Johnny Winter: A Perplexed Appreciation of a Neglected Guitar Genius

Before I begin this review, I need to send certain readers on their way from the get go. There are some who do not relate to the blues idiom in music, just as there those, either by cultural upbringing or temperamental disposition, who do not relate to classical music. This is not written for those who dismiss out of hand the blues tradition in rock music, nor for those who merely see the blues style as acceptable for their listening only if is an occasional and marginal ornament to an otherwise pop-oriented song. Nor is this for inane blues purists who believe that only African Americans born to a share-cropper family should ever be (or should ever have been) permitted to play it.

Now to business: thank you Repertoire Records for so skillfully and lovingly remastering and reissuing the first two official records by Johnny Winter for new generations to discover and fully appreciate his music, and for older generations who knew of him in the era of his artistic emergence to recall just how talented and enriching to the genre he was (and remains). Unarguably, on the basis these two recordings alone, he is one of the most inventive, melodious, graceful and energetic blues rock guitarists who has ever lived.

It is indicative of one of several gaping holes of ignorance in canonical rock histories (which all seem to cross-reference each other rather than going back to the source material) that Johnny Winter barely gets even a mention. Perhaps it can be chalked up to the fact that he did not martyr himself to his art like the socially exploited/politically bedeviled Jimi Hendrix, or meet with an untimely fatal accident after successful rehabilitation like Stevie Ray Vaughn, thereby attracting to himself a mystique in rock annals. In fact, he has been lucky enough to live into late middle age. This is due in no little part to how he respected and loved his title to existence early enough to have gotten himself help to get free of heroin addiction, after a naive seduction by this nefarious drug in the midst of the chaos and novelty of international touring and new-found success as a young man.

The case for Johnny Winter is not a question of a talented yet frustratingly flawed musician who can be venerated as an underdog by pretentious music snobs. No, Johnny Winter is actually a consummate and consistent professional musician of the first order, easily worthy of favorable comparisons with the highest "guitar gods" of the guitar-oriented era of his musical breakthrough in the late '60s and early '70s. I think we must face the real possibility that the under appreciation of Johnny Winter must be chiefly laid at the feet of the rock industry's Achilles heel: its obsession with "ideal" physicality in its performing stars (however much that definition might change from from era to era). To come to the point: Johnny Winter was an albino, which is a normal genetic variation found in all "races" of humankind, including even African Americans.

The unfortunate obsession in our culture of pairing the "pretty boy" with our concept of "musical talent" is probably the ugly (hidden) truth behind Johnny Winter's lack of public and critical recognition. Ironically, it is the social ostracism he suffered from the beginnings of his life that drove Johnny (and his equally musically-talented also-albino brother, Edgar Winter) to work hard from an early age to develop musical talents that would socially redeem him in the eyes of his peers of whatever age. It is equally ironic that Johnny and his brother Edgar were not ugly looking at all but actually handsome, but for too many uninformed people their albinism alone defined them as physical "freaks".

Hopefully, by now, more of us have been educated about genetics and the superficiality of any concept of "too much" skin and hair pigmentation" or not "not enough" skin and hair pigmentation. All variations are natural, and albinism as a recessive visual trait arises in every living species on the planet. Jimi Hendrix was a handsome black man. Johnny Winter is a handsome albino man. Now move on and pay attention to what's really important: their inner musical gifts.

So, I please invite you to purchase Repertoire Records' recent releases of his debut album, Johnny Winter, and his sophomore album, Second Winter. I guarantee you will experience a musical epiphany...and then an aftershock of reflection: why does Johnny Winter's name not get expressed in the same breath as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Duane Allman, Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi and Eddie Van Halen?

As purely a side note, I have to mention that even though I am a great fan of Derek Trucks, Johnny Winter is the finest slide guitarist, bar none; indeed, Winter is a veritable shaman at putting the glass pill-bottle to the vibrating fretboard!

Oh yes, I forgot to remark upon his voice: Johnny is one heckuva blues crooner, wailer, testifier and growler!

"Remember When They Were Great? How The Heck Did They Get So Dull?"

