Mean Town Blues: Johnny Winter at 80

Ever have one of those wayback memories where you know you saw somebody – let’s say somebody in concert – but you can’t recall the time, the place or much else except for how damn good it was? 

For me, that would be Johnny Winter, who, had not a lifetime of multiple health issues intervened, would have turned 80 on February 23rd.

Well, I got there – wherever it was – by car driving maybe an hour and a half each way. I lived in central Maine (Orono, attending the University of Maine) and we, meaning me and my then-girlfriend Hillery, headed out somewhere into the western wilds to a roadhouse we’d never been to or heard of. It was some time in the summer of ’78. I was between junior and senior year at college. We were going out there to down a few beers and see the whitest bluesman in rock ‘n’ roll tear it up for the first time. (For us, not him, obviously.)

That much I know. But I checked the Concert Archives site and, nope, no Maine gig listed for JW in 1978, and had him only playing seven concerts that year and never got close to Maine. 

Setlist.fm has him playing 27 shows that year. No Maine gigs that year either, but one in Augusta, Maine’s Civic Center. Sept. 10, 1977. Nope, that wasn’t it, either. (I saw arena shows in August, Lewiston, Portland and Bangor during my Maine years.) We were there, out in the sticks, and I remember the raucous vibe and the beer-soaked floor. Was there sawdust? I think, maybe. It was packed but there couldn’t have been more than 400 people in the joint and I felt right at home.

I wasn’t reviewing it, so I’ve got no archival material to back up it. Yet, the images in my head, the sounds I heard — the great tone and vibrato — and the rowdy fun I had, that I can conjure up at will. I’ll have to trust you in thinking I am not an unreliable narrator.

VIDEO: Johnny and Edgar Winter “Tobacco Road”

I bring this up to say that even if punk rock and New Wave had taken over a lot of my world in 1977 and 1978, I still held a genuine love for the white-hot blues-rock of Johnny Winter and would travel deep into the forest to find him. For that matter, I had the same love for his younger brother Edgar and his band White Trash. Both had been high school favorites and the Johnny Winter And … Live album, with second guitarist and frequent Winter brothers bandmate Rick Derringer, was often on the turntable.  

There was only one Winter original – “Mean Town Blues” – on it, but that album showed how Winter and company could raise the bar on almost any classic rock song they covered: the Stones’ “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” the Jerry Lee Lewis medley of “Great Balls of Fire,” “Long Tall Sally” and “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On” (yes, covers of covers), and Chuck Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode.” I wasn’t yet a reader of Robert Christgau’s Consumer Guide, but going back through them – thank you, Google – I found his blurb that said, “this is what every live album ought to be and all too few are: loud, fast, raucous, and to the point.”

Right on, Bob.

I knew the multi-tattooed, legally blind, rail-thin albino guitarist had some drug problems. I’d read the rock press. There was heroin. Methadone. There was also lotsa booze and butts. I’d listened to “Too Much Seconal,” so I’m guessing, as Winter wrote it, he wrote the truth. I have to admit there was some attraction – as I guess there always is – to artists who did a lot of self-damage and still created brilliant music. (See: Shane MacGowan, Warren Zevon, Ian Curtis, etc.)

And, of course, there was the wry “Still Alive and Well,” title track of the 1973 album, written by Derringer, where Winter drolly addressed those of the he’s-a-junkie/going-to-be-dead-soon mindset: “Every now and then I know it’s kinda hard to tell/But I’m still alive and well.”  (Actually, Edgar recorded and released it first, then Johnny, then Rick. I guess it applied to ‘em all.) Mick Jagger and Keith Richards contributed a tune, too, “Silver Train,” which later came out on the Stones’ Goats Head Soup album. It was a hard boogie-ing album, and “to boogie” was not an ironic comment back then.

I moved to Boston, fall of 1978 and the next year started writing for the Boston Globe, something I’d continue with for 25 more years. And, as both fan and critic, I saw Winter more than a few times, first in December 1984 at the Paradise club. At that point, Stevie Ray Vaughan was in the spotlight as the hotshot blues-rock guitarist from Texas, a position Winter had occupied a decade earlier. 

