Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (20 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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Johnny’s current philosophy about blues purists is a far cry from the mindset of his younger days when he told reporters that purists “wouldn’t know blues if it climbed up their ass.”
“Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more tolerant of people’s ideas than I was,” he says with a laugh. “It was just a matter of how I felt at the time. I’ve mellowed out a bit. I wasn’t always mellow; I was pretty shitty back in the old days. I thought everybody should do things my way. Now I feel like everybody should have their own say and do what they want.”
The First Atlanta International Pop Festival held on July 4 and July 5, 1969, was a festival Shannon and Turner will never forget. Performers included Janis Joplin, Chuck Berry, Blood, Sweat & Tears, Canned Heat, Joe Cocker, Al Kooper, and Led Zeppelin, but it wasn’t the incredible lineup that stands out in their memories.
“Uncle John and I got busted after the Atlanta Pop Festival,” said Shannon. “It was one hundred degrees when we got back to the hotel and got busted. Somebody snitched us out. I had a lot of dope and had a feeling something was wrong. I told everybody, ‘I have a bad feeling—we better hide our dope.’ I stuck the majority of mine under the Coke machine. I still had some downs and pot that I was going to use to get high, and that’s what they caught me with. They took Uncle John and me to jail for possession. We were in jail overnight and Steve Paul paid $5,000 to get us off.”
“I had thirteen tabs of mescaline and nine tabs of acid,” said Turner. ʺThe members of various bands stayed downstairs in the hotel because they were afraid they were gonna get busted. It seems like someone set us up. We paid the fine and were told to stay out of Georgia for six months.”
The most well-known festival Johnny played in the summer of 1969 was held on Max Yasgur’s dairy farm in Bethel, New York on August 15-17. The Woodstock Music and Art Fair drew nearly 450,000 people to a pasture soon transformed into the Woodstock Nation, a counterculture community. Naked bodies roamed the muddy campsites; stoned-out hippies made love in public. Dope dealers openly sold pot, LSD, mescaline, speed, Seconal, and hash without repercussion. LSD was the drug of choice for many concertgoers and performers, and Johnny was no exception.
“We were trippin’ for Woodstock too,” says Johnny. “I don’t remember very much of Woodstock. I remember sleeping in a press trailer and then waking up and wandering up to the stage with the band to see what was going on. Nobody was there, so they stuck us on. We just happened to be there—we had the band together, so they put us on. We were supposed to go on sometime during the day but didn’t go on till around midnight.”
Johnny played a Fender Electric XII with only six strings. The set list included “Tell the Truth,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Six Feet in the Ground,” “Leland Mississippi Blues,” “Mama, Talk to Your Daughter,” and “Mean Mistreater.” Edgar joined the band on “I Can’t Stand It” and “Tobacco Road.” Johnny played slide on “Mean Town Blues,” their encore song.
Although Johnny wanted to stick around for Hendrix’s show, logistics caused him to leave before that early morning performance.
“We wanted to be on the stage for Jimi Hendrix, but the helicopters weren’t stopping very often, so we got out of there before he played,” says Johnny. “We missed one and if we didn’t take the next one, there was no promise we’d get another one. Everybody went in and out of the festivals on helicopters. Ridin’ in them was alright; it was a way to get out. They took you back to the hotel in upstate New York where everybody was staying. From the helicopter, I remember seeing a sea of mud and people messin’ around in the mud. It was something else. There was still a good crowd when I was leavin’.
“As far as eating and sleeping—we had a hard time. I don’t remember eating at all. We were in a press trailer and I went to sleep on a bag of garbage. Everybody had to sleep in the mud, but we were in the press trailer so we were pretty safe. We had one of the best places going—at least it was dry. A lot of people never got paid for Woodstock, but we did—we got $3,750.”
“Woodstock was a trip,” said Shannon. “We rode bubble helicopters. You know where you get above the Earth and you can only see so far? That is how the people looked... it just went on and on from the air. It was like, ‘Wow!’ We didn’t know it was going to be that big until we got there. You couldn’t get there by car. We had heard it was a big deal, but I didn’t think it was going to be anything like that. We went on about ten hours later than we were supposed to. We were late going on and then they came up and said, ‘You got to go on, you got to go on.’ We weren’t even prepared—mentally or in terms of our equipment. First thing I said was, ‘Where’s my bass?’”
Psyched about playing for such a large crowd and the opportunity to hear so many phenomenal bands, Turner was determined not to miss a minute of the experience. Unlike Johnny, Edgar, and Shannon, who slept before the show, he took amphetamines to stay awake and still has vivid memories of Woodstock and the days leading up to that festival.
“We played in Chicago and Detroit the Friday and Saturday before Woodstock,” said Turner. “We were scheduled to play on Sunday, so we were watching it on the news on TV. We got into New York City at about seven o’clock in the morning. We were scheduled to take a private plane up to the Woodstock airport at 11:30 AM, so we checked into a motel near the airport to try to get some sleep. The roadies overslept and didn’t wake us up, and we missed our flight. Steve Paul had to run around and charter two small airplanes to get us to the Woodstock airport.
“When we got to the Woodstock airport, there was a blinding rainstorm. They had helicopters going back and forth. We started out toward the festival site in a little whirlybird helicopter with just a seat and a glass bubble, and a gigantic black cloud started coming toward us. So he turned around, went back to the airport and set the thing down. I arrived at Woodstock at three oʹclock—thatʹs the time we were supposed to play originally. Everything was so messed up by then, we ended up not playing till midnight. Played forty-five minutes or something like that. Because the thing was running so ridiculously late, they were cutting the times short.
