In 2011 Classic Rock asked Johnny Winter's official biographer Mary Lou Sullivan to tell his story. It's a dangerous tale involving deranged bandmates, scumbag managers, and more close encounters with destruction than almost anyone else in rock'n'roll. Less than three years later he was gone.
We’ve all heard about the curse of Led Zeppelin, the deal Robert Johnson made with the Devil and the litany of rock stars dead at 27. But, as stories go, it’s quite possible that Johnny Winter is the unluckiest rock star of them all. As the veteran bluesman admits, “I’ve led a very interesting life. You can’t make this stuff up.”
You certainly can’t. Being born albino in the 1940s didn’t give him the best start. Johnny, when doing research as a child, discovered that different cultures either venerate albinos as gods or reject them as defective. And it’s this dichotomy that’s followed him throughout his life. Growing up in redneck Texas, he was treated so cruelly that he told people he was from Venus.
When Johnny Winter signed a $600,000 record deal with Columbia in February 1969 and received what was then the largest advance in music history, the fiery guitarist was about to embark on an amazing career. But the hoopla generated by the bidding war between RCA Victor, Columbia, Elektra and Atlantic attracted the parasites so prevalent in rock’n’roll. Within months, Johnny’s former managers and producers started crawling out of the woodwork to cash in on his newfound fame.
Bill Josey, who owned Sonobeat Records, had recorded a live show at the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin so Johnny would have a demo to shop for a major label. However Josey released that performance as Progressive Blues Experiment on his own label. But before the ink had dried on Johnny’s Columbia contract, Josey sold the LP to United Artists. This album is still one of Johnny’s best-selling and most highly acclaimed releases, but the artist never saw a penny. “Bill Josey had the tapes and he got the money,” Johnny says. “Even now when they sell that CD, I don’t get any money.”
Then there was Roy Ames, a Houston record producer who convinced Johnny to sign a management agreement so he could produce Johnny’s records. When Ames heard about Johnny’s success, he sold his three-year-old recording contract with Johnny to Atlantic Records, and included enough old masters and tapes for two ‘vintage’ Johnny Winter LPs. Ames also sold 20 of Johnny’s songs to GRT Corporation, which released them on About Blues in November 1969.
But Ames’ penchant for evil went well beyond ripping Johnny off with bootleg releases; he was a child pornographer who served 11 years in federal prison. His arrest record paints a dark and disturbing picture. In 1974, Ames was indicted on one count of conspiracy and ten counts of mailing obscene material, and charged with two counts of sexual abuse of a child. In 1975, he was arrested on six charges of compelling the prostitution of a minor.
When police raided his home five weeks later, they seized two tons of obscene material. From the time of his parole in 1986 until his death in 2003, Ames continued to sell unlicensed tracks to a range labels, filling the market with dozens of bootleg recordings of Johnny’s music dating back to 1966. Ames’ bootlegs contained the same songs in varying order on a dozen labels, repackaged with different titles and different covers.
When he died, the headline in the Houston Press read: “Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish. Roy Ames, child pornographer and record producer, dies at 66.” Johnny loved the headline and sat enthralled when his biographer read him Ames’ obituary.
"He definitely went to hell,” says Johnny. “I’m glad he’s gone. I couldn’t do nothing about Roy. He was just an asshole – a professional asshole.” But it’s not just unscrupulous managers and music industry types who litter Johnny’s career, although there were plenty of more of those who got their claws into Winter.
Crazies and mental institutions play another role in Johnny’s rock’n’roll legacy. He wanted to use his close friend Ikey Sweat on bass when he put together his original band, which played at legendary rock festivals and venues including Woodstock, the Isle of Wight Festival, the Atlanta Pop Festival, the Bath Rock Festival, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Fillmore East and West. But he played only two gigs with Sweat before replacing him with Tommy Shannon.
“Tommy got the job ’cause Ikey freaked out and went in a mental institution because he couldn’t get an erection,” said Uncle John Turner, Johnny’s close friend and drummer in that band. “He was just 24-years-old and it freaked him out. He quit, and I talked Johnny into sending for Tommy.”
