Habe gerade einen interessanten Artikel über Johnny Winter im "Guitar World Magazine" gefunden.
Leider in engllisch und reichlich lang. Aber man erfährt so einiges über seine Probleme in den letzten jahren und dass es seit 2005 wieder aufwärts geht.
Bis die Tage
Marquee
The trials of Johnny Winter After years of substance abuse and bad business deals, blues legend Johnny Winter gets a new lease on life-and fights to reclaim his lost legacy. By Sean McDevitt
It's sometime after midnight on a warm August weekend, and Johnny Winter sits in contemplative silence as the road passes beneath the wheels of his tour bus. Less than an hour ago, he was exiting a Delaware stage, having just completed a simmering 75-minute set that closed out a weekend blues festival in the city of Wilmington, and now is his time to unwind. Music from a 20-gig iPod loaded with more than 4,500 classic blues tunes fills the air, and a pack of Marlboros and Winter's trusty black lighter sit before him, beckoning.
If you'd witnessed the scene immediately after the show, you could forgive the 63-year-old Texan for wanting to quietly decompress. One by one, fans waited in line for a chance to meet their hero, many of whom remembered him not as a bluesman but as an early-Seventies arena-rock favorite. But for most of them, simply meeting Winter wasn't enough. Few could resist the urge to bend his ear about the past. There was the rotund, balding, 50-something man in glasses, tanked but still semi-lucid, who leaned through a window and into the bus where Winter sat, his speech slurred. "Hey Johnny! I saw you in Philadelphia, dude! 1973! You blew the fucking doors off the place…"
Not more than two minutes later, a smiling woman took her turn: "Um, Johnny, hi! I doubt you remember me, but one time I met you backstage at a show in New York. It was about '76 or so. Do I look familiar?"
On and on it went. "Johnny! Saw you with Muddy Waters in '77, man! You guys played 'Hoochie Coochie Man!'" Once Winter's window was mercifully closed and the curtain drawn, the bus began to roll. The hordes of people quickly disappeared from view, and the sudden stillness was downright eerie.
"We see this at the autograph signings at the end of every show," explains Paul Nelson, Winter's rhythm guitarist and the man who has guided his career since late 2005. "They want to touch him, talk to him, grab his jewelry, whatever. He sees these people get really intense, and he hears people talk about how, when and where they saw him, or how his music changed their lives. But he's like, 'How can my music do that to somebody?' He just doesn't get the enormity of it all."
The concept of wanting a piece of Johnny Winter isn't a new thing; it's always been this way. Dick Shurman, the producer of several Winter albums, including 2004's Grammy-nominated I'm a Bluesman, remembers hanging out with Winter in Chicago in the mid Eighties. "Everybody wanted to mess with him or interact with him somehow if he tried to go anywhere," Shurman recalls. "We'd have to find him refuge from people. Everybody wanted to fight him, fuck him, give him a tape, or get him high. Anything except leave him alone."
'Everybody's got a story' Back on the bus, Winter, now comfortably ensconced, lights a cigarette and begins to softly sing along to an old Son House tune. Music is his thing. If he's awake, he's listening. Rare is a Johnny Winter response that exceeds a single sentence, but the many famous musicians with whom he's crossed paths often serve as the best catalysts for the kind of tantalizing detail that's almost agonizingly absent in his dialogue.
A Freddie King tune comes on. "I jammed with him at a place called the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin in '68," Winter says. "We had a lot of fun." Later during the drive, someone from his entourage asks Winter about Muddy Waters. "Of all the people I played with, I'd say Muddy impressed me the most," he says. "I was real proud of the stuff we did together."
Eventually, Jimi Hendrix's name comes up. "I never got to know him that well," Winter says. "Mainly we just jammed a lot." Then Jim Morrison. ("He was drunk all the time!") And Woodstock. ("It was really muddy. Crowded too.")
