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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  Meyer and Iglauer talked the next day, with neither one willing to budge in terms of access to the studio during the sessions. So Iglauer picked up cassette rough mixes of the sessions and began looking for another engineer who could capture the sound he wanted. He took them to Chicago Recording Company (CRC), but their best engineer couldn’t duplicate the sound. Reluctantly, he took the tapes to Streeterville Studios, where he was introduced to a young engineer named Justin Niebank, who quickly duplicated and improved the sound Iglauer had in mind.

  While Iglauer searched for a studio, Johnny scouted Chicago record stores or hung out in his hotel room, listening to records with Shurman, who empathized with his situation.

  “Johnny had been trying for three years to get on this label,” said Shurman. “He said he literally put his hands on Teddy’s throat and said, ‘I asked you to get me a deal with Alligator for three years. If you don’t do it, I’ll just call myself.’ He was really up for it and he comes in, and here’s this guy who is so egotistical and into himself that he’s gonna torch the whole project. Poor Johnny is sitting in his hotel room, not knowing what the hell to think or what’s going to happen to the project now that he got kicked out of the studio.”

  Johnny’s angst had turned to anger by the first session at Streeterville Studios.

  “Johnny was drinking vodka real steadily and smoking pot,” said Iglauer. “We were in a small room used as an overdubbing, soloing space. Johnny was really drunk and he kept saying I’m going to kill somebody. I’m going to kill somebody. And I was the somebody, of course. It was both scary and hilarious at the same time because I wasn’t sure if he was going to kill somebody.”

  Johnny remembers that evening well. “I told Dick I was gonna show Bruce what it’s like to be a jerk. I walked around all night saying, ‘I’m gonna kill somebody, I’m gonna kill somebody.’ I felt like murdering somebody—I was really that mad. It’d take a lot for me to murder somebody, more than just a fucked-up record, but I would if I got mad enough. I think it scared Bruce a little ’cause he was hidin’. I’ve got a reputation for not taking any shit.”

  The combination of alcohol and anger took its toll on Johnny’s output during that session. The only useable take was the solo on “Lights Out.” “We recorded some other things and they were useless,” said Iglauer. “He was either fumbling or too drunk. First he was just too angry, then there was a moment of being able to play, and then he was just too drunk.”

  The first night at Streeterville Studios with the entire band started out just as badly, but Johnny surprised them when they realized the method behind his madness.

  “Johnny was really rude to the band,” said Iglauer. “He spent the whole night just changing strings, tuning, screwing around, and ignoring them completely. They didn’t know what to do with that—they were pretty pissed. We cut ‘My Soul’ that night. Johnny asked for some very heavy strings because he wanted to play the solo on bass strings for a different kind of sound. It was about eleven o’clock at night and I was phoning around the city, trying to find a musician who had a big E string—it was like a .60. I didn’t know what was going on until I heard the final song. I was baffled. I think Dick was baffled too. We cut the track and the band was just playing parts; they had no idea what song we were doing. They were playing patterns, and Johnny eventually built the song from the basic rhythm track.”

  Johnny didn’t like too much structure in the studio; he wanted to be able to create the sound he heard in his head and change it until it felt just right. “My records tend to be spontaneous—not planned out,” Johnny says. “You can change a song in a lot of different ways. Sometimes I play a song two or three different ways before deciding which version I like best.”

  Iglauer was accustomed to working with artists like Albert Collins, who would lay down tracks for six or seven hours and finish an album in two nights.

  “I’m used to people coming in and saying, ‘Okay, let’s make a record, here’s a song list, does everybody know the arrangement?’” said Iglauer. “With Johnny, you had to create the atmosphere to get him to record. Johnny also had his body-clock schedule where we couldn’t start before a certain hour. We usually went to the studio around eight thirty. The first hour to hour and a half was often a big waste. He’d be getting his momentum up. Then there would be peaks of creativity, and he’d have a two-hour block of being extremely productive, doing songs quickly, leading the band, and showing them what he wanted them to play. He’d be really energized. He’d knock out three or four final takes in a row. When the energy started dropping, you’d usually get nothing after that.”

