{"id":26583,"date":"2015-08-18T15:12:01","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T20:12:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/?p=26583"},"modified":"2020-11-29T12:51:41","modified_gmt":"2020-11-29T18:51:41","slug":"johnny-winter-gone-for-a-year-remembering-the-mad-albino-bluesman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/johnny-winter-gone-for-a-year-remembering-the-mad-albino-bluesman\/","title":{"rendered":"Johnny Winter Gone for a Year: Remembering the Mad Albino Bluesman"},"content":{"rendered":"

A Tombstone Is My Pillow<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u201cIn Johnny\u2019s voice I could hear the manifestation of my essence \u2026\u201d \u2013 <\/i>Leo Sacks, saved by music <\/span><\/p>\n

CHICAGO: <\/i>A year and a day after the death of Johnny Winter in Switzerland, I had lunch in Chicago with Dick Shurman, a friend of the Texas bluesman who produced Winter\u2019s 1992 album, Hey, Where\u2019s Your Brother?<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

Shurman\u2014<\/i>a self-taught music scholar, documentarian and Class of 2014 inductee into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame\u2014<\/i>was wearing a straw hat and a Howlin\u2019 Wolf t-shirt.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWolf (Chester Burnett, 1910\u20131976) used to drive me home from his gigs,\u201d remembered Shurman, 65. \u201cHis favorite thing was telling people how to live. He once told me that women were wearing their skirts so short they were showing two faces to the world.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

There was so much for us to discuss, but as always (whether talking to Frank Zappa or Pete Townsend), I wanted to talk about Johnny. Shurman was one of the few people invited to private funeral services for Winter last July at Union Cemetery in Easton, Connecticut.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"johnny<\/a>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cThe family kept it very quiet, [discouraged] people from posting photos of the ceremony,\u201d said Shurman. \u201cThey didn\u2019t want a lot of pilgrims coming by.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Which, as someone who has archived notes left on the graves of Jack Kerouac (Lowell, Massachusetts) and Sherwood Anderson (Marion, Va.), I find disappointing. Vanity,<\/i> said William Saroyan, is an artist\u2019s courage and fans\u2014be they partisans or pilgrims\u2014give life to that courage. <\/i>(I have also paid respects to the grave of Saroyan [author of The Human Comedy<\/i>] in Fresno, California.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Last December, at Buddy Guy\u2019s Legends nightclub on South Wabash in the city of Augie March, Johnny\u2019s manager (and second guitarist) Paul Nelson and younger brother Edgar staged their last tribute to Johnny. Most of the dates were ones Johnny was already scheduled to play when he was found dead in his Zurich hotel room on
\nJuly 16, 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Johnny guitar parts (as though anyone could fill them\u2014<\/i>Townsend recoiling in 1997 when I told him Clapton couldn\u2019t buckle Johnny\u2019s guitar strap) fell to fellow Beaumont native Mike Zito. <\/span><\/p>\n

At Winter\u2019s 70th birthday bash at B.B. King\u2019s Blues Club in New York City, Zito pitched in on \u201cJumpin\u2019 Jack Flash,\u201d which Johnny released in 1971 on Live Johnny Winter And<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In that same Gotham City, back about the same time, an adolescent Leo Sacks sent away his allowance money to join the Columbia Record Club, no way of knowing that one day he\u2019d grow up to be a producer for the company that bought Columbia\u2014<\/i>Sony\u2014<\/i>and oversee their 1995 compilation, Legacy\u2019s Rhythm and Soul Revue<\/i>, featuring the Isley Brothers, Aretha, and Cab Calloway.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOne day a record called Different Strokes: 19 Contemporary Artists Perform Music of Our Time<\/i>, arrived in the mail, remembered Sacks. \u201cThe first track was \u201cRock & Roll, Hootchie Koo\u201d by Johnny Winter And.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m thinking: \u201cJohnny Winter And\u2026what?\u201d<\/i>\u201d\u00a0\"art<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n

And this baby: \u201cSuddenly the needle drops and a sonic sledgehammer comes at me faster than a slow motion punch out of Raging Bull<\/i>,\u201d said Sacks. \u201cI\u2019m talking the hardest, meanest, sweatiest, stankiest <\/i>guitar-driven rock I\u2019ve ever heard.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cNothing the rabbis preached in Hebrew School ever spoke to me as purely and passionately and profoundly as \u2018Hootchie Koo\u2019 did,\u201d marveled Sacks. \u201cNothing had ever prepared me for this \u2026\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

As nothing\u2014<\/i>not even my Johnny\u2019s decades of hard living, a million miles on the road, drug addiction, and a hip replacement\u2014<\/i>prepared me for his death last year as I undertook a road trip to see him outside of Burlington, Vermont.<\/span><\/p>\n

Fans and loved ones owe a lot to Paul Nelson for shepherding Johnny through the final, drug-free years of his life. Nelson came to Johnny\u2019s aide from the world of metal, a respected \u201cshredder,\u201d in that sphere, said Shurman.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI suspect Nelson will gravitate back to the kind of music he was playing before he joined Johnny and away from the blues,\u201d said Shurman as we walked from a restaurant in the Loop to Bob Koester\u2019s Jazz Record Mart around the corner.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWithout Johnny, you will gradually move away from the blues.\u201d\u00a0\"The<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Tombstone Is My Pillow \u201cIn Johnny\u2019s voice I could hear the manifestation of my essence \u2026\u201d \u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":249,"featured_media":26586,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3220,1209],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-delta-2","category-obituaries"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/alvarezwinterannFEAT.jpg?fit=620%2C349&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/249"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thelocalvoice.net\/oxford\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}