Winter Still Steeped In the Blues

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By ROBERT PALMER

JOHNNY WINTER, the rocking blues guitarist who is performing at the Ritz tomorrow night, has been playing The blues, and making a living at it, since he was 14 years old. It hasn't always been easy. When he was a teenager, playing around his hometown, Beaumont, Tex., with a band called Johnny and the Jammers, the audiences demanded rock-and-roll. Then he played Top 40 hits and soul music on the Southern bar circuit. Upon being discovered by Columbia Records in 1968 and signed to a lucrative contract, he was urged to play the role of guitar hero, America's answer to the British blues-rock guitar invasion led by Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck.

Somehow, the blues always won out in the end. "There's always been an audience that wants to hear the blues," the rail-thin, 42-year-old guitarist said the other day. "But for years, the record company and other music-business people kept wanting me to change, to play like whatever rock groups were real popular at the time. But I have no desire to 'modernize' myself. Very few people are playing the kind of music I play, so I figure I should keep doing it. You always keep learning ; you can learn something from almost anybody.

But you don't want to just ignore everything you've been doing for years to try something new you don't even understand, just to sound like whatever's happening on the radio." Mr. Winter's career has had its ups and downs. He had been a professional musician for a decade when the rock world suddenly discovered him in 1968, but he wasn't entirely prepared to go from local bar jobs to national and international rock tours virtually overnight. "It seems like as soon as I went from the bars to recording for CBS, I went from being a blues player right into being a rock-and-roller, without ever intending to," he recalled.

"Don't get me wrong, I enjoy playing rock-and-roll music, up to a point. But when I'm not playing and listening to a lot of blues, it seems like there's just a big hole in my life. I don't think the manager I • used to have ever understood why, if I I :could play rock-and-roll and make a , ' lot more money, I still wanted to play blues. It didn't make any sense to him. But it's real simple to me. Blues makes me feel good." Playing Outsider's Music Blues is traditionally an outsider's music, even within the black culture that nurtured it. When Johnny Winter was in his early teens, few white musicians were devoting themselves to it. His early blues performances in Texas drew puzzled or hostile reactions from white bar crowds.

Mr. Winter, who is an albino, said he often felt more welcome in black clubs. He spent a lot of time hanging out with a black blues guitarist, Clarence Garlow, whose recordings from the late 1940's now sound like precursors of later blues-rock, with their driving uptempo shuffle rhythms and declamatory guitar breaks. "Before the CBS deal came through, I worked in a bar in Houston for a couple of years, playing soul music," Mr. Winter said. "We'd do a soul hit like 'In the Midnight Hour' and people loved it. But then we'd do some hard Delta blues, like 'Rolling and Tumbling,' and even if it was Saturday night, the place would just empty out.

Finally, I met a bass player, Tommy Shannon, and a drummer, John Turner, who said, 'Let's just play blues, the way we want to play it, and stick with it until it works out.' Nobody had said that to me before. We love each other, those two guys and me. They helped me out so much, I don't think I'd ever have made it if it hadn't been for them." Less than a year later, fame and fortune beckoned. But the tightly knit trio was in for a shock. The kind of loose, interactive playing that was dynamic in a Southern roadhouse on a Saturday night somehow sounded diffuse, even aimless, in an arena rock concert.

"Those two guys always got put down so bad," said Mr. Winter. "The writers would say they liked me, but the bass and drums were terrible. It got to the point that you just didn't want to go out and play for people, and finally it broke the band up." On his new album, "Third Degree" (Alligator), Mr. Winter and his original trio got back together to record two tunes. "It was great to finally feel somebody caring," he said. Mr. Winter was a major rock star of the late 60's and early 70's, selling millions of albums for CBS. But when blues-based guitar solos went out of fashion with rock audiences, Mr. Winter's record sales gradually began to slip.

His manager and record label suggested a new style and a new image. Mr. Winter was recalcitrant. He was encouraged by the audiences for his concerts, which remained large and enthusiastic. "The audience has always been there," he ' maintained. "But the music-business people Just didn't seem to have the slightest grasp of who was listening, or how to reach them. And I admit, they had me kinda scared. They were telling me that if I didn't change, nobody was going to want to hear me again. It is scary if you begin to think nobody knows what you've done and still can do, and that nobody cares."

Hope From a New Label During the past few years, the story has taken some ironic twists and turns. In the late 1970's, Mr. Winter had a lifelong dream come true. He was able to produce the last albums by the great bluesman Muddy Waters, and those albums won the Mississippi Delta guitarist the biggest record sales and widest audience of his entire career. But at the same time, Mr. Winter's own career continued to slip. In 1981, Johnny Winter and CBS came to a parting of the ways. And after thinking things , Mr. Winter resurfaced on Alligator Records, an independent, Chicago-based label solidly committed to the-blues-and-nothing-but.

The Texan's three albums for Alligator — "Guitar Slinger" (1984), "Serious Business" (1985), and the brand-new "Third Degree" — have brought Mr. Winter more attention, and better sales, than any of his later CBS releases. While this was going on, another white blues guitarist from Texas, Stevie Ray Vaughan, surprised the record industry by becoming phenomenally successful and was snatched up by — irony of ironies —CBS. The company then signed the Fabulous Thunderbirds, another Texas blues band that features Stevie Ray Vaughan's brother Jimmy on guitar.

These artists, playing just the sort of music Mr. Winter was urged to abandon, are among the company's best-selling artists. "I'd rather be with somebody who has faith in me and is going to stick it out," Mr. Winter said. "Alligator's been great. I always knew you're bound to have some bad times along with the good times. I always had faith in my music over the long haul ; lean times never really scared me. The blues will teach you all you need to know about that." Mr. Winter will perform at the Ritz, 119 East 11th Street, tomorrow at 11 P.M.