The title of Mary Lou Sullivan’s 2010 portrait of guitar slinger Johnny Winter is a bit of a misnomer. Readers who pick up Raisin’ Cain – The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter, might expect a more lurid story of partying, groupies, and burned bridges. But what they’ll get instead is a sensitive, well-researched and respectful biography that gives equal time to Johnny’s important childhood experiences, his brief stay in the mainstream limelight and the long years that followed, with countless tours, a beautiful second act as Muddy Waters’ producer and advocate, and struggles with bad management, the fickle nature of popularity, and human foibles.
Blues scholars say that there’s a blues boom every ten or twenty years, however you count it. There was one in the eighties, when Stevie Ray, Robert Cray and ZZ Top were going strong. Johnny Winter found success at the tail end of the long sixties blues renaissance, but he was always under pressure to play more rock. As a young fan – my first concert was Johnny Winter at the Felt Forum during his tour supporting Captured Live – I was never aware of this dichotomy. But Raisin’ Cain makes it clear that Johnny Winter lived this conundrum day in and day out. There were always plenty of fans to fill the seats on his endless tours, but they didn’t buy all that many of his records.
Johnny and The Jammers?: With BB King at The Scene Club
Enter the most clueless management to ever take up so much space in the bio of an important artist. Any fan of Jimi Hendrix will know about Steve Paul’s Scene Club, but I didn’t know that he was Johnny Winter’s manager and that he got him his groundbreaking deal with Columbia Records. I’m not really sure how badly Paul did for Johnny. He got him the big advance, and Blue Sky Records seemed to serve Winter’s interests pretty well, even putting out all of the Muddy records. But his biggest selling album was And Live, a no brainer that must have cost hardly anything to produce.
Enter Teddy Slatus, who took over for Paul when Johnny’s contract with Columbia ran out in the eighties. Suffice it to say that Slatus pretty much wrecked Johnny’s career through inept and unprofessional management practices, including keeping him over-medicated on prescription drugs and out on the road until Johnny was more or less a wreck in his fifties, far too young to be physically and mentally debilitated.
Johnny around the time the book was released
More enjoyable to read are the sections about Johnny’s childhood and his quest to form his identity as a musician from an early age. JW grew up in an upper middle class household but apparently that didn’t keep the kids in Texas from mercilessly teasing him due to his albinism. He was left with psychological scars, not unlike his friend and sometime paramour, Janis Joplin, that made it hard for him to relax and at times understand crucial relationships. But his parents were really there for him, and they nurtured his and his brother Edgar’s talent for music right from the beginning.
There is much to recommend in this book, including details of Johnny’s working relationships with Muddy Waters and Rick Derringer, and the early years with Tommy Shannon. The biography was published in 2010, before Johnny died in July 2014. Judging by the foreword, he was very happy with the way it turned out.
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