THE BEST NEWS of last week was that Johnny Winter, after a year in medical exile, was once again alive and functioning, and due to gig in England. This means that we're going to get a chance to hear probably the word's finest straight-ahead rock guitarist getting down and doing it all over again. Winter is a 27-year old - albino blues guitarist, stone-greased white lightnin' out of Beaumont, Texas, who first got famous after a New York impresario named Steve Paul read about him in an article about Texas blues, and signed him to CBS for an unprecedented advance. Predictably enough there came about a prodigious hype and Johnny Winter became a household name before anybody knew what he sounded like. Winter was later to bitterly regret all this ballyhoo.
"I had this fuckin' manager, man," he told me a year ago after a gig at Reading University, "as a matter a fact I've still got him. He made everybody think I got all that bread at one time. It was actually spread over a long time. "I just wished I could give the whole goddam lot back and start over." Winter's career was additionally hampered, in the beginning, by buck-making businessmen taking advantage of Steve Paul's hype by issuing old Texas tapes of varying quality. The best of these, a glorified demo called "The Progressive Blues Experiment", was actually issued some weeks before Winter's official CBS debut, "Johnny Winter and various others soon followed.
They didn't help Johnny much. "People kept coming up to me and saying, 'Hey man, your new album's a bunch of shit', and I'd say, "which one?' and they'd tell me one of the old ones." While "Progressive Blues Experiment" and "Johnny Winter" were high-energy but basically mainstream blues albums, the critics had Alive and well and ready to gig again expected Winter to be in a Cream or Hendrix bag. And so, until the three-sided
"Second Winter"
was issued in 1969, Johnny Winter looked like the ace flop of the year.
SECOND WINTER
, in Winter's words, "saved my ass". With Edgar, his younger brother, . adding support on alto saxophone and assorted keyboards, Johnny came to grips with some rock and roll which mingled with his blues to produce some staggeringly fine music. Together with a few musical conjuring tricks like performing Little Richard's "Miss Ann" as if it was Lowell Fulson's "Reconsider Baby", and Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" as if it was "Dust My Blues", there was a wealth of simple, no-holds-barred, all-action extravaganzas such as a blazing "Johnny B. Goode" and the stunning slide-guitar set-piece "I Love Everybody".
That album melted all the accrued resentment. And it made Johnny Winter a real superstar at last. Around this time Steve Paul took an ailing ex-teenybopper band called the McCoys under his wing. Best-known for a lucky hit single of "Hang On Sloopy" cut when they were fiteen, the McCoys were older, sadder, wiser and looking for a new front man. Meanwhile, Edgar Winter had left Johnny's band to cut his solo album "Entrance" and later to form White Trash. Johnny's rhythm section had proved itself too pedestrian to handle Johnny's new material. Inevitably, Winter and the McCoys met; jammed; and formed a new band called Johnny Winter And.
An album of the same name followed soon after, and the partnership of Winter and the McCoys' diminutive singer/guitarist Rick Derringer was deemed most fruitful. (Derringer's the one who looked like Bette Davis in her good days). The new band played tough, modern hard rock with a low blues content . . . and the chance to play off against another guitarist worked wonders for Winter, and the new bass and drums gave him a fine propulsive lift. "It we such a drag," he now says, having to carry those two other guys in the old band."
"JOHNNY WINTER AND"
contained one absolute masterpiece, Derringer's "Rock And Roll Hoochie Koo'", a song tailor-made for Winter. To me it will always epitomise Johnny Winter; and it is one of the finest expositions of why we're all here, and what we're all here for. "Rock and Roll Hoochie Koo/lawdy mama light my fuse/Rock and roll hoochie koo/come on out and spread the news The band were miraculous live. The sight of tall, spectral milk-white Winter bounding across the stage to tower over the dark, stocky little Derringer, defiantly blowing hot lix and slick tricks right back at him, is one of the definitive images of the rockand roll concert,and the beautiful, blistering soundtrack of those gigs can be heard on Winter's last album, Johnny Winter And/Live.
For my money Johnny Winter is the finest working white blues guitarist (an outrageous claim, but not indefensible). With Michael Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Peter Green all in various kinds of retirement, and Jeff Beck's playing getting more and more bizarre and less bluesy every day, Winter is the champion of earthy, stinging, hamburger blues. When he hits the stage with Edgar and Derringer at Crystal Palace on the 29th, let's hope the sun's shining and everybody's loose, high and happy. Johnny Winters music is a joy and a kindness, the natural product of the blues, rock and country of a Texas adolescence, spiced and sparkled up by all the flash and arrogancE and showmanship that we expect from a '70's rockanroll star.
Let him enjoy you. There's no way you won't enjoy him.
Get down!
Charles Shaar Murray
