Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) (39 page)

The show was taped in Philadelphia in the morning and aired in the afternoon, so not all of Johnny’s responses made it to the national broadcast. When Douglas asked him, “Do you have anything to tell the youth of America about drugs? Like, don’t do them!’ Johnny didn’t take the bait. “He just looked at him seriously and thought about it for a second,” recalled Margolin. “Then Johnny says, ‘Well, I’ve always thought anything that doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’ That never got into the actual TV show.”

During the musical segment, the band played “The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock ‘n’ Roll,” “Love Me with a Feeling,” and closed the show with “Got My Mojo Workin’.” Unfortunately, Waters exuberant dancing on “Mojo” was overshadowed by the ending credits.

Less than three weeks later, Waters and Johnny returned to The Schoolhouse to record
I’m Ready.
More polished than
Hard Again,
Waters’s second LP on Blue Sky featured Jimmy Rogers, his guitar player from 1947 to 1955, and “Big Walter” Horton, a former harp player. Margolin suggested using Rogers and Horton and both Johnny and Waters loved the idea.

“Muddy played slide on ‘33 Years,’ ‘Mamie,’ and ‘Screamin’ and Cryin’,” says Johnny. “He played more ’cause I asked him to. I had more control of him and he was ready to play guitar—that’s why he called the record
I’m Ready
. I didn’t play on as many songs because we had Jimmy Rogers playing too. That was the first time I’d seen Jimmy Rogers; I played open tuning slide on ‘Who Do You Trust’ and he played the other guitar part. Me and Jimmy and Walter traded solos. He played a hollow-body Gibson and was playin’ a little more distorted than I was used to, but it worked out fine.”

“Muddy used my Music Man amp and Jimmy used Muddy’s amp,” said Margolin. “I set them up to have pretty heavy distorted guitar sounds. Muddy and Jimmy liked that—it was the way they sounded in the ‘50s when they played together. Johnny was up in the control room, and said, “Are you sure you want those amps that dirty?’ They said, ‘Yeah, we like that.’”

Before they began recording, Johnny asked Waters and Rogers if one of them wanted to play the top part and the other play the bottom. “They said, ‘We don’t care about that; we just play what we want to play,”’ says Johnny. “I guess they were so used to playin’ and not worrying about talkin’ about it, they thought I was crazy for even mentioning it. They made me feel like an idiot, to tell you the truth,” he adds with a laugh.

Both Johnny and Waters had misgivings about Horton, so they asked guitar player Johnny Nicholas to accompany him to the studio and make sure he didn’t drink.

“Muddy worried that Big Walter might screw up in the studio because he’s a screw-up,” says Johnny still laughing. “He was an excellent harp player but he drank too much.

“Big Walter gave me a lot of trouble playin’ through a glass at Columbia [the
Johnny Winter
LP], so I wasn’t sure if it would work or not. But Muddy is a good leader. Big Walter was easygoing when it came to Muddy ’cause Muddy was the boss. He was anxious to play with Muddy and do a good job. We brought in Jerry Portnoy just in case. Jerry was a good harp player—he was fairly young and Muddy had used him before for several years. We worked both of ’em in. We didn’t really need two harp players. We could have left Jerry out, but we figured we’d go ahead and use him.”

Margolin credits Horton’s respect for Waters for his good behavior. “I remember Muddy giving Walter some instructions and Walter’s eyes got real big, ‘Okay, Muddy. Anything you say, boss,”’ said Margolin. “Walter’s nickname was ‘the Old Goat’ because he could be cantankerous. He was a little lamb that day and played pretty well.”

Portnoy had a close relationship with Horton and was thrilled to work with him on that record. “I love Big Walter,” Portnoy said. “I used to go to his house and drink and exhort him to play for me. I just soaked it up. He had the greatest pure sound ever to come out of a harmonica. Walter certainly was a very eccentric fellow. A lot of those old-timers were, in one way or another. Sometimes you have to step around their idiosyncrasies to get what you want. I learned a lot just hanging around with him in Chicago, trying to imprint his sound on my head. I love his sound, and I dug him as a person too. He had a very crusty exterior, but he was a goodhearted guy inside.”

Both Portnoy and Horton played harp on “I’m Ready” and “Hoochie Coochie Man.” Portnoy played chromatic to Horton’s diatonic on “I’m Ready.” Both played diatonic—the standard blues harp—on “Hoochie Coochie Man.”

Margolin had filled in on bass for Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown at a European gig in 1976, so when he eliminated his spot as a guitar player by suggesting Rogers, Waters asked him to play bass. “Bob Margolin played bass on everything,” says Johnny. “He played bass real well. Charles was a better bass player but Bob played simpler.”

Johnny didn’t join Waters for the
I’m Ready
tour because it didn’t make sense financially. He had helped Waters pay Portnoy and Jones during the
Hard Again
tour, and now had his own band to think about. “It cost so much to go on the first tour and I couldn’t manage goin’ in the hole again,” he says. “It just about cost me more than I made ’cause we had different bands to contend with. I earned more money with my own band, so I just came around when he had something goin’ on and I had the time to do it.”

Johnny shared the stage with Waters at a “Foghat Blues Tribute” at the New York Palladium in 1978. The show, released on video in 1979, included Foghat, John Lee Hooker, Paul Butterfield, Otis Blackwell, Dave “Honeyboy” Edwards, and Eddie Kirkland. Margolin remembers the grand finale. “All the bands were jamming onstage,” he said. “Johnny turned around to me and said, ‘I can’t see too well. How many people are onstage right now?’ I looked around, counted, and said seventeen. He said, ‘Man, this is gonna set the blues back thirty years!’”

