Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (23 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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“It was mostly Steve’s idea,” he says. “They were blues-rock songs—all bluesy but not straight blues. He convinced me I wouldn’t be around for long if I didn’t play more rock on my records. It seemed like the blues was so big in the late ’60s, that by the early ʹ70s, people were tired of the blues—they wanted more rock. I felt like I had to do ’em or I wasn’t going to make it. And that would really hurt me if I had gone so far and then become a nobody. That scared me. By
Second Winter
I was doin’ more rock ’n’ roll, but I don’t like it as much as I like blues.
“Blues purists didn’t like that record. They said I sold out, and I guess I did.... It hurt me to hear that but you just had to deal with it. It’s hard because people have strong opinions about what blues should be like. You miss a lot of good music by saying anything but straight blues is not blues and by not playing rock ‘n’ roll because there’s a lot of good rock ‘n’ roll out there too. To say it’s not blues unless it’s acoustic blues—thatʹs just crazy to me.”
Jimi Hendrix producer/engineer Eddie Kramer, who is credited as producer consultant on
Johnny Winter,
was hired to help with production of
Second Winter,
but never made it to the end of the sessions. “He wasn’t doing his job,” says Johnny. “He was outside the studio recording rainstorm sound effects. So we fired him midstream leaving me and Edgar to finish the job of producing and recording the album.”
“Eddie Kramer was uppity in the studio; that’s why he got fired,” said Turner. “As to recording the rain, I donʹt know if it was Eddie Kramer who instigated that or us. I thought it was at our instigation, our psychedelic nature, that we recorded the rain. Eddie was very good. On the
Johnny Winter
album, Eddie was the one that got in there, set up the mikes, did the sound. I didnʹt like the sound he was getting, but it turned out to be real good. But he was uppity about the way he approached things. We could have got a lot more from Eddie. We looked at him as the opposition. We had our own big egos. That’s why we fired him on the second record. We thought we could do a better job and we couldn’t,” Turner adds with a laugh. “We fired him shortly into it. It was just a few days and we paid him off and sent him home. Eddie was a no-nonsense guy. I donʹt think Eddie wanted to record the rain; I think Johnny wanted to record the rain. We were all together on stuff like that—‘Yeah, let’s record a rainstorm, ha ha. Roll me another joint.’”
The hip counterculture scene pulsated with psychedelics, lightshows, and lava lamps; and famed photographer Richard Avedon had begun experimenting with the Sabatier Effect, a darkroom technique also called solarization, to create hallucinogenic images. By partially developing a negative or print and then overexposing it to light, he could make the whites silvery, eliminate detail, highlight or darken shadows, and get a distinct black line around the edges. In 1967, he created psychedelic posters of the Beatles, and a solarized photo of John Lennon for the cover of
Look Magazine.
Avedon created a striking blue and purple cover for
Second Winter
; the front cover is a dramatic full-face headshot and a right profile of Johnny with his silky hair blowing in the wind. His hair from the cover shot flows onto the back of the album, where the tip of his nose is the only feature unobstructed by his tousled mane. Avedon captured the detail in his face and hair and used purple ink to fill in the shadows and create the solarized effect. The inside cover shot is a black-and-white group shot with all four musicians looking in different directions.
“The picture on the cover was my idea,” says Johnny. “I liked the posters Richard Avedon had done of the Beatles; that’s why I picked him. It was done in his studio and it didn’t take long at all. We posed the way he told us to for the inside cover and he used a wind machine to get the effect with my hair.”
Second Winter was a double album pressed on only three sides. Technology for recording on vinyl demanded wider grooves for louder volume; after about twenty-two minutes a side, squeezing more music onto a record could only be accomplished to a limited degree and at the expense of volume. The liner notes on that LP gave the following explanation:
The original plan was to cut as much material as possible and pick the best of what was cut to make up a regular one-record album. After we finished, we found out that if all the songs were used we might lose some volume if only one record were used. Since it was very important to us that our album be as loud as is technically possible, we had a problem. We had to cut everything that we wanted to and everything we had planned on doing and we didn’t have anything else that we really wanted to do. We also really liked everything we’d done and didn’t want to leave any of the songs out. We couldn’t honestly give you more, and we didn’t want to give you less, so here is exactly what we did in NashviHe—no more and no less.
 
