they treated me real nice,” says Johnny. “Her father had been in the FBI—I thought it was pretty strange. He seemed like a cop a little bit; he had that feel about him. But he didn’t have a problem with me. I smoked grass over there too. I waited until they went to sleep and me and Susan would go out on the front porch and smoke grass. My parents were cool when they met her; she made me happy and they were not going to tell me what to do. But my other girlfriends didn’t like it very much.”
Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) Page 21