Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (16 page)

Paul may not have told Johnny he liked the band, but considered that meeting “exciting and enjoyable” and on a personal level, found Johnny to be “really smart, funny, and enjoyable to be with.” Nevertheless, Johnny doesn’t think that goodwill ever extended to the rest of the band.

“Later on I found out he didn’t like Tommy or Uncle John at all,” says Johnny. “He didn’t think they were as good musically as they needed to be, but he didn’t say anything about that for a good while. He waited. He never did have opinions of his own. He would ask his friends what their opinions were and he’d get enough opinions in one direction and that would be his decision. He was real strange about that.”

Despite Paul’s comments that he loved the blues and blues artists—Muddy Waters was the first recording artist he hired to play at the Scene—Johnny believes he only embraced the genre because it was trendy in the late ’60s.

“Steve Paul wasn’t into blues—not particularly. He just knew blues was very popular at the time. He was a New Yorker, a fast talker. He wasn’t like anybody I ever knew. He never seemed to have a thing for girls—he never liked guys either. We couldn’t figure out what he was, but he just didn’t go for either sex. He didn’t want us to know—I guess he felt we would be down on him if he told us he was gay, so he didn’t tell us.

“He said, ‘Let’s go to New York and Iʹll show you what I can do.’ And he did. I stayed at his house and he took me to the Fillmore to see Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper. I sat in with them and played ‘It’s My Own Fault,’ and blew everybody away. The crowd gave me a standing ovation. They just flipped out completely. They’d seen all the stuff in
Rolling Stone
and were waitin’ to see what I was like. Everybody wanted to sign me up after that. Steve didn’t make me sign until after he had gotten a deal with Columbia—I had already signed with Columbia when I signed a management deal with him. He had owned the Scene for several years when I met him. It was a big club on Forty-Sixth and Eighth Avenue, a basement club under a dirty bookstore. I played a lot at the Scene and played with a lot of people there including Jimi Hendrix.”

“Steve Paul was a cool person,” said Turner. “A brilliant, fast-thinking New Yorker, he hung with the Warhol crowd. Steve Paul delivered the $600,000 deal. He got the money and he also brought Johnny to New York to his club and got him to jam with Jimi Hendrix. In our mind, this guy was powerful.”

“Being a hick from Texas, I didnʹt know what to think of Steve Paul,” said Shannon. “I’d never seen a New York Jewish guy before. It was weird how it happened. One night, Uncle John and I were sleeping on the floor with our clothes in footlockers. The next day, we fly into the airport, where there were two beautiful girls waiting on us. We went from there to some mansions in upstate New York. We went from sleeping on the floor to living in mansions overnight.”

Shannon also had another experience in New York he had never encountered in Texas.

“When we first moved to New York, there was a black guy named Jason who was supposed to be our valet,” said Shannon. “He was gay and fell in love with me. I was so dumb, I had no idea. One night, we went out and ate with a big group of people. He came over and sat in my lap, and I still didn’t get it. Everybody started laughing and I couldn’t figure it out. Someone had to tell me he was gay. After that it was like, ‘Get away from me, man!’”

Steve Paul enjoyed traveling with an entourage. Whether the initial destination was a restaurant, a concert, or a Broadway play, the group always ended up at his nightclub. He had opened the Scene just off of Manhattan’s theatre district in 1964. The bluecanopied basement club quickly became the place to see and be seen. Tiny Tim of “Tip-Toe Thru the Tulips with Me” fame got his first break at the Scene in 1965 when Paul hired him, and he soon earned the title of House Freak. The Scene was also a spawning ground for up-and-coming musicians and the place where legendary players always stopped by for the good-looking groupies and impromptu jams.

“There was always a line outside the Scene and lots of celebrities,” says Johnny. “Jimi Hendrix and all of the English bands who came to New York—once they left their gigs, they came to jam. It was a real well known place for rock ‘n’ roll people. There was everything in the Scene in 1968—heroin and cocaine, speed, ups, downs, grass. They pretty much did it in the open and nobody cared.”

