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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  When Torello left, Johnny brought back Richard Hughes. When Slick cancelled her tour to rejoin Jefferson Starship, Torello was out of luck. But he rejoined Johnny in 1982, and enjoyed being part of Johnny’s flamboyant lifestyle on the road.

  “What was Johnny like on the road?” he said with a laugh. “He’s a maniac. He’s crazy. Sometimes it got hairy when he got a little out of hand; he’s a pretty eccentric guy. But for the most part, it was total fun. All you had to do was show up and play the gig. Very rarely would we do sound checks because we had a real tight knit band. We stayed at the best places, had twenty-four-hour room service all the time. Johnny usually had a girlfriend on the road with him. I had a different one in every time zone; he could afford to take one with him all the time. Every musician in the world would come to see us—the respect he has from musicians is incredible. The Rolling Stones in the audience, Van Halen waiting in the dressing room, all kinds of people.

  In a move he soon regretted, Torello left Johnny in April 1983 to play with Michael Bolton, who was embarking on a career as a rock artist. He played on the Michael Bolton LP on Columbia, the MTV video for the single “Fool’s Game,” and the consequent tour.

  “I thought it would be the next Bon Jovi,” said Torello. “Johnny always told me: If you can find a better job, take it because it doesn’t matter. I’ll always play and we’ll always be friends. I took it and it was the wrong move. The Michael Bolton organization ... they didn’t even call me and tell me I wasn’t working anymore. Let’s leave it at that. I tried to get back in Johnny’s band. But by then, they said, ‘Bobby’s just gonna quit again because he keeps jumping ship,’ and that was the end of it.”

  Raisin’ Cain fulfilled Johnny’s original Columbia contract, and signaled the end of the Blue Sky label. “Blue Sky dissolved because Steve Paul lost interest in it,” says Johnny. “’Cause there wasn’t any big money in it. He was making good money off of all of us but he wanted big money. He wanted somebody huge. Selling almost a million copies, like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones.”

  With no record label and a burning desire to play blues, Johnny started checking out blues labels. “I just wanted to play on other people’s records,” he says. “We went to Malaco Records, but they didn’t know what to do with me and they weren’t gonna give me enough money. The record companies never wanted to pay blues artists—that’s why so many couldn’t make a living. Labels figured they could make more money on something commercial.”

  After gaining acclaim for reviving Waters’s career, Johnny thought about producing other older bluesmen, including Memphis Slim and Otis Rush. He talked to Rush about a project, but didn’t like his attitude.

  “Me and Dick saw Otis Rush in Chicago,” says Johnny. “I liked him a whole lot as a guitar player and he sang real well too. I asked him if he was willing to have me produce him or if he needed/ wanted to get a record deal—he wasn’t interested. He said he didn’t care about the way it was produced or who produced him. He said the money’s the only thing that made any difference to him. After hearing that, I didn’t care about working with him anymore.”

  Determined to produce an older bluesman., Johnny approached several blues labels, but none were interested. “I didn’t want any money; I just wanted a chance to do it,” he says. “I don’t know why they said no—maybe they didn’t want any fresh ideas or different ideas from what they’re doin’. There were great musicians who deserved recognition and needed help. Old musicians who were well-known but didn’t have any money comin’ in—who hadn’t had anything goin’ for them for a while. I felt like I was in a position where I could help people like that.”

  Johnny still kept in contact with Waters, frequenting his gigs whenever his idol was in town. When Waters played the Beacon Theatre in New York in March 1981, both Johnny and Cotton were guest stars. Johnny saw Waters at the Savoy two months later; Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee opened the show. Johnny’s wish came true when drummer Styve Homnick, who had played with the duo since 1978, approached him about producing Terry’s next album. A country blues harmonica master, Terry was best known for acoustic albums with McGhee, his longtime partner.

  “I walked up to Johnny, who was at a table with Edgar, and said, ‘Sonny would like to do a record with you. Will you play guitar and produce it?”’ remembered Homnick. “Johnny says, ‘Damn right. I’d love to do that.’ He gave me his phone number, and two days later, we were up in Johnny’s penthouse with his manager, working out the details.”

