Part of that star treatment was fussing over Johnny’s meals, a ritual that is still played out when Johnny is on the road. “Teddy used to make the crew nuts, because he would have them being valets and butlers to Johnny, which really isn’t crew work,” said Epstein. “Teddy always made such a huge production out of Johnny’s dinner, and he’d have the crew guys going mental about getting everything.”
Johnny finally started thinking of Slatus as a friend, rather than just a manager, when he helped him during his breakdowns in the early 1990s. He was especially pleased when Slatus identified himself as Johnny’s friend when he took him to the doctor. Years later, when Johnny questioned the amount of money he was earning, Slatus used that act of friendship to his advantage.
“I trusted him at first, but sometimes, I haven’t been sure,” says Johnny. “I remember telling him I didn’t trust him once and he said, ‘Well, I took care of you when you weren’t sure what you wanted to do with Susan and the other girlfriend in Texas. I always helped you, so I don’t see how you could think I would do anything against you.’ I agreed he was right. But then I wasn’t sure because I wasn’t making as much money as I thought I should.”
Although Johnny met with Slatus once a week about business matters, and received profit and loss statements from his accountant, his failing vision and overmedication ensured that he accepted what he was told at face value. In 2003, when asked if he thought Slatus was ripping him off, Johnny hesitated before answering the question. “I wondered—I wasn’t sure, sometimes,” he said. “He gets a percentage of everything. Now, I feel like he’s doing the best he can. If I’m behind on my statements, and don’t have enough money to pay for everything, he lends me money from his account, and gets it back whenever I’m making some money. He’s real good about that. During the period I wasn’t working [because of my breakdown] he was paying for that with his own money.
“Teddy does what I want him to do and that’s important. When I broke my hip, he made sure I had somebody to come over to help me. When I got radial nerve palsy, he took me to the doctors and stayed in my corner. He’s been there for me. When I went crazy, he went to the hospital with me and paid for everything till I could afford to pay for it. He’s always stuck by me when I went nuts. The last time I went crazy [1994], he paid for the original costs to get me in the hospital.”
Because of his problems with managers in the past, Johnny practiced the “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t” philosophy with Slatus. “There’s so many bad ones out there, I’d hate to think about trying to get a new one,” he said. Johnny acknowledged Slatus kept him in the dark about a lot of dealings, and kept him away from reporters, filmmakers, and even his band mates.
“That’s a drag,” he said. “Sometimes I talk to him about it but he says he’s just trying to do the best for me. He tries to keep people away from me that he doesn’t think should be around me. Sometimes I don’t agree with that, but in most cases, I think he’s right. I know Teddy overdoes that sometimes—keeping people away. That’s just Teddy.”
“Getting together with Johnny was like having an audience with the Pope,” said Ganz. “It was, ‘You have to wait here, you have to do this, you can’t go here.’ Then Johnny says to me, ‘That’s ridiculous, come on.”’
Keeping Johnny isolated went beyond star treatment; it was Slatus’s way of ensuring control and limiting information flow. By 2001, the band and crew weren’t allowed to see Johnny, unless it was a band rehearsal or a gig. Slatus totally controlled access to Johnny, and fired anyone who tried to work around him.
Compton, who left the band in 1998, was another casualty of Slatus. He was replaced by Vito Liuzzi, a Connecticut drummer who had begun filling in for Compton at rehearsals the previous year. “Tom and Teddy had a falling out of some kind,” says Johnny. “Teddy wanted to get rid of Tom and Tom got tired of fighting it. It was too bad.”
Although Johnny could have fought Slatus’s decisions, he never did. “Johnny’s relationship with Teddy was a marriage; it was way beyond business,” said Epstein. “‘They go back so far, they’ve been doing this dance for so long. It wasn’t just Teddy running Johnny around; Johnny had to give him permission to do it because he could ultimately say no at any moment. I think Teddy cared about Johnny on some level, but not in a selfless way. Take Johnny away from Teddy and he crumbled. He wanted to be Johnny. When he walked him on the stage ... a lot of people in the music business who aren’t musicians are feeding off that same energy. They’d sure love to be [the artist]; that’s why they’re drawn to the whole scene.”
