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.