Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (10 page)

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Authors: Mary Lou Sullivan

BOOK: Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)
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Influenced by the sound of Little Walter on his Muddy Waters’s records, Johnny had taken up the harmonica in 1959. “I started playing harmonica when I was about fifteen,” he says. “I liked the way it sounded. I loved Little Walter—he was my favorite; he was better than anybody else, way better. I could hear what he was doin’ on the record and I just picked it up on my own. I eventually stopped playing because it was too hard to keep it up. You had to keep practicing or you’d lose your lip.”
In 1962, Johnny met Albert Collins, the Texas bluesman dubbed “Master of the Telecaster,” at the Gulf Coast Recording Studio. Although many of Collins’s biographers place both Johnny and Janis Joplin at the studio that day, Johnny doesn’t recall Joplin’s presence.
“I was in Bill Hall’s studio when Albert Collins recorded ‘Frosty,’” says Johnny. “I didn’t really know him except from his record ‘Freeze.’ He wasn’t famous at the time; he just had one record out. He was a real good guitar player—he didn’t sound like anybody else.”
Despite his increasing forays into the music business, Johnny continued to attend Beaumont High School. His parents made it clear he couldn’t allow music to interfere with his education, so he worked hard to keep up his grades, especially in math.
“The hardest thing was math,” he says. “I hated math. I just couldn’t get it. A girl in high school helped me with my math once a week. I’d go to her house, get her to help me with my math, and smoke cigarettes with her. I was taking college prep courses; I always knew I was goin’ to college. I had two algebras [Algebra I and II] and a geometry class. I took Latin and was terrible at it. I didn’t even make good Fs—I made zeros sometimes. I couldn’t do it. Daddy used to do most of the homework help, though Momma was the smarter one of the two. He’d go over the homework with me—not every night, but anytime I needed help.”
Johnny graduated from Beaumont High School in June 1962 and enrolled in Lamar State College the following fall. He majored in business, taking three business courses, including Business Administration and Business Orientation, as well as introductory courses in English and in math.
Despite his academic pursuits, Johnny still yearned to travel to Chicago, the home of Muddy Waters and so many of his blues idols. He called Drugan, who had moved there in 1960, and made plans to check out his band. Undaunted by the 1,200-mile, seventeen-hour drive each way, he and Chamberlain took a weekend road trip from Beaumont to the Windy City.
“We were very close, and kept in contact after I left Texas,” said Drugan. “He came here in 1962 with Willard to see what Chicago was like. I was playing at the Last Resort at Fox Lake, a suburb about forty miles outside of Chicago, in a band called Jimmy and the Gents. The lineup included Terry Kath and Walter Parazaider, who later went on to form Chicago. Johnny just stayed that evening—that was a one-shot deal for the weekend. They drove all the way, stayed that night, and then drove back to Texas.”
That trip changed Johnny’s life and perspective; he decided to forgo his plans for higher education and move to Chicago the following summer. “I passed all my classes but only stayed one semester,” he says. “I decided to leave college ’cause I had the deal going to move to Chicago. I wanted to play more music and I found out I couldn’t do both well at the same time. So I quit school because college was getting in the way of my music.”
While Johnny finished up his classes at Lamar State College, he played in a band called Diamond Jim and the Coastaleers for about a year. “Diamond Jim was the bass player and he also sang a little bit,” says Johnny. “We played R&B and some blues ballads. We played a club called Yvonne’s in Beaumont, and played at a club in Louisiana.
“In 1963, I recorded a single, ‘Cryin’ in My Heart,’ under the name Texas Guitar Slim for Diamond Records, Diamond Jim’s label. Guitar Slim was a pretty big name in the South and we figured we might get some sales for Texas Guitar Slim. Elton Anderson, a black man with a band in Louisiana, came up with the idea for me to try the Texas Guitar Slim thing. He played a lot of the same clubs we did and I sat in with him in Louisiana. That song was recorded on Diamond Records and then leased to Floyd Soileau’s Jin label because it was bigger. It wasn’t very big but it was bigger than Diamond. I never did make any money off those records either.”
When Ritter discovered Johnny was recording under another name for a different label, he demanded the record be taken off the market. Johnny complied, even though he didn’t find Ritter’s demand reasonable. “It was really nothing [to him] because I didn’t have a contract with him,” he says.
“Roadrunner”/“The Guy You Left Behind,” a single produced and recorded by Ritter, was Johnny’s next release. “Ken leased that one to Todd Records, but it didn’t sell many records,” Johnny says. “I had a number ten on one of those early ‘60s records. The disc jockeys were pretty good with local guys. They’d put your record out in the Top Ten even if it wasn’t sellin’ many records. I still have all of my 45s.”
Although Johnny’s singles weren’t the blues recordings he longed to make, and his band played rock and R&B, he found encouragement and inspiration in a white blues artist named Joey Longoria, who performed as Joey Long. Johnny met him in a club in Houston, and later saw him at the Sam Houston Coliseum when Long opened for Fats Domino.
Born in southern Louisiana in the early 1930s, Long, raised by parents who worked in the cotton fields, was captivated by the sound of acoustic blues coming from the home of a black family down the road. He began his musical career playing country and western music, but soon turned to the blues. Johnny was thrilled to hear a white man successfully playing the music he loved and was encouraged by the bluesman.
“I met Joey Longoria when I was about seventeen and had started playing clubs in Houston,” says Johnny. “He was the first white person I met playin’ blues. Joey was a blues guitar player in Houston. I loved it because he was a white guy makin’ it playing black blues. I played with Joey a lot. He couldn’t make as much money by playin’ blues, but at least I knew you could make a living doin’ it. He said, ‘Keep on tryin’, you can make it, just keep on pushin’.’”
With Long’s words ringing in his ears and resonating in his soul, Johnny continued his musical journey.
4
 
