Johnny Winter was in a very good mood. He had been rehearsing with his new band for the European trip, the new album was about to be mastered, and, aside from the fact that he wasn’t yet sure what he would wear onstage in England, everything was going smoothly. Everything, that is, except this interview. One day the reporter was ill, another day the snarling New York traffic prevented their meeting. Finally, after several attempts, Johnny Winter and the reporter managed to converse. Winter was pretty excited about the trip to London.
“I was trying to figure out last night when the last time I was there was... seems like it was 1971; it’s been quite a while. People always told me that I would think it was strange over there because the audiences were quieter and more subdued, but I didn’t find it that way at all. They were exactly the same as American audiences. If you do a good job and play rock and roll music, people would rock and roll, and if you played quiet music, they would sit there and listen.”
They don’t toss as many firecrackers?
“No, that would be nice,” he laughed. “You know, that never really happened at all until last year or so. It seems as though every concert I’ve done, or every concert I’ve gone to, it’s not all the kids—it’s just some of them who come to the concert to raise hell and don’t care. But all that firecracker and bottle-throwing stuff in the past year or two has really gotten worse and worse. It’s weird that you brought that up because I was talking to Teddy, my road manager, about that the other night, and I said to him if anything ever happened to me with that stuff, and I got really hurt or something, I don’t know, I’d have to put chicken wire around me... because I’d really get hurt bad. We had a bottle thrown at the drums once, and it put a dent in the drum set. You can imagine what would happen if that hit someone in the head...”
And when the spotlights are on you, you can’t see anybody. “I don’t think they really want to hurt you; they just want to throw things. Maybe they ought to have some kind of search and not let kids into concerts with firecrackers, bottles, things like that. It’s really only the high-energy music that does it, though. It’s like in the early 1950s when they wanted to ban rock and roll because it incited riots, and people would go crazy. We just want people to have a good time. Like a party. We don’t want to do anything destructive. I don’t know what it is about good-time music that makes people go crazy and want to tear up things. I just consider it good-time music.”
As far as the new album is concerned, it’s finished except for the mastering. Johnny’s written more songs for this record than he has on any previous album—five of them. “Three are pretty blues-based,” he says, “some of them are blues-rock, and some of them are blues the way I used to do it a long time ago. This album is really strange because it’s got some of the really older Johnny Winter stuff that I haven’t done in a long time, and it’s got some very different things that people are not gonna believe are me. Two of the songs I wrote: one of them is a country and western tune about myself called ‘Love Song To Me,’ just about how much I love myself... and I wrote another really pretty ballad.”
