Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (27 page)

Meanwhile, Caldwell. was exploding over his sideman’s pay, especially after seeing thousands of dollars counted out in hotel rooms after the gigs. He had been earning $150 to $200 a weekend playing in Noah’s Ark, and wasn’t doing much better in Johnny Winter And.

“I was making only a little better than that initially—which was an outrage,” he said. “It wasn’t a case of being paid what you were worth—it was a case of what you would tolerate. I remember sitting with Rick in Steve’s hotel room in Miami. I said, ‘I’m quitting the band. I don’t give a damn. I don’t care who it is. If I don’t get paid more, I’m done.”’

Paul was envisioning a solo project for Derringer, and tried to smooth things over by telling Caldwell he could be part of that project.

“Steve Paul had an idea that someday he would like to manage Rick,” said Caldwell. “He wanted me to be involved ’cause Rick and I play well together. Steve was only managing Edgar and Johnny at that time, and was directing Rick’s affairs—whatever that meant. Steve said, ‘Rick is going to be doing some things on his own in the near future—we’d like you to be a part of it and stick around.’ I thought, that’s fine—but we’re still talking about money now. It was a pivotal moment because I didn’t care. Things changed very quickly and he agreed to pay me what I was asking.”

From Johnny’s dramatic rise to fame in 1969 until the present, Johnny has always been the star with his musicians relegated to sideman status. Given that dynamic, Steve Paul felt that he and Johnny treated the band members responsibly. But Caldwell had concerns about the way the players were treated, especially Randy Hobbs.

“Randy was a very good bass player with a lot of experience, but he wasn’t taken very seriously,” said Caldwell. “He was a child star along with Rick in the McCoys, and he idolized Johnny. Randy was a sycophant and Johnny and Randy grew to be good friends. Everything was, ‘Oh yes, Johnny, you’re right, Johnny.’

“It was an ongoing joke. We’d all be sitting around, killing time on the road. We’d be reading
Rolling Stone
or
Creem
magazine and Randy would be reading
Guns
&
Ammo
. He was a redneck—I’m not saying that disparagingly. Nowadays, every country band member probably reads
Guns
&
Ammo
. But in those days, it was all about arts and music. Everybody was more into the yin, the feminine side of their energy, and Randy was firmly ensconced in the yang.

“When we were playing in Stockholm, we went to a club after the show. He’d just bought a new Stetson and some drunken girl kept hitting it. He was gone, but he had a tremendous reservoir of ability to hold it. You wouldn’t know it—he could have drunk, done drugs, and still played and hardly made any mistakes. This woman kept hitting his hat, and all of a sudden it got pretty nasty. Randy slapped or hit her, and her blood went all over his new Stetson. Everybody stood up, and there was chaos. Another time, Randy had words with a union worker backstage. Randy had a pair of pliers in his guitar case and started chasing the guy with these pliers like he was gonna do some dental work or pull his nose off. That’s the kind of things we dealt with—we’d laugh about it.

“Randy Hobbs was like a second-class citizen in that band. Everyone looked at Randy as someone to tolerate and politely put up with. He was a fine bass player but he was always high on something. Yet he could always get up there and play—every night. It was unbelievable.”

In early 1971, the band released
Johnny Winter And Live
, which made the
Billboard
charts that March, peaked at number forty and stayed on the charts for twenty-seven weeks. Johnny earned his first and only gold record in 1974 with
Johnny Winter And Live
.

“A live album seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” Johnny says. “We recorded it at the Fillmore East and Pirates World in Florida [an eighty-seven-acre theme park in Dania with a large outdoor concert venue]. Our shows were ninety minutes, so we had three hours to pick from. The audiences seemed to like the new band pretty good, real good in fact.
Johnny Winter And
sold worse than anything we had out to that point, but the
Johnny
Winter And Live record sold more than any other record I ever had out.”

A high-energy showcase that captures the intensity and excitement of that lineup,
Johnny Winter And Live
is the hardest-rocking recording that Johnny ever released, almost an anomaly in his catalogue.
(Captured Live
! comes close, but never reaches the intensity of
Johnny Winter And Live
.) The scorching guitars of Johnny and Derringer on “Good Morning Little School Girl” take the Sonny Boy Williamson blues standard into the outer stratosphere of rock, making the Yardbirds’ version sound like Pat Boone. Many rock aficionados consider it one of the best rock ‘n’ roll records ever, and Caldwell explains why he thinks it earned that moniker.

“You can hear it’s a real group—it’s not a ‘Johnny, you’ve got it all going, and I hope you can pull it off’ like it usually is,” he said. “Every night was a juggernaut. It was unstoppable; as big a stomping band as you’ve ever heard. It was like walking in the forest and there was King Kong standing there. You thought all the monkeys you had encountered on the path looked pretty big, and all of a sudden you see this thing that’s one hundred feet tall. That’s what comes across as a group on that record.”

While Johnny toured with Johnny Winter And, Edgar put his own band together with a lineup of Louisiana and Texas musicians. Edgar and his band lived at Hearthstone Farm in Clinton Corners, New York, not very far from Johnny’s house in Staatsburg.

“When I was putting together White Trash, Johnny used to come out to the Hearthstone Farm and listen to the band play,” Edgar said. “On occasion, he would sit in. He played slide on ‘I’ve Got News for You’ on the
White Trash
album. That song came out great. I loved the primitive authentic slide guitar in contrast to the Ray Charles R&B-style horn.”

