I knew we’d never develop a bond if our conversations were one-sided and my visits ended when I shut off the recorder. It took time to develop a friendship with Johnny at first I was just another journalist asking questions. When I asked if he forgave me, he smiled and said yes, and I began the interview. “Yeah, that was a drag,” he said in his inimitable Southern drawl. So I set up my tape recorder on the couch next to Johnny, sat down at the other end, and said I was sorry. I didn’t know what to do after she gave him another dirty look and stormed out of the room.
To her credit, she said it wasn’t my fault and that it had been a sweet gesture. “That’s not me,” she said, handing the photo back and giving Johnny a dirty look. I printed and framed it for my next visit, but her reaction wasn’t what I had expected. It was difficult to tell which one of us was more nervous, so I made small talk with his wife Susan, telling her I had seen a great photo of her with Johnny and Muddy on Muddy Waters’ website. When I began interviewing Johnny on Saturday nights in his home in January 2003, he stood up when I entered the room like a true Southern gentleman. He said he had talked to other writers, but chose me because “You have heart and you really care about Johnny.” It took another 15 months before Slatus made it official.
It was on the day before Septemthat Slatus and I finally entered into a handshake agreement (actually he kissed my hand) to make me Johnny’s biographer. As I always say, “Everybody has a Johnny Winter story and some of them are even true.” I was determined to tell Johnny’s story with his input during his lifetime, rather than leave it to biographers forced to rely on the often self-serving memories of peripheral players after he was gone. I kept asking and he kept turning me down, but I never abandoned my quest. But Slatus said Johnny was still young and they wanted to wait until he won a Grammy. Johnny’s life story had all the ups and downs and twists and turns of great literature and, in 1985, I approached his manager Teddy Slatus about writing his biography. He was such a charming, larger-than-life character I felt I wanted to know more about him. When I asked him about how he’d practised his scream by yelling into a pillow as a kid, he grabbed a small brown pillow off the seat and screamed into it. Smoking his trademark Kool and sipping on a glass of vodka in the back of the bus, he pulled out a small velvet sack and proudly displayed the last remaining slide from a 12-foot piece of tubing he bought at a plumbing-supply store in 1965. Impressed by his honesty, affinity for storytelling, philosophical approach to life and self-effacing sense of humour, I set up another interview for a Johnny Winter special on my WCCC radio show in Hartford so I could meet him in his tour bus after the show. When I first interviewed Johnny by phone in 1984, he had just released Guitar Slinger on Alligator Records and celebrated his 40th birthday by getting the Screamin’ Demon tattoo on his chest. I had to pick him up off the floor and out of the place − it was hilarious.” That was pretty much the end of the song. He leaned back to hit this note and the stool fell backwards, he fell into the drums and knocked them over on top of the drummer. He had his top hat on and his fringed jacket. I’ll sit on a stool and sing and you play guitar.’ So we got up and he sat on a stool. You’re too drunk, you can’t stand up, don’t do it.’ He said, ‘Come on, Pat, just one song. “We’re in there five minutes, and the band says, ‘We see Johnny Winter, let’s get him up to play a song!’ Johnny stands up, ‘Yeah!’ I pull him back in the chair and say, ‘Johnny, no. I’m too drunk − I can’t stand up,’” Rush recalls. “We sat at a table at The Ivanhoe and Johnny leaned over and said, ‘Pat, promise me that you won’t let me get me get up and play.
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