f Out Winter ee coal pe) Pisses deeded bed Sloe ec end petro int deusthichcieneaba neta pe i tr aJohnny Winter: The Last in Line Interview by Andy Aledort Reprinted from Guitar magazine, March 1989 Good blues tells a story and a good storyteller knows not to rush, but how to build and tease to capture an audience. Like the blues itself, the story of Johnny Winter's career has been a continual teasing of and by the fates, In 1969 he was the last in line of young white boys who sang the blues that included John Hammond, |r., Mike Bloomfield, and Steve Miller, When he put out his first album, on Clive Davis's Columbia Records, it was for the highest advance ever paid in that notoriously free-spending era. He was a fixture at his manager's nightclub, the Scene, a stark white-on-white presence in black leather, touring with Rick Derringer on the tumultuous rock ‘n’ roll circuit. But the downside was just as fierce, and almost immediate, culminating in a bout with drugs it took years to win, and a return to a blues-based rock format that didn’t ring true. Finally, Winter came back to the blues, with a series of albums for Alligator that reunited him with the long lost love of his life. If you can put it into words, what is it about the blues that makes it so vital? | don’t know, but I’ve never been at a point in my life where I was even close to getting tired of it. It does seem like | appreciate it more now than when | first discovered it. What I've never been able to figure out, and | guess | never will, is the reason some people can listen to a blues record and flip out and love it, and other people can listen to the same record and say, “What is that? Whoa, that’s terrible!” That used to happen with me and my brother, Edgar. He loved Ray Charles and the people who were musically perfect, but I'd play him somebody like Lightnin’ Hopkins or John Lee Hooker, somebody who doesn’t change on. time or the words didn’t always rhyme, and they were out of tune, and some of those records just made him crazy. I'd turn other musician friends of mine on to these records and they would just look at me and say, “What's wrong with you, man? You lost your mind or something?” | still don’t know why somebody can just go nuts and it makes them feel better than anything, and other people just don’t get it. If it doesn’t feel good to you, | don’t know if it’s something you ‘can acquire and make yourself like. For me, as soon as | heard it | knew it was exactly what | was looking for. When | heard my first blues record, | thought, “Where have | been all these years? I've got to have more of this!” Now | just want to be out there playing it for the people who want to hear it, ‘cause you can’t win over people that don’t like it. What was the first instrument you played? The first thing | played was a clarinet, when | was four or five, ‘cause my father listened to big band music and he played the sax and the banjo. I'd hear stuff like Artie Shaw and Benny Goodman. | played clarinet to try to play that kind of stuff. | had braces when | was in the first or second grade and they made me stop playing clarinet ‘cause it was making my overbite worse, That was traumatic. But then I started playing ukulele, because that's just what was lying