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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  “At the Long Beach gig, we just let loose and did our normal thing and it came out amazing,” said Brockie. “Johnny played me rough mixes around 2004. It’s better than Johnny Winter And. He’s singing at the peak of his power, playing the greatest guitar of his life, and he’s got the greatest band he ever had behind him. You’ve got three feisty guys—Randy Jo, Richard, and myself—and we were breathing flames up his rear end. We sound like a buffalo herd locked underneath Johnny. The gig starts out real clean, like white fire noise. But when the booze kicked in, it got to be scorching and burning, UFOs hitting atmospheres. That tape sounds like Johnny has something on the level of Cream on the rhythm section. ‘Be Careful with a Fool’ on the King Biscuit Flower Hour is probably the greatest live rock-blues recording I’ve ever heard.”

  Johnny and Brockie are the only living members of that lineup. Hughes committed suicide at the age of thirty-five; Hobbs died of an overdose at forty-five. Having lost so many friends and members of his bands to an early death is quite unsettling to Johnny. The loss of life that accompanies a rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle also played a role in Brockie’s change of musical direction.

  “After the show, we went to parties and blew out big time,” Brockie said. “That’s the only problem with rock ‘n’ roll and fame. A lot of guys die; they lose their minds in it and they can’t maintain it. Richard was one of my best friends and one of the greatest drummers I ever played with. He was never boring; he played like a wildcat out of the jungle. He had a great feel on the drums and was capable of doing just about anything, probably one of the best American drummers. When he died, he was one of those unsung heroes. Richard recorded everything at the board on a cassette deck. I remember hearing shows that were unbelievable. Unfortunately, when Richard died, all those recordings disappeared.”

  By the middle of the tour, Brockie grew bored with playing rock ‘n’ roll and wanted to venture into jazz. He left when the tour ended, but still has enormous love and admiration for the man who jumpstarted his career.

  “Looking back on it, I regret we didn’t stay together because we could have done so much,” said Brockie. “Bands are all chemistry, magic. You change one member and you lose that magic. Being onstage with Johnny was insane. To this day, it’s like yesterday—the excitement. He was like a spiritual master to me. It was like meeting a guru, because he had that effect on my life, along with the Beatles, Hendrix, and Cream. Johnny was right there at the biggest part, saying, ‘Really go for it!’ Not just in terms of playing; he’s a huge influence on me in all ways. Johnny is my brother. I owe him so much, and I love him to death. Johnny is a major part of where I am and everything I’m doing in music to this day.”

  After the tour concluded, a new public television performance series called PBS Soundstage debuted with Muddy Waters & Friends: Blues Summit in Chicago, which aired over PBS affiliates in October and December 1974. Filmed in WTTW Studios in Chicago on July 18, 1974, the show featured Waters, Mike Bloomfield, Junior Wells, Willie Dixon, Koko Taylor, Dr. John, Buddy Miles, Nick Gravenites, Phil Guy, Paul Oscher, Pinetop Perkins—and Johnny Winter. It would be only the first time he would play with Muddy Waters, his childhood idol.

  By the time Johnny was ready to cut his next LP, Steve Paul, who was also managing Edgar, Derringer, and Dan Hartman, had formed his own label. Blue Sky Records was an apropos name for a man known to have a fetish for the color blue. Johnny was still signed to Columbia; Edgar and Derringer were signed to Epic; so CBS, the parent company for Columbia and Epic Records, distributed and promoted Blue Sky Records.

  With the leverage of his own label and a stable of popular acts, Paul immediately negotiated a better deal for his artists. “It wasn’t easy, but at that time Columbia wanted to develop my relationship with them,” Paul said. “The first criterion I set forth was to raise the royalty rate for the artists I was managing.”

  Paul set up and oversaw two businesses in the same suite of offices: Blue Sky Records and Organic Management. He hired Rick Dobbis as executive vice president and general manager of the Blue Sky Records and Teddy Slatus took care of the day-to-day operation of Organic Management, Paul’s artist management company. Slatus’s role involved planning tours, working with Premier Talent Agency (the booking agent) and promoters, going on the road as tour manager, and taking care of publishing.

