Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (7 page)

BOOK: Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)
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3
 
JOHNNY B. GOODE
 
T
he alienation Johnny and Edgar felt was mirrored to some extent by adolescents across the country. Spurred on by the earthy rhythms of Elvis Presley and rebelling against the music of their parents’ generation, teenagers embraced the hot new phenomenon called rock ‘n’ roll. Johnny was twelve when radio turned him on to the raucous energy of this new musical genre.
“The Big Bopper had a good blues show on KTRM, but he also played rock ‘n’ roll as J. P. Richardson,” Johnny says of the legendary Texas disc jockey. “He played Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Buddy Holly, and Sun artists—Elvis Presley, Roy Orbison, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Carl Perkins.”
Johnny loved the early rock ‘n’ rollers who captured the feeling of the blues. “I love Little Richard because it had a lot of feeling. I liked Fats Domino, ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ by Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis too—he was a great musician, a good ole rock ’n’ roller.”
Johnny watched
American Bandstand,
a live dance music TV show hosted by Dick Clark that debuted in 1957. But
American Bandstand
never featured Johnny’s favorite black rock ‘n’ roll performers. The show’s racial barrier wasn’t broken until 1960 with a performance by Chubby Checker, a nonthreatening black artist, whose stage name (a takeoff on Fats Domino) was suggested by Clark’s wife.
The racism wasn’t lost on Johnny, who loved Elvis Presley’s “That’s All Right Mama,” the 1954 Sun single
Rolling Stone
called the first rock ‘n’ roll record. The combination of the sound of the blues and the acclaim Elvis generated from fanatical and adoring fans heightened Johnny’s desire to live the life of a musician.
“Elvis could play blues like ‘That’s All Right Mama’ and other songs that were bluesy because he was white,” says Johnny. “He could do that, get away with it, and have people love him—mostly white women.”
Johnny got his first chance to play rock ‘n’ roll for a live audience in 1959, when Anchor Bay Entertainment released
Go
,
Johnny, Go
, an early rock ‘n’ roll film featuring performances by Chuck Berry, Jackie Wilson, Richie Valens, the Cadillacs, Eddie Cochran, and others.
Movie theaters across the country held “Johnny Melody” contests to accompany the release of that film. KTRM jumped on the bandwagon, offering a recording session and a record deal as first prize. Johnny entered the contest as a solo artist.
“There were about ten of us; you could only play one song,” says Johnny. “I played ‘Johnny B. Goode.’ Me and this other guy were the best out of the bunch, so they had a contest for the two of us to fight it out for the best singer. I won the contest and won a session at Bill Hall’s Gulf Coast Recording Studio in Beaumont and a record deal for a single at Dart Records.”
Johnny’s rendition of “Johnny B. Goode” impressed the judges enough to catapult him into his first record deal, but his victory was marred by the audience’s initial reaction. The crowd in the Beaumont movie theater laughed when he walked out onto the stage. That cruel reaction made a lasting impression, and he told the story almost twenty-five years later when he appeared on
Late Night with David Letterman
in May 1983.
“I’ll never forget the first time I did ‘Johnny B. Goode’ for an audience,” he told Letterman after playing a rousing live version of the song with Paul Shaffer and the Late Night Band. “I’ll never forget walking out onstage and everybody laughed. Like, ‘What is it?’.... People didn’t know exactly what to think because there are not that many albinos around and especially that many years ago in the Deep South. Nobody knew quite what to think of us.”
Now he’s a bit more philosophical when he talks about the contest. “They thought it was funny to see a white-headed person up there, I guess,” he says. “It bothered me but what could I do? All I could do was get up there and play good. That wiped them out anyway—they were sorry they laughed.”
In late 1959, shortly before the contest, he formed his first band, Johnny and the Jammers, with a lineup that included Edgar on tenor guitar (and later piano), Dennis Drugan on bass, and David Holiday on drums. Later, he added Willard Chamberlain on saxophone.
