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Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter
Author Mary Lou Sullivan sat with Johnny Winter for hours of exclusive, no-holds-barred interviews, covering the guitar slinger's entire career. From toughing it out in Texas to his appearance at Woodstock, his affair with Janis Joplin, his stadium-filling tours, and washing out on drugs and the temptations of the road before finally fulfilling his dream of becoming a 100-percent pure bluesman, resurrecting the career of Muddy Waters, and winning a Grammy Award for his effort, this is a raucous roller coaster of story. Rolling Stone magazine has called Johnny Winter one of the greatest guitar players of all time. Ripped off and beaten down by unscrupulous managers, strung out, living the extreme highs and extreme lows of an uncompromising musician, Johnny is a true rock 'n' roll survivor. Signing with Columbia in 1969 for the largest advance ever paid a musician (which led to his appearance at Woodstock, recently reissued in the deluxe Woodstock Experience box set) he has jammed with guitar heavies Hendrix, Clapton, and the Allman Brothers. He is a legend and an icon, paving the way for fellow Texas superstars Stevie Ray Vaughan and ZZ Top. Along the way he has gone from boom to bust and back again, but has never lost his lust for his own brand of blues. Still on the road, playing hundreds of gigs a year to his devoted, adoring fans, Johnny, like this book, is the real deal.
- GenresMusicBiographyNonfiction
412 pages, Kindle Edition
First published April 1, 2010
17 people are currently reading
72 people want to read
About the author
Mary-Lou Sullivan
1 bookMary Lou Sullivan is an award winning journalist, author, public relations professional and former radio show host. Her first authorized biography, Raisin' Cain - The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Backbeat Books, May 2010), earned popular and critical acclaim, as well as prestigious awards for the quality of her writing and her research.
Her second authorized biography, "Everything's Bigger in Texas - The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman" (Backbeat Books, November 2017) chronicles the life of another Texas icon.
Best known as an irreverent cigar-chomping Jewish country-and-western singer, turned author, turned politician, Kinky Friedman has dined on monkey brains in the jungles of Borneo, supped with presidents, and vacationed with Bob Dylan in the tiny fishing village of Yelapa, Mexico.
A satirist who loves pushing the envelope, he's been attacked onstage, received bomb threats, and put on the only show in Austin City Limits' history deemed too offensive to air.
From the 1970s music scene in L.A. with Tom Waits and the Band, to political platforms advocating legalized marijuana, to friendships with John Belushi, Joseph Heller, Don Imus, Willie Nelson, Dwight Yoakam, and Billy Bob Thornton, Sullivan's biography is the candid account --- based on dozens and years of interviews --- of the larger-than-life Texan who is still writing books and songs, recording albums, and performing for enthusiastic audiences throughout the world.
Her second authorized biography, "Everything's Bigger in Texas - The Life and Times of Kinky Friedman" (Backbeat Books, November 2017) chronicles the life of another Texas icon.
Best known as an irreverent cigar-chomping Jewish country-and-western singer, turned author, turned politician, Kinky Friedman has dined on monkey brains in the jungles of Borneo, supped with presidents, and vacationed with Bob Dylan in the tiny fishing village of Yelapa, Mexico.
A satirist who loves pushing the envelope, he's been attacked onstage, received bomb threats, and put on the only show in Austin City Limits' history deemed too offensive to air.
From the 1970s music scene in L.A. with Tom Waits and the Band, to political platforms advocating legalized marijuana, to friendships with John Belushi, Joseph Heller, Don Imus, Willie Nelson, Dwight Yoakam, and Billy Bob Thornton, Sullivan's biography is the candid account --- based on dozens and years of interviews --- of the larger-than-life Texan who is still writing books and songs, recording albums, and performing for enthusiastic audiences throughout the world.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
September 13, 2015
I just finished “Raisin’ Cain”, the authorized biography of Johnny Winter, and I have very mixed feelings. The book is well done and well researched. Kudos to Mary-Lou Sullivan who did a fantastic job on the background research. The time she spent working on Johnny’s life is obvious and the narratives seem accurate and heart felt. Further, the music and discs Johnny released are mostly well covered and the insight is welcome. I learned a great deal about the tunes and how they were recorded. But the elephant is the room is a big, big issue....
