Shannon says he never got deeply involved in heroin when Johnny did, but still has vivid memories of his first time. “I got real sick, threw up, and had to lie down on my bed,” he said.
In a 1999 interview with the British edition of
GQ,
Keith Richards said he used heroin early in his career to isolate himself from the demands that came from being a celebrity. He compared it to a cocoon he could hide in, which provided a buffer from the outside world. Johnny felt the same way.
“Heroin definitely was something you could hide in,” he says. “When you wanted to talk to somebody about drugs, they didn’t care who you were, they just were sellin’ heroin to another guy. Who you were wasn’t important; you were just another addict. It made you forget everything—thatʹs what was good about it. You’re not nervous about anything; you’re not bugged about things that normally bother you. You’re off in your own little world. It’s a lot better than downs. With downs, you might play real bad because you’re wiped out. With heroin, unless you do too much of it, it makes you relaxed without being tired, without being downed out where you’re gonna play bad.
“A lot of artists are high on heroin when they play. After a while, you developed a tolerance and didn’t stay high as long. My fame didn’t really make it okay, but it made heroin easier to get a hold of. I guess to some extent, I might have thought, ‘I’m a rock star, and rock stars do heroin.’ Having money helped. You wouldn’t be able to buy it unless you had a pretty good paying gig.”
Johnny’s breakneck touring schedule and escalating fame that eventually led him to harder drug use included festivals across the country, and concerts at high profile venues such as the Fillmore, Fillmore East, Hollywood Bowl, and the Spectrum in Philadelphia. One of his warmest memories is playing the Fillmore East with B. B. King in January 1969.
“We opened for B. B.,” says Johnny. “That was the first time I saw him since I played at the Raven Club. The Fillmore show was fun. He said he was really happy for me and was glad to see me making it. He said, ʹI told you, you were gonna make it.ʹʺ
Johnny jammed with King for the first time at the Newport Jazz Festival that July.
“We played with jazz artists a good bit of the time at other festivals, so it was just another show,” says Johnny. “I remember the fences coming down at Newport and the police tear gassing people. That was a real drag; I was backstage when that happened. I jammed with B. B. at the end—that was great.”
In early August, Johnny played the Atlantic City Pop Festival.
“I remember the Atlantic City Pop Festival vaguely,” says Johnny. “It’s hard to remember any of those festivals because there were so many. The festivals were a big blur when you were taking drugs. Sometimes I was tripping. I think it made things worse, but a lot of times the audience couldn’t tell.”
“Nineteen sixty-nine has been called the greatest year in rock because they had pop festivals with audiences of 80,000 to 150,000 people in all the major cities,” said Shannon. “Woodstock was half a million. I never dreamed there would be crowds like that. We played all of those festivals, Fillmore East and West, Royal Albert Hall. It was really a trip; I grew about ten years in that one year.”
The band played every major festival that summer, but never had an opportunity to experience the “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll” ambiance that permeated the festival crowd.
“You can’t see much from the stage—itʹs hard to tell what’s going on,” says Johnny. “You had to stick around the stage area because if you tried to go see people on the outside, they would mob you. That was frustrating. So we’d stay behind stage to see the other artists. That was great. I met Mick Jagger and Keith Richards at one show. I remember Mick saying, ‘Mr. Winter, Mr. Winter, it’s Mr. Jagger. Wait for me.’ Mick Jagger was always pretty nice. Keith Richards said I played blues as good as any of the Chicago guys. That was so nice. I hung out with them, but never did get to play with them. Last time I saw Keith was at S.I.R. [Studio Instrument Rentals] in New York—he was practicing in a rehearsal room before a show.
“We never had a chance to meet other artists for any amount of time there because it was a ‘do it and get out.’ It was frustrating because you didn’t get to hear the bands as much as you’d like to. I was supposed to play with Jeff Beck at one festival. I was talking to him before the show and he said his band didn’t show up. I said, ‘You can go on with my band’ and he said, ‘Sure, great.’ We played, then announced him, and I saw him running out across the field in back of us. He just ran away—he wouldn’t do the show. So I said, ʹI guess Jeff Beck’s not gonna play.ʹʺ
That incident was at the Laurel Pop Festival, held at a racetrack on July 11, featuring Led Zeppelin, Edwin Hawkins, Jethro Tull, Al Kooper, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, Ten Years After, and Vanilla Fudge. A driving rain almost cancelled that festival but Johnny’s band refused to let their fans down.