  “I didn’t know Sonny very well when I decided to produce him,” says Johnny. “I think he saw what I did for Muddy and was hoping I could do the same thing for him. We got together at my house in New York and I got to know him pretty well. I loved him; he was a great guy. We talked a lot. He’d been on a bunch of different labels. He was well known for the folk music thing, but I don’t think he made any money.”

  “Sonny and I were real close and he trusted me,” said Homnick. “I said, ‘Sonny, you haven’t done any decent albums in a long time. You’re getting old. It’s time you did an album that’s out of this world. Why don’t you let me throw together the right crew?’ He said, ‘You put it together, whatever you want to do.’”

  Aware of the impact Johnny had on Muddy’s career, Homnick wanted him to produce Terry’s last album.

  “Sonny was getting to that point where he was about to stop playing; his arthritis and gout were killing him,” said Homnick “I thought, it’s gotta end with a bang. Who would be better than Willie Dixon on standup bass and Johnny Winter on guitar and producing?”

  “Sonny had never done an album with an electric guitar player,” says Johnny. “I always wanted to make a record with Sonny because I thought he needed a more Mississippi-style guitar player. Like me. I played a lot of slide on that record because it fit with his voice and his harp. Sonny was great at those sessions. He had a real unique style; he didn’t sound like anybody else. He did the whoopin’ thing, played great harp and sang great too. Sonny had a raspy voice—a Mississippi Delta sound. He could keep the rhythm going on his harp while he was singing. He was seventy when we did that record. He had bad arthritis and was having a hard time getting around. He was in pain all the time but he still played great.”

  Johnny wanted to work with Dave Still, who engineered all his records at The Schoolhouse studio, but Still had moved to Pennsylvania. So Johnny et al drove to Mechanicsburg for the July Fourth weekend to record at Baldwin Sound Productions, Inc., where Still worked.

  “We picked up Willie at the airport with his standup bass, traveled down together, and had a hell of a time,” said Homnick. “Sonny’s wife Emma was in the studio the whole time. Sonny and Johnny got along famously. They got a kick out of each other. Johnny loved Emma, and Susan, what a girl! Everybody got along great. We all thought we were making history.”

  The Baldwin Sound Productions studio, a large square room with high ceilings, was an ideal location for Johnny to set up the mikes and the musicians to capture the ambient sound of early blues recordings.

  “We set up in a circle,” said Homnick. “Willie was on my left, Sonny was on my right, and I was facing Johnny. Like a baseball diamond. Johnny threw most of the mikes in the middle of the room, with a few mikes near my drum set, and mikes near everybody. It was incredible. Sonny and Emma picked the songs. Willie brought in a song he wrote that was never recorded—‘I Think I Got the Blues.’ He sat right there in the studio, sang it a cappella, and coached Sonny on how to do it the way he envisioned it. Ten or fifteen minutes down the line, Sonny got it the way Willie wanted it, and we recorded it spontaneously, just from Willie humming it.”

  The band had never played together, so they spent the first day in the studio just jamming. Like the sessions with Waters, the players followed the leader.

  “Sonny did what he wanted to do and I fit my style into it,” says Johnny. “You gotta follow Sonny ’cause all his songs weren’t strictly by the book—they changed when he wanted to ch
ange.”

  “We all followed Sonny because Sonny really doesn’t know twelve-bar blues,” said Homnick. “He’s just in another world. He’ll turn around before the twelfth bar, or he’ll go thirteen bars. Or he’ll go to the eleventh bar and go one or two beats after the eleventh bar, go right around, and go back to the beginning. You don’t know when he’s going to do that, so if you don’t follow him, you screw up the whole song. There is one song [on Whoopin‘] where it is completely noticeable. You’ll be tapping your foot and all of a sudden, it ain’t workin’.”

  Just as Johnny couldn’t get Waters to play guitar on Hard Again, he couldn’t convince Terry to play electric harp to get the distorted raw sound of Chicago blues.

  “We tried using the mike, but Sonny wasn’t used to it—he wasn’t comfortable doing it,” says Johnny. “He played straight into the studio mike, which made his harp playing a little cleaner. I played piano on that record ’cause I thought it needed a piano. I liked that record a lot.”