Frankly, Johnny Winter was not a person I would have ever let in my office or car; not to mention my house. He was a weird, misogynist, obsessive/compulsive who happened to play guitar better than virtually anyone else I had ever heard. He was simply amazing during parts of his career. But because he could not control his impulses; not only his fans, but his friends and family were subjected to Johnny’s ADD issues. This is really a sad story about co-dependency, and it was hard to read because of all the mistakes one can make in life.
BUT, the book.... It is very, very good. If you can get past the subject’s odd life, the writing is compelling and the research is excellent. The discography is particularly helpful and well researched. I cannot give it a 5 star review because it is like looking at a car accident... It’s just too painful for this fan. RIP Johnny.
Frankly, Johnny Winter was not a person I would have ever let in my office or car; not to mention my house. He was a weird, misogynist, obsessive/compulsive who happened to play guitar better than virtually anyone else I had ever heard. He was simply amazing during parts of his career. But because he could not control his impulses; not only his fans, but his friends and family were subjected to Johnny’s ADD issues. This is really a sad story about co-dependency, and it was hard to read because of all the mistakes one can make in life.
BUT, the book.... It is very, very good. If you can get past the subject’s odd life, the writing is compelling and the research is excellent. The discography is particularly helpful and well researched. I cannot give it a 5 star review because it is like looking at a car accident... It’s just too painful for this fan. RIP Johnny.
March 8, 2013
This amazing book was made with the full cooperation of its subject.
On the one hand, this is a sad story of music-biz exploitation and codependency; the consequences of his drug addiction; the rigors and anxiety of stardom; and the tough but few compromises he ever made along the way.
It is nevertheless colorful and inspiring, from one so singularly dedicated to the cause and mastery of the blues. Johnny Winter added incalculably to the oeuvre of this most American idiom. His musical accomplishments, his toughness and the engrossing story of overcoming the hardships of albinism are inspiring.
Although he arguably had a libertine attitude towards women, he never made excuses for himself. You get the sense that, unlike so many countless posers and peers, at least he walked it like he talked it. After reading this, you'll listen to his lyrics with new ears. The swagger and braggadocio of the blues always invites speculation - he puts a new twist on it!
He is to be commended for his unvarnished honesty and humility; as is the author for getting this important story so lovingly told. Wonderful! It puts to shame so many other self-serving music biographies. Definitely the real deal; something we all can relate to.
On the one hand, this is a sad story of music-biz exploitation and codependency; the consequences of his drug addiction; the rigors and anxiety of stardom; and the tough but few compromises he ever made along the way.
It is nevertheless colorful and inspiring, from one so singularly dedicated to the cause and mastery of the blues. Johnny Winter added incalculably to the oeuvre of this most American idiom. His musical accomplishments, his toughness and the engrossing story of overcoming the hardships of albinism are inspiring.
Although he arguably had a libertine attitude towards women, he never made excuses for himself. You get the sense that, unlike so many countless posers and peers, at least he walked it like he talked it. After reading this, you'll listen to his lyrics with new ears. The swagger and braggadocio of the blues always invites speculation - he puts a new twist on it!
He is to be commended for his unvarnished honesty and humility; as is the author for getting this important story so lovingly told. Wonderful! It puts to shame so many other self-serving music biographies. Definitely the real deal; something we all can relate to.
March 2, 2018
I’ve always been a fan of Johnny Winter’s music, but I never knew much about his life before reading this book and watching the documentary, Down & Dirty. I’d recommend both to anyone who has been a fan of Winter’s music. The book in particular will add the kind of depth to your experience of his music that knowing where it comes from can add.
Mary Lou Sullivan was Winter’s friend, not just his biographer. And she wrote with Winter’s cooperation — he even wrote an approving Foreword to the book. In it, he says, “To whitewash my life would have been horrible.” And Sullivan didn’t cover up the bad parts — the drug and general health problems, Winter's regrettable treatment of some of his bandmates and the women in his life, and the nightmarish treatment of Winter himself by at least one of his managers (Teddy Slatus).