Turner and Shannon were also dazzled by the Scene and the musicians the club attracted.

“All the people at the Scene were famous,” said Turner. “Rod Stewart, Joe Cocker. One of the first times we went there Jerry Lee Lewis played.”

“The first time I went to the Scene I couldn’t believe it,” said Shannon. “Jimi Hendrix and Rod Stewart were there, as well as the most beautiful girls you can imagine. You have to remember, we were hicks from Texas. I couldn’t believe Jimi Hendrix was sitting over there, Jerry Lee Lewis was there—any night of the week, you would go in and there’d be great musicians. I played with all the great guitar players just about... Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Muddy Waters, and all the Kings [Albert, Freddie, B. B.], just about all the great guitar players except Jimi Hendrix.”

Early in their careers, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, the Rascals, Blood, Sweat & Tears, and the Chambers Brothers performed at the club, which was known for its horrible ventilation, deafening acoustics, and laissez-faire attitude. Raven, a Buffalo-based rock/ blues/jazz band that relocated to New York City, played there regularly, and was the backdrop for Johnny to dazzle new audiences with his mastery of the guitar. Other house bands included the McCoys; Free Spirits, a jazz-rock band with Larry Coryell and Jim Pepper; and Players, which featured Dan Armstrong, the studio session guitarist and luthier who invented the clear Plexiglas guitar. Patrons witnessed musical history in the making at amazing jams by Janis Joplin and Eric Burdon; Tiny Tim and the Doors; Richie Havens and Joan Baez; Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck; Hendrix and B. B. King; the Monkees and Frank Zappa; Hendrix and Jim Morrison; and Hendrix and Johnny Winter.

The excitement and success of that nightclub attracted more than just celebrities, musicians, and groupies. A local thug named Junior—purported to be a member of organized crime—demanded a cut of the club’s income. When Paul and the club’s manager Teddy Slatus, who later became Johnny’s manager, refused, Junior retaliated with a show of force. In late August 1969, he planted a number of thugs in the club and staged a fight that started a brawl and injured a number of patrons. An off-duty detective celebrating his wedding anniversary used the office phone to call police. Police arrived and made several arrests, but not in time to save Slatus from a brutal beating. Slatus, who left the club alone when he locked up at 4 AM each morning, refused to testify against the wise guys. The club never reopened after that fateful night, but before it closed its doors forever, it played a pivotal role in Johnny’s career.

After Johnny captivated New York by sitting in with Bloomfield and Kooper at the Fillmore East and jamming with Hendrix at the Scene, Paul announced that sealed bids would be accepted from four record companies: RCA Victor, Columbia, Elektra, and Atlantic. The competition flamed the fires of desire. Johnny continued to play his heart out and let Paul handle negotiations with record executives who flocked to the Scene to check out this amazing new talent. Columbia won the bidding war with what Columbia president Clive Davis called the “largest amount ever given to a new performer in Columbia’s history.”

“There was a bidding war between Jerry Wexler at Atlantic and Clive Davis before I signed with Columbia in February 1969,” says Johnny. “They were the two big name bidders. The Columbia deal was $600,000 over a period of five years—I had to do two albums a year. They said it was the highest advance in history but I don’t think it really was. We only got $50,000 at a time for each record we put out. We ended up not making two albums a year—we made one album a year. It came out to just about $600,000 over a long period—about ten years.”

Danny Fields, who managed the MC5, the Stooges, the Ramones, Steve Forbert, and Jonathan Richman, was an influential figure on the New York and Detroit underground punk music scenes during the 1960s and 1970s. As a member of Warhol’s social circle, he frequented the Scene and traveled in the same crowd as Paul. Fields offered insight into Paul during an interview with Paul Trynka for the biography
Iggy Pop: Open Up and Bleed.

