The band was being paid a huge $5,000 a night then. outside recording a rainstorm) and the brothers finished it. Goode Highway 61 Revisited) recorded in Nashville with the renowned producer Eddie Kramer (Hendrix, Zeppelin, Stones, Kiss etc), who was sacked mid-way due to lack of attention (e.g. It marked a slight shift to rock ‘n’ roll or at least a broader songbook (Johnny B. A second LP was issued later that same year, climbing to 55 (it might have done better if his ’68 debut wasn’t reissued as a cash-in), one of the few double albums issued as a three-sider! They didn’t have enough material for four sides but was too good to edit (the third side was exclusively his songs): Winter also wanted it to be as loud as technology could then achieve.
#Johnny winter young plus#
The year 1969 was his high point: an eponymous album with the same trio plus Edgar on keys/sax (who joined full-time), Walter ‘Shaky’ Horton on harmonica, and the upright bassist-songwriter Willie Dixon for powerful covers of B.B.King, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson II etc which peaked at 24 on Billboard. CBS, later called Columbia, signed him for $600,000, a record at the time (Zepp for example were allegedly paid a third of that by Atlantic). In December 1968 he got a guest spot in New York to jam with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and combined with a prominent article on Texas calling him the best thing in music to come out of there aside from Janis Joplin (like Leonard Cohen, he had a fling with her and guested at her Madison Square Gardens show), a label bidding war started to sign him.
Recorded at Austin’s Gas Works Club, it sports a Carnaby Street image with capes ‘n’ all. Non-stop gigging and numerous local hits (one went on to Billboard 100 as The Traits with Harlem Shuffle in ’66 the popish Eternally was licensed to Atlantic and did well in Texas and Louisiana) led to the 24 year-old’s debut The Progressive Blues Experiment (1968), a trio’s recording of ten tracks split equally between covers (including his beloved Son House) and his own songs. He ventured into black areas even when National Guardsmen were sealing off towns due to racial unrest, but always welcomed because of his sincere interest in the music. When he said he had, B.B.King lent him a guitar and at the end was greeted by a standing ovation. Because Johnny kept badgering the performer to jam with him, he was asked if he had a musicians’ union card. Three years later the brothers were the only whites in the Raven club on the ‘wrong side’ of his hometown. He was starting the climb to be among the greats of Texan blues, from Blind Lemon Jefferson and Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins and his cousin Albert Collins, to T-Bone Walker, Stevie Ray Vaughan and fellow-Gibson-touter Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.
By the time he was 15 he’d cut one of his early songs for Houston’s Dart Records, School Day Blues with his 12 year-old brother as Johnny and the Jammers. Johnny graduated from ukulele to guitar, a family heirloom, when he was 11 or 12 and started his first band.
The musical family had permanently moved there by the time Edgar was born almost three years later, and both played various instruments in their formative years. When first recording in the 1950s, press-shots are like a photo-negative of Elvis.Īlthough he liked to say he was from the home of blues in Mississippi, where his father was a mayor with a struggling cotton business (he also played sax and sang in swing era bands and choirs), John Dawson Winter III was in fact born in Beaumont, Texas in 1944 because there was no hospital in Leland. Never a prolific songwriter-there is just one song on the album completely by him-he modestly preferred to be known as an ‘interpreter’. Albino like his well-known younger brother Edgar (of the hit Frankenstein fame), he felt well-suited among a disadvantaged minority like those he paid tribute to live and in the studio-an international ambassador respected by other giants among white blues (what a great surname for it!). One reviewer likened him to a ‘pagan apparition’, a nice variation on the hackneyed ‘cool dude’ epithet. A gaunt, lanky albino festooned with tattoos accentuated by his pale skin, a card-playing, cigarillo-smoking, bourbon-drinking Stetson-wearer, he had alcohol and BBQ sauce brands named after him. He had his own stand-alone style musically (he never learned to read music because didn’t want to copy or trust what others wrote) and visually.
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