  Dobbis was a record product manager at Epic assigned to the Edgar Winter Group when he first met Paul. “When Steve was forming Blue Sky, he asked me to come and work directly for him and have responsibility for all the artists that were going to be on the label,” said Dobbis, who went on to become President of Sony Music International, and currently runs his own Global Business Management Company. “That was great; it was entrepreneurial. Working at Epic was a great way to learn the business, a great place to go to college—it was my record business education. Working for Steve was graduate work because Steve was so inclusive.”

  Dobbis worked with Steve Paul and his artists from the conceptualization to the release of the records, and acted as liaison to CBS Records. “I worked very closely with the CBS Records people on the planning and execution of the release, the packaging, the marketing plan, the coordination of their sales and distribution network,” said Dobbis. “I represented Blue Sky and the artists’ interests with CBS, and saw that the vision we had for the project would be followed through, and the appropriate amount of attention required for it to meet its maximum audience be attained by the machine.”

  Creating his own record label was a savvy business decision because it gave Paul more control over how CBS handled the records. “There were three reasons to bring Blue Sky into existence,” explained Dobbis. “One was to be able to sign and bring more artists into it; another was to control the product; the third was to make more money.”

  Edgar Winter, however, had concerns on how the Blue Sky label impacted CBS’s commitment to the artists. “It seemed to me Steve was using his leverage as a manager to create what he felt was a better deal for the artist, but it wasn’t a real label, it was a custom label,” Edgar said. “He was able to obtain a higher royalty rate, but the money that would have gone back to CBS—had it not been a custom label—would have indirectly benefited the people out in the field, the promotional people, the radio people, the rack jobbers, the independent promoters, people who push radio airplay—all of the CBS machine. Instead of going back into CBS, that money was going to this entity called Blue Sky, which was just an office with a secretary with no promotional people, no nothing.

  “My feeling was that although it was being distributed by CBS, it wasn’t really a CBS label, so why would they have the same enthusiasm about working that record? Steve assured me it was going to have no effect, that it was a great deal, and we should trust him as a manager to make such decisions. But I noticed ever since that happened, there wasn’t the same feeling, the same closeness between us and the record label as there once had been. I felt that was very damaging and the company wasn’t putting the same energy into promoting and was just waiting for our contract to expire.”

  Neither Paul nor Dobbis agreed. Paul’s take was that the CBS publicity effort varied according to the product. Dobbis thought the Blue Sky structure kept more pressure on Columbia to work harder and to spend appropriately.

  Johnny’s first release on Blue Sky Records, John Dawson Winter III, had a formal seated portrait of Johnny in a black tuxedo with wide brown velvet lapels and an oversized brown velvet bowtie. “It was hard comin’ up with different names so I just used my real name,” says Johnny. “I liked dressin’ up for the cover. I have a tux of my own now but at the time, I had to lease it.”

  John Dawson Winter III took four months to record at the Record Plant; the late summer/early fall sessions were interspersed with Johnny’s trips to New Orleans to write songs and to produce the Thunderhead LP. A departure for Johnny stylistically, John Dawson Winter III is a mixture of blues, rock, country blues, ballads, and country and western. Although Johnny
played primarily with Hobbs and Hughes, producer Shelly Yakus added lavish production, with strings, synthesizer, keyboards, horns, and background vocalists on several of the songs. “You can’t really categorize that record because it was pretty different from anything before,” says Johnny. “It was important to me to let people know I could do something different.”

  With New Orleans as a getaway from New York, Johnny wrote five songs, more than he has ever written for any recording. He wrote “Stranger” (“a pretty ballad—one of my favorite songs that I’ve ever written”), “Self-Destructive Blues,” “Pick Up on My Mojo,” “Sweet Papa John” (a country blues song with lascivious lyrics), and “Love Song to Me,” a country and western song with lyrics reflecting his tongue-in-cheek sense of humor.

  “That was about how much I loved myself,” he says with a laugh. “I was just having fun. ‘Sweet Papa John’ was a blues tune about me too—about how cool I was. I used a solitary bass drum on ‘Sweet Papa John’ ’cause all the old blues groups did; it was something I had gotten used to hearing on Muddy’s records. It was a dirty song,” says Johnny laughing as he sings a bar. “‘They call me Sweet Papa, ’cause my candy is the best. You know I melt right in your mouth, sure don’t leave no mess.”’

