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

by Mary Lou Sullivan

  Torn between leaving a bizarre situation, and looking out for Johnny’s interests, Minett returned to Slatus’s room, but he wouldn’t answer the door. When he finally answered his phone, he told her to go without him. She met with the Sony executives and returned to Connecticut that same day. Slatus was missing for a week. To finance his binge and penchant for prostitutes, he ran up $40,000 worth of charges on his American Express card, which Johnston later disputed as fraudulent, claiming the card was stolen.

  “It was all to an escort service tagged as Hampton Bay’s Antiques,” said Minett. “When Teddy did come back, he was still out of his mind. Betty Ann made it like he was trying to break in and tried to hit her. I don’t know if it’s true, but I can’t imagine it. She had him taken away by the police, and then had him put away into a detox place.”

  Slatus’s relationship with Johnston was mutually codependent—she needed him for financial reasons, he needed her to run the business, work as tour manager when he was drunk or in rehab, and convince Susan and Johnny he was looking out for their interests. She told women they were married. Slatus told women the relationship was strictly business.

  “They both hated each other equally,” said Minett. “They were both so manipulative; I had a hard time figuring out who was the worst of the evils. If they got you by yourself, they would have you believing the other one was the devil on Earth.”

  Slatus became an easy mark for the friends he made in rehab. He hired Ricky, a former heroin addict who didn’t stay clean, to do odd jobs around his house. When Johnston was away for a few days, Ricky stopped by with several bottles of scotch. They had a couple of drinks together, and before long, Slatus signed over $5,000 worth of checks to his rehab buddy.

  “Teddy got so bad sometimes,” said Minett. “Betty Ann and I would be working and need Teddy’s signature for checks. I would have to go up to his room, where he had pissed and shit all over himself in bed, wake him up, prop him up, and tell him I need his signature. There were many times I had to void checks, because he had signed all over the place. That was his life.”

  In March 2002, Johnny returned to Carriage House to record guitar parts for three more songs recorded and produced by Hambridge in Boston. Two months later, Johnny started rehearsals with a new lineup that included legendary blues harp player James Montgomery, bassist Scott Spray, and drummer Wayne June. Scott played in Edgar’s band, and had filled in for Epstein at rehearsals since 2000. They played three gigs in June, including a show at B. B. King’s in New York, followed by six blues festivals in France. Reviews of those shows were mixed; loyal fans were thrilled to see him back onstage, while others were dismayed by his frail appearance and the diminished capacity of his vocals and dexterity on the guitar. Concerned that Johnny only had a forty-five-minute window when he could perform, Slatus hired Montgomery to share frontman duties and infuse energy into the show.

  “I was hired to distract from Johnny’s health,” said Montgomery. “Teddy and Bruce Houghton [Johnny’s booking agent] said they needed someone that looks lively, can carry part of the show so the audience isn’t saying, ‘Look how bad Johnny looks.’ I’m a pretty animated performer. Johnny wouldn’t have a guitar player up there, but because Muddy worked with harmonica players all the time, it was alright.”

  Montgomery was dismayed when he began rehearsing with Johnny, wondering how the band—with Johnny in his diminished capacity-could ever play in front of a live audience. “The first rehearsal with Johnny, I was going oh ... my... God. We’re going to put this show on the road?” said Montgomery. “Our first show was at a club called Stash’s in New London, Connecticut. I’m onstage thinking, this is not working, but the crowd was going nuts. A light bulb went off above my head like in the cartoons. It doesn’t matter. They love Johnny. We’re going to go over big, we’re going to get an encore, they’re going to love this show. He has a strong following that is loyal.”

  Buoyed by the audience reaction, the band rehearsed weekly, playing the same songs at every gig and rehearsal. “Eventually through repetitiveness and rote, we put together a pretty solid show,” said Montgomery. “Johnny would still have flashes where you could see he is one of the greatest blues guitarists who ever lived. If he’d been handled differently over the years, he’d be bigger than Eric Clapton.”

  Johnny’s handling was far from professional. Slatus continued to make business decisions that sabotaged Johnny’s career. When Robert Gordon, author of the 2002 biography of Muddy Waters, teamed up with Morgan Neville to film a documentary on Waters for the PBS American Masters series, he contacted Slatus to set up an interview with Johnny for the film. When Gordon and crew flew in to interview both Johnny and Keith Richards, who also lives in Connecticut, Slatus cancelled the interview, saying Johnny had a rehearsal for an upcoming tour.