All too often individual musical artists and bands with something striking to communicate with their vocals and instruments get seduced by the money in their first flush of real success, which mat come after perhaps long years of desperate struggle or goading semi-success. A producer at this point takes them aside and tells them that they are now going to use recording techniques that are going to make them "really big" (i.e., appeal to an even broader audience) and thus get them all even higher record sales. What this typically amounts to in the subsequent studio release is an album by a band shorn of all its interesting edges, idiosyncrasies and acoustical texture. Now it is true that the band may at this early stage of early artistic corruption still re-assert its distinct identity during performances of its live act on tour, often doing on stage better versions of songs that had been "homogenized and pasteurized" in the studio. But the fact that the band may not yet have entirely lost its musical soul when it goes up to the footlights does not satisfy the demands of posterity, unless a good live recording is captured on a good night for its members (either with the band's blessing or by a sneaky bootlegger). Otherwise, this reassertion of originality against the studio product is offered up only to the dissipating ether and the fading memories of the people lucky enough to be in the audience for that performance. Some bands (who aren't obsessing about whatever the petty critics are taunting them about) become aware that their older fans, while still loyally attending their concerts, are complaining about the increasingly smooth superficiality of the band's more recent releases. The response from artists (or shall we say by this point "semi-artistic pot-boilers") is typically this: musicians need to "change" in order to "survive"; or, the band needs to "grow"" in order to keep the music "fresh". Now as this blog has pointed out in earlier articles, there actually have been bands where change was good and they developed by using new and pleasing musical ideas. However, all I can say when the responses are merely apologies for denatured inspiration is this: a little less greed and a little more fidelity to one's authentic artistic self will do more for career longevity than bowing to fleeting mega-profits and digitally pureed musical trends. Ask any venerable blues or jazz musician, and he or she will tell you the same. A smaller but more steadfast fan-base is the reward for bands that refuse to have their horns hacked off and their gonads replaced by an electronically-operated titanium pair.

Sometimes There Are Substitutes When the Original Article Fizzles Out

I am among those collectors of music that find it irritating that Crosby Stills Nash (& sometimes Young) only made two albums and one single (which was supposed to herald a third album) from their awe-inspiring "hippie" period. By the time at least three of them patched up their differences to re-form the band in the late seventies, their sound (along with most of the rest of the popular music world) had changed. An opportunity (it would seem) was forever lost. Well, it may be heresy for me to say this, but you can get a darn good fix of that kind of breathtaking vocal blend and blissed-out acoustic/electric balance from their contemporaries of that golden period in music. A different trio came on the scene back then by the name of America, and they brought forth a freshman album called "Homecoming" in 1972 that was the sort of thing that CSN (&Y) should have made after Deja Vu, if their third album hadn't aborted in '73 from egotistical bickering (to which the peace-maker, Graham Nash, to his credit, was not a party). America consisted of multi-instrumentalists and talented vocalists, Gerry Beckley, Dewey Bunnell and Dan Peek. While I absolutely love the solo albums from Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, David Crosby, and Neil Young from what I have loosely called, "the hippie era" (which came to an end sometime in the mid-seventies), the folk-rock "power-house" feeling of those musicians when they were all united as the three or four musketeers can only be found in that album by another group, Homecoming, which was not faux CSN but an original effort by America that picked up where their pioneering predecessors left off.

Another gripe I have is that Cream broke up too soon. It would have been okay if there had come along some true heirs of their sound, but there really weren't (Led Zeppelin are often cited but they are rather a different kettle of fish). Cream had just the right balance of heavy blues rock and jazzy British folk rock. That power-trio was truly unique, but their sound did briefly continue, albeit not by Eric Clapton (who went the way of country-rock pop) nor by Ginger Baker (who turned to jazz-rock fusion). I am not talking about the nearly abortive group Clapton and Baker formed with Steve Winwood (Blind Faith), which aside from being a false start sounded too laid back to be a new incarnation of Cream. No, it was the passionate Scotsman from the fallen trio, Jack Bruce, who carried on (though briefly) the true Cream standard during his solo career. This he managed with his two fine rock albums, Songs for a Tailor (1969), and Harmony Row (1971). In these one of course misses Clapton's voice being a part of musical milieu, but I have always identified with Bruce's vocals as being as much an intrinsic part of the Cream sound, and on these two solo releases by Bruce, he does not deviate from the special style alchemized by Cream, and nor does his backing band.

Still, there are some wonderful groups for which there never arose a substitute after they came (for their fans at least) to an untimely end. No one picked up the ball after it was dropped (although some might have claimed to) when Led Zeppelin broke up. There was never again anything like the glam-rock synergy of Ziggy and his Spiders. And there was never another Beatles, though there have been pretenders to the throne. Oh well...

Review: "Arthur" by The Kinks

This record was a fully intentional and independently inspired concept album. Its songs, though varied in content, support a unifying theme and a progressive narrative. In content Arthur combines an epic reach in terms of lyrics and music with an emerging personal story that communicates with the regular struggling person that resides in each of us. The exultation and nostalgia of belonging to a once mighty nation coexists here with the simple gratitude of living in a stable and free society, no matter how humble one's circumstances. These positive feelings are offset by an expression of grief and sense of waste that comes of war, and an awareness of the gratuitous pleasure some people take in playing with human lives in the constant recycling of martial conflict. The album begins to grapple with the more general contemporary condition in Western society of the long struggle of the average person to achieve financial stability, while at the same time postponing their sweeter dreams for what such people hope will be an idyllic retirement -- but which all too often turns out to be a state of sterile isolation for all the security and amenities it has promised. The then new bass player for The Kinks, John Dalton, adds a strong mellifluous but unaffected voice to the vocal palette of the band, which happily still includes the inimitable and different singing qualities of Ray and brother Dave Davies. The orchestration of the ensemble's musicians reach a peak of grandeur in this album, and their individual instrumental contributions to the greater (and beautifully disciplined) whole reflect a sense of virtuoso elation never again so ambitiously achieved.