FROM THE WINDY CITY TO THE DEEP SOUTH
 
C
hicago was Johnny’s next destination. Drugan lived there so he knew he would have a band to play with and a place to stay. He quit his gig with Diamond Jim and the Coastaleers, packed his bags, and booked a flight. Arriving in early summer 1963, Johnny stayed with Drugan for two weeks before renting a studio apartment with a fold-up bed in the beach area of Lake Michigan. His girlfriend then moved up from Texas and into the North Side apartment with him.
“We started playing as soon as Johnny got here,” said Drugan. “I was playing up at Fox Lake where there were a lot of places to play. His first job was with Jimmy and the Gents at the Last Resort, an old resort with a big stage and a dance floor overlooking Fox Lake.”
Formed in 1962, Jimmy and the Gents consisted of a guitarist, organist, saxophone player, bass player, drummer, and a vocalist named Jimmy Rice. Their set list included a wealth of Elvis Presley songs, so they had bookings at several Chicago area clubs.
To Johnny’s chagrin, he soon discovered that although he was living in Chicago, he wouldn’t be playing in a blues band, and he wouldn’t be playing guitar. “They played twist music,” says Johnny with a laugh. “I didn’t know that before I left Texas. I got my first job playing drums. The drummer had his tonsils out and I played drums until he got well. I didn’t really know how to play drums; I just kind of faked it.”
Johnny’s strength on guitar eventually led to the ouster of Jim Guercio, the band’s guitarist. It was a fortuitous break for Guercio, who moved to L.A., where he eventually managed Chicago and took them from an obscure club band to stardom. He later produced records by Chicago, the Beach Boys, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and Frank Zappa, and built a state-of-the-art recording studio at his ranch in Boulder, Colorado, where Joe Walsh, inspired by the picturesque surroundings, recorded “Rocky Mountain Way.”
With Johnny taking on the role as leader and guitar player, he remembers the band changing its name to Johnny and the Gents. Drugan remembers it simply as the Gents. Either way, the band was making fifty dollars a night per person, rather than the ten or fifteen dollars a night Johnny had made in Texas. Johnny didn’t consider the musicians on the same par as the players in Johnny and the Jammers, but the money was great and they were playing a minimum of five nights a week.
After playing a number of Fox Lake resort gigs, the band set its sights on Chicago’s Rush Street entertainment district. “It was the twist era and all the good money was on Rush Street,” said Drugan. “Chubby Checker was coming out and clubs were dying for bands that could play the twist. Rush Street was where people would come into town to have a good time. They had go-go dancers in white boots on the side of the stages; they’d dance up front on the floor too. Drinks were six dollars, which was a lot of money back then. There were always lines of people waiting to get into those places.”
“Rush Street was a seedy area with a lot of twist clubs and strip clubs too,” says Johnny. “We started at the Tony Paris Show Lounge, and also played the Lemon Twist West. We wore sharp suits with velvet collars, tapered legs, and Beatle boots; and I had my hair combed back in a pompadour. One time we came in wearing matching shirts and the owner got pissed off. He said, ‘You can’t come in here wearing shirts—you have to wear suits or forget it.”’
“We were wearing Beatle-type jackets with cutaway collars like priest collars—with velvet collars and velvet pockets,” said Drugan. “They were turquoise blue with black velvet. Johnny wore candy apple red shoes with metallic toes—he loved those shoes. We also had red suits with Beatle-type jackets with black velvet. We got ’em at Smoky Joe’s in Chicago, which catered to musical groups.”