  In an interview published in Jazz News, Iglauer was less generous. “Johnny is a very high-strung and nervous guy, and it’s hard for him to get focused in the studio,” he said. “He works in ‘streaks,’ so that in five hours he may have thirty minutes of greatness, but that thirty minutes is truly great.”

  Johnny agrees with the first statement, but dismisses the notion that he was only on for such a short period of time. “I don’t agree with that,” he says laughing. “I think he got more than that. But maybe he felt that way.”

  Shurman felt that Johnny’s energy level during a session depended upon his alcohol intake. “It wasn’t temperament; it was how much he ingested and how long ago,” Shurman said. “He liked to record his guitar sober, because he thought he played sloppy when he was drunk. But he liked to sing when he was a little bit drunk. Not over the edge, but just more relaxed. We’d have him do his guitar part in the earlier part of the evening. When he felt relaxed enough to start singing, he would sing until he got beyond the point where he was going to do anything productive. You could tell. He’s start grumbling about small things, getting a little more scattershot in his approach and comments. It was obvious when it was time to stop for the night.”

  Johnny’s first priority in the studio was laying down guitar tracks because he found it more difficult than the vocals. Although two of his solos were overdubs, he recorded the majority of his leads with the band.

  “It’s the hardest part for me, and it makes it easier to do it with the band playing,” he says. “I do the leads first because they are harder to do and then do the rhythm parts. I do the vocals later because they’re easier. I usually drink when I’m doing my vocals. It helps me to relax a little bit and do the songs better. I don’t drink when I play the guitar—not as much,” he adds with a laugh.

  “Johnny never liked to do his final singing and playing at the same time,” said Shurman. “The way he plays guitar is more or less steady through the whole song—compared to a lot of other blues artists. There is a little less call-and-response in his guitar patterns. So when he’s tracking with the band, he wants to be able to concentrate on his guitar playing. He’ll do enough of a vocal just to give the band an idea. The hope is he’ll get his lead guitar track with the rest of the band because the band is playing with him when they do their track.”

  Iglauer also observed a nuance of Johnny’s guitar style that set him apart from other blues guitarists. “Johnny tends to solo in four-bar segments,” said Iglauer. “A lot of blues artists do but because he knows so many licks, his four-bar segments will sometimes be somewhat disconnected from one another. Like a four-bar Slim Harpo, followed by four bars of Gatemouth, not imitation, but clearly inspired by. And he finds ways of stringing them together. His mind would swing from place to place to place very quickly; he was playing them that way, too. Not just because he’s playing fast; the synapses work very quickly with his fingers.”

  On the third night in the studio, Johnny placed his guitar on a stool, and when Gayden walked by, he stepped on the cord, which wrecked havoc on the input jack. “It was my Lazer,” says Johnny. “He broke the guitar; yanked the guts out of the inside where the cords connected to the guitar. I flipped out. I said, ‘Oh no, man, how could you do that?’ He said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry.’ He didn’t mean to do it, and I knew it wasn’t his fault.”

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p; “Poor Johnny Gayden was waiting to see which one of us was going to kill him first, but fortunately Johnny was in a good mellow mood about it,” said Shurman. “I think that helped with all of them. They saw Johnny was just a guy like them—he wasn’t going to put some kind of attitude down because Johnny Gayden accidentally damaged his guitar.”

  Johnny’s mellow demeanor also made an impression on Branch, who didn’t quite know what to expect. “You get this image of this wild man with long white hair and tattoos, but he was cool, real mellow, and laid-back,” said Branch. “He’d greet me very warmly; he was always pleasant and easy to work with. You got a good vibe. He wasn’t like some people that you get a vibe, ‘Okay, I got you guys working here, let’s get this over, I’m a big star, the hell with you guys.’ It wasn’t that at all. He didn’t talk a lot but you still got a warm feeling from him.”

  Johnny’s initial Alligator recordings had three producers, which is atypical, but Iglauer and Shurman had worked together before with Albert Collins (and after with Roy Buchanan), and had their roles worked out.

