Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition) by Mary Lou Sullivan Page B

laugh. “That was the worst possible thing to hear—‘You don’t have any jobs; go back home for a while.’ Sets were forty-five minutes on, fifteen off—10 to 2 AM, and sometimes 9 to 3 AM. The band members made twenty-five bucks a night, and I made fifty dollars because I was the leader. The agency took twenty-five percent. We got paid once a week. We didn’t make much money, but enough to get by. We were young and having a good time.”
    The band rented a U-Haul trailer for their equipment and hitched it to the back of Ikey’s car. “We could’ve bought two or three real nice trailers for all of the rent we paid,” says Johnny. “We really never got far enough ahead money-wise to buy the things most bands have. We had a homemade PA set, U-Haul trailers, and old cars.”
    Yet the excitement of being away from home for the first time, traveling to new cities, and playing clubs for appreciative audiences—especially women—was ample compensation for any sacrifices the band made.
    “Down South we had a pretty big following,” says Johnny. “We had groupies and I did as good as anybody. If you brought ’em back to the room, somebody would go in another room for a while. It wasn’t an overnight thing.”
    Edgar was the first band member to start growing his hair long and combing it into bangs; Johnny and the rest of the band quickly followed suit. Unfortunately, it didn’t bode well with Southern audiences and club owners. The band’s set list remained the same—predominately soul and R&B, with songs by James Brown, Wilson Pickett, Otis Redding, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. But the long hair, black turtlenecks, iridescent bluish-gold collarless suits, and suede low-heeled boots caused them to lose a lot of gigs.
    “None of the club owners were honest, really—just some of ’em were better than others,” says Johnny. “I played one club for a week—five days straight—and didn’t get paid. That’s the only time that’s ever happened. The only reason he didn’t pay us was because we had long hair. The audience seemed to like us better when we had short hair combed back. He paid us when we had short hair, but said with long hair, ‘It’s not workin‘—I’m not gonna pay you.’”
    As songs by British artists started climbing the charts, the band incorporated them into their set list. “We played everything on the radio, and all of the British Invasion—Beatles, Rolling Stones, Herman’s Hermits, Dave Clark Five,” said Edgar. “We played everything out there. ‘Midnight Hour,’ ‘Knock on Wood,’ ‘Hold On, I’m Coming,’ were right up there.
    “We used to do ‘Honky Tonk,’ a Bill Doggett sax song that was probably one of the biggest instrumentals ever in the South. Johnny did a killer version of ‘Cryin” by Roy Orbison. We did a lot of the Beatles songs too. We did Little Richard and Chuck Berry songs, James Brown’s ‘Out of Sight,’ and ‘Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag.’ We didn’t do much blues, honestly. The only traditional blues song was ‘Baby, What You Want Me to Do,’ the old Jimmy Reed song,” Edgar added.
    “We played songs by the Rolling Stones—‘Satisfaction,’ ‘19th Nervous Breakdown,’” says Johnny. “I picked the songs by what was on the radio and what albums were good. I made all the decisions—I was the leader and that was just the way it was. A lot of our songs were R&B. I liked R&B but I wanted to be playin’ blues— real blues. Most white people didn’t know what blues was, and if you didn’t play music the people wanted to hear, you wouldn’t keep the job very long.”
    It didn’t take much to start a fight in a juke joint. Longhaired hippies and musicians were a prime target—especially musicians that wouldn’t take requests to placate drunken patrons.
    “I used my white Les Paul to hit people,” says Johnny with a laugh. “I was lucky enough that it didn’t happen a lot, but it happened in a club in Galveston in the