Winter is also asked about the scene immediately after his performance earlier that evening: The people. The things they say. The stories they tell. Is it overwhelming to be constantly prodded about the past? "Everybody's got a story, I guess," he says with a laugh. "But some of those people can get a little crazy sometimes."
For better or -- more often -- worse, many aspects of Johnny Winter's life have been about such extremes: his albinism; his prodigious guitar virtuosity; the mammoth six-figure deal he famously signed with Columbia Records after Rolling Stone ran a glowing story about him in 1968; the critical acclaim of seminal albums like Johnny Winter, Second Winter and The Progressive Blues Experiment; and the depths of his noted bouts with heroin, pills and alcohol.
As a general rule, there's very little about Winter that rests in the middle. Things are either magic or tragic, and rarely in between. But for all of Winter's career ups and downs, perhaps nothing rivals the level of grotesque exploitation Nelson says the guitarist endured at the hands of his former manager, Theodore "Teddy" Slatus.
Slatus managed Winter for more than two decades before Winter fired him in a letter dated August 25, 2005 ("faxed over at the stroke of noon, just like in a spaghetti western," Nelson quips), and Slatus' handling of Winter's career and finances is now at the center of a multimillion-dollar claim that the guitarist's lawyers -- barring some kind of settlement -- were preparing in late 2006 against his late manager's estate. (Slatus took a fatal, drunken plunge down a flight of stairs on November 3, 2005, less than four months after the passing of his 51-year-old wife.) The pending legal action, among other things, accuses Slatus of breach of contract and violation of fiduciary duties. But the missing millions tell only part of the story.
'I want him back on that stuff!' Johnny Winter's "lost years" began way back in the early Nineties. A recovering heroin addict, he acknowledges that he began taking anti-depressants that, when combined with his ongoing methadone treatments (and a penchant for straight vodka), made a bad situation worse. Spiraling out of control, Winter spent most of his waking hours high as a kite, and his career, not to mention his health, suffered mightily. By the dawn of the 21st century, Johnny Winter, once a seminal figure in the world of blues and rock, a titan of the guitar, seemed to be on a collision course with a sad, tragic ending.
Did Slatus, Winter's then-manager, willfully supply the anti-depressants in an attempt to keep Winter -- and his earnings -- under his thumb? In all likelihood, no one will ever definitively know: Slatus is dead, and Winter, even if he wanted to talk, probably couldn't remember the specifics. But Nelson, who forged a fast friendship with Winter after meeting the guitarist back in 2000 at Carriage House Recording Studios in Stamford, Connecticut (where Nelson was recording at the time), thinks the answer is yes.
"Nobody can say for sure that was the original intent," Nelson says, "but I think it grew into something like that. It wasn't until Johnny was just about off the anti-depressants [in 2004] that Teddy called Johnny's doctor, once Johnny had started to wake up, and said, 'There's something wrong with Johnny! He's asking a lot of questions!' The doctor, meanwhile, was weaning Johnny off the anti-depressants, and Teddy told him, 'I want him back on that stuff!' That's when I knew."
By that time, Slatus, an alcoholic who'd been in and out of rehab, was battling his own demons, and Nelson, a top-flight guitarist and established session man in his own right (and one who eschews the word "manager"), was putting aside his own musical ambitions to fill Winter's managerial void.
"I was working with the doctor then, screening Johnny every week as he got off the pills to see if it was affecting him or hurting him," Nelson says. "But for his manager to say that he's got to go back on the stuff, then something's wrong."
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) und natürlich die letzte Zugabe: Highway 61 !
...und mir eben diese Musikrichtung so richtig schmackhaft gemacht haben...ganz nach dem Motto "Geben und Nehmen" ...wir Schwestern führten die Jungs in die Altenpflege ein und diese uns in die Musik des Blues... 
, scheint aber nicht allzuviel zu machen zur Zeit .
... die Sendung hieß Tracks und lief vor der Preisverleihung. Wiederholung s.Posting von Briankeith bzw. hier:
Tuesday, May 22nd 2012, 8:11am
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