  “Bruce makes it happen, I help it happen,” said Shurman. “Bruce would organize everything, do the business, and book the studio. We’d have a preproduction meeting at my house and go through the material, and Bruce would run the rehearsal. Bruce’s nervousness drove a lot of artists nuts, so I would be on the floor with the band, to give them cues and take them through the performance. He would be in the control room with the engineer making sure it was coming out well on tape. It was a good complementary situation.”

  MTV debuted in 1981 with the ambitious goal of playing music videos 24/7. A shortage of material in those early years allowed bands with professional videos to get airtime. So Iglauer decided to film a video for Johnny’s “Don’t Take Advantage of Me.”

  “It was very early in MTV’s history,” said Iglauer. “They would play all videos and there weren’t that many videos. The video got on regular rotation on MTV—what they call lunar rotation, which meant very often. It was on in the middle of the night, but it was there. It was a big turning point for Alligator because that was the first time we were perceived as being something more than a blues specialist label.”

  Johnny’s video is filmed in color in a Western bar; it changes to sepia tones when the scene flashes back to the Old West. Barechested with his multicolor “Screamin’ Demon” tattoo and his trademark cowboy hat, Johnny sends cowboys flying into the wall with killer guitar riffs and brands barmaids with a touch of his hand.

  Iglauer solicited friends and actors from ImprovOlympic for his cast. “One of the bar girls was Nora Dunn, who was later on Saturday Night Live [a regular cast member from 1985 to 1990] and plays a reporter in the Three Kings movie,” said Iglauer. “The famous acting coach Del Close played the drunk, and the bartender was one of the ImprovOlympic guys.”

  “The video for MTV was something else,” says Johnny. “I didn’t know what I was doin‘—I didn’t have any confidence at all. I didn’t know about making videos, so I went along with what Bruce had to say. You usually don’t make videos for blues, so I was glad to be doing one. They shot it in Deadwood Dave’s, a biker bar outside of Chicago. Bruce came up with the script. The video was a little corny but it wasn’t bad. They had us walkin’ around doin’ dumb things. Spinning around onstage, ripping off my shirt.”

  By the end of the video and the recording of Guitar Slinger, Johnny and Iglauer had resolved their differences. But Johnny’s reluctance to promote the record, teamed with Slatus’s unwillingness to take a stand with his client, hurt their rapport. Slatus had been a gofer for Johnny when he worked for Steve Paul, and still played a subservient role.

  “It was frustrating working with Johnny and Teddy on the promotion of the record, because Johnny would make commitments to do interviews—either live or on the phone—and break them,” said Iglauer. “Teddy, rather than confronting Johnny and saying, ‘You can’t do this to the media, it’s insulting,’ would just make excuses. So we got tired of asking. There was so much more we could have done to advance Johnny’s career if Teddy had been willing to act as an authoritative manager. But Teddy absolutely would not confront Johnny about anything. He would apologize for Johnny over and over again. Teddy was Mr. Apology.

  “We had a big interview for Johnny in the Japanese Guitar Player; the guy was calling from Japan to do a phoner with Johnny. Johnny was home and the guy in Japan had screwed up on the time change and called at the end of the two-hour block of time. Teddy told me Johnny sat and listened to the guy on his answering machine but didn’t pick up the phone because he wasn’t calling at the right time. He never did the interview. Johnny is a kid; he has never grown up. In some ways, he’s very spoiled.”

  Unlike major record labels, Alligator has a limited number of releases, and works their records to radio and the press for a considerable time. Even when the records are no longer getting airplay, Alligator promotes its artist’s gigs to generate coverage on radio and in the print media. “We commit to working with an artist’s career, not just the record,” said Iglauer. “Johnny was an absolute priority for us. He was our bestselling artist at the time and I was proud of the records. But Johnny was problematic. At a gig in Chicago, he wouldn’t do any interviews before the show because he was getting ready for the show. After the show, he wouldn’t do any interviews until after eight. We wanted him to greet some store people, and by the time he was ready to greet, everybody had left. That was real typical. People would want to meet him, even if it was only a minute, and he was resistant to that. So we had a real hard time getting media things going.”