The Kinks' Artistic Breakthrough

The Kinks' sixth studio album, The Village Green Preservation Society, which originally came out in 1968, is the product of an already great band leaping into truly outstanding heights. It was an intimate, less self-conscious, more poetic statement of what became more impassioned, grand and bald in their immediately succeeding albums. Though the Kinks were outsold by fellow British bands such as the Rolling Stones and The Who, neither of those sexier bands could have made an album of such thematic and lyrical sophistication, emotional sensitivity and conceptual variety, and the aesthetic dynamics of the musical compositions themselves are a true wonder for the mind to digest. Something truly exquisite must have happened to Ray Davies and his bandmates, a eureka moment of some sort, for while such albums as the Kinks Kontroversy, Face to Face and Something Else certainly bear a proliferation of gems that point toward a steadily rising artistic development, Village Green sounds like a liberation album, every song utterly inspired and possessed of a non-commercial pop sound with a delightfully carefree spirit. Its songs run from wry folk rock to delicately rendered calypso, each deftly commingling such feelings as vintage sadness, gentle humor, the awe of the weird, and the unabashed joy in the humble creations given to everyday life.

The Village Green Preservation Society is an engaging concept album without being overtly so, and each song is an exploration of a special room in a mansion filled with a cornucopia of moods, reflections, rhythms and imagery, both lyrical and musical. It is also an autumnal album, about the baby that was getting thrown out with the bathwater in the rapidly changing times of the High Sixties, but in this album it is the glory and joy of a metaphorical Fall at its nostalgic best: the oeuvre of brightly colored leaves, the gallant celebration of precious things people carelessly throw away or "responsibly" forget as a spiritual winter looms, the faith in mysterious forces more lasting than the vapid trends that fixate people, the exuberant sense of homage to a natural simpler existence, the gently observant humor that enables a psyche to survive a subtly fading world, the illusory mesmerism of summer's golden fame compared to the natural fulfillment of family and friendship in a humbler season, the fascinating strangeness of dying summer's weird evocations, and the power of present-mindedness over inevitable fatalism to inspire a festive mood for the dance honoring the year's final harvest.

Yet this record was not their swansong, but ironically the beginning of new creative muscularity in the group that would last for four consecutive albums. That the Kinks had the misfortune to live in the long shadow of the Beatles is regrettable. And then, just as the Beatles bid adieu, swaggering Led Zeppelin stormed the barn, inadvertently keeping the Kinks from entering the fore as they deserved. Society then as now had tendencies toward monolithic tastes and fixations, but this album fortunately has continued to get pressed in new editions in the decades that have followed its mostly ignored debut, and succeeding generations have discovered that it is a lasting work of art. Moreover, it is an album that especially speaks to our own times, where the changes in society are entering another watershed, with great doubt as to what will survive of our collective culture. Now that the frenetic rattle of the Stones has finally quietened and the colorful fog of the Beatles has finally cleared, true music lovers may finally see and discover in retrospect the fantastic work of those bands who were their equally talented peers and contemporaries -- and most especially, The Kinks.