  “Rock ‘n’ Roll People,” the opening track, was penned by John Lennon. Yakus solicited that song while working on Lennon’s Walls and Bridges album. “I don’t know why John didn’t do it himself, but I liked it and was glad to have a John Lennon song,” says Johnny. “It’s hard to get songs from people you respect. You’ve got to find somebody who you like who’s got enough material where they don’t need to use it all for themselves.

  “I met John just in passing at the Record Plant; we were both workin’ in the same studio. He came in with May Pang. We mostly talked about music. That was the only time I saw him. I loved his song writing. He wasn’t much of a guitar player but he was real good at writing and singing.”

  For the other five songs, Dobbis contacted songwriters, including John Fogerty, Cat Stevens, Van Morrison, Billy Joel, Alan Toussaint, and James Taylor. “We picked those artists because they’re good writers,” says Johnny. “We were lookin’ for something bluesy that had potential to get on Top Forty radio. We’d usually have forty or fifty songs to choose from.”

  After listening to shopping bags full of tapes and acetate demo records, Dobbis selected fifty songs, and brought them to Steve Paul’s house, where he, Paul, Johnny, and Yakus listened and made lists. Once they agreed upon the songs, Johnny went back into the studio.

  Engineer Dennis Ferrante, who worked with Yakus on several John Lennon albums, remembers those sessions.

  “We’d start at seven o’clock at night and go to one o’clock in the morning,” Ferrante said. “In those days there was no clock; it was rock ‘n’ roll. Your session started at seven, and you’d stop when the artist was falling down, or you were tired. Those sessions were loose, very relaxed; there was no pressure.”

  Dobbis noted the differences between those sessions and contemporary ones, where time is of the essence. “Those sessions were long, intense, and experimental from the standpoint that there was a lot of openness to try something else, let’s try it again this way, let’s try it again that way,” said Dobbis. “Johnny’s style of playing uses a lot of improvisation, and studio albums were more structured. That is always a challenge for somebody that really lets loose live.”

  Ferrante, who worked with both Johnny and Edgar, noticed a distinct difference in their approach in the studio. “It was more feel for Johnny, it was rock ‘n’ roll,” said Ferrante. “In the words of Rick Derringer, ‘Edgar makes masters; Johnny makes demos.’ It wasn’t a bad inference. Johnny lets a lot of things slide, and Edgar is a perfectionist on everything he does. Edgar would spend a half hour on getting one note in a sequence, and Johnny would do a whole song. Just whatever happened, happened.

  “You know how he always yells ‘yeah’ when he plays? It sounds very rock ‘n’ roll, but actually what it is, is he screwed up. That’s how together he is with his playing. Not something noticeable, but with his ears—he had perfect pitch—he heard a bum note. He knows at the moment he made a mistake, he has to cover it up by yelling. He said, ‘When I do that, I screwed up.’ I said, ‘You must’ve screwed up a lot.’ He said, ‘No, if I do it once, then I do it later on, because it sounds like it’s planned.’

  “Johnny and John Lennon were very similar in the studio. They didn’t want to make everything too slick. John Lennon knew exactly what he wanted; the concept was in his head; we just had to execute it. With Winter, it was basically the same way. He came in, he had the songs written, he knew what he was gonna do.”

  Johnny used a MXR Phase 90 on several songs, a monumental departure for a man who always said he hated effects. He discovered it at Thunderhead’s Bogalusa ranch house.

  “Johnny was writing songs for John Dawson Winter III when he was staying with us, playing on and producing our record,” said Rush. “He wrote ‘Stranger’ in our living room. When we rehearsed, he played through my amp. I had this MXR Phase 90 phase shifter lying on the floor in a large box. He said, ‘What is that?’ ‘A phase shifter.’ He said, ‘What does that do?’ ‘Well, step on it.’ So he stepped on it and he heard that phase-shifter sound and it became part of his sound. The only effect he ever really liked; there were some years where he had it on all the time.”

  Another discovery he made during that period was Vandermint Dutch Chocolate Liqueur, which satiated both his love for chocolate and yen for alcohol. He drank a 750-milliliter white ceramic bottle by himself at each of the sessions.