Val Minett, who worked for Slatus from 1998 to 2002, agreed. “In Teddy’s mind, Teddy was the star,” she said. “Anybody he worked with, he only did things for them so he would look good. When we would go to Johnny’s house for meetings, he would say, ‘Look what I did for you!”’
Although Johnny never said anything in public or on the record about Slatus’s misdealings, Epstein said he was well aware of what Slatus was doing.
“Johnny knew what was going on the whole time—he wasn’t in the dark,” said Epstein. “In terms of when he was being taken advantage of, and any of the things Teddy was doing that Johnny didn’t want to happen. Johnny knew. He might not have been feeling up to making a change, but he knew. We caught Teddy in some lies and Johnny told me—and this is a quote—‘Teddy has a problem with the truth.’ Johnny is cagey. He’s not gonna let on what he knows, or even a tenth of what he knows. He doesn’t say much, but he doesn’t miss anything.”
By the late 1990s, Slatus’s alcoholism spiraled out of control. Johnny no longer saw him socially because he hated to see him drunk and listen to his apology the following day. “He says he’s sorry and that he wishes he didn’t start doing those things,” says Johnny. “Then he says, ‘Well, you drink too.’ I said, ‘Yeah, Teddy, but I don’t try to kill people and fire everybody when I drink. I don’t overdo it like you do.’ He can’t stop. He’s fired a lot of different people.”
“Teddy told me I was fired once or twice,” said Epstein. “I just laughed. The bottom line was Johnny hired me, not Teddy. Johnny was the only one that can fire me or hire me. As far as the rest of the crew, Teddy was a very abusive guy. If he didn’t get his way, he would go ballistic. He thought nothing of making you feel as bad as he could, sometimes he enjoyed it. Everyone had their run-ins with Teddy. My attitude was: I’m not going to glorify it or take it seriously. Managers just work for the artist like the band does. They can make your life miserable, but don’t have the power they think they wield.”
Like many people who didn’t see Slatus on a daily basis, Epstein initially wasn’t aware of his drinking problem. “When I met Teddy, he seemed totally sober,” Epstein said. “I didn’t notice him drinking till ’98 or ’99 on one of our European trips. When I showed up in Copenhagen, I bumped into Teddy in the hotel and he was very drunk. I had never seen him that drunk before. The next day, he wouldn’t come out of the room. We used a local road manager and did the tour without him.
“Johnny basically hoped Teddy wouldn’t fall off the wagon but didn’t seem preoccupied about Teddy’s drinking. Johnny was pretty self-absorbed most of the time. He was more concerned with what’s for dinner and that he got to do whatever he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.”
A creature of habit, Johnny doesn’t like to alter his routine. He has a set schedule and nothing short of an act of God is about to make him change it, whether it’s eating a particular food at a specific time, sleeping during the day and staying up all night, or not giving interviews earlier than 9 PM.
“There’s something with food with Johnny that happens with everybody,” said Epstein with a laugh. “I’ve been good friends with Jon Paris for a long time, and we always joke about that. You call Johnny up after six months, you have this great conversation, and halfway through some sentence, he says, ‘I gotta eat dinner, got to go, bye.’ Click. It’s always food ... or his pills. He had a schedule and it had to be adhered to.”
Johnny loved eating and traveling on a tour bus. “It’s expensive, but you have everything there, and can sleep on the way to the next gig,” he says.
“We always traveled at night because it’s easier,” said Epstein. “We’d eat dinner, hang out, have a couple of beers, and one by one, people would crash. Johnny would be up all night long. We had satellite TV with music stations, but Johnny would just want the blues station on all the time. It drove us nuts because you hear the same stuff over and over again. We didn’t watch movies; we didn’t watch TV; it was just the blues station. He’d be up all night long, so there was no relief,” Epstein added with a laugh.
In 1998, Slatus moved into a bed-and-breakfast in Colchester, Connecticut and met Betty Ann Johnston, who owned and operated the property. Slatus claimed he moved to Connecticut because Derringer needed financial help; Johnny says Slatus could no longer afford his New York apartment. It was the beginning of his personal and professional relationship with Johnston, who worked her way into his management company. Johnston’s blatant dislike and contempt for Johnny (who she blamed for Slatus’s drinking), teamed with her manipulative behavior, didn’t bode well. She would eventually help Slatus increase his share of Johnny’s earnings, and make it easier for him to manipulate and control Johnny and his wife.
