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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

By the late 1990s, Slatus’s alcoholism spiraled out of control. Johnny no longer saw him socially because he hated to see him drunk and listen to his apology the following day. “He says he’s sorry and that he wishes he didn’t start doing those things,” says Johnny. “Then he says, ‘Well, you drink too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, Teddy, but I don’t try to kill people and fire everybody when I drink. I don’t overdo it like you do.’ He can’t stop. He’s fired a lot of different people.”

  “Teddy told me I was fired once or twice,” said Epstein. “I just laughed. The bottom line was Johnny hired me, not Teddy. Johnny was the only one that can fire me or hire me. As far as the rest of the crew, Teddy was a very abusive guy. If he didn’t get his way, he would go ballistic. He thought nothing of making you feel as bad as he could, sometimes he enjoyed it. Everyone had their run-ins with Teddy. My attitude was: I’m not going to glorify it or take it seriously. Managers just work for the artist like the band does. They can make your life miserable, but don’t have the power they think they wield.”

  Like many people who didn’t see Slatus on a daily basis, Epstein initially wasn’t aware of his drinking problem. “When I met Teddy, he seemed totally sober,” Epstein said. “I didn’t notice him drinking till ’98 or ’99 on one of our European trips. When I showed up in Copenhagen, I bumped into Teddy in the hotel and he was very drunk. I had never seen him that drunk before. The next day, he wouldn’t come out of the room. We used a local road manager and did the tour without him.

  “Johnny basically hoped Teddy wouldn’t fall off the wagon but didn’t seem preoccupied about Teddy’s drinking. Johnny was pretty self-absorbed most of the time. He was more concerned with what’s for dinner and that he got to do whatever he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”

  A creature of habit, Johnny doesn’t like to alter his routine. He has a set schedule and nothing short of an act of God is about to make him change it, whether it’s eating a particular food at a specific time, sleeping during the day and staying up all night, or not giving interviews earlier than 9 PM.

  “There’s something with food with Johnny that happens with everybody,” said Epstein with a laugh. “I’ve been good friends with Jon Paris for a long time, and we always joke about that. You call Johnny up after six months, you have this great conversation, and halfway through some sentence, he says, ‘I gotta eat dinner, got to go, bye.’ Click. It’s always food ... or his pills. He had a schedule and it had to be adhered to.”

  Johnny loved eating and traveling on a tour bus. “It’s expensive, but you have everything there, and can sleep on the way to the next gig,” he says.

  “We always traveled at night because it’s easier,” said Epstein. “We’d eat dinner, hang out, have a couple of beers, and one by one, people would crash. Johnny would be up all night long. We had satellite TV with music stations, but Johnny would just want the blues station on all the time. It drove us nuts because you hear the same stuff over and over again. We didn’t watch movies; we didn’t watch TV; it was just the blues station. He’d be up all night long, so there was no relief,” Epstein added with a laugh.

  In 1998, Slatus moved into a bed-and-breakfast in Colchester, Connecticut and met Betty Ann Johnston, who owned and operated the property. Slatus claimed he moved to Connecticut because Derringer needed financial help; Johnny says Slatus could no longer afford his New York apartment. It was the beginning of his personal and professional relationship with Johnston, who worked her way into his management company. Johnston’s blatant dislike and contempt for Johnny (who she blamed for Slatus’s drinking), teamed with her manipulative behavior, didn’t bode well. She would eventually help Slatus increase his share of Johnny’s earnings, and make it easier for him to manipulate and control Johnny and his wife.

  Like the star he wanted to be, Slatus is highly visible in the footage of Johnny’s May 1998 induction into the Rock Walk on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Johnny laughs about the day his hand-prints and signature were immortalized in cement.

  “I remember having gooey hands,” says Johnny. “They took a lot of pictures, and I donated a guitar.” Johnny usually donated cheaper models when asked for memorabilia, and was surprised to learn he had donated a Firebird to the Rock Walk Museum. “That was stupid,” he says laughing. “I must have wanted that award awful bad.”

