8
BACK WITH A VENGEANCE
W
hile Johnny was in California, Derringer traveled to the Jersey shore to see Cobalt, a Johnny Winter cover band managed by his banker. “Our manager kept bugging Rick about jamming with us,” said Doug Brockie, Cobalt’s lead guitarist. “Rick finally gave in and came out and jammed.”
When Derringer brought Johnny to see Cobalt at a dance in New Jersey, he was blown away. “It was amazing,” Johnny said in an interview for
Play:Back,
published by Columbia Records. “Out of the fifty songs they knew, forty-five of them were mine. I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.... I grew up copying Ray Charles, and these guys were growing up doing me.”
The minute Johnny heard Cobalt’s drummer, his search was over. “Richard Hughes was a basher, a crasher, and could play anything I needed,” he says. “He played real well, he played all my songs, and he was a good guy.”
Formed by Brockie when he was sixteen, Cobalt was based in Point Pleasant, Mantoloking Bay Head on the Jersey shore. “I found Richard at a gig at my church, playing with Jim Bentley from the 1910 Fruitgum Company,,” said Brockie. “He didn’t know any Johnny Winter material when I met him. I taught Richard all of the Johnny Winter material because I was a Johnny Winter freak. At fifteen and sixteen, Johnny was like my Robert Johnson.”
As soon as he auditioned and hired Hughes, Johnny went into the Hit Factory in New York City to cut
Still Alive and Woll.
After nine months in the hospital and even more time away from his music, Johnny was elated to be back in the studio cutting an album. “It felt great because it’s something you love that you’d given up for a while,” he says. “We cut seven songs in a row on the first take on the first night.”
Released in 1973 on Columbia Records,
Still Alive and Well
was the perfect anthem for Johnny’s triumphant comeback. Derringer wrote it as a member of Edgar Winter’s White Trash, which released it on
Roadwork
the previous year.
“Everybody thought he wrote it for me, but that wasn’t true,” says Johnny. “Rick wrote it for himself—he was bragging he was still alive and well. I recorded it ’cause I thought it was a good song and I was ‘still alive and well.’ I wrote ‘Rock & Roll’ and ‘Too Much Seconal’ for that album.”
Johnny wanted the sound of a power trio so most songs featured Hobbs and Hughes, with Johnny on vocals, guitar, slide guitar, and mandolin. But he also used several guest artists, including Derringer on slide guitar on “Silver Train,” electric guitar on “Cheap Tequila,” and pedal steel and click guitar on “Ain’t Nothing to Me.” Todd Rundgren played a Mellotron on “Cheap Tequila,” Mark Klingman played piano on “Silver Train,” and Jeremy Steig played flute on “Too Much Seconal.” “I had heard his album,
Jeremy & the Satyrs
[a 1968 Reprise release],” says Johnny. “I liked Jeremy and liked the way he played. He was a famous jazz flute player who played real bluesy.”
“Mick Jagger and Keith Richards gave me ‘Silver Train,’” Johnny says. “They hadn’t recorded it yet. I did ‘Let It Bleed’ on that album too—they’d already recorded that. I always liked the Stones’ sound; they did a good job of writin’ blues songs that were hits too.”
Johnny was loose during those two-week-long sessions, tossing off asides that would amuse fans but make the FCC wince. At the end of “Let It Bleed,” Johnny says, “God damn it. Did that get it or what?” and prefaces the intro to “Still Alive and Well” with “I’m hungry—let’s do this fucker.”
Still Alive and Well
was rereleased on CD in 1994, and included the previously unreleased tracks “Lucille” and “From a Buick 6.” Neither song had lead guitar tracks, so Johnny wasn’t pleased when he discovered their inclusion. “They weren’t ready to be added,” he says. “They should have talked to me, but of course they didn’t. Both of those songs were just rhythm tracks. They never told me they were gonna put them on the CD because I would have said something. I didn’t want them on ’cause they weren’t complete.”
The inside sleeve of the album contains a black-and-white photo of Johnny with the words THANKS, SUSAN in the lower right-hand corner. That simple message reflected how quickly their relationship had evolved. “Living in the same house with Susan in Rye helped me to get to know her,” says Johnny. “It made it a lot easier because she was always there. It was really pretty country and we did a lot of talking outside. I stayed up all night and she stayed up all night with me, so something was bound to happen.”
