Chicken-Soup Freak

Shades of Tiny Tim! The hottest recording discovery in the land these days is a tall, skinny, cross-eyed albino blues guitarist with limp, shoulder-length cotton white hair. He may look like a hippie Ichabod Crane, but Johnny Winter, 25, is something else. Columbia Records has just signed him to a contract that could pay him $600,000 over the next five years, and concert managers have already begun to book him for as much as $7,500 a night. Yet three months ago, Johnny was bouncing from one dingy Texas joint to another for maybe $50 in a lean week.

Wow. Or, as Johnny himself puts it: "How can it be?" The answer is partly that blues are big these days, partly that Johnny Winter is the swingingest, funkiest new white blues singer to come out of the South in years. His electric guitar crackles with a kind of voltage that can only come from the gut, not an AC outlet. His singing ranges from a harsh, staccato yell to a high soprano wail. Many of his songs are his own--improvised on the spot, or written down the night before. Like Leland, Mississippi Blues, which he sang to a crowd of shouting enthusiasts recently at Manhattan's Fillmore East:

When I was young, man, you know,

and free from harm, You know I would sit right there,

people, on my daddy's cotton farm.

Giant ass woman, you're just

wasting time, You can't never keep me 'cause I

have a rambling mind.

Primitive Concept. Johnny's blues lyrics are not the most skillful ever written, but that does not matter to him. "The blues really isn't that worked out or put together," he says. "It's emotional. It's what you feel at the time." What Johnny feels at the time is likely to be a kind of sliding, "bottleneck" guitar playing in the classic twelve-bar blues pattern or keening "harp" (harmonica) stylings imitative of Little Walter. "When I'm playing without a band, I don't change chords when I'm supposed to--I change chords when I feel like it. That's a primitive concept, but if it feels good and sounds good to me, then I'll play it."

The blues began feeling good to Johnny at the age of eleven, when he first heard the records of Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' Hopkins on the radio down home in Beaumont, Texas. He began playing along on a hand-me-down guitar from his grandfather. Three years later, Johnny, 14, and Brother Edgar, 11, had their own band, Johnny and the Jammers. They made $8 a night for gigs across the border in Louisiana, where clubs were more lenient about age requirements. Edgar recalls that though Johnny only took enough lessons to pick up a few chords, he would practice four to six hours a day. "Johnny always said he was great," says Edgar. "He just wanted other people to know it too."

Living Is Trouble. To play the blues, Johnny had to go to the black clubs. "In those days, I didn't get any resentment because I was white," he says. "They knew I wasn't putting on and that I loved the music and I could play it as good as they could. It was great." Today, he is puzzled by the notion that only Negroes have suffered enough to sing the blues. "I've had trouble too, and everybody has trouble. Just living is a different kind of trouble." Living for Johnny meant dealing with a minority problem of his own: "Being an albino is hard, and when you're younger, it's a lot harder. When they said 'Hey, Whitey,' it was just like calling someone a nigger. They called me anything--fag, queer, freak."

In the world of rock, where a distinguishing trait of any kind is the ultimate asset, Johnny Winter is a "chicken-soup freak" of the first order. Explains Steve Paul, 27, owner of a Manhattan nightclub called The Scene, and now his manager: "Johnny is a freak in the sense of being a unique individual, and chicken soup in the sense that he is a human being and nice as well." Last November Paul read about Johnny in an underground newspaper, dashed down to see him, brought him back to The Scene, then watched him knock 'em dead at the Fillmore East. Immediately, the word about Johnny began to spread through the pop underground, and four major record companies began bidding for his services. Columbia won, and Johnny's quick climb to fame was done. Pretty good for a guy who had doubts about coming to New York City in the first place. Recalls Johnny: "But I figured why not? It's a free plane trip."

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