  Later that year, Slatus hired Val Minett, who managed singer/ songwriter Loretta Hagen, to create and maintain Johnny’s website. Slatus wanted to manage Hagen and claimed he could get her a record deal. It was the beginning of a four-year business relationship that Minett described as “a weird time that felt like twenty years,” and ended with a lawsuit.

  Rumors about Johnny’s health continued to fly. Even diehard fans thrilled that he was touring, were appalled by his frail appearance and seeing him being led onto the stage, too weak to pick up his guitar. Johnny had lost the edge in his voice and the dexterity in his fingers. Many fans, as well as music critics, questioned why Slatus was keeping him on the road in that condition. To Minett, the answer was obvious.

  “Teddy needed the money,” she said. “Teddy treated it like a circus. He had his sideshow and that’s the way he treated Johnny. Whenever his money started to get down, he would call Bruce [Houghton of Skyline Music] and say we need some gigs.”

  Earlier that year, Solow Management Corp., the landlord of Johnny’s penthouse, sent him a notice of nonrenewal of the lease. Although Johnny had lived in the rent-stabilized apartment since September 1974 and never missed a rent payment, he had listed his corporation Ole Pa Enterprises as the tenant for thirteen subsequent leases. The realty company sued Johnny’s corporation, claiming “neither Ole Pa nor Johnny Winter was entitled to renewal.” The suit argued that Johnny was a subtenant of Ole Pa, and a corporation cannot use its premises as a primary residence.

  Johnny and Susan stayed in the apartment for ten months without a lease (December 1998—September 1999) while the case was pending and Susan looked for a house in Connecticut.

  “We were pretty much forced out of the apartment in New York because they kept suing us and evicting us,” said Susan. “We were spending so much money on lawyers. I said, ‘Let’s just get a house and get out of this.”’

  Johnston, who began making inroads as a friend and confidant, accompanied Susan when she found and fell in love with an eleven-room house in Fairfield County. Living in a two-story house soon proved to have a downside. In October 2000, Johnny got up in the middle of the night, and half asleep, thought he was in his New York apartment. Thinking he was walking down his old hallway, he stepped out into space and fell down a flight of stairs.

  “I screamed,” says Johnny, laughing at the memory. “I landed all over—on my ass, my back; and I screamed at Susan to help me get up. I tried to make it up the stairs but I knew something was wrong. I waited about three days before I went to the hospital. I thought it might get better but it got worse. I knew I had to go to the hospital and face the fact I had broken my hip.”

  Johnston knew a doctor at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, so Slatus had Johnny taken there instead of to an emergency room. X-rays confirmed a broken hip. Surgeons inserted a plate and four screws to hold the hip together. Johnny stayed in the hospital for four days, and then recuperated at home, forcing the cancellation of an extensive November tour of the Midwest, Northwest, and western Canada.

  His bad luck was just beginning. Two months later, his father died in Beaumont at the age of ninety-one, and Johnny was in no shape to fly to Texas for the funeral. “He had broken his hip too, strangely enough,” says Johnny. “He fell down in the street—the wind knocked him over. He was real weak and he just got weaker and weaker. I saw him just a few months before he died. He was walking with a walker. I’m glad I went to see him before he died. He was a good person who lived a good life. Even up until his death, he went to choir practice once a week and taught Sunday school.”

  Although Johnny’s hip should have been healing, his problems were far from over. A
year after the first surgery, he was still in pain and unable to play standing up. X-rays revealed the metal plate had broken in his hip, and he needed another operation.

  When Johnny returned to the stage, he walked with a cane and played sitting down. “It’s a drag to have to sit down,” says Johnny. “I thought there’d be a lot of rumors about me being too messed up to stand up, but I didn’t hear anything. There are always rumors because I had that problem with heroin in the early ’70s. People think I’m going back to heroin for some reason. I hate that.”

  In February 2001, Johnny released a video compilation entitled Pieces & Bits with concert footage, TV clips, and personal photos. The video got poor reviews for the “grainy clips and bad sound,” with one reviewer calling it a “nothing but a big money grab by Teddy Slatus.” When it was released on DVD that December, fans who purchased both formats complained the DVD version wasn’t as good as the video. The reason was obvious. Slatus didn’t want to invest any money in the project so asked Minett, who produced it, to ask fans for footage via Johnny’s website. Fans obliged but the footage was copies of copies of copies—much of it fifth-generation.

