Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (30 page)

Johnny’s status of famous and cool continued to haunt him when he left River Oaks and traveled to Austin for some downtime with Franklin.

“When went to Texas after rehab, I couldn’t just go out and watch a band,” says Johnny. “People would ask me to sit in, to give them a pick—give ’em something or do something for ’em, and I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to be able to be just another guy—I didn’t want to have to be a star all the time. It’s really tiring. I felt like a jukebox ’cause that’s what everybody expected from me—music. Put a quarter in and get their song. People don’t relate to you as a person and there’s not much they can do about it and not much you can do about it.”

Johnny vented his frustration to
Rolling Stone
reporter Chet Flippo, who met him in Austin after he left the hospital. The interview took place in Franklin’s studio above the Armadillo World Headquarters, a club in the National Guard Armory that became the place to hear music in Austin after the Vulcan Gas Company closed. In an article aptly titled “Just Act Like I’m A Person, Dammit!”, Johnny openly discussed his addiction. The article ran with an unflattering photograph with a quote for a caption: “ALL I COULD THINK ABOUT WAS: YOU’RE A JUNKIE, YOU’RE A JUNKIE. I HATED MYSELF.” “Smack just sneaks up on you, without you realizin’ it,” he told Flippo. “Pretty soon you just can’t get up in the morning without it.”

“I’ve never been very subtle about that kind of stuff so I pretty much answered his questions,” Johnny explains. “I figured that maybe it could help other people that were goin’ through the same thing.”

Johnny felt grounded when he saw his friends from Texas; he knew them before he achieved fame and never had to question their motivation.

“I was honored that he decided to come here after he got out of rehab,” said Franklin. “He seemed great. I was hoping it would last, but didn’t really expect it to. I think just about every excuse is used by people that get out of rehab to do another hit. One time, we flew to New Orleans, where he ran into a musician that knew where to score. Johnny snorted it, and threw up right away. He offered me some but I don’t have a predisposition for heroin. I wish I could transfer some of that gene to Johnny; he just has the addiction gene.”

Although Johnny escaped a certain death by putting himself into rehab, he had another close call in Austin two years after he left the facility.

“In about ’73, Johnny OD’ed in my apartment,” said Turner. “Me and Jeanne Whittington, a friend of Johnny’s, and my old lady Jill were there. He came into town and we got some heroin. He did the heroin and fell out—basically stopped breathing. We snatched him up, put him in a bathtub full of cold water, and I started slapping him like a rubber chicken, as hard as I could slap him, slappin’ the shit out of him. God, I didn’t want him to die in my apartment. We took his pants off, but I couldn’t get his shirt off quick enough so I just threw him in. I was trying to get his shirt off, and time was of the essence. So I said, ‘Throw him in the tub; fuck his shirt.’ When he woke up, he was mad because I threw him in the tub with his purple velvet shirt on. He didn’t realize what had happened, and when he came to, he said, ‘God damn it—you fucked up my shirt.’”

That was a wakeup call for Johnny. No longer able to dismiss heroin as a recreational drug, he knew the repercussions could be fatal. That incident led him to the methadone clinic in New York and caused him to make serious changes in his life. He set down rules he says he has stuck to since 1973. He never works more than four or five nights a week, and never stays on the road for more than four or six weeks at a stretch. Avoiding junkies was another critical decision.

“I decided to not be around people who were doing drugs and not to be on the road all the time,” he says. “With one-nighters, you gotta do so much travelin’, flyin’ from place to place. I just told Steve Paul how it had to be—whether he liked it or not, he had to do it.”

Before Johnny formed another band, he spent time on the West Coast, regaining his confidence by performing for large audiences. During July and August 1972, Johnny sat in on a couple of shows at the Hollywood Bowl in L.A., jamming with friends eager to see him back in the spotlight. He sat in with Captain Beyond on July 23, when Caldwell’s band opened for Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out” tour. Like his appearance with Edgar, the audience went wild when he walked out on the stage.

Johnny also sat in with the Allman Brothers at the Hollywood Bowl on August 6. He joined them for an encore, playing “Johnny B. Goode” and jamming with the band on Robert Johnson’s “Dust My Broom.” He was back in the game and ready to take the world by storm. But first he had to take care of some personal business.

When Johnny signed himself in to River Oaks Hospital, Carol Roma moved home to Nacogdoches and stayed with her mother. Johnny had kept his basement apartment in New York, but she didn’t want to stay there alone, so far away from Johnny, her family, and her friends. After living with her mother for a while, she moved to Houston, got an apartment with a friend, and went back to working as a hairdresser.

His infidelity had always been a problem in their relationship, and the personality and lifestyle changes that accompany heroin addiction didn’t help. As Johnny grew more and more dependent on heroin, drugs became the focal point of his life. He became isolated from Roma, as well as family and friends. He had to deal with the psychological stress of trying to rationalize and defend his drug use, and he experienced bouts of anger and depression as the heroin high became milder and more short-lived.

Johnny admits his addiction had an adverse affect on their relationship, but didn’t foresee any problems by his drug use or his nine-month stay at the hospital.

“I couldn’t put anything into the relationship because I was so unhappy about myself,” he says. “When she found out I was doin’ hard drugs, she didn’t like it but there wasn’t anything she could do about it. She did it a little bit too, but not near as much. She never got strung out.”

With Johnny in the hospital, the possibility of a future together—at least to Roma—became nebulous. She turned to another man to meet her emotional needs.