Mental institutions were commonplace in the 1960s and 1970s; an easy dumping ground for anyone with emotional problems. When Johnny married Mary Jo Beck in 1966, it was an impetuous move for a man never a fan of monogamy. When arguments about his infidelity escalated into screaming matches with Beck “tearin’ up my stuff,” Johnny didn’t hesitate. “I had my folks take her to Galveston and put her in a mental hospital,” he says. “She was gonna kill herself; she was that crazy.”
Even Johnny spent time institutionalized. When Johnny checked himself into River Oaks Hospital in New Orleans for heroin addiction, a Rolling Stone article described him as “Johnny Winter, frail Texas albino bluesman/turned/rock superstar/turned/ mental hospital inmate.”
Although River Oaks was considered to be completely drug-free, the truth was somewhat different. The hospital had a happy hour where patients could have one drink, whether it was a beer or a shot of Jack Daniels. Yet when Johnny was caught smoking a joint in the hospital, the staff used arm and leg restraints to strap him into his bed for 12 hours a day for a month. “The reasoning was that you might feel so guilty, you’d try to kill yourself,” Johnny explains. “I didn’t feel guilty at all – I felt like smokin’ grass was fine.”
Johnny may have been fine, but he couldn’t say that about members of The McCoys when they moved to the Staatsburg estate where he was living with his band. The estate included two houses and two renovated barns for rehearsals. When his manager Steve Paul rented the second house, he invited The McCoys – Rick Derringer on guitar, Randy Jo Hobbs on bass, Bobby Peterson on organ and Randy Zehringer on drums – to move in with him.
Although Johnny loved working with Shannon and Turner, Paul convinced him to fire them and work with The McCoys in a band called Johnny Winter And. “It was real strange being around that band,” Johnny says. “You know these guys aren’t playing with a full deck.”
“One time, I was walkin’ on ice on the Hudson River in the middle of the winter,” Johnny relates. “The river was partially frozen, and they were all walkin’ on the ice. I figured they all lived up north and knew what they were doin’. But they didn’t – they were just crazy. I fell in up to my neck but Bobby Peterson thought I was walking on the water. Me bein’ as hot as I was and the water being cold, steam came up when I fell in.
"So Bobby thought I was God. After that he would follow me around the house, calling me God. He started watching me sleep. He would just sit there when I went to sleep. When I woke up, he’d still be sitting there. Having somebody like me is great, but watching me sleep is definitely too much.”
Peterson’s bizarre behaviour continued to escalate. He tried to kill himself on a dark rainy night and came back into the house with a rope and red mark around his neck. “Bobby hung himself on a tree,” says Johnny. “The rope broke and he said, ‘The tree doesn’t even like me – the tree threw me out’. We took him to the hospital and all they wanted to do was to call the cops and put him in jail. I was screamin’ at ’em, ‘He’s not taking anything; he’s just suicidal’. They thought he was on drugs and the poor guy was just fucked up.
“After that, he started wearin’ the rope around his neck. He thought he was Judas Iscariot. He couldn’t eat or dress. He was always a little bit off, but it was so much different from anything he had ever done before – just changing clothes was hard for him. It came out of nowhere and he wasn’t doing any drugs.”
Peterson wasn’t the only member of The McCoys who was mentally unbalanced. Randy Zehringer played only two gigs with Johnny Winter And before Johnny had to let him go. Zehringer said he didn’t want to perform live because he was afraid he’d cry on stage and was afraid the band would make him drink water. When the band was driving to New York to look at amps, he jumped out of the car in the middle of the freeway because he didn’t like his shirt.
“He wasn’t doin’ drugs, he was just messed up,” says Johnny. “We knew we couldn’t work with him. Randy Hobbs would call me at four o’clock in the morning to say: ‘Weren’t we supposed to practise at four?’ ‘Yeah, at four this afternoon.’ They were nuts and I used them for a long time.”
But Johnny liked Hobbs, so when he got out of River Oaks in 1972 he put together a new band using him on bass. Hobbs never made it past the rehearsals.
“We set the whole stage up so we could see how everybody wanted their gear set up,” says Pat Rush, who played guitar in that line-up. “Randy put his bass on, turned around, started adjusting his amplifier and all of a sudden, he fell over in the drums and passed out cold. We called the emergency guys and they came and took him away.”