Winter seemed quite comfortable not to be the new blues-rock king and, in fact, was burrowing more into the less-commercial end, the blues. It was evident on his then-current album, Guitar Slinger, and over the course of the show, though he did include “Bony Maronie” and “Johnny B. Goode.” It was, I wrote then (and stand by still) “a powerhouse – an evening of high-speed velocity and emotive skill.”

He opened the set with “Hideaway,” a 15-minute opus which set the tone for the evening, Winter, bassist Jon Paris and drummer Tom Compton taking us an exhilarating peaks-and-valleys with hairpin turns trip. When he went down, he went way down with “Blues Come Home for Christmas,” a gentle song of loneliness and a plea for help.

I later saw Winter open up a tour for George Thorogood, play a mini-blues festival with Buddy Guy and the Nighthawks, headline back at the Paradise. He valued payback, and in the late ‘70s, he produced three Grammy-winning albums for Muddy Waters, certainly aware that among modern audiences he was the star and Muddy the blues legend-but-old- guy-footnote. To be perfectly honest here, Winter brought the young me into Muddy’s world, too.

I recall reading some of the reviews over the years, writers who wanted to take Winter down a notch for, I dunno, not being Son House or Willie Dixon or Howlin’ Wolf. Lightnin’ Hopkins or Freddie King. Right. Winter was an odd-looking white guy who built upon what those guys had laid out.

Winter was a staple in my life – his music stayed on the A-list through all sorts of other fads and trends – and it was always a pleasure to return to wherever he was going to show up.  

His last studio album, his 19th, was 2014’s Step Back and that album, like many a disc by late-stage rockers, has guest players who were big fans paying tribute: Eric Clapton, Joe Perry, Billy Gibbons, Ben Harper, Brian Setzer, Leslie West, Dr. John and others. It was released in early September 2.

Alas, Winter died July 16, on tour in Switzerland, a double kick of emphysema and pneumonia. It was two days after his last gig at the Cahors Blues Festival in France. The fact that Johnny Winter made it to 70, well, that’s not a bet many would taken.

In 2015, Winter posthumously won his first Grammy for Best Blues Album. I’m listening to it now and I’m still livin’ Winter’s blues.

Note to readers: After this story was written and posted on Facebook, an alert reader chipped into the comment thread to say that the club Winter played in 1978 was the Red Barn in Monroe, Maine. He should know. He’s Ryan Wright and was the editor of the music magazine I first started writing for back in 1976, Sweet Potato, based in Portland, Maine. He, too, was at the show.

“We drove up from Portland,” he told me. “Just before Johnny was supposed to go on, all the lights went out. Some drunk had hit a pole and all electricity was out. It was restored about 2 A.M. and the show went on.”

Imagine, that part I’d forgotten. But after he dinged the distant memory bell, it clicked in. He’s right. I remember a long wait to hear the music and Hillery and I getting back to Orono wicked late that night or early that next morning.

I went to MapQuest to check out how far we went. I was wrong about the time I spent traveling. It was about half of what I thought, 45 minutes. And it wasn’t exactly due west, but southwest and more south than west. 

I did a Google search for the Red Barn and found this item in the Bangor Daily News, Maine’s largest daily and the paper I wrote for in college and few years after. I had a weekly column called “Rock Garden.” Anyway, four years ago, Emily Burnhams wrote a story about long-gone Maine bars and clubs and wrote this about the Red Barn.

“For decades, this literal barn on a dirt road in the Waldo County town of Monroe hosted live music from blues legends such as Muddy Waters, B.B. King and James Cotton, country artists like Connie Smith, as well as regional rockers including Bill Chinnock. Though exact dates on when it was open are sketchy, it hosted music and dances as early as the 1960s, and continued as late as the 1990s. It was the classic example of a bottle club — a bring-your-own-booze venue that was popular in the mid-20th century.” 

VIDEO: Johnny Winter “Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo (Live)”

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Jim Sullivan

Jim Sullivan is the author of Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Classic Rock Chats and Rants, which came out in July, and the upcoming Backstage & Beyond: 45 Years of Modern Rock Chats and Rants, which will be published October 19 by Trouser Press Books. Based in Boston, he's written for the Boston Globe, Herald and Phoenix, and currently for WBUR's arts site, the ARTery. Past magazine credits include The Record, Trouser Press, Creem, Music-Sound Output. He's at jimullivanink on Facebook and the rarely used @jimsullivanink on X.

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