  In May 2001, a devastating outbreak of Mad Cow Disease cancelled Johnny’s plans for a European tour, which included headlining the Bishopstock Blues Festival in England. When he embarked on a month-long tour of the Midwest, Northwest, and western Canada to make up the dates he canceled when he broke his hip, Johnny and his entourage came down with the flu. Worried about his reputation, Johnny performed anyway. “I had a hard time singing, but I wasn’t gonna stop just because of the flu,” he says. “I didn’t want to get the reputation of a band that cancels every time the wind blows the wrong way.”

  With Johnny’s health issues and a sporadic touring schedule, Johnny’s band fell to the wayside. Epstein moved to Hawaii, making it too expensive to fly him in for gigs. Whether it was over financial matters or because Epstein and Liuzzi had seen too much (which often predicated a change of lineup), Slatus convinced Johnny to hire new musicians.

  “Mark wanted more money and Vito wanted more money, and I just couldn’t afford them,” says Johnny. “I hated losing Mark and Vito because I thought they were real good. Teddy didn’t—he didn’t think they were as good as they should be.”

  Although the Pointblank label had disbanded, Virgin agreed to pick up Johnny’s option for one more CD. Slatus, still eager to get a crossover hit, enlisted Tom Hambridge to produce I’m a Bluesman. Hambridge, the writer, producer, and drummer who produced Susan Tedeschi’s Grammy-nominated Just Won’t Burn CD, wrote two songs for Johnny, recorded them in Boston, and sent the tapes to Johnny.

  “Dick’s a good producer but Tom was more commercial,” says Johnny. “Tom wrote ‘Lone Wolf’ and ‘Cheatin’ Blues’—they were a little more commercial, more rock flavor. I did guitar and vocals over the tracks his band played on. Tom was a good drummer and the bass player [Tommy McDonald] played real nice too.”

  While dubbing the tracks with Hambridge at the Carriage House Recording Studios in Stamford, Connecticut, Johnny met a guitar player who would turn his life around. Paul Nelson had just finished cutting tracks for the XFL, the professional American football league created as a joint venture between NBC and the World Wrestling Federation that only played for one season. Nelson had studied with Steve Vai at the Berklee College of Music and played with Liege Lord, a heavy metal band that released two recordings on Metal Blade Records in the late 1980s. Slatus was impressed with his musical and technical knowledge and told Nelson he wanted him to be Johnny’s second guitarist. Because of Johnny’s resistance to having another guitar player in his band, Slatus said he would work him in slowly and tell Johnny he had been hired as his guitar tech. Nelson flew to England with the band the following week. He quickly expanded his role by co-writing three songs with bassist Scott Spray for the CD, and playing rhythm guitar on five tracks.

  Slatus hired Hambridge and McDonald as Johnny’s rhythm section for the rescheduled Bishopstock Blues Festival in August. The CD was scheduled to be recorded between tours in 2001, but fate has other plans. When Johnny tried to sign a work permit in the airport in London, he had no feeling in his right hand.

  “I couldn’t move my right hand; it was just hanging down limp from the wrist down,” says Johnny. “It was completely numb. I thought it would be okay the next day, and it wasn’t, so I went to see a doctor in Bishopstock. He said it was radial nerve palsy and would last about six weeks. If it hadn’t healed by then, I’d have to have an operation. It just happens, there’s no reason for it. We’d flown all the way over there, and to get off the plane and find out your hand doesn’t work—it was real tough.”

  Rather than letting the promoter break the news to the 5,000 fans waiting to hear him perform, Johnny stepped onstage to announce the cancellation before heading to the doctor. He felt his fans deserved a personal message, and Slatus wanted the audience to know Johnny could walk and talk, and thus quell rumors he had a stroke.

  “That was a hard decision to make,” Johnny says. “I told everybody I was sorry; that I wanted to play for them, but I couldn’t. I was afraid I was going to get booed and have people throw things at me. But they clapped and gave me a standing ovation. It was great.”