  Meanwhile, Slatus’s continually underhanded dealings with Minett had reached the breaking point. She told him she couldn’t work for him any longer. Johnston called the next day and demanded she return merchandise stored at her house and sign off on the Pieces & Bits video. Minett still hadn’t received the monies designated by the contract she had with Slatus, but when she called the bank, he had withdrawn the money and closed the Pieces & Bits account. She sued, but by the time the courts allocated her the agreed-upon fifty percent, DVD sales had slowed considerably. Minett still hadn’t been paid for tour work and maintaining Johnny’s website for a year, so she retaliated by blocking access to the website, posting bold black letters on a bright red background proclaiming CLOSED DUE TO NONPAYMENT. It was hardly a victory. She returned to Tennessee, still concerned about Johnny’s welfare, and disgusted by the way she had been treated.

  “Once they have all your ideas, you’ve got things running, and you’ve seen too much, then they’re done,” she said. “Once they drain you dry, they’re done with you.”

  14

  FREE AT LAST

  When Slatus discovered the website after returning from a European tour, he put the blame on Minett. He couldn’t account for all the money during that tour, so he claimed the bus driver overcharged him $10,000, and the crew had stolen money. Yet the band had seen several—often more than one at a time-well-dressed prostitutes going in or out of his hotel room. More than likely, that’s where the money went. In January 2003, when the band embarked on a West Coast tour, Slatus made Montgomery the scapegoat for his out-of-control drinking, charging his liquor to the harp player’s hotel room. “In Santa Cruz, Teddy was ordering booze like it was going out of style and saying, ‘My God, Montgomery sure is drinking a lot,” said Montgomery. “He had a $600 bar bill for six days. They took him right from that hotel and sent him to rehab again.”

  When Slatus checked into a rehab center in California, he appointed Paul Nelson as tour manager, admonishing, “Don’t stab me in the back.” Nelson, who already had misgivings about Slatus’s financial practices, soon realized Slatus had behind the scenes deals with various club owners. That practice had been going on for decades. One scam was demanding more money (that Johnny never received) on the night of the show. That con became so common, one promoter built it into the budget.

  Although that promoter requested anonymity, he shared his experiences with Montgomery. “He would tell the club owner, ‘I’m going to book Johnny for $7,000 and tell Teddy I could only get $6,000,” said Montgomery. “I want you to take the other $1,000 and put it into stacks of $500 cash.’ Later, Teddy would come in just before the show, say, ‘Look at this place, its packed. Give me $500 cash or Johnny’s not going on.’ The club owner would pretend to be surprised and give him the $500. Just before Johnny was about to go on, Teddy would say, ‘I need another $500.’ The club owner would say, ‘You’re beating me up, but here’s the $500.’ It was planned in advance because the guy knew Teddy was going to come in and take that money.”

  Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson’s quote—“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run
free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”—described Slatus perfectly. His dishonesty ran deep; he considered it business as usual in the music industry.

  “Teddy bragged about being a busboy in the Catskills and coming home with more money than the maître d’,” said Montgomery. “Teddy was a wheeler-dealer from day one. What he learned in the borscht belt and learned working for Steve Paul was what he thought life was all about. You wheel and deal, you try to get what you can. If there is a little bit of cheating to make sure you get ahead, that’s life.”

  Susan and Johnny suspected financial discrepancies in the late 1990s, but couldn’t get out from under Slatus’s thumb. In 1997, Edgar and Johnny’s mother Edwina joined forces to call Johnny and try to convince him to find another manager.

  “Edgar told me Teddy wasn’t being honest,” says Johnny. “Momma didn’t trust Teddy either. Edgar had worked with Teddy but quit working with him because he didn’t trust him. That’s why Rick Derringer left Teddy too. When Edgar stopped working with Teddy, he told me that he didn’t trust him. When I talked to Teddy about it, he’d get real mad. Every time I would accuse him of anything, he’d get really pissed off.”

  Although Johnny usually let the subject drop after Slatus got indignant, at the urging of Edgar and Edwina, he and Susan asked to have the books audited. Slatus responded by quitting the day before Johnny was scheduled to go on tour.

