A guitar player infused with an incredible level of skill and fretboard fire, as well as an impassioned and soulful lead vocalist, Johnny Winter exploded onto the vibrant music scene in the late 1960s, signing to the Columbia/ CBS record label for a reportedly unprecedented US$300,000. Winter was one of a wave of incredible guitar playing talents that emerged in that era, as Rock music moved entered one of its most creative and thrilling eras.
Winter was born in Texas, in February 1944 but was something of an unknown quantity anywhere else until Steve Paul, owner of New York’s The Scene club, brought him to New York in 1968 with the aim of securing him a record deal. It was on his very first night there that Winter joined his friend Michael Bloomfield onstage at the Fillmore East in Manhattan, on a version of the BB King chestnut, ‘It’s My Own Fault’. Bloomfield had befriended Winter six years before at the Fickle Pickle coffeehouse in Chicago, in one of Winter’s early forays up North.
Winter quickly found himself thrust into the hurly-burly of the vibrant NYC music scene. Things moved on at pace; by January 1969, Winter was in a recording studio in Nashville with his fellow band members ‘Uncle’ John Turner (drums) and Tommy Shannon (bass), as well as guests in the shape of Willie Dixon (bass), and Walter ‘Shakey’ Horton (harmonica), and Winter’s younger brother Edgar on keyboards and sax. The resulting, self-titled, self-produced album, was a bit of a cracker; featuring three original songs along with a trenchant set of Blues stylings, performed with the zeal and panache of an artist who obviously felt that his moment had arrived. It was well-received and quickly helped to establish his reputation internationally.
As time wore on, Winter consolidated his status through his follow-up album, Second Winter, which was a three-sided double album. By 1970, Winter and his manager Paul sought a different format for Winter’s music, and recruited The McCoys, of ‘Hang On Sloopy’ fame, to back him up. The new combo was named Johnny Winter And, featuring Rick Derringer on guitar, forming a formidable twin guitar axis with Winter, and providing a musical base that was more squarely framed in a contemporary hard rock idiom than the Turner/ Shannon line-up. A studio and live album followed, before Winter’s growing dependence on drugs resulted in an enforced period in rehabilitation to wean him off his addiction.
Winter re-entered the marketplace strongly with March, 1973’s Still Alive and Well album, and from the next album – 1974’s Saints & Sinners – until 1980’s Raising Cain album, his releases (five albums under his own name, and three as producer and band member of Muddy Waters late seventies combo) came through Steve Paul’s Blue Sky Records label, an imprint owned by Columbia/ CBS.
After a very successful collaboration as producer and contributor to the final three albums by Muddy Waters also released on Blue Sky, he would go on to record for the Alligator Records label, as well as the short-lived Point Blank Records, a specialist Blues offshoot of the Virgin Records label, and latterly Friday Music, several of his albums were Grammy-nominated. He toured the US and Europe regularly, and sadly, it was while he was on tour that Winter died in his hotel room in Zurich, Switzerland in July 2014. The veil was drawn on a career that had oscillated between some remarkable highs, as well as some dark troughs, whilst leaving behind a legacy of frequently dazzling music.
With thanks to Alan Robinson.