  Despite Johnny’s reluctance to do interviews, Guitar Slinger earned a Grammy nomination and made the Billboard and Cashbox charts. It reached #183 in Billboard in August 1984 and was on the charts for four weeks. “It sold about 100,000 copies,” says Johnny. “It did better than Raisin’ Cain.”

  In June 1984, Johnny played with Waters’s Legendary Blues Band at the first Chicago Blues Festival, which was established to honor the memory of Muddy Waters. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. Although Iglauer sent the band a tape of Guitar Slinger specifying the songs Johnny would play, they never bothered to learn them.

  “I remember the band not being very good because they didn’t know my songs at all,” Johnny says. “They thought they were too good to have to learn anything; figured it was all blues and they could do it. I didn’t want to use them. I wanted to use my own band, but they wanted me to use the Legendary Blues Band.”

  Understandably miffed, Johnny initially refused to go onstage. “Johnny was very angry and basically barricaded himself in the dressing room,” said Iglauer. “The Legendary Blues Band did its own set; maybe thirty minutes before Johnny came out. The stage manager comes out to get Johnny, and Teddy is standing by the door. ‘Johnny’s not coming out.’ Maybe Teddy groveled, or I groveled, or we all groveled, and he eventually came out. Johnny was rightfully pissed because when he tried to do ‘Mad Dog’—with totally regular changes—they screwed it up. It was very disrespectful.”

  Once Johnny got onstage, drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith played off of the beat and ignored Johnny’s tendency to push the front of the beat and his signals to pick up the tempo. “Johnny kept looking around at us, giving us the body language to urge Willie, to push him,” said Jerry Portnoy with a laugh. “I looked around and saw Willie—he knew what was going on—he had his head up, his eyes forward, and he wouldn’t look at Johnny. Willie Smith is probably the most obstinate man on the face of the Earth. Once he makes up his mind, there’s just no moving him.”

  Disgusted with the way he was treated, Johnny left immediately after his set. “I was too pissed off to ask them why they didn’t listen to the record,” he says. “I didn’t want to scream at ’em, so I got out of there.”

  In 1985, Johnny went into the studio to record Serious Business with Gayden, Jones, Saydak, and Paris on harmonica. “Murdering Blues” and “Unseen Eye” had been recorded du
ring the Guitar Slinger sessions; Paris’s harmonica parts were dubbed onto the existing tracks.

  Johnny had written five songs for Serious Business, but only “Good Time Woman” and “Serious as a Heart Attack” made it onto the album. “I wrote those two in my hotel room in Chicago,” says Johnny. “It didn’t take too long to write those songs. Sometimes if you’re in the right frame of mind, they just come out. I wrote the music in my room and wrote the words after the band recorded the song. It was easier to write that way.

  “Bruce didn’t like any of my songs. He didn’t want to use ‘Serious as a Heart Attack’ because of the line, ‘I’m gonna make your blue eyes black.’ He didn’t like it because it was an anti-woman, anti-female song. I worried a little that it might be perceived as violent, but I wrote a lot of violent songs,” he says with a laugh. “On that song, I was goofin’ on the ‘Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue’ song.”

  Iglauer understood the humor, but felt the song also had a darker side. With “Murdering Blues” already slated for that LP, he was concerned about adding another song about violence toward women.

  “Bruce didn’t mind saying what he felt,” says Johnny. “I didn’t like it but I felt I had to give him some leeway because he owned the label.”

  “It was on Serious Business that we really fell out,” said Iglauer. “He discovered I’m hardheaded and strongly opinionated. I like things my way and he does too. I’m not a flexible guy, and in those days, I used to have a really bad temper, and was much worse. Part of it was I used to drink a lot of coffee, and late at night I drank alcohol. I never drank in the studio because it would affect my judgment, but I drank afterward. So I was always going up or going down.”