  “Sonny could play electric harp; it’s just not his thing,” said Homnick. “He made a living as an acoustic Georgia boy harmonica player and he wanted to do what worked for him. I was disappointed because it would have made things completely amazing. Believe me, being with Sonny nine months a year, I heard him do things that nobody’s heard. He could play Chicago blues like Little Walter. He could do it, but nobody can get him to play through an amp and get that sound. I know I tried.”

  Johnny’s energy and enthusiasm sparked the players, who finished the album in record time. The band spent only three days in the studio (including the first day’s jam), with all but one song recorded on the first take.

  “We did the whole thing in pretty much one session,” said Homnick. “We just played a live show. We didn’t know until later that they recorded the jam session. The first thing we did spontaneously, ‘Sonny’s Whoopin’ the Doop,’ became one of the songs on the album. That’s why Johnny called it Whoopin’. I’ve recorded and worked with a lot of different blues guys, but I never worked with anybody like Johnny Winter. He had an energy in the studio that overwhelmed everybody. He’d be jumping around yellin’ ‘Yeah!’ and making everybody enthusiastic. Every tune was wonderful; there’s only one song where we did a second take. He didn’t want me to play drums on one song, and decided later that he wanted them. So I had to play the drums listening to the headphones.”

  Johnny was thrilled to be working with Dixon again, and found the sessions more enjoyable than the sessions for Johnny Winter. “Willie Dixon picked up things real quick,” says Johnny. “He played standup bass, which I like better than electric bass. Big Walter was such a pain in the ass, it wasn’t much fun working with Willie on Johnny Winter. This time it went a lot smoother.”

  Although Johnny was pleased with Dixon’s performance, Homnick was critical of the bass, as well as the drums.

  “Willie’s bass didn’t come out that strong in the recording,” he said. “Willie hadn’t played bass in a long time; I don’t think his fingers were as dexterous. He was getting on in age; he wasn’t at his peak at that session. I was very disappointed with my drumming because Johnny steered me to using the brushes the whole time. I use brushes on every darn song and I wanted to use sticks. The album could’ve been bumped up five notches if I was lightly slamming the sticks.”

  Homnick may have been disappointed, but Johnny wasn’t fazed a bit. “Johnny thought, ‘Oh man; this will get a Grammy award!’” said Homnick. “He was Mr. Grammy at that point; he had gotten a bunch of Grammys. He thought this is something different; everybody’s gonna freak out. He was so nuts. I love that guy. He’s one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. He’d get pissed off at me when I gave him a hard time but he was easy to work with. When it was time to perform, it was like seeing somebody from another planet. He brought everybody up.”

  Johnny released Whoopin’ on Mad Albino Records, a label he formed specifically for that record. Whoopin’ was pressed on red vinyl with a line drawing of Johnny’s face as the logo. “I came up with the concept for the logo and asked a friend of mine to draw it,” he says. “Susan took the picture for the cover.”

  Susan’s photograph depicted all four musicians, whose names were also on the cover. “I almost fainted when the album came out and Johnny put my name in script, along with Sonny, Johnny, and Willie’s name,” said Homnick. “It was a real honor, another thing that showed me he was a true democrat. He said, ‘You played drums, you brought us all together; I’m going to give credit where credit’s due.’ That’s Johnny Winter for you, an amazing guy. A lot of love.”

  Running a label would have taken more energy than Johnny wanted to invest, so he pressed 300 copies through Baldwin Productions with the idea of using those records as demos to get it released on an established label.

  “I didn’t want to do the whole record company thing,” says Johnny. “Starting your own label is more bullshit than I would like to worry about. Paperwork and everything else. I don’t remember all that I had to do, but it was a pain in the ass, I remember that. I didn’t do much with Mad Albino really—I just used it as a way of getting Sonny’s record out.”

  When Johnny played the Dr. Pepper Festival at Pier 84 in New York that August, he billed Terry as a special guest. Much to the delight of the audience, Terry, Dixon, and Homnick joined him for five or six songs. “I figured it would help him some,” says Johnny. “The audience seemed to like him real good.”