“She didn’t know if I was gonna get out of the hospital or not,” says Johnny. “There wasn’t much of an understanding. We hadn’t really talked much about our relationship—I was too worried about myself. Everything was fine till I found out about the other guy. She had a thing goin’ with a guy in Nacogdoches, and she didn’t say anything when I was in hospital. I didn’t know till I got out and went back down to Houston.

“As soon as I got out, I went to Houston to see her and to get back into playin’. I went to her apartment—her roommate Nancy was there but she wasn’t home. I saw pictures of her and this other guy, and asked Nancy, ‘Who’s this?’ She said, ‘You don’t know about whatever his name was,’ and I said, ‘No, you better tell me.’ Carol came home when I was there and I tore up the place and broke up with her. She didn’t tell me she was seein’ anybody else; that’s what made me mad. I wanted her to stay true and I got real mad when I found out she was goin’ out with somebody else. I never told her to stay true—I just expected her to.”

Devastated by Johnny’s reaction, Carol tried to explain why she’d started seeing someone else, but it fell on deaf ears.

“I told her that was it,” says Johnny. “She cried a lot. She said she didn’t know if I was gonna stay alive or not—she was all by herself so she got involved with this other guy. That wasn’t a good enough excuse for me. She went along with me seeing other people, but she finally went out with somebody else and that’s what broke us up. I wasn’t gonna put up with it. But I still didn’t break up with her completely.”

Johnny makes no bones about his double standard. “That’s just the way it was,” he says without apology. His fame and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle attracted women who didn’t mind being one of many and the women he lived with tolerated his infidelity.

With or without Carol in his life, Johnny never had a shortage of women eager to get to know him better. He met his next significant other as soon as he flew back to New York. Susan Warford, Paul’s new driver, picked him up at the airport. Susan was living in Miami when she met Edgar’s fiancée Barbara in Coconut Grove.

“I was a hippie,” Susan said. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do; I was just lying around doing whatever came along. When Barbara, who became Edgar’s second wife, was down from New York, I met her in the park and we became friends. She said she was going to marry Edgar and she’d give me a call. About a year later, in 1969 or 1970, she called and said, “We’re married, and he’s going to do a show with Johnny in Miami.”

Susan was nineteen when she met Johnny and Edgar in Coconut Grove, where they were staying at a friend’s apartment. She thought he was “nice and sweet,” and didn’t become dazzled until she saw him at a large outdoor festival in Dania.

“I always tell people time stopped for a second—everything froze,” she said. “There was some kind of connection there. I always remember that moment where time froze and Johnny came onstage.”

Johnny doesn’t remember much about their meeting in the apartment but has a vague memory of meeting her. “I remember thinking that Susan was kinda cute but I didn’t really think a lot about it,” he says.

Determined to see more of Barbara and Edgar and to work in the music business, Susan traveled to New York in 1972. “I came up to visit Barbara at her house in the country, and we drove into the city and had dinner with Steve, Rick and Liz Derringer, and Barbara and Edgar,” she said. “Steve was looking for somebody to work for him, and they talked him into hiring me. I went back to Miami, got my stuff together, and two weeks later I was back working for Steve. I did everything—I was like a Girl Friday. I drove him everywhere, I made all his appointments, I picked up things for him—a little bit of everything.

“Steve was intimidating; he had a caustic mouth and I was always afraid he was going to turn on me. I lived in his house in Rye, New York. Living there was part of the job; otherwise I don’t know what I would’ve done. I didn’t have any money. I got stuck on the third floor in an attic room. I was working for Steve a couple of months before Johnny got out of the hospital and came up from Texas. When I picked him up at the airport in Steve’s blue Lincoln, Johnny was very talkative; he was excited about starting new projects. He was crazy, but so was I, so we got along real good.”

“I remembered Susan when she picked me up at the airport,” says Johnny. “I thought it was a good thing she was Steve’s driver—I’d probably put the make on her.”

Getting a band together and recording a new album were Johnny’s priorities, so he didn’t stay in New York long. Derringer had joined Edgar’s White Trash and Caldwell had Captain Beyond. Hobbs had just drifted, and met up with Johnny as soon as he got out. Despite Johnny’s decision to steer clear of drug users, he quickly enlisted Hobbs for his new lineup.

“I stuck with Randy ’cause he was still my good friend,” says Johnny. “He was takin’ drugs, though. I wondered if it would affect me, but it didn’t. But eventually he got so bad I had to let him go.”

Johnny’s contract with Columbia called for two albums a year, but his yearlong hiatus didn’t jeopardize the agreement. Although it would have been quicker to cut a new album with studio musicians, Johnny didn’t want the clean sound of seasoned professionals. He wanted a trio that would play with wild abandon, so he traveled to Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco to audition musicians. With Steve Paul giving him free rein over his choice of musicians, and cautioning him not to rush into anything, Johnny stayed at the Continental Hyatt House in L.A. for several months while he was auditioning players. He put up a notice at Musicians Equipment Rentals and held auditions at Studio Instrument Rentals.

“I always liked getting my own band,” says Johnny. ‘Studio musicians are too clean, and I wanted guys who can bash their instruments. I put advertisements in trade magazines and auditioned hundreds of people. It’s hard to find people just out of nowhere. Sometimes they aren’t any good; sometimes they’re too good and don’t fit in the way I want them to. I got a lot of crazy people and didn’t find anybody I liked. They played pretty good but not what I wanted. They were more rock ’n’ roll—I didn’t get anybody who could play good blues.”

Disappointed, but undaunted, Johnny returned to New York still searching for the perfect players to continue his musical journey.

PART II

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