“I wanted a band so I could play clubs,” he says. “David Holiday wanted to be a guitar player; he called me up and asked questions about playin’ the guitar. I didn’t need another guitar player, so he got a drum set and taught himself drums. Dennis Drugan, who’s still a good friend of mine, was my bass player. Dennis’s daddy taught guitar lessons at Jefferson Music where I was teachin’ too. He’d come down to see his dad and we got to be friends. We practiced once or twice a week in the room we had upstairs. My parents were great about it.”
“Johnny got offers to play different functions, so he put the band together,” said Drugan. “By then he had quit taking lessons with my father and pretty much picked up a lot himself by listening to records. He had hundreds of records in his house. He’d hear new songs on the radio and say, ‘Let’s learn these.’ By the next week, he’d have ’em all down—memorized and then he’d play them in his own style. He was a quick learner.”
Edgar always played in Johnny’s early bands, but it wasn’t because they were siblings.
“I always included Edgar in bands and on records because he was one of the few guys that could play everything,” says Johnny. “Not because he was my brother; it was because he could play a lot of different instruments.”
“I played bass for a while, drums, piano, even before electric piano,” said Edgar. “In Johnny and the Jammers, I played a tenor guitar that was like a four-string electric, like the top four strings of the guitar. I played drums for a short while in Johnny and the Jammers—between David Holiday and Melvin Carpenter. That was when the band changed its name to the Crystaliers and we were playing the Black Cat Club in Port Arthur. I saw the movie
The Gene Krupa Story
and had to have a set of drums. I got Slingerland drums—champagne sparkle—and set them up in my room.”
By then, Johnny and Edgar had their own bedrooms. Their parents had renovated the attic into a bedroom for Edgar and a family room for rehearsals.
“We used to rehearse in the garage when we had bands,” Edgar said. “When we started to have electric instruments with amplifiers, my parents decided to remodel the attic because everything was getting too loud and driving everybody crazy.”
Johnny and the Jammers had only been together six weeks when they went into Bill Hall’s Gulf Coast Recording Studio to cut their first record. Hall, a music producer, promoter, and publisher, had booked and eventually managed country artist George Jones. He had produced the Big Bopper’s “Chantilly Lace” in 1958, and later joined forces with Sun Records engineer Jack Clements to form the Gulf Coast Recording Company.
Johnny penned two songs for his first record: “School Day Blues,” a rocking number, and “You Know I Love You,” a ballad for the flip side. Hall produced that single, with Johnny on guitar and vocals, Edgar on piano, Chamberlain on sax, Drugan on bass, and Holiday on drums.
The recording studio was primitive by today’s standards, with egg crates on the walls to reduce the echo, and a mixing board in the same room where the musicians were recording. Still, it was a heady experience for Johnny and his band.
“I was pretty excited to be able to play in a recording studio,” says Johnny. “We didn’t go through the songs very many times—we got ’em pretty quick.”
“They set up the players on the floor and microphones all over the place,” said Drugan. “In those days, they just put a microphone in front of your speakers and adjusted it. They didn’t record separately—everybody played at the same time. We did about five different takes. The mixing board was behind a glass in the same room. They’d open the door and holler out, ‘Okay, take one,’ and close the door. You’d watch ’em in the window but couldn’t hear them; they’d make faces and point. When they point, you start playing. Then they’d play it back through a little radio to see how it would sound. We thought we were real big time—making a record already.”
Recording his brother’s original songs, as well as spending time in a studio with a well-known engineer and professional musicians, made a strong impression on Edgar, who was twelve.
“Recording ‘School Day Blues’ was certainly a memorable experience for all of us,” said Edgar. “At that time, I didn’t know Johnny could write. I was so impressed when he came up with that song. I was amazed. All we had done was copy other people’s music and when he came up with ‘School Day Blues,’ it was a real song. It was very exciting for a little kid—actually being in a recording studio and being able to listen back to what we had played.”
Johnny’s single was released on Dart Records, a small label in Houston owned by Pappy Daley. Although the record wasn’t distributed to a broad market, it was available in all the Beaumont record stores and several stores in Houston.
“It was great seein’ it in stores and hearin’ it on the radio,” says Johnny. “Ridin’ around town with the radio blastin’, playing your own music—that was great. I didn’t make any money on my record. I only sold 200 copies, and we got twenty-five free copies. Ole Pa was real happy when I came home with the record. But my parents didn’t want me to get into it too much. They wanted me to be sure to keep school first.”
