 |
More than a decade ago, guitar legend Johnny Winter blew into Edmonton for a rare club appearance. Different people remember it as at different venues, but there's one consistent point to the tale: he didn't play much at all.
Winter was smashed like fine china in a tornado. The Texan's reputation as a former junkie and alcoholic preceded him, but that didn't stop a full room from turning up to see the man who made Bob Dylan's Highway 61 a slide guitar classic; a man who would only give way on stage to a certain guitarist named Jimi; a southern boy who, stigmatized by a tough childhood as a crosseyed albino, is reclusive, suffers depression and battles the bottle.
He hasn't been back since, until now. Winter plays June 25 and 26 at Festival Place in Sherwood Park. The Monday night show sold out so quickly a second was added. The good news, according to Winter and his manager/rhythm guitarist Paul Nelson, is this time he'll be sober both nights.
Since kicking the bottle a few years back and having painful hip surgery, Winter has preached the gospel of the recently converted rock star: that his "missing years" were the fault of his manager, long-time artist rep Teddy Slatus, who died in 2005.
Nelson recently told Guitar Player magazine - after taking over the remaining questions from the reclusive string slinger - that Slatus kept Winter in a "perpetual haze" of booze, drugs and medications. Nelson, a guitar prodigy himself and protege of Steve Vai, says Slatus stole Winter's earnings. Were it a half-hearted suggestion, it might be pushed aside as sour grapes. But Nelson is dead serious.
"He was the colonel to Johnny's Elvis, a real character from the Catskills old school, a real mafioso," says Nelson. "Johnny was kept in a cocoon. It was really messed up and anyone who tried to straighten things out was fired. He ran the whole organization.
"Then his wife passed away, and he fell down 20 stairs and broke his neck. Slatus was more famous for his underdealings in the business than his artists were for being on top."
There are plenty of reasons to feel compassion for Johnny Winter. He's a creative genius who, early in life, couldn't get on TV because his cross-eyed albino looks might've scared audiences. He's a Mississippi country boy uprooted at 12 and told to be a Texan. He's a former heroin addict who battles both his hip pain and occasionally crippling carpal tunnel syndrome. His depression has left him a recluse of sorts.
But maybe the biggest reason is that he doesn't remember much of a larger-than-life career.
If you'd told Winter when he was 12 that he'd be a legend one day, he'd have probably looked at you like you were nuts. Winter was known as a humble youth until he hit it big as a guitarist. After that, as he once noted, "I pretty much figured I was the best white blues guitarist out there."
This led to fame, which led to money and drugs. Always somewhat ill-at-ease with small talk, Winter also had the misfortune of placing himself - albeit briefly - under the auspices of Roy Ames, his first manager.
Ames, who died in 2003 at age 66, was a notorious child pornographer and Houston record label owner who, according to everyone who knew him, is currently roasting in whatever corner of hell is reserved for sociopathic cheats. He did a nine-year jail stretch for sex offences against minors and child porn, and made millions stealing songs from just about every major musician to come out of Texas, including the likes of Freddie King, Joe Hughes and Sonny Boy Terry.
His legacy was concisely summed up a few years ago in a Houston Press article.
"Child porn and Gulf Coast music and memorabilia were Ames's favorite wares to sell, and the way he went about peddling and acquiring both was not dissimilar. He coerced people into making the stuff for him and then sold it on the sly, legal consequences be damned," wrote John Nova Lomax. "In both cases, his victims lost their innocence; they felt raped and soiled. Consider all that is decent in the world. Roy Ames was as far from that as you could get."
Winter has said over the years that Ames exploited him endlessly and that he fled Texas to get away from him, a similar line to his description of Teddy Slatus.
Some industry insiders close to Winter say they didn't see the friction or the problems.
"I had plenty of chances to see both of them together and deal with them and if anything, Teddy seemed concerned that Johnny was taking too many pills or drinking too much," said one industry source, who requested anonymity. "Teddy was a character himself and he had his own issues to deal with but he wasn't that type, I don't think."
Another source who worked with both men at various times said if Slatus had a problem, it's that his own demons prevented him from doing anything about Winter's substance abuse. He could not recall ever seeing the two disagree over Winter's finances, and he could not recall Slatus acting any more controlling than any other agent.