“We didn’t have enough music to make four sides and we had too much to just do two sides,” says Johnny. “So we decided to make a three-sided record. I don’t know why CBS let us do it, but they did.”
Columbia released
Second Winter
in late 1969, and by then more of Winter’s former managers had come out of the woodwork, trying to make a quick buck off of anything he had ever recorded, regardless of the sound quality. In August 1969, GRT Records released
The Johnny Winter Story,
an album of old material the label bought from Ken Ritter.
“The music wasn’t all that great on that record,” says Johnny. “I had recorded it years before, somewhere around 1961 to 1964. They had a guy playing horrible slide on it but it wasn’t me because I didn’t even play slide back then. They overdubbed a whole band on some of the cuts. In one place, you could hear two drummers, and one was hitting the beat at [a] different time. It was awful. They were dumbasses; they didn’t know what they were doing.
“Ken was my manager in Texas when I was about seventeen. He put out several singles on different labels, KRCO, Frolic Records—we weren’t on any major labels. We never did get any money; he said it wasn’t selling enough. Columbia was really good about
The Johnny Winter Story
coming out. Their lawyers never went after anybody because they said it wouldn’t be worth it.”
GRT Corporation, which wholly owned GRT Records and fifty percent of Janus Records, also bought twenty sides of Johnny’s old material from Roy Ames. Those cuts were released on
Abont Blues
on the Janus label in November. One month earlier, Buddah Records released
First Winter,
which contained four tracks from
About Blues.
Buddah president Neil Bogart said he bought his tapes from Huey Meaux, a Houston record producer. Johnny didn’t know about any of the unauthorized albums until friends mentioned seeing them in record stores.
“About Blues was real old stuff recorded around 1961 to ‘63,” says Johnny. “It was all kinds of different music—some Bob Dylan, some R&B songs, some rock ’n’ roll tunes. I talked to Roy when it came out and he said it would help me in the long run. First Winter was tapes they bought from Huey Meaux, who got the tapes from Roy. Edgar was on some of them but the bands were made up of a lot of different people. The quality was not too good.”
The influx of unauthorized Johnny Winter albums confused fans, who assumed they were buying his latest album. When an occasional fan told Johnny his latest LP wasn’t as good as his earlier ones, he’d discover they had purchased a bootleg record. Material he had deemed not even good enough for local labels competed with his Columbia releases and threatened to tarnish his reputation.
“I felt very hurt when that happened,” Johnny says. “I hated it because it wasn’t nearly as good as the material I was comin’ out with. It just wasn’t the right thing at all—for that to happen to us. I didn’t make any money, and career-wise, it definitely wasn’t good. It was a real drag. There were so many coming out
Rolling Stone
gave me a chance to tell everybody they weren’t very good and not to buy them.” An April 16, 1979 article titled “Johnny Winter: It’s Just Bad Music” addressed the four unauthorized releases and explained why Johnny was more concerned about the quality than the lost royalties. “I just don’t want that bullshit out,” Johnny told the reporter. “It’s just bad music.”
 
In December 1969, after the release of Second Winter, Steve Paul rented the second house in the quadrangle, and moved the McCoys to Staatsburg. Paul had met the McCoys—a band that included Rick Derringer on guitar, Randy Jo Hobbs on bass, Bobby Peterson on organ, and Rick’s brother Randy Zehringer on drums—when they wandered into the Scene and asked if they could play.
“I thought they were really talented players and individuals, and were incorrectly perceived by some as a teen pop band,” said Paul. “People like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and Johnny Winter surely appreciated just how good they were.”
A teenage band from Ohio, the McCoys experienced short-lived phenomenal success and opened for the Rolling Stones on their 1965 American tour. Signed with Bang Records, their first single, “Hang on Sloopy,” hit number one on the
Billboard
charts. “Fever,” their second release, peaked at number seven two months later.
Pigeonholed as a teenybopper band playing bubblegum music (their photograph appeared on the cover of 16
Magazine),
the McCoys struggled after leaving Bang Records and signing with Mercury, where they released two albums. Poor record sales and the reactions of audiences wanting to hear “Hang on Sloopy” left the band between a rock and a hard place. Paul signed on as their manager, negotiated their release from Mercury Records, and invited them to Staatsburg to regroup and write new songs.
The McCoys’ house was about one hundred yards away from Johnny’s band’s house with the rehearsal room. When Johnny wasn’t practicing with Shannon and Turner, Derringer practiced his new material with the McCoys. The proximity of the bands’ houses naturally led to jams with both bands, as well as some really strange experiences for Johnny and his band members.
“I didn’t know it, but Rick knew the whole band was crazy,” says Johnny. “One time, I was walkin’ on ice on the Hudson River in the middle of the winter. The river was partially frozen, and they were all walkin’ on the ice, so I figured it was safe and walked out there too. I figured they all lived up north and should know what they were doin’. But they didn’t—they were just crazy.
“I fell in but Bobby Peterson thought I was walking on the water. I fell in up to my neck and got out real quick. Me bein’ as hot as I was and the water being cold, steam came up when I fell in. So Bobby thought I was God, and I walked on the water. He wasn’t doin’ much drugs; he was just crazy. After that he would follow me around the house, calling me God. He started watching me sleep. He would just sit there when I went to sleep. When I woke up, he’d still be sitting there. Having somebody like me is great, but watching me sleep is definitely too much. I thought it was crazy—I still think it’s crazy.”
Peterson’s bizarre behavior continued to escalate, attracting the attention of the local sheriff and almost landing the band in the slammer.
“One night Bobby went out in the woods and tried to hang himself,” said Turner. “It was a rainy evening, and when he came back, he had a broken rope around his neck. He found it in the garage, hooked it around his neck, jumped off, and broke the rope. He came in with that rope and a red mark around his neck and said, ‘I hanged myself, Johnny.’ We didn’t know what to think about that—it threw us for a loop.”
“Bobby Peterson hung himself on a tree in the backyard,” says Johnny. “The rope broke and he said, ‘See, the tree doesn’t even like me—the tree threw me out.’ We took him to the hospital and all they wanted to do was to call the cops and put him in jail. I was screamin’ at ’em, ‘He’s not taking anything—he’s just suicidal.’ They thought he was on drugs and the poor guy was just fucked up.”
“You know the song ‘The Mighty Quinn (Quinn the Eskimo)’ by Bob Dylan?’” asked Shannon. “He’s an actual sheriff up there. He came to our house when Bobby Peterson tried to hang himself. Somebody freaked out and called the police. The sheriff came out to the house and we got worried he was going to bust us. To get out of that, we went over to one of the Vanderbilts’ houses—she was living up there too, in the same part of the country. We played acoustic guitar, and sang all these sad songs like “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” on her front porch to get her to tell him to back off.”
After that evening, Peterson’s behavior continued to become more and more erratic.

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