“Everybody bailed out—most bands either didn’t come or left,” said Turner. “When we got there, the crowd was still there, standing in the rain. The other bands didn’t want to wait around for it to stop raining. Our attitude was if those people are gonna stand out there in the rain waiting for music, we can sure sit here in this trailer waiting for it to stop raining. So we waited for it to stop raining, and played. Everybody thought we were heroes because everybody else gave up.”
Playing festivals on massive stages was a far cry from playing small clubs and roadhouses in Texas, but Paul taught the band how to adapt to larger venues. “He helped us learn how to be rock musicians on a larger scale,” said Turner. “He told us to increase our movements—throw our arms around, jump around, move around more.”
The crowd loved Johnny’s wild stage antics, which went a little too far at one gig.
“One of the early stages of moving around led to Johnny falling off the stage in Kansas City,” said Turner. “Johnny started a song back by his amps and started dancing. He had his head toward the microphone in the front of the stage, then he turned back and was lookin’ at me while swaying and moving toward the mike. He went past the mike and fell off the front of the stage. It was funny at the time, but he actually sprained his ankle and was limping around for two or three weeks.”
Johnny still remembers that misstep in the Midwest.
“I fell off the stage,” he says with a laugh. “I wasn’t even high. It was a big hall with a raised stage. I was jumpin’ up and down—I jumped up in the air and came down on the people in the front row. My leg landed on their seats and I broke a few cameras. It took me awhile to get up; I was hurt and my leg was sprained. But I got back up onstage and played sitting down for a while.”
While Johnny was cavorting on massive stages across the country, his brother was playing clubs in Texas. So Johnny invited Edgar to New York to sit in with the band and showcase his musical talents.
“We had made the big time and Edgar was still playing nightclubs in the entertainment district in Houston,” said Turner. “Of course, whenever we got a chance, we’d go back to Houston to show off,” he added with a laugh. “We told Edgar, ‘Why don’t you come to New York and play with us, and try to get your own record deal? We’ll play thirty minutes as a trio, and then we’ll play thirty minutes with you, and you can show off what you can do.’”
With Johnny’s goodwill and considerable clout behind him, Edgar moved to New York, joined his brother’s band, and soon had his own management deal and recording contract.
“I played on
Johnny Winter
but didn’t join that band until later,” said Edgar. “I signed with Steve Paul when I signed my recording deal with Columbia Records. That was one of the inducements of signing with him. Obviously, he could see the potential for us as brothers. That was probably part of the reason Johnny was so adamant about not doing too much work together. He didn’t want to see that exploited. As we grew older, Johnny was really adamant about not wanting to become known as the Winter Brothers. He wanted us to have separate identities and our music became very different.”
Johnny made it clear to Steve Paul and to Columbia Records that they were and would remain separate musicians—not the Winter Brothers. But Paulʹs single-minded focus on the bottom line, as well as his concept of marketing them as albinos, had an adverse effect on their relationship.
“It’s really hard to say what Steve Paul thought of me as a person,” says Johnny. ʺI don’t think he cared much about me as a person; it was just payinʹ the bills for him. I donʹt think it would have mattered who I was. He wasn’t the kind of person you wanted to hang around with; we didn’t hang around with him at all. He just thought of me as an artist and not as a person. He’d talk about me when I was in the room—that made me feel bad. When Edgar was just startin’ to play with me, Steve said, ‘If you can’t make it with one albino, get two.’ That pissed me off. I came real close to punchin’ him when he’d say those things. I donʹt think he cared or realized what he was saying or thought it would hurt anybody. Nothing bothered him too much.
“At first I liked him, but I got tired of him real quick. He wanted us to do more rock ‘n’ roll than I wanted to do. He was too controlling. I didnʹt need or like control. He’d try to control me with the songs he wanted me to do, how much he wanted me to play, things like that.”
