Beaumont legend Edgar Winter honors ‘Brother Johnny,’ his musical hero
Fifty years separate the first and most recent Grammy nominations earned by Edgar Winter. The first time, he drew two nods for “Frankenstein,” his iconic ’70s instrumental, but saw Eumir Deodato and Gato Barbieri take home Grammys that night. Fast forward a halfcentury: Winter last month won a golden gramophone for best contemporary blues album for “Brother Johnny.”
Depending on one’s accounting, “Brother Johnny,” released on Quarto Valley Records, was eight years or one lifetime in the making. Winter’s big brother, blues great Johnny Winter, died in 2014. “Brother Johnny” found the younger sibling working out his grief and paying tribute to his first musical hero by covering songs associated with Johnny, assisted by guests including Ringo Starr, Billy Gibbons, Keb’ Mo’, Derek Trucks, Joe Walsh and Kenny Wayne Shepherd, among others.
The Winter brothers grew up in Beaumont to two musically-inclined parents, who placed ukuleles in their hands while they were young. As teenagers the brothers would visit Beaumont clubs to see blues and R&B stars like Bobby “Blue” Bland, Ray Charles and B.B. King. The Winter brothers developed their own connection that Edgar calls “telepathic,” and they collaborated well into the ‘70s.
While Johnny kept to the blues, Edgar’s trail was full of offshoots into jazz, blues, R&B, pop, rock and any other sound that caught his ear. “In some ways, it’s all the blues,” Winter says. “It’s a pervasive thing. You hear it in every form of popular music that exists today.”
Winter, 76, is preparing to head on a spring tour with Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band, though the itinerary won’t bring him back to his native Texas. He discussed his tribute to his brother, the Grammy and some of his first musical memories as a kid growing up in the Golden Triangle.
Q: It’s a cliché for a Grammy winner to say “Awards aren’t the reason I made this album…” But I think you have a particularly strong claim to such a sentiment.
A: It was such a surreal moment, and still hard for me to grasp. Honestly, I never expected at my age and at this stage in my career to have any music on the charts ever again, much less win a Grammy. It takes me back, too. Johnny and I were so different in terms of our approach to music. He had the drive, determination and ambition as far back as I can remember. He was going to be a star. He read all the music magazines. He had a huge record collection. He knew every song. He was Cool Daddy Winter with the shades. I was the quiet kid who played all these instruments. My dream was to learn as much about chords, harmony, rhythm, and pass it on to others. I just wanted to play with
people I admired, and first on that list was Johnny. He’s still my all-time musical hero. So doing the album was an expression of love, from start to finish. I did it for Johnny and for our mom and dad who have passed on. I just wanted to perpetuate the Winter name. But as you say, I never thought much about awards. I just hope maybe more people will hear it and go back and listen to Johnny. It’s a tribute to him and to the blues and to Texas music, all passed down generation to generation. Our dad showed us chords on the ukulele when I was 6 years old.
Q: I read somewhere that after Ira Louvin died, his brother Charlie would still sing their songs, and when
he’d get to the harmonies, he’d step to the side of the microphone to make room for his brother.
A:
There’s a bond in brotherhood that’s different, when you grow up and learn and play music together. Johnny and I had an almost telepathic musical communication. It started out with call and response. He’d play guitar licks and I’d sing them back. I knew all his licks. So it was easy for us to do those kinds of things together. And that followed me through my career. I’d do that with every guitar player that would come into the band. On the other hand, you also learn new stuff from new guitar players. It wasn’t a one-way street. But I was so accustomed to doing it with Johnny, I’d try to form similar bonds. That’s really what a band is about: developing that chemistry.
Q: The Texas thing is interesting to me. Johnny told me he absorbed a lot of the sound here, but he also felt pulled to Chicago. That he developed a better appreciation for blues in Texas as he got older. It occurs to me in addition to playing these instruments, you have orchestrated a lot of the music you make. A sort of updated version of what Joe Scott was doing in Houston.
A:
What a great musician and a great band. And I didn’t appreciate fully the unique character of the music in Texas until I moved away. I took it for granted. I was oblivious to how great the local musicians were. I came to New York thinking the greatest musicians in the world were there. And there were plenty of great musicians, but nothing like a “New York sound.” To me, New York to Texas is like chicken soup to gumbo. Chicken soup is good and tasty. But I’ll have the gumbo, please. I was in New York. I went to the West Coast. I went to Boston to Berklee, a great music school. I looked all over and the realization struck me: Man, this is just not the same as the guys back home.
Q: “I’ll Drown in My Own Tears” is one of my favorites on the record. It has a different vibe.
A:
That song for me is the most emotional on the record. Johnny did that on his first Columbia record, and I always felt like he did that song especially for me. He knew how much I loved Ray Charles and wanted to do something on a style I loved. When it came time to do that song, I recorded everything at home. It was late at night. I was all alone. My wife was in the bedroom. And I just felt like I was singing it to Johnny, singing it back to him the way he sang it to me so many years ago when he was so young and vital. But now I was singing it to him, having passed, and for our mom and dad, who’d passed. And these bandmates . . . all these guys like Jerry LaCroix, Dan Hartman and Ronnie Montrose from the Edgar Winter Group who had died. I got choked up and I broke down, but I got through it.
I don’t like to listen to my own albums. That to me is the height of arrogance. But this album has so many beautiful guest performances. And in a sense, it’s my album. But it feels more like Johnny’s album. When I put it on, it takes me away. I don’t know what else to say. To me that’s what music is. It takes you somewhere or it doesn’t. When I put this record on, it takes me away. It reminds me of how I felt about music when I was young. Somebody once asked me what was my first memory of music. It makes me think of that.