“Steve was very smart and very canny and had been in show business since he was fourteen,” said Fielding. “He seemed to be in everything. He ran poker games at hotels. He was a publicist for the Peppermint Lounge and he was in the real early sixties Mister New York Highlife and the Scene was
the
scene. Jimi Hendrix was there every night. He’s a character. Steve Paul could construct a visionary, a tableau of the timeline of the future and he was going to change Johnny and Edgar and do the first albino brother act in history and all this worked out. He didn’t give any of the other supporting players [a chance] to express themselves or become themselves. He’s got the scenario, and here’s the script, and this is what will happen.

“That was the strategy with Johnny from the beginning. They thought they would get a buzz going and then he would get some figures tossed around. I think he wanted $600,000 for signing him, which in ‘69 was a lot of money for a blues guitar player.... Steve had such a hype going that it was dominated by the price; the amount of money had been broadcast in the industry. He broadcast the asking price for Johnny Winter as if that was evidence of his work. In other words, ʹI won’t start under $50,000 or $75,000 upon signing.’ And everyone is supposed to go, ‘Whoa! They must really be fabulous!’

“He suckered Clive into doing it because he’s so persuasive and so eloquent, visionary and brilliant, and has incredible linguistic skills. That’s why anyone calling him a fool is one. He may have done or be doing foolish things, but he ain’t no fool. He’s like a Jewish James Joyce when he gets on a roll. He’s formidable and the domitability of him is that if you want to shut him up. ʹHereʹs $600,000; I have someone else waiting to see me.’ ‘Thanks, Clive, you won’t be sorry.’”

Paul invested “a fair amount” of time and money into building Johnny’s career. The cost of limos, housing, hotels, food, and traveling with an entourage was substantial. Johnny’s income was deposited into a corporate account. Paul paid expenses and the band drew a salary. Although Johnny initially earned up to $10,000 a performance, he and his band members received one hundred dollars a week.

“We just drew money off the corporation,” said Turner. “I didn’t think much about it. At the time, it was enough money to get along. They paid our room and board; everything was paid for. That one hundred dollars was spending money for drinks and clothes, and we spent plenty on both.”

“We got nothing out of the advance,” said Shannon. “We got one hundred dollars a week; it was like a salary. We did the same thing with Stevie [Ray Vaughan] except we were drawing $1,750 a month. Expenses were paid; we paid for clothes, amplifiers. A girl I met named Eleanor took me out and helped me buy all these cool clothes—velvet bellbottoms, really cool shirts, shades... she got me looking like a rock star.”

“I always let Steve handle the business end because he knew more about it than I did,” says Johnny. ”It’s not that I didnʹt care about money at all—itʹs something you have to be aware of—but it wasn’t the main part of it. Music was the main thing. Having more money didn’t affect me very much. I just got to get the things I wanted—it was nice in that way. I could buy all the records I wanted. But then you had to take care of your money—that was hard because you had to trust your accountant. Accountants you could trust were hard to find. In that way, it was hard to make it [be successful], keep the money coming in right, and have somebody to take care of it.

“When I got the deal, I moved to New York with Red and Tommy. We all lived in a house in Staatsburg, New York, close to Rhinebeck. Five minutes from Poughkeepsie, about a hundred miles out of New York City. It was a lot cheaper to live in Staatsburg than living in the city. When we stayed in the city, we stayed at the Chelsea Hotel.”

Located at 222 West Twenty-Third Street and officially called “Hotel Chelsea,” the Chelsea Hotel attracted writers, visual artists, musicians, actors, and film directors. Famous residents included Robert Mapplethorpe, Arthur Miller, Joni Mitchell (who wrote “Chelsea Morning” while staying there), Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Tom Wolfe, William Bur-roughs, Tennessee Williams, and members of Andy Warhol’s circle, including model Edie Sedgwick, Ultra Violet, and Viva.
The Chelsea Girls,
Warhol’s 1966 film about his Factory regulars and their lives at the hotel, was shot on location.

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