Johnny also joined Waters’s band for occasional gigs in Europe, including a blues festival in France the following year. Johnny traveled with one of his girlfriends, who made quite an impression on Portnoy. “She had some kind of bustier, something low cut,” Portnoy said. “Across the rise of her left breast was Johnny’s signature tattooed into it. When he came out to join us onstage, the first song he did was “I Got My Brand on You.” I got a tremendous kick out of that; I thought it was pretty hilarious.”

Johnny frequented clubs in Manhattan, and on an evening that would prove to be serendipitous, he stopped by the Bottom Line in February 1977 to catch Son Seals, who was opening for Mose Allison. He met Bruce Iglauer, the president and founder of Alligator Records, when he went backstage. “Johnny just showed up,” said Iglauer. “He was very approachable, very friendly, not pretentious. He was like, ‘Hey, I’m a blues fan, you’re a blues fan; here we are.’ There wasn’t any sense of ‘I’m a cool guy’ at all.”

They met again the following year when Johnny sat in with Seals at the Bottom Line in January. “He came in with the
I’m Ready
record and asked me what I thought of the cover,” said Iglauer. “I actually didn’t like it so I was beating around the bush, trying to tell him I wasn’t crazy about it. He said, ‘I hate it.’ We liked each other right away and stayed in touch.”

A week later, Johnny traveled to Chicago and stayed at Iglauer’s house. “I had a lot of Alligator Records,” says Johnny. “They had the best people around—they were a real good label. I thought it would be nice to get to know Bruce better and be friends with him. Bruce had a lot of good records, so when he went to sleep, I stayed up and played his records. He had one Junior Wells record I never had heard before.”

Iglauer was delighted to have Johnny as a guest. “He just hung out with me and stayed in my spare bedroom,” said Iglauer. “He was a wonderful houseguest, which sort of surprised me. He always made the bed. We went out to clubs every night—the Wise Fools, the Kingston Mines—and I asked Dick Shurman to take him out one night when I couldn’t go. They got along right away too. After we got back from gigs, Johnny would want to sit up and listen to my record collection. As soon as he detected I was tired, he’d get on headphones so he wouldn’t disturb me. He smoked pot and knew I was a little phobic about that. So he would very carefully clean up after himself and take his pot back to his room when he went to bed.”

Iglauer invited Johnny back to play on a live Son Seals record being recorded at the Wise Fools Pub. He stayed at Iglauer’s house; and once again, they had a great time talking about and listening to music. “Johnny had this huge vocabulary of blues knowledge and we talked music all the time,” said Iglauer. “He was excited, fun, and funny, always very wired, twitching with the enjoyment of being in Chicago.”

Although Johnny played several songs with Seals, none appear on
Live and Burning,
the album recorded at that gig. “It wasn’t very good because they were too nice to each other,” explained Iglauer. “I was trying to get them to go head-to-head, to have a little guitar battle, and everybody was holding back. It was, ‘After you,’ ‘No, after you,’ and they both played very conservatively.”

During his time in Chicago, Johnny began a friendship with Shurman, who would produce several of his subsequent albums. “We got along ’cause he knew a lot about blues and he liked to talk about blues and I did too,” says Johnny. “He was a good guy to hang out with. I remember him asking me a question to see if I knew what I was talkin’ about. He asked me who’s the girl in the song that—oh hell, a particular blues player that I can’t remember the name of right now—but he asked me what the girl’s name was on the record. I said, ‘Lily,’ and I was right. I don’t know what he would have done if I had said the wrong name,” he added with a laugh. “But I knew it was pretty off-the-wall and he was doing it to test me.”

Despite a raging snowstorm that almost shut down the city, Shurman took Johnny to Biddy Mulligan’s to hear Lonnie Brooks, who Johnny had seen in Texas in the early ’60s. “Me and Dick had to push a car out of a snowdrift to get a parking space,” says Johnny, chuckling at the memory. “I jammed with Lonnie that night. There weren’t many people there but I liked it pretty well.”

During Johnny’s jaunts to Manhattan nightclubs, he also forged a friendship with John Belushi, who asked his advice about his Blues Brothers project with Dan Aykroyd. “I had seen John Belushi at several different clubs and got to be friends with him,” says Johnny. “He called one night and wanted to know what I thought about him doin’ the Blues Brothers thing. I told him nobody would take him seriously; they would just think it was funny. He didn’t say anything back—I don’t know if that’s what he was lookin’ for or not.”

Luckily, Belushi didn’t take his advice. In April 1978, he and Aykroyd made their Blues Brothers debut on
Saturday Night
Live, with Belushi as lead vocalist “Joliet” Jake Blues and Aykroyd as harpist/vocalist Elwood Blues, fronting a band of well-respected musicians. Their live album,
Briefcase of Blues,
released later that year, reached number one on the
Billboard
charts and went double platinum. The 1980
The Blues Brothers
movie is still considered a classic.

In late spring/early summer 1978, Johnny returned to The Schoolhouse studio to make
White, Hot & Blue.
Johnny produced that album, which includes three of his originals—“One Step at a Time,” “Slidin’ In,” and “Nickel Blues”—as well as “just good ole blues songs I liked,” he says.

Unlike
Nothin’ But the Blues,
Johnny used his own band so it would be viewed as his own album. “I used Pat Rush, Bobby T., and Ikey,” Johnny says. “Edgar played keyboards. I also used Pat Ramsey, a real good harp player.”

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