“When the Beatles came out, we were already wearin’ clothes just like what they were wearing,” says Johnny. “Real nice iridescent gold clothes we bought in the South Side of Chicago.”
To meet the demand for danceable songs, the band’s set list consisted of rock ‘n’ roll, soul, and songs by Elvis Presley. “I couldn’t work any blues into the sets at Tony Paris’s Show Lounge,” Johnny says. “It didn’t have to be a twist song; but it had to be a twist beat, which gets pretty boring after a while. We played a lot of things like ‘Midnight Hour.’ I sang ‘Midnight Hour,’ but I can’t remember most of the songs I sang because I didn’t like them that much. We did some soul songs—“Out of Sight” and ”Barefootin’.”
Playing songs the club owners demanded gave the band steady work; they played Rush Street clubs six nights a week, at gigs that ran from 9 PM until 2:30 AM. When they got restless during the breaks, they did what they could to amuse themselves.
“Sometimes we’d go to a room upstairs,” said Drugan. “Johnny liked to bring his glasses up there. When we finished, we would smash them on the wall. Johnny thought that was fun. The bouncer would come upstairs and say, ‘I hear some noise up here.’ His name was Rico; he was about seven feet tall and weighed 300 pounds. He parked the Cadillacs outside and he’d let us sit in them and listen to the radio. We were kinda bored after a while—we didn’t know what to do in between sets.”
That problem disappeared when the proprietors, who owned both the Tony Paris Show Lounge and the Scotch Mist, decided to have the band play their other club during their breaks.
“On some weekends, we never got a break—just long enough to go to the other club,” said Drugan. “We played nonstop. They advertised continuous entertainment at the Tony Paris Show Lounge, so our band would play during the break time. The regular band was Bobby and the Troubadours (which featured keyboard player Barry Goldberg, who cofounded the Electric Flag with Mike Bloomfield in 1967 after Bloomfield left the Paul Butterfield Blues Band). When we finished playing at the Scotch Mist, we’d go down the street and play during the break for the other band. We did that for about a month or so. It was tough. One of the owners said, ‘Anybody bothers you guys, you let me know about it.’ He looked like one of the Sopranos. There were a lot of
Soprano-type
guys around those places. Everything was ‘you guys better do it.’”
With the Rush Street gigs in such close proximity, it wasn’t difficult to move the band’s equipment from one club to another. One night things literally got out of hand.
“Johnny and I were rolling the amplifiers down the street from one club to another,” said Drugan. “We lost balance and it fell over and broke my toes and Johnny’s too. We hobbled down the street and played with broken toes.”
Playing six nights a week didn’t give Johnny much free time. He got home around 3 AM, listened to records to unwind, and slept until two or three in the afternoon. But he read about the Fickle Pickle, a coffeehouse on the North Side of Chicago managed by a nineteen-year-old blues fanatic and guitar player named Mike Bloomfield. Bloomfield would locate blues musicians from the ‘20s and ’30s, book them at the coffeehouse, and introduce them to a new audience of mostly young, white hippies. Artists included guitarist Big Joe Williams, harp player Jazz Gillum, guitarist Walter Vincson, and bass player Ransom Knowling, who played on Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup’s recording of “That’s All Right.” Hoping to hear and maybe jam with some blues legends, Johnny decided to check out the scene.

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