  “It was like drinking Bosco, but it was potent,” said Ferrante. “He always came in with the same stuff and got so smashed on it. One night we were just kibitzing around, and Shelly called him a bleach-bottle blonde. Johnny says, ‘No, this is my hair,’ and Shelly said, ‘I don’t believe you.’ So he drops his drawers in front of me and Shelly to show us that he is blonde everywhere. He was like a twig; he looked like a piece of birch bark. There was no color, no pigment anywhere. We were laughing, he started chasing Shelly around the console, and I ran out of the room. Later, he came walking out into the hallway. By this time he had his pants on. He was three sheets to the wind but he was holding up pretty good until we started talking. He was talking to me, leaning against the wall, and all of a sudden—like in slow motion—he went down very slowly and finally hit the floor. He just started laughing; he was so tipsy at that point, he didn’t know what was going on. It was one of the most hilarious nights we ever had with him.”

  With the completion of his latest LP, Johnny was ready to go back out on tour. Despite his reluctance to use yet another second guitar player, Hobbs convinced him he needed a rhythm guitarist to fill out the sound and add to their live performances. Johnny hired Floyd Radford in June 1974. “Floyd’s a real good guitar player,” says Johnny. “He played whatever I wanted, whatever I needed—he was real good at it.”

  Radford had played on Edgar Winter’s White Trash, released in 1971, and toured with Edgar’s band. He played with both White Trash and Tin House until June 1971, when Johnny went into rehab. “That’s when everything around Johnny fell apart, including Tin House,” said Radford. “I left Edgar and White Trash, and went back to Orlando with Tin House to regroup.”

  Paul thought Tin House needed a fourth player, but when they returned to New York as four pieces, Paul passed on managing them. In June 1974, when Radford was literally a starving musician in L.A., he looked up Paul at a music convention, hoping to sell him some equipment.

  “I was real poor, so when I found out Steve Paul was going to the Columbia Records convention, I went there to try to sell him some guitar speakers,” said Radford. “Steve said no, but Johnny needs a guitar player, so put a tape together and send it to me.”

  With no equipment except a tape recorder, Radford put a rough tape together, and Johnny called and invited him to New York for an audition. �
��I had a Gibson ES 355 and one Marshall at the audition,” said Radford. “Randy Jo was on acoustic, Richard was on drums, and Johnny was playin’ the Firebird. We jammed for about an hour and a half, one song after another, and Richard recorded it on Johnny’s cassette player. I kept up pretty good. I had practiced songs on Johnny’s albums with Randy and Richard, especially John Dawson Winter III.

  “After the audition, Johnny says, ‘We’re gonna go in the other room and talk—you stay here.’ I stayed in the practice room, biting my nails, wondering if I got the job. When they all came back in, Johnny says, ‘We like your playing; you’re in. We’re going to tell that other guy not even to come.’”

  Like Brockie before him, Radford moved into a communal house in Connecticut, and rehearsed with the band for a week before embarking upon a European tour. He also experienced a sense of closeness and family he didn’t feel when he knew Johnny only as a member of his opening act.

  “Johnny was very personable,” said Radford. “It was like talking to your brother or your best friend. We got really close. After Johnny put down his guitar, we’d talk about things. Johnny would go on and on about not wanting to be commercial, wanting to play blues.”

  Although Johnny still longed to return to the music of his idols, he played predominately rock ’n’ roll during that phase of his career, with a live set list that included “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Boney Moronie,” “Rock ’n’ Roll People,” and “It’s All Over Now.”

  “Johnny had a love-hate relationship with rock ‘n’ roll,” said Radford. “Johnny is a blues guitar player and he was made to play rock ‘n’ roll. Everybody was trying to get Johnny to be a little more commercial, but I don’t think his heart was in it fully.”

  Radford played a straight-ahead rock style of guitar and needed a bit of coaching to develop a rock ‘n’ roll style. “I grew up playing a lot of British-style rock: Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck; I was definitely a rock player,” said Radford. “Rock is pretty solid and straightforward. Guitar players play it very straight, down the middle, down the line. The roll part of rock ‘n’ roll is little to the left or the right. Randy was a very strong rock ‘n’ roller and helped me develop that rock ‘n’ roll style.”