Drugan remembers hearing the single on KTRM radio, which included it on the station’s favorite songs listing in February 1960.
“They put out a survey of ‘Favorite Fifty Songs’ with a lot of famous artists on the list,” he said. “Ray Charles was number eleven with ‘My Baby’ and Johnny was number eight with ‘School Day Blues.’ For us to get number eight, we were on top of the world. We had made it already. We were also listed in ‘Country Song Roundup,’ a national country list that came out that July.”
Their excitement at fever pitch, the teenagers began promoting their record at local radio stations. Sax player Willard Chamberlain drove the band to the stations.
“As soon as we got some extra records, we got in Willard’s car and went around to the radio stations,” said Drugan. “That’s how you had to get your record played—you had to go to the stations and ask them to play your record. We knocked on the door, told ’em who we were, and asked them to play our record. They’d say, ‘No problem,’ and we’d sit down and talk on the radio for a while. Outside the radio station, there was a big tower broadcasting maybe eighty or one hundred miles around. The station would play our record and I’d run out to the car to see if it was on. We were so excited to hear our record played on the radio. As soon as we’d get on one station, another station in the local area would pick it up. Those were exciting days—the infancy of rock ’n’ roll.”
The airplay proved to be advantageous to Johnny’s band. “When the record hit number eight on the Beaumont charts, we got a few more bookings and could make a little more money,” says Johnny. “There were bigger bands in Beaumont, but we started getting a few jobs at dances.”
To promote their gigs at dances and other school functions, they had posters printed and placed them around town. The posters read: JOHNNY AND THE JAMMERS—FEATURING GUITARIST AND THE VOICE OF JOHNNY WINTER, BEAUMONT, TEXAS’S OWN JOHNNY MELODY. PLAYING THE BEST OF ROCK ‘N’ ROLL, RHYTHM ‘N’ BLUES. Lines for “Place” and “Time” were printed at the bottom so the band could customize the posters for specific shows.
“We’d go around three or four hours after school putting posters all over town, at where we were playing the next time, different soda shops and places where the kids would see them,” said Drugan. “The more people we’d draw, the more money we’d make. In those days, they had a thing called the kitty. You’d put a box out and people would come up and request songs and put a dollar in the kitty. You’d also get money at the door—they’d charge maybe fifty cents. What you made depended on how many people came through the door rather than getting a set amount.”
Early in their career, Johnny and the Jammers played social clubs and semiformal dances as the Johnny Winter Orchestra. They played a homecoming dance at the St. Anthony’s High School auditorium, and a graduation dance at St. Ann’s High School. Their first gig, a social event at the Beaumont Country Club, featured Johnny on guitar, Edgar on tenor guitar, Chamberlain on sax, and Drugan on “silent guitar.”
“That was my first job with Johnny,” said Drugan. “Johnny was in junior high. He didn’t have a bass player and there was no keyboard at that time. We wore white sports coats, black bow ties, and sunglasses. There was a group called the Shades at that time and they wore sunglasses. I wasn’t quite good enough to play, so I played silent guitar. I was hooked up to an amp but didn’t have any volume. He said, ‘Just stand up there and look good.’ He paid me for it too; he said, ‘I’ll give you five dollars for that job because you weren’t hooked up.’ They turned the volume up as I got better.”
“I had him play silent guitar just for fun because I liked him,” says Johnny. “He learned to play bass later on and really played in my band.”
After the country-club gig, and Drugan’s switch to bass, the band started playing more school functions, as well as teen dances called canteens, including several dances at the Park District Canteen.
“We played a lot of school functions—after the basketball games, sock hops, stuff like that,” says Johnny. “They always liked us pretty good. Kids usually brought liquor into dances. The band drank too and we got away with it. We drank everything—vodka, Jack Daniels. I started smokin’ cigarettes when I was fifteen too. I had different girlfriends—it was probably easier being in a band. I didn’t date a lot in high school—it was more fucking than dating.”
BOOK: Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)
4.3Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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