Like the star he wanted to be, Slatus is highly visible in the footage of Johnny’s May 1998 induction into the Rock Walk on Hollywood’s Sunset Strip. Johnny laughs about the day his hand-prints and signature were immortalized in cement.
“I remember having gooey hands,” says Johnny. “They took a lot of pictures, and I donated a guitar.” Johnny usually donated cheaper models when asked for memorabilia, and was surprised to learn he had donated a Firebird to the Rock Walk Museum. “That was stupid,” he says laughing. “I must have wanted that award awful bad.”
Later that year, Slatus hired Val Minett, who managed singer/ songwriter Loretta Hagen, to create and maintain Johnny’s website. Slatus wanted to manage Hagen and claimed he could get her a record deal. It was the beginning of a four-year business relationship that Minett described as “a weird time that felt like twenty years,” and ended with a lawsuit.
Rumors about Johnny’s health continued to fly. Even diehard fans thrilled that he was touring, were appalled by his frail appearance and seeing him being led onto the stage, too weak to pick up his guitar. Johnny had lost the edge in his voice and the dexterity in his fingers. Many fans, as well as music critics, questioned why Slatus was keeping him on the road in that condition. To Minett, the answer was obvious.
“Teddy needed the money,” she said. “Teddy treated it like a circus. He had his sideshow and that’s the way he treated Johnny. Whenever his money started to get down, he would call Bruce [Houghton of Skyline Music] and say we need some gigs.”
Earlier that year, Solow Management Corp., the landlord of Johnny’s penthouse, sent him a notice of nonrenewal of the lease. Although Johnny had lived in the rent-stabilized apartment since September 1974 and never missed a rent payment, he had listed his corporation Ole Pa Enterprises as the tenant for thirteen subsequent leases. The realty company sued Johnny’s corporation, claiming “neither Ole Pa nor Johnny Winter was entitled to renewal.” The suit argued that Johnny was a subtenant of Ole Pa, and a corporation cannot use its premises as a primary residence.
Johnny and Susan stayed in the apartment for ten months without a lease (December 1998—September 1999) while the case was pending and Susan looked for a house in Connecticut.
“We were pretty much forced out of the apartment in New York because they kept suing us and evicting us,” said Susan. “We were spending so much money on lawyers. I said, ‘Let’s just get a house and get out of this.”’
Johnston, who began making inroads as a friend and confidant, accompanied Susan when she found and fell in love with an eleven-room house in Fairfield County. Living in a two-story house soon proved to have a downside. In October 2000, Johnny got up in the middle of the night, and half asleep, thought he was in his New York apartment. Thinking he was walking down his old hallway, he stepped out into space and fell down a flight of stairs.
“I screamed,” says Johnny, laughing at the memory. “I landed all over—on my ass, my back; and I screamed at Susan to help me get up. I tried to make it up the stairs but I knew something was wrong. I waited about three days before I went to the hospital. I thought it might get better but it got worse. I knew I had to go to the hospital and face the fact I had broken my hip.”
Johnston knew a doctor at St. Francis Hospital in Hartford, so Slatus had Johnny taken there instead of to an emergency room. X-rays confirmed a broken hip. Surgeons inserted a plate and four screws to hold the hip together. Johnny stayed in the hospital for four days, and then recuperated at home, forcing the cancellation of an extensive November tour of the Midwest, Northwest, and western Canada.
His bad luck was just beginning. Two months later, his father died in Beaumont at the age of ninety-one, and Johnny was in no shape to fly to Texas for the funeral. “He had broken his hip too, strangely enough,” says Johnny. “He fell down in the street—the wind knocked him over. He was real weak and he just got weaker and weaker. I saw him just a few months before he died. He was walking with a walker. I’m glad I went to see him before he died. He was a good person who lived a good life. Even up until his death, he went to choir practice once a week and taught Sunday school.”