  Despite the damage control, losing feeling in his hand and canceling that gig was another rough blow. “It was a pretty big financial loss,” says Johnny. “They were going to pay us pretty well. You have to give back the advance; you have to pay for the rooms and the flights. I lost a lot of money.”

  When Johnny returned to Connecticut, he went back into the studio with Hambridge, who recorded and dubbed Johnny’s vocals on several additional songs. Slatus immediately posted photos of those sessions on Johnny’s website to show the label, promoters, and fans it was business as usual.

  Yet being unable to play guitar and wondering if he’d need another operation took its toll on Johnny. Doug Brockie, his second guitar player from 1973—1974, traveled from New Jersey to visit him every week, offering moral support and massaging essential oils into his hand.

  “I don’t know if that helped or not, but I was willing to try anything,” says Johnny. “I was afraid I might have to have an operation, and I sure didn’t want that. I hated it—I can’t even imagine what it would be like not to be able to play guitar. I thought what in the world will happen if I can never play guitar again? I tried not to think about it. I believe in God, and I believe God can do anything for you that you need done. I prayed a lot and it worked.”

  Johnny wore a leather cast and an Ace bandage, which gave him minimal use of his fingers. “I could use my fingers to smoke or get an iced tea, but it was hard to eat with a bandage,” he says. He did exercises every day, and the feeling gradually returned. Within six weeks, he was able to strum his Lazer guitar. Encouraged by his progress, he practiced an hour every day. Within several weeks— which seemed like months—he regained his picking ability and could play both the Lazer and the Firebird.

  Meanwhile, Val Minett was learning firsthand about Slatus’s deceptive business practices and alcoholic episodes. Lured by the offer of a fulltime salaried job, she had left Tennessee and bought a house in Connecticut, but it wasn’t long before she regretted her decision.

  “I didn’t know Teddy had drinking issues,” she said. “The only time I realized I had seen him drunk so many times was the first time I saw him sober. It was an awakening. When I still lived in Tennessee, he would call me all hours of the night with, ‘I got this idea. What do you think of this?’ ‘Let’s do that.’ He always had a lot of good ideas but he never followed through.”

  One of the things Slatus never followed through on was paying her a salary. He had a reputation of exploiting people without compensation, and Minett was one of dozens lured into his trap with promises of future projects and eventual payment.

  “Almost as soon as I moved up here, their attitude started to change,” said Minett. “I noticed just how controlling Betty Ann
was and how drunk he was all the time. He would go through periods of sobriety, and always fall back in. I think at times he had Johnny’s best interests at heart, but he was a very tortured man.”

  Minett became increasingly concerned about Johnny’s overmedicated state, and the number of prescriptions he got from his doctor, who also kept Slatus supplied with pills. “Betty Ann called him [Johnny’s physician] Dr. Pill,” said Minett. “Even when Teddy was out of his mind, he made sure Johnny had his medicine. Maybe it was his way of making sure Johnny didn’t know how badly Teddy was doing.”

  Slatus was in and out of rehab in 2001 and 2002, but couldn’t stay sober. “Teddy kept falling off the wagon,” Minett said. “I was doing everything: arranging the tour, setting up interviews, and going to the gigs. Teddy started crying one day, saying, ‘You’re Johnny’s manager now.’ Teddy would fall off the wagon every time something bad happened or something good happened; whenever there was any type of pressure. Two days before they went to Europe, he fell off and Betty Ann had to go to Europe.”

  In late 2001, when Slatus had a meeting in New York with Sony Music executives to discuss the upcoming release of Best of Johnny Winter, he asked Minett to accompany him. When it was time to go to the meeting, he wouldn’t come out of his hotel room.

  “He answered the door crocked out of his mind in his dress shirt and underwear,” Minett said. “I told him we had a meeting, and he told me to change it. I could see the bottle of scotch, and he was trying to not let me walk in the room, pushing me back saying, ‘Don’t come in here.’ Finally he said, ‘I’m not alone,’ and I saw a prostitute on the bed.”

  Minett returned to her room to regroup, but the drama has just begun. She got a call from Johnston, who told her to get Slatus’s wallet when she heard he was drinking. “I asked how I was going to get his wallet away from him,” said Minett. “She says it’s in his pants pocket, and I said he wasn’t wearing any.”