When Johnny began seeing Susan, he was still involved with Carol Roma in Texas and had a few more women on the side. He still had feelings for Carol, who wanted to get back together. “It was still a big deal to break up with Carol, so I had her come up to New York to see how I felt about her, to see if we could get back together,” he says. “When she came, Susan took off. I loved Carol in a way too. I didn’t treat Carol very good but she really did love me. I just couldn’t get close to her after she’d been out with somebody else. I didn’t think I could ever live with her after that. Even though I was going out with other people, I wasn’t going to put up with her going out on me. So I sent her back home and stayed with Susan. I still saw other people but Susan didn’t.”
Carol returned to Houston, and within a year or so, began dating Edgar, who was also living in that city. “Carol first met Edgar in Houston years ago when he was playing with me, and Edgar had been in love with her for the whole time,” says Johnny. “He always liked her, but he said he didn’t do anything about it because she was with me. When he first started seeing her, he told me he had been in love with her and hoped I didn’t mind. I said, ‘No, we broke up. You can do anything you want to.’ They were goin’ out awhile, but not too long, before they got married. I didn’t go to his wedding. I’m not sure how long they were married. They broke up ’cause she was goin’ out with other people and he found out about it. I never did think she loved Edgar—I thought she did it just to get back at me. She never did treat him right.”
“Carol wasn’t as loyal and dedicated to Johnny as other girls who were fixated on him,” said Turner. “Her marriage to Edgar lasted a few years. It was fascinating to Johnny that his little brother had married his old lady. Like the rest of us, he thought it was really weird. He said she couldn’t have him, so she took Edgar. It was the next closest thing.”
After the final split with Carol, Johnny invited Susan to live with him in the basement apartment they had shared on Eighty-Fifth Street. She was still working for Steve Paul, but quit shortly after she moved into the City.
“We were living together real quick,” says Johnny. “First at Steve’s house, then in my apartment in New York. The more I lived with Susan and was around her, the more I got to where I really felt strong feelings for her. She was real sweet, not aggressive at all, and she didn’t seem like she wanted anything from me. She seemed like she was being completely honest, and really true to me. A real, real person.”
Within two or three months Johnny knew he was in love, but he waited to express his feelings. “I knew Susan probably six months when I told her I loved her,” he says. “We were walkin’ down the street, going to one of our favorite Italian restaurants and I told her I loved her. She said, ‘I love you too.’ It was pretty unbelievable that it happened that quick.”
Although Johnny was busy with rehearsals and recording sessions, they savored their time together to enjoy their budding romance. “We went to plays, restaurants, movies, clubs,” he remembers. “It’s nice when you’re first getting to know somebody. We’d go see plays on Broadway—going to the theater was Steve’s idea. We saw
Grease;
we saw
Equus
with Richard Burton. I loved that; it was great. Steve always traveled in an entourage—he always wanted to have a lot of people around. Steve went with whatever friend he was courting at the time. Buster Poindexter would go sometimes. We’d go to Max’s Kansas City, where Steve had his own table. He liked being a big shot and wanted everything his own way. He’d send back food if it wasn’t to his specifications. I didn’t like him—it was uncomfortable when he was like that.”
Once Johnny and Susan became an item, they traveled south to meet his and her parents. “We went down to Cutler Ridge in Florida to meet Susan’s folks and they treated me real nice,” says Johnny. “Her father had been in the FBI—I thought it was pretty strange. He seemed like a cop a little bit; he had that feel about him. But he didn’t have a problem with me. I smoked grass over there too. I waited until they went to sleep and me and Susan would go out on the front porch and smoke grass. My parents were cool when they met her; she made me happy and they were not going to tell me what to do. But my other girlfriends didn’t like it very much.”
To the chagrin of those girlfriends, Johnny invited Susan to join the band for the initial leg of the Still Alive and Well tour. “That was kinda silly,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t know why I wanted to do it, it was worse than Paul McCartney and Linda McCartney. It’s ridiculous how people can get that way. I thought it would be fun. She played tambourine and she played a beer can one night. The first night Susan played tambourine with the band, she was scared to death. She was supposed to just stand there and beat the tambourine. She finally realized she was gonna have to drink to do it. Susan played a few gigs with us. She played
Midnight Special
too. She wasn’t in the band very long. Two or three months, maybe.”