“The first thing I saw backstage was a large tent for the staff and the performers. Then I saw Jerry Garcia and somebody else sitting on stools, singing through a small sound system in the tent. Then I saw Jimi Hendrix’s manager carry Mitch Mitchell, Jimi’s drummer, out of the mud so he wouldn’t get his English boots muddy before the show.
“As soon as we found out we’re not going on at three, I popped some more pills—diet pills to stay awake. I tried to see everybody. Johnny was smarter—he found the
Look Magazine
guy who had a traitor—Johnny stayed and slept in the trailer. I stayed up the whole time. I was exhausted by the time we played but I stayed up and saw Santana, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, several people.
“People brought their own rented trailers—there were 500 trailers in the backstage area and maybe 1,000 people. In back of the stage area was a freight elevator that moved all the people and the equipment up and down. So I’d see somebody playing, go back down for a while. Then when a band came back on, I’d go back up to the stage on the elevator and see somebody else playing. I watched everybody playing before us from the side of the stage.
“It was so exciting to see all those people playing. I stayed all night to see Jimi Hendrix. About eight o’clock Monday morning—Jimi Hendrix hadn’t come on yet—I looked backstage and there was only one car left. Everybody was gone. The guy who was getting into that car had a crew shirt on. I thought if I donʹt catch this ride, I don’t have a ride back. I had no idea where I was, so I had to go back to the hotel in Woodstock with that last guy. I’m driving off the Woodstock grounds with my window open and I hear Jimi starting out. And I had stayed all night to see him.”
Although Johnny played an incredible set at the festival, his performance never appeared in the
Woodstock
film or on the soundtrack album. Filmmaker Michael Wadleigh recorded his performance, but Johnny’s manager refused to let them include it in the film.
“Steve Paul didn’t want us to be in the movie because he thought we wouldn’t make any money,” says Johnny. “Woodstock had lost money up to that point and he thought it was gonna be a drag so he didn’t want us to be on it. Of course it helped a lot of people’s careers. I wish I could have been in it. Later on he admitted he fucked up. I heard the filmmaker said he thought the act was too strange. I donʹt know if that’s true, but I heard that. The whole thing was full of strangeness—thatʹs what Woodstock was all about—strange people.”
The audio and video of Johnny’s fiery slide playing on “Mean Town Blues” eventually hit the stores, but it took years to surface. In 1994, the audio and video was released as
Woodstock: Three Days of Peace and Music, 25th Anniversary; Woodstock Diary
was released as a CD. The fortieth anniversary in 2009 generated a glut of DVDs and CDs, including
Warner Home Video Woodstock: 3 Days of Peace & Music Director’s Cut—40th Anniversary; The Woodstock Experience,
a ten-CD box set by Sony Legacy; and
Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience,
a two-CD set by Sony Legacy.
 
Johnny spent Thanksgiving weekend 1969 playing the West Palm Beach Festival in Florida, a three-day festival featuring the Rolling Stones, Janis Joplin, the Chambers Brothers, Sly and the Family Stone, Jefferson Airplane, the Byrds, Steppenwolf, and others. It was his first meeting with Joplin and proved to be a concert and an evening neither one would forget.
“I met Janis at the Miami Pop Festival where I ended up jammin’ with her and doin’ vocals and drinkin’ Southern Comfort,” says Johnny. “I had taken acid before and Janis and I were drinking Southern Comfort on the stage like it was Kool-Aid. Later on down, I got real sick. I threw up on her in the helicopter. We went back in the helicopter and I threw up all over her. It was terrible—it was a mess. She was alright with it; she called me up later on and asked me for another date.”
Turner remembers that weekend in Miami. “Here were two misfits from Beaumont and Port Arthur on top of the world and they were determined to sample each other,” he said. “They went about this odd courtship for a while. Janis was determined to hook up with Johnny that weekend. We played the first night and she played the first night. On the second night, Janis shows up with a quart of Southern Comfort and proceeds to get Johnny drunk. She got drunk too and they jammed with Vanilla Fudge. It was pretty funny—the whole affair. They got real drunk and rode back to the hotel in a helicopter. Johnny is so drunk, he keeps throwing up; and Janis has his head in her lap, saying, ‘Oh my baby, my baby.’ Roadies had to carry her from the helicopter to her room. Pitiful, but that’s the way we lived.”
Johnny saw Janis several times after that but it never evolved into a serious relationship.
“I didn’t see her a lot, but from time to time I’d see her,” Johnny says. “When we got together, she would usually call my agency and I would call her back. One time her office called my office and asked if I wanted to go to the premiere of
Myra Breckinridge
with Janis. It was Mae West’s last movie. That was the first time I spent any real time with her. We went to the premiere in New York and it was a lot of fun. We were both dressed up. I was wearing a long velvet coat with bellbottom pants and a long scarf. Janis dressed in feathers and a big ole cape.
“Janis was a real sweetheart but she was drinking too much and taking too much dope—mostly drinking too much. We both felt comfortable being around each other because we were both born in Texas in towns close to each other. We didn’t really have a relationship—Iʹd just see her once in a while and we’d go to bed together. We stayed on Fifth Avenue when she was in New York.
“She had talked to me about going to her high-school reunion; I guess it was because I was from around that time. I didnʹt think it would be the kind of thing I would like, so I didnʹt go. It sounded like it was pretty bad—they were screamin’ at her, ‘Remember me in the back of the car,’ and stuff like that. I donʹt know why she wanted to go. I guess she wanted to prove she was cool. But those kinds of things never work.
“Me and Paul Butterfield jammed with her at Madison Square Garden that December. Janis asked me to play with her at that show. It was her last night with the Full Tilt Boogie Band; I never was crazy about that band. Janis was doing heroin at the time. She really didn’t want me doin’ it at the same time she was doin’ it herself. She told me it was a bad thing. She tried to keep me from it-she didn’t succeed, but she tried.”

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