Ikey Sweat (long out of the hospital) flew in the next day, but he couldn’t handle dealing with Johnny’s fans. He played that tour and the White, Hot & Blue studio sessions, and returned to Texas. “Ikey left because he was gettin’ crazy,” says Johnny. “He was going nuts because he had too many fans bothering him. We’d all stay at one hotel and he would stay somewhere else so they didn’t know where he was. He had a hard time dealing with it.”
Johnny continued to stay in close touch with Sweat, and was devastated when his friend was found dead in his own garage in Fort Bend, Texas with a gunshot wound through his left temple. The initial ruling of suicide didn’t fit the evidence. Sweat was right-handed and police found his .25 calibre automatic, keys and sunglasses by his left hand. An autopsy showed no evidence of gunpowder residue on either hand. Although Sweat had always talked about suicide, his wife Sharon Sweat was indicted and arrested on a murder charge.
The circumstances that followed Sweat’s death at age 45 were equally disturbing. He wanted Winter to have his oldest bass guitar, but it disappeared during the funeral. Sweat’s son contested a new will leaving everything to his step-mother, calling it a forgery. Six months later, a fire nearly destroyed Sweat’s home. Prosecutors later dismissed the murder charges for lack of evidence. “I hated them letting her go,” says Johnny. “Because everybody down there thought his wife had killed him.”
Death claimed many of Johnny’s sidemen long before their time. Drummer Richard Hughes, who played with him from 1972 to 1976, died by suicide after hooking a hose to his car’s exhaust pipe. Hughes recorded all of his shows with Johnny from the soundboard onto cassette. But when he died at the age of 35, all those recordings, including the show at Madison Square Garden in June 1973, disappeared.
Randy Hobbs was 45 when he died of a cocaine overdose in a hotel room in Ohio. Johnny had invited him to jam with his band at an upcoming gig in the Midwest. Hobbs, who never got over losing his place in the spotlight and moving back home into his mother’s trailer, had been playing with friends that night to get his chops up for Johnny’s gig.
Johnny Winter turned 67 in February 2011. Nobody, including Johnny, had expected him to live this long. Despite a wild and raucous lifestyle that would have killed a lesser man, Johnny has cheated death a number of times.
There was the incident at 19 in a car with friends, being chased down back roads by a man whose wife he had slept with. When they finally stopped, the cuckolded husband pulled a gun on him. “I had a .22 Derringer in my pocket, but every time I’d get my hand close to my pocket, he’d say: ‘Keep your hand away from your pocket,’” says Johnny. “I couldn’t have gotten to my gun quick enough. He finally started crying and left.”
When Johnny got out of rehab determined to stay away from drugs, Houston guitarist Rocky Hill picked him up at the hospital in a van. Hill had a large quantity of Quaaludes, so when the police pulled them over they divided them up, each swallowing a massive dosage. Although he didn’t die or go to jail, the Quaalude high didn’t help him overcome his cravings for narcotics. Less than a year later, Johnny ODed on heroin in Uncle John Turner’s apartment.
The quick response of a very freaked out Turner saved his life. “He did the heroin, fell down, and stopped breathing,” recalls Turner. “We snatched him up, put him in a bathtub full of cold water, and I started slapping him like a rubber chicken, as hard as I could slap him, slappin’ the shit out of him.
"God, I didn’t want him to die in my apartment. We took his pants off, but I couldn’t get his shirt off quick enough and time was of the essence. When he woke up, he was mad because I threw him in the tub with his purple velvet shirt on. He didn’t realise what had happened, and when he came to, he said, ‘God dammit – you fucked up my shirt.’”
Johnny is the first one to admit to having his share of eccentricities, from his proclivity to go au natural at home and in hotel rooms, to his “vampire schedule” that has him sleeping days and staying up all night, and his penchant for specific foods that has his crew driving miles out of their way to satisfy his cravings.
Weirdness is such an integral part of Johnny’s life that when his brother Edgar married Carol Roma, who had been Johnny’s live-in girlfriend for five years, he didn’t bat an eye. And his parents took it in stride when he started getting tattoos all over his body at the age of 40. “Momma thought it was pretty strange but she knew I was strange all the way around so it didn’t surprise her too much,” he says with a smile.
Like he said, you couldn’t make it up.
This feature originally appeared in Classic Rock 163, published in October 2011. Raisin’ Cain, Mary Lou Sullivan’s authorised biography of Johnny Winter, is available from johnnywinterbook.com.