Following the release of
Still Alive and Well,
Paul booked a coliseum tour of dates from March to June, with Foghat opening in April and May. That tour culminated at the June 16 show at Madison Square Garden. To create a look for that tour, Paul hired Bill Witten, a theatrical costume designer, whose musical clients included Earth, Wind & Fire, the Commodores, and the Jackson Five. During their initial meeting, Johnny demonstrated his own sense of style.
“I’ll never forget the first time we went to meet Bill Witten,” said Susan. “We were meeting him and Steve at the 21 Club or Sardi’s. Johnny decided to wear a wraparound skirt I had made out of Indian material a couple of years before. I let Johnny walk ahead of me. I was so embarrassed; I had to walk about four feet behind him.”
“I took the train from Connecticut to New York wearing that skirt and people laughed and said, ‘What are you advertising? What are you sellin’?’” Johnny recalls. “I had my fingernails painted different colors, and I was wearing cowboy boots, a cowboy hat, a cowboy shirt, and a cloth skirt with a lot of different colors that hung down halfway between my knees and ankles. We took a cab from Grand Central to the restaurant. The driver didn’t say anything—as long as he got paid, he could care less. Bill Witten thought I was funny. He liked my outfit, but Steve just went crazy. He scrunched down in the seat as much as possible like he didn’t want to know me. I just wanted to freak everybody out, and it worked.”
Witten designed costumes for Johnny’s touring band, which included Susan, Hobbs, Hughes, and Jimmy Gillan, his old drummer from the Act III, as a second drummer. “Jimmy was a friend and he needed a gig real bad at the time,” says Johnny. “So I used two drummers for that whole tour. He was a pretty good beater, but much too jazzy.”
Johnny wore a black velvet cape with a red satin lining over a white spandex jumpsuit with silver-studded bellbottoms, suspenders, and a studded collar. His costume included an amethyst medallion that he wore on his bare chest and studded armbands adorned with silver streamers that draped down toward the floor. All band members wore a different colored spandex costume—Susan’s was pale blue and cut low in the front, Gillan’s was red and orange, Hobbs wore blue, and Hughes’s costume was green.
“My jumpsuit was real stretchy, so it was pretty comfortable,” says Johnny. “We wore those outfits for about six or eight months. After I stopped wearing it, I gave it to the Museum of the Gulf Coast in Port Arthur.”
During that tour, Johnny was the consummate showman, playing on his knees, with his guitar held over his head, and behind his back. “Never learned how to play with my teeth though,” he says, and cites Mick Jagger as his main influence for showmanship. Although his stage antics were a guaranteed crowd pleaser, he admits to having mixed feelings about combining theatrics with his music.
“Showmanship was a big part of it, but I didn’t want it to be a main thing,” he says. “Because I couldn’t play guitar as well when I was doin’ all that fancy stuff. It’s fun to do it once, but if you have to keep doing it over again, it quits bein’ fun. People expect it of you,”
In 1973, late night TV shows featuring live rock ‘n’ roll performances debuted on two networks. Paul used his contacts in the industry—Don Kirshner and people involved with
The Midnight Special
—to hook Johnny up with what would be the precursors of MTV.
On July 6, 1973, Johnny appeared on
The Midnight Special,
a weekly late night rock ‘n’ roll show that debuted that February. Catering to hip, young audiences, the show aired on NBC at 1 AM on Saturday mornings. Guest host Jose Feliciano performed a few songs, and introduced artists Savoy Brown, the Staple Singers, Stories, and Tower of Power. Johnny headlined that show performing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” “Johnny B. Goode,” and “Rock & Roll.”
Despite his mesmerizing performance, Johnny had been reluctant to perform that night because of technical problems at rehearsals earlier that day. “The rehearsal before the show was so terrible, I felt like walking out,” he says. “It’s hard to play on a soundstage with cameras and they just didn’t know what to do with us. They tried to get us to play quieter and we couldn’t play quieter.
Midnight Special
was a rock ‘n’ roll show—you thought they’d know what they were doing. But they didn’t know how to record people—how to get the sound right when you’re playing loud.”