  “He went nuts,” said Susan. “‘How dare you even think I would do anything like that?’ He went crazy, so we backed off. I talked to Murray [their accountant] and tried to go over the financials to try to figure out where things were going. It looked like it was about right. I didn’t have any way of knowing otherwise and I didn’t want to accuse him unless I really knew. I always thought something was wrong, but I had no way to tell.”

  When Slatus couldn’t go on the road without drinking, Johnston became road manager. She had no knowledge of the music industry and little respect for Johnny and the band, which she considered “a ragtag group of weirdos.”

  When Johnny confronted him about his drinking in 2003, he said he could quit without any outside help. “Teddy just doesn’t want to quit—that’s the whole thing,” said Johnny during that time frame. “He’s got to want to quit before it’s gonna work. Teddy has gone to four or five programs for drinking, but none of them have helped. At the last one, all they did was dry him out.”

  Slatus was drunk when he met Virgin Record executives at Johnny’s June SummerStage concert in Central Park. Bouncers at B. B. King’s in Manhattan threw him out of Johnny’s August performance, which was taped for the Johnny Winter: Live in Times Square video. “Teddy was too fucked up that night,” says Johnny. “One of my drivers had to take him home and then come back to get us.”

  Unhappy with the quality of his performance at the B. B. King show, Johnny told Slatus not to release the video. Slatus agreed but released it anyway. Meanwhile, Bob Margolin, Muddy Waters’s guitarist, began a project at Sony to produce reissues of the Waters Blue Sky LPs that Johnny produced in the late ’70s. Slatus supplied the masters from the Blue Sky sessions, but Johnny knew nothing about the project until I told him about it during one of our interviews. “I’m surprised Johnny didn’t know because Teddy Slatus has been involved with all this from the start and recently provided a lot of the original multi-track recordings,” said Margolin. “I hope there’s nothing weird going on.”

  Despite Slatus’s behind-the-scenes manipulations and rip-offs, he continued to play the gofer, catering to Johnny’s every whim. A creature of habit, Johnny wanted what he wanted, when he wanted it. Slatus did what he could to keep him happy. The band and crew spent eight hours in Paris looking for Ocean Spray cranberry juice, and they drove hours out of their way to find Johnny’s favorite Jell-O, yogurt (Yoplait with the gold top), and Pop Tarts; they also used a GPS to locate a White Castle or a Taco Bell, which make the only burgers and tacos Johnny will eat.

  “It was important for Teddy to have this schedule for Johnny so he could control everything,” said Montgomery. “Making sure he had what he wanted, rather than saying no. It was an unreal world where you had a guy who was overmedicated making decisions, and a manager who wasn’t making any career decisions at all. Nothing to further his career—just let’s keep him on the road, keep him on the medication. It was a bizarre scene.”

  Even more bizarre was Johnston’s role as road manager, which she overplayed to make up for her lack of knowledge and experience. Pushy, overbearing, and sometimes belligerent, she made ridiculous demands for Johnny just to throw her weight around. She flattered Johnny and bought him gifts; but behind his back, she called him a “burnout like Ozzy Osbourne.” Smarter than Slatus, especially in his compromised condition, she helped him pad bills for anything and everything; a ninety-dollar car-cleaning bill doubled by the time they sent it to Susan.

  “With Teddy, it was twenty dollars here, eighty dollars there, fifty dollars there—the same way he operated in the Catskills as a busboy,” said Montgomery. “Teddy thought because he was working so hard for Johnny that he deserved it. My impression was the two of them didn’t have a problem with skimming money off the top, because they felt they deserved it for taking care of this poor fucked-up musician. But he was in shambles because of the way they handled his career and the medications they let him do.”