With their live recording on its way up the charts, Johnny Winter And began a tour to follow up the release. In January and February 1971, they played concerts in Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and England. During their off time in London, Johnny jammed with Traffic at a college gig. Two days later, Johnny celebrated his twenty-seventh birthday headlining the Royal Albert Hall.

“The Royal Albert Hall show was like Oscar night with the red carpet,” said Caldwell. “Everybody who was in town came to see us that night: our competition, Johnny admirers, flaggers, whoever didn’t like us. It was a great show.”

The band returned to the States in March for a three-night gig at the Fillmore East with the Elvin Bishop Group and the Allman Brothers. At
Fillmore
East, the Allman Brothers Band’s double album of that performance that earned a gold record and cemented that band’s reputation, was recorded at those shows.

“The live
At Fillmore East
album gives you the impression they were headlining, but Johnny Winter And was the headliner,” said Caldwell. “That was probably the biggest rock show there outside of Hendrix, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles at Shea Stadium. Bill Graham did a tremendous job. Believe me, when it’s time to go on, you better go on. It was run like a military operation.”

Johnny’s touring schedule continued to be exhausting. He’d been playing a breakneck schedule of gigs and festivals since he moved to New York. “The first three years were pretty chaotic,” he says. “I was playing pretty much every night. We were busy all the time. We were always traveling—playing Europe and the States. Steve wanted us to work as much as possible and I wanted to play as much as I could.”

Johnny needed drugs and alcohol to unwind and his drug use escalated with his fame.

“After the gigs, we had parties in my hotel room,” he said. “We’d have psychedelic drugs and downs at the parties—usually Seconal—and I’d find a girl to go to bed with. The parties lasted three or four hours, just sittin’ around getting’ high, and talkin’. You’d be so keyed up from playing; it helped to take something to bring you down. You either drank or took a down. You get real anxious before you play, and it’s hard to calm down when you know you’re gonna be playin’ for a whole bunch of people. Believe me, if there’s not a bunch of people, I still get nervous. Even playin’ in small places. I was probably drinkin’ a fifth of Jack Daniels a night. When I did heroin, I wasn’t drinkin’ as much.”

Caldwell remembers the tour schedule as grueling with added pressures hoisted on Johnny as the star.

“We were playing three or four nights a week,” said Caldwell. “It was really grinding because we were travehng—going to the airports, then getting picked up, getting off the plane, getting into the cars, going to the hotels, from there getting to the gigs, doing sound check, coming back, meeting people. Johnny felt the pressure more. That’s the hook about being famous; the more people know who you are, the more demanding they are. You’re constantly being interviewed unless you’re in the car with the rest of the band or you’re home. I think Johnny felt that constant fishbowl thing in addition to traveling and playing.”

With the continual touring and mounting pressure, Johnny viewed heroin as a harmless escape and made no bones about his drug use.

“I didn’t hide it at all,” Johnny says. “I didn’t have any reason to hide it—I was real upfront about it. Everybody was pretty upfront about the drugs they did. They didn’t talk about heroin as much as I did—but everything else. People admitted their drug use more than they do now. People would tell me sometimes, ‘You shouldn’t be so open about this,’ and I’d say, ‘Well, why not?’ I didn’t realize it was different from pot or LSD or magic mushrooms or whatever. Steve Paul hated it; he didn’t want me to do it. He told me how bad it was and I said, ‘Yeah, maybe for some people but I’m smart enough to stay away [not get hooked] from it.’

“Teddy Slatus didn’t like me doin’ heroin either. Nobody around me liked it. Edgar knew I was doin’ drugs—he did ’em with me but he stopped before it got too bad. When he knew I had a drug problem, he said he’d help in any way he could. I don’t think I would have ever wanted to do heroin if it hadn’t been for the fame. You just felt that lonely feeling; you couldn’t get away from it. With heroin, you didn’t feel bad about what was going on around you. Anybody that was trying to take advantage of you, you’d feel like you’re gettin’ what you wanted out of them. You didn’t care about what people were doin’ around you. You feel good within yourself and don’t care about anything else. Drugs are amazing—they help a lot of stuff. They just don’t keep lasting.”

Heroin was considered to be just part of the scene. The band knew Johnny and Hobbs indulged, but had no idea of the extent of Johnny’s growing addiction.

“It was common knowledge,” said Caldwell. “He certainly wasn’t trying to hide it from anyone in the band, and there was little made of it. No one had a problem; it was really a recreational drug, as dumb as that sounds. It was complete and total ignorance. I know Johnny didn’t realize the ramifications of it.”

In April, Johnny Winter And played the Fillmore West and the Fillmore East. In May, Johnny appeared at Liberty Hall in Houston with Willie Dixon and the Chicago All Stars, which included Willie Dixon on bass and vocals, Lee Jackson on guitar, Lafayette Leake on piano, Big Walter Horton on harmonica, and Clifton James on drums. Although he was probably delighted to play with those blues icons, he has no memory of that show.

Johnny Winter And played the Spectrum with the Allman Brothers Band and the Detroit Rock Revival with them as well as Edgar Winter’s White Trash, Bob Seger, and the J. Geils Band. They flew to London for another show at the Royal Albert Hall on June 22. When the band played a show at the Fillmore East two days later, the musicians had no idea it would be their final gig.

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