Despite their tentative personal relationship, Paul’s savvy as a manager continued to catapult Johnny into the spotlight with high profile gigs. After the blues-soaked Yardbirds disbanded, their guitarist Jimmy Page formed Led Zeppelin. When the Jeff Beck Group cancelled out of an American tour, Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant convinced the promoter to take a chance on this unknown group, and they opened for Johnny on a number of gigs. One show was at the Spectrum, an 18,000-capacity stadium in Philadelphia. It was a night (and a nightmare) the band will never forget.
“It was horrible,” says Johnny. “The Spectrum had a revolving stage, and we were all trippin’. The stage turned around real fast—that terrified me. It was like being on a sonic merry-go-round. I’d walk away from the mike, not remember where it was, and couldn’t find it. I wouldn’t play any revolving stages after that.”
“We played the Spectrum during our short-lived acid days,” said Turner. “We had some LSD someone had given us. Based on our past experiences, we thought we could split a tablet and be able to play just like we had done before. But it turned out to be the strongest LSD we ever had. We realized we had gotten ourselves out on a limb, and walked in thinking, ‘This is going to be tough.’ Then we looked up and saw Led Zeppelin on the revolving stage. The stage felt like it was going around one hundred miles an hour, but it was barely moving. From the stage, you could see spotlights all the way around the room. We were revolving around, with all these colors changing, and became totally disoriented. We couldn’t even tell if we were playing at all—we were in a trance.”
When the show finally ended and the stage stopped, the band thought their nightmare was over. But just like
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
by Lewis, Carroll, things weren’t always what they appeared to be.
“We had approached the stage from behind our amplifiers,” said Turner. “When the stage stopped, it stopped in the opposite place from where it had started, with the back side of the stage facing the front row of the audience. But we were way too high to realize this. So Johnny thinks he is getting off the stage to go back to the dressing room and he jumped off the stage into the front row. The crowd just jumped on him. They were going to consume him, so the roadies grabbed him by the arms and pulled him back up on the stage.”
Crowd control was an issue at the Denver Pop Festival, a three-day festival at Mile High Stadium. Johnny played on June 28; the Jimi Hendrix Experience closed the festival the following day. Although tickets were only six dollars a night or fifteen dollars for all three nights, about one hundred gatecrashers stormed a chain link fence the first night. The night Johnny played, a crowd of between 300 and 400 charged through the fence. Police hurled teargas canisters into the crowd, which tossed them back at police. Clouds of teargas choked thousands of fans; two people were rushed to the hospital.
“Someone said, ‘Don’t let a fence stop you,’ and they tore down the fence,” recalled Shannon. “I was running around trying to find a place to hide because people just came rushing over the fence. They finally got it under control.”
Johnny also played the Memphis Country Blues Festival featuring many of the early acoustic artists he had heard on the radio in his bedroom. The lineup included Reverend Robert Wilkins, Walter “Furry” Lewis, Fred McDowell, and Sleepy John Estes. The program read: JOHNNY WINTER, A DOWN-AND-OUT YOUNG HOUSTON BLUES MUSICIAN AS RECENTLY AS A YEAR AGO, IS NOW ONE OF THE HOTTEST PROPERTIES IN ROCK AND A LEAPING POPUILARIZER [SIC] OF TRADITIONAL BLUES STYLES.
Johnny was thrilled for the opportunity to meet his idols. “Johnny was really wigged out that this old blues guy from Mississippi was playing,” said Turner. “He was particularly excited about meeting Fred McDowell.”
The Memphis Country Blues Festival attracted a more mellow audience than the Denver Pop Festival, but that didn’t let Johnny off the hook. Like Bob Dylan at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, the band caught flak for using amps at an acoustic festival.
“Most everybody was acoustic, both traditional black artists and the white bands that played the blues,” says Johnny. “But the promoters wanted us, so we figured we’d give it a try. We played most of the blues songs on
Johnny Winter.
The audience seemed to like us pretty good. Johnny Woods—he played harp—came out and said, ‘You Elmore James, you Elmore James.’ But we got put down by the white bands that were playing old-style blues. I guess they’ll always be blues purists who want everything to be old-style blues, and they got the right to like whatever they want.”