  During Johnny’s 2003 European tour, Johnston’s belligerent behavior resulted in lost dates, lost gigs and merchandising income, and a lawsuit. The original itinerary had blues festivals in Norway and Italy. Slatus revised the itinerary a month before the tour began, dropping those festivals and a club in Germany, and adding six new German dates. The tour started with blues festivals in Switzerland and Austria, followed by a show in Leipzig, Germany. After that sold-out performance, Johnston accepted the final advance from Fabulous German Entertainment GmbH, the German promoter. Unhappy with the tour bus they provided, she hired a new bus and, together with the band and crew, skipped town in the middle of the night. Johnston was able to rebook the festivals in Norway and Italy, but it didn’t make up for the damage caused by her knee-jerk reaction. Johnny lost seven gigs, had thirteen extra free days in a twenty-three-day tour, and was sued by the promoter, who distributed the following press release:

  WE ARE VERY SORRY THAT JOHNNY WINTER’S GERMAN TOUR WAS CANCELLED IN SUCH A MYSTERIOUS WAY, BUT ALL OUR EFFORTS FELL ON THE DEAF EARS OF THE US MANAGER TEDDY SLATUS AND ACTUALLY PEAKED IN AN ERUPTION OF CURSING, WHICH ONLY DOCUMENTS THE UNPROFESSIONAL BUSINESS CONDUCT OF THIS MAN.... AT NO TIME DURING THE PREPARATION OF THE TOUR WAS OUR WORK EFFORT CRITICIZED OR DRESSED DOWN BY THE US MANAGEMENT. ACCORDINGLY WE SIMPLY CANNOT UNDERSTAND THE NIGHTLY DEPARTURE FROM LEIPZIG FOR AN UNKNOWN DESTINATION USING AN UNKNOWN BUS.

  Johnny backstage with his trademark Gibson Firebird. (Photo by Susan Winter)

  Johnny’s guitar collection in New York. Lying down L—R: mid ’60s non-reverse Gibson Firebird, and seven early ’60s Gibson Reverse Firebirds. Standing L—R: early ’60s Gibson Thunderbird bass, two Dobro resonator guitars. (Photo by Susan Winter)

  With his father and namesake, John Dawson Winter Jr. (Photo courtesy of Johnny Winter)

  Johnny and Susan Winter—the early years. (Photo courtesy of Johnny Winter)

  Soaking up the sunshine on his New York City balcony. (Photo by Susan Winter)

  Johnny with the beginning of his extensive cane collection in a shot for Raisin’ Cain. (Photo by Susan Winter)

  Standing L—R: Styve Homnick, Johnny, Willie Dixon; seated: Sonny Terry. Cover shot for Whoopin’. (Photo by Susan Winter)

  Johnny, wearing an Ikey Sweat tee shirt, shows Styve Homnick exactly how he wants him to play the drums on Whoopin’. (Photo courtesy of Styve Homnick)

  Johnny played his 1920s National resonator during the Third Degree sessions. (Photo by Paul Natkin)

  Albert Collins and Johnny at the Park West in Chicago in 1984. (Photo by Paul Natkin)

  Johnny’s re
ndition of “Mojo Boogie” at the Mohegan Sun Casino in 2008. (Photo by Charles Fitzsimmons)

  Johnny proudly displays his “Screamin’ Demon” tattoo and Lazer guitar. (Photo by Paul Natkin)

  “Betty Ann talked us into quitting the job,” says Johnny. “I thought it was the right thing to do too. We had a really bad bus. The bathroom stunk and there wasn’t a bed for me. I wanted a bed in the back for me but it just had narrow couches you couldn’t sleep on. And we had two long drives from country to country that ended up being twelve hours and fourteen hours. It was really a drag.”

  Montgomery, who had fronted his own band since 1970, knew how to save the tour, but neither Slatus nor Johnston would listen to his advice. The entire entourage enjoyed an impromptu European vacation. Johnny’s fondest memories were visits to two hash bars in Amsterdam.

  “We went into Amsterdam for four days and I smoked myself silly,” says Johnny with a laugh. “Hash bars, where they smoke grass too. They have all different kinds of grass that they sell in the bars. The hash was good; long and stringy, real gooey. People mix it up with tobacco and smoke it in the bar. It’s legal over there. It’s lovely. Going to Amsterdam was definitely worth not doing the gigs. I loved it. Did it all night. The Bulldog was a lot of tourists but there were other places like the Green House where people from Amsterdam went. It was amazing. The Bulldog was a disco. Smokin’ and watchin’ people in a disco was hilarious.”

  Fresh from his European tour/vacation, Johnny returned to the studio in July and September to finish I’m a Bluesman. Nominated for a Grammy and finally released on Virgin in June 2004, the CD garnered mixed reviews, many commenting on Johnny’s diminished vocals. Clueless about Johnny’s condition, Slatus told Shurman Johnny should have gotten closer to the microphone.