  Whoopin’ eventually got international distribution when it was rereleased on Alligator Records in 1984.

  “I told Bruce Iglauer, I’d go with him if he’d put a record out with me and release my Sonny Terry record on Alligator,” says Johnny. “That was one of the prerequisites of me goin’ with him. I knew Alligator would be better able to promote it and market it than me because I didn’t know what I was doing. Whoopin’ did pretty good. Bruce was really surprised he sold as many records as he did.”

  Iglauer was happy with the sales but doesn’t remember it a part of the deal. “It was on top of the deal with Johnny,” he said. “We released Whoopin’ and Guitar Slinger as a double release at the same time.”

  Terry was thrilled with the distribution and sales. “Sonny was happy too; I don’t think he had ever sold that many before,” says Johnny. “It was Sonny’s first electric album, and he said it was his favorite record. That made me feel great.”

  “Sonny played it on the cassette player till we finally got a CD,” said Homnick. “‘That’s the best record I ever did’—he’d say that all the time. He loved the way he had a group behind him, and everybody followed him. He loved his singing, the way it was recorded, the tone, the arrangements. He loved everything about that album; he was tickled pink.”

  Working with Terry reminded Johnny of the good times with Waters, so he made a surprise appearance during Waters’s performance at the first Chicago Blues Festival in May 1981. During a September break in his schedule, he followed Waters’s tour, traveling to shows at the Paul Masson Mountain Winery in California; the Delta Blues Festival in Mississippi; and clubs in New Orleans, Austin, Houston, and Dallas.

  “I had been workin’ with Muddy for a while and I decided I wanted to spend more time with him,” says Johnny. “We stayed in little cabins in California wine country and had lunch and dinner with him. Muddy’s whole band was there. It wasn’t that good a band; they were pretty rotten. His band had given him notice they wanted more money, and Muddy gave them notice they were all fired. So he had to get another band together real quick. We flew to Mississippi and I played with him at the Delta Blues Festival. We drove to Texas to see Muddy too.”

  When Johnny and Edgar went to see Waters at the Savoy in October 1981, Memphis Slim and John Belushi were in the audience. Johnny didn’t talk to Slim (“he seemed very standoffish—not like the kind of guy you could get close to real easy”), but had a few unkind words for his buddy Belushi.

  “John Belushi was pretty big,” says Johnny. “I was d
runk and called him a fat pig. He just laughed. He didn’t take me seriously. I’m glad he didn’t. I shouldn’t have said nothing.”

  Susan remembers that night and a later phone conversation with the comedian. “I was so mad at Johnny,” she said. “Johnny sometimes speaks without thinking, but John forgave him.... I’ll never forget the night John Belushi called. He was ranting and raving for about two hours. He told me to call him the next day and when I did, he didn’t remember talking to me at all—he was so out of it when he called.”

  Belushi continued his downward spiral. Less than five months later, he died from an overdose on a speedball—a mixture of cocaine and heroin.

  Waters’s health was also on the decline. That January, he was diagnosed with lung cancer, had part of his lung removed, and began radiation. Waters wanted to keep his condition quiet, and his manager Scott Cameron respected his wishes. By late spring, his cancer was in remission, and he booked a new tour. But the cancer returned and he wasn’t strong enough to undergo another operation. He died on April 30, 1983, without Johnny ever knowing the extent of his illness.

  “He didn’t want to be around his friends too much then, so I had no idea he was sick,” says Johnny. “I never saw him after he got sick.”

  When Waters died of a heart attack, Johnny attended the services, even though funerals made him uncomfortable. “I went to Muddy’s funeral; I just felt like I should,” he says. “B. B. King was there; there were a lot of people there. It was a hard thing for me to go through. I was crying. I was trying to talk to B. B. King and I couldn’t even talk to him I was crying so much. It hit me hard. I missed all the times we had recording together and getting to know him. All the good times we had together that we weren’t going to have anymore. It was a hard thing for me to deal with. Seeing someone in a coffin is scary to me. You know you’re not gonna ever see that person again.”