Mutual Muse

When discovering music retroactively, it is the product of research and recommendation -- not listening to top-forty radio. So the music-lovers of vintage rock, for instance, tend to follow veins of musical relationships. A good example (which leads even to the present) would be: Muddy Waters -- The Bluesbreakers -- The Yardbirds -- Cream -- Derek and the Dominoes -- Stevie Ray Vaughn & Double Trouble -- The Black Keys. I have recently made a discovery that if I had been an adult or adolescent at the time the music came out, I might not have noticed in the haze of bands competing for my ear and radio play. I have long been an ardent fan of Buffalo Springfield, an American band full of great musical ideas and talent from the latter half of the sixties, who came to an untimely end because of battling egos. Their finest work was their middle album from 1968, entitled, Buffalo Springfield Again. It is a record that encompasses its own little universe of musical and lyrical ideas, stating its creative intentions better than most any group of its time -- and certainly full of unique surprises. Now recently I have been discovering the seventies incarnation of a British band called, Traffic. I decide to give a listen to their sixties incarnation and select their 1968 self-titled effort, Traffic (and coincidentally the middle album also for that version of the group). I take an immediate liking to it, and find it to be a different animal than the later incarnation of the group. What is more, it makes me think of an American band, who, in their own way, they resemble more than any other of the time: Buffalo Springfield. It is not a mere question of them being contemporaries of each other. Here I am detecting a similar vision, approach, quality and style of musicianship. It feels like I'm home again, listening to a lost album. Sadly, both groups, as they were formed for those respective albums, soon collapsed from infighting. Their final albums were odds and sods left over after coming apart; for Traffic it was Last Exit; for Buffalo Springfield it was Last Time Around. Traffic was later reborn with a new direction (though with a definite musical continuity with its sixties version, and in way so was Buffalo Springfield, in the form of Crosby Stills & Nash (aka, "CSN"), then later, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (aka, "CSNY"). With the British group it was a rivalry and clash of musical directions between lead guitarist, songwriter and co-lead vocalist, Dave Mason, and keyboardist, songwriter and guitarist, Steve Winwood. With the American group it was a similar conflict between co-lead guitarist, songwriter and co-lead vocalist, Stephen Stills and co-lead guitarist, songwriter and vocalist Neil Young. Too much talent in one place to be happily contained? Interestingly, in both cases there was so much mutual respect that the rivals took each other back (in both cases temporarily) when, on the one hand Stephen Stills and company made the album, Deja Vu by having a creative reconciliation with Neil Young, and on the other hand when Steve Winwood and company made the album, Welcome to the Canteen by having a creative reconciliation with Dave Mason. In both cases the reunions didn't get past a single musical tour, but the similarities do not end there. Finding myself delighted by the particular contributions Dave Mason had made to the sixties-version of Traffic, I listened to his debut solo album, Alone Together. This is a wonderful album, through and through, but once more, I felt like I had gone back to home sweet home: it bears an astonishing resemblance in style and quality to Stephen Stills first two solo albums, which I acquired after loving his special contributions to both Buffalo Springfield, CSN, and CSNY. Rarely have I found such a pleasing (and accidental) affinity between contemporaneous British and American groups and artists. It is far more the case (at least to the trained ear of the rock fan) to find differences between the popular music of those two Anglophone realms in the late sixties and early seventies period; even when comparing groups in similar subcategories between the two nations, you can't get much more different than The Grateful Dead and Led Zeppelin, or James Taylor and Cat Stevens, or Grand Funk Railroad and Black Sabbath. Yet in the case of the Dave Mason (et al.) / Stephen Stills (et al.) paradigm, I think we have a delightfully miraculous situation of a mutual muse! How cool would it have been if any assemblage of these musicians featuring those two key players had met at a rock festival and jammed together? It would have been musical nirvana!

When a Band or Artist Changes and Gets Better

We are probably all familiar with the negative side of change when it happens to a group or solo artist we like. There can be any number of reasons why musicians and singers lose that muse that made us originally love them. For some, they become wealthy and take the opportunity to be so self-indulgent that they no longer have anything interesting to say musically. For others its because they start taking higher doses of certain drugs, or change to different drugs, which effectively changes the whole character of their music. For others, it seems like life just starts to intimidate them, they begin to lose their youthful passion, and then start to "play it safe" with their music, resulting in a musical output less stimulating for the listener. Then there is the theory that an artist needs to be "hungry" to be good, and that once they are financially secure so goes the spark informing the quality of their music -- this theory seems disproved by Bruce Springsteen, who has kept "the hungry" in his music despite all his mounting success down through the years. Indeed, change does not always have to be negative. There are cases when it is quite a good thing. There are artists (at least up to a point) where a person likes them more as they evolve. That is the key word: evolve. When change is negative, it is not because the artist is evolving but rather they are either retreating from their original passion or rehashing earlier tropes with diminishing inspiration. The trick is for the rock or pop artist not to lose sight of the fact that what they are doing is a form of art and not merely a formulaic business of noise-making where you hope to push the profitable buttons in the music-making doframus. There are great examples of evolution where groups or individuals kept renewing themselves in fresh and beautiful ways while remaining true to their identity: Jethro Tull from the late sixties and through the seventies into the early eighties, blending and developing various permutations of blues rock, folk rock, prog rock and operatic rock; Elton John from the late sixties into the late seventies, going from singer/songwriter to glam rocker to passionate rock and roller. However, my favorite case is The Kinks, and here I am only interested in mapping their mid sixties to early seventies output. They went from unhinged blues rockers and ecstatic mod punks, to astutely satirical and trenchantly poetic observers of urban life, to epic tragedians and fond odesters of the transformations of working class identity and its retention of a Gothic imagination. What a journey -- and I'm not just talking about the lyrics!