The public record seems to indicate at least concern on Slatus's part for Winter's reputation. He helped launch a 1995 lawsuit - ultimately unsuccessfully - against D.C. Comics for creating two monsterous albino characters in a comic book called Johnny and Edgar August. "It was picking fun on them for being albinos," Slatus told the Washington Post, when asked why he'd pursued the suit.
But after spending months backtracking deals, and bank accounts, and contracts, and memory fragments from long-indulging musicians, Nelson has another explanation: Teddy Slatus loved making money off of Johnny Winter.
Johnny Winter calls around 7 p.m. The interview is just 15 minutes long, and no matter how complex, personal or researched the questions are, his answers could be charitably described as terse.
What's it like being back on the road again, after nearly two years in a chair because of his hip?
"It's good."
What was it like working with Muddy Waters on Hard Again, the great bluesman's 1977 comeback?
"Really good, really. That was great, working with Muddy."
Alligators cough up teeth more easily than Winters gives quotes, although it's easy to see why: 10 years' worth of interviews suggest he has heard every question that might appeal to a general audience a thousand times before. When asked why he's so quiet during interviews, he candidly admits "I hate it. I hate doing these."
But he's honest about his health. Though he concurs with Nelson's assessment of Teddy Slatus in Guitar Player, he concedes he made some bad choices on his own.
Did Teddy Slatus force him to take drugs or drug him, or supply him with drugs? "No, nothing like that."
Was it just the case, then, that his long-time manager allowed Winter to damn near kill himself. "Uh huh, that's about it."
So why did he become a junkie in the first place, Winters is asked. "Because I hated my manager so much I'd take drugs to get away from him," he says.
Anyone who tried to screen out the poison and the pills had to deal with Slatus. Winter was a lot more valuable to the former club bouncer while out of it, says Nelson.
Winter met Slatus while jamming at a New York club called The Scene back in the late '60s. Teddy was the head doorman, occasional muscle and, Nelson says, widely suspected at the time of being connected to the mob.
The house band was quite the draw: Jim Morrison would be on vocals, with Winter on guitar, Jimi Hendrix playing bass and Mitch Mitchell on drums. Tracks from the legendary sessions have floated around cyberspace for a few year now, testament not only to Johnny Winter's staying power but the fact that, 40 years after his business troubles started, people are still ripping off his music.
"Teddy and his wife Susan kept Johnny basically in a cocoon since at least the early '90s," says Nelson. "And the way he could control him was by taking advantage of the frailty of his condition. He tapped into Johnny's drug use, and was at Johnny's bedside when he was trying to kick, telling him, 'If it wasn't for me, you'd be dead.'
"If there was a really ballsy employee who went straight to him and complained, that employee was fired. If the tour manager said he thought maybe Teddy was ripping Johnny off, the tour manager would be fired."
The years of abuse took a toll. Winter vaguely remembers Woodstock; his sellout show at Madison Square Garden; a bust-up with brother Edgar that prevented them from playing together. "It's not so much a mental thing, it's just all a big blur," says Nelson. "He's seen and done so much that to him, Woodstock was just another show. You ask him what he remembers and he says, 'Well, it was wet and it was muddy.' "
That means he still needs help getting his business together. Winter paid no attention to what he was signing and for whom, as evidenced by the slough of albums he released without seeing a dime. Nelson's part-time job for the last two years -- aside from being an in-demand session guitarist in his own right -- has been putting the puzzle pieces together.
"We're all set now," he says optimistically. "We have every file, every stick of money that Johnny was owed, real estate records, you name it. They left a paper trail that was truly child-like."
Winter is going after Slatus' estate for "millions" in court, says Nelson. They'd parted company just before Slatus' death. "We got the finest lawyers and we had his lawyer fired, his accountant fired and Teddy fired all on the stroke of 12 noon. And none of them put up a fight because they all knew they'd be caught."
Nelson is not lacking his own dramatic flair. "And then it was dead silent on the Teddy front until we got word that he'd fell down a flight of stairs, drunk on two-fifths of Johnny Walker Red and all the pills he could swallow.
"And the only words out of Johnny's mouth when he heard were, 'Are we having tacos tonight?' "