Sullivan writes more like a friend, telling her friend’s story, than like a dispassionate journalist. I think that gives the book an emotional dimension that you don’t find in “just a biography."
The book is organized into three parts. The first covers Winter’s childhood and early part of his career. He was born into an upper middle class family, and both he and his brother Edgar were encouraged to pursue music. Their dad sang in a barbershop quartet. Johnny learned to play ukulele, among other instruments, and listened to the family collection of pop songs (maybe explaining Winter's early recording of “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” that I’ve always wondered about).
Of course, there was Winter’s albinism. He was picked on, bullied, and that sense of simply being different gave him the personal challenges of youth that his family’s comfortable economic situation didn’t.
Rock and roll was making its mark as Johnny grew up, and, although he was always drawn to the blues, he followed it. That tension between the commercial appeal of rock and Winter’s lifelong love of the blues is a theme throughout his career.
Winter went seemingly from nobody to famous musician suddenly. He joined or put together local bands for a while, like most, but when he broke he broke big. But the rockstar life seems to have undone him. Sullivan gives Winter’s own account of the drugs, groupies, and the fast pace. He went from aspiring Texas bluesman to rockstar rubbing elbows and other things with Janis Joplin, jamming with Jimi Hendrix, hanging out at the same clubs as the Stones, the Doors, . . . all the gods of sixties and early seventies rock and roll.
Parts one and two of the book are divided by Winter’s seeking treatment for heroin addiction in 1971 and a pretty long hiatus from recording while he was trying to get himself turned around. Quitting cold didn’t work, and Winter found what he thought was the solution in methadone.
For a while, Winter was able to devote himself to the blues, as he’d always wanted. His collaborations with Muddy Waters in the 70s revived both their careers and really helped Winter to establish himself as a blues musician. To his great credit, I think, he tried to do similar projects with other older blues musicians who had never been paid what their work was worth. His work with Waters, and their personal relationship, was one of the highlights of Winter’s life. Sullivan conveys the passion both Waters and Winter felt for their relationship.
Those years, as Sullivan recounts them, seem to have been Winter’s best years in some ways. He wasn’t the rock star he had been, but he was doing what he loved, and he was successful. He had the standing to resist the pull from his manager at the time, Steve Paul, toward rock, as he hadn’t when he was younger. In truth, I gather from what Sullivan can tell us of Johnny’s own thinking, that that tension between commercial success and staying “true to the blues” was as much a struggle within Winter’s own heart as one between himself and his management.
Part 3 is pretty dark. All those years, even while Winter was playing the music he loved and attaining the success he sought as a blues player, he was on a very bad road. Sullivan writes that, while most methadone treatments are short term, meant to wean a user off of heroin, Winter really just turned a 2 year heroin addiction into a decades long methadone addiction.
By the mid 90s, his playing had deteriorated badly, and he lived in a fog. He was on powerful anti-anxiety medications as well as methadone, not a good mix at all. He had always been always skinny, and now he was skeletal. He had breakdowns. He spent two stretches in the hospital for anxiety treatments. He was a mess that his manager at this point, Slatus, was, according to Sullivan’s account, trying to milk for everything he could get out of him.
There was a four year gap in recording. The over-medication in particular seems to have been what turned the high-energy, creative Winter into the slow-moving, physically decrepit, and musically fogged Winter of the 90s.
In assessing Slatus’s role, we should keep in mind that he and the author had a pretty major conflict. Sullivan says, in the book’s Preface, that Slatus became “threatened” by her relationship with Winter and forbade him from having any further contact with her.
If Teddy Slatus is the villain of the story, Paul Nelson is a hero. Nelson extricated Winter from Slater’s grip, weaned him away from his medications (something that was still going on when this book was published), and got him healthy enough and coherent enough to make a real comeback.
Overall the story leaves me with the impression that, as great as Winter was, he was never what he could have been. It wasn’t just the drugs, it was also that temptation towards commercial success. If he’d been able to play the music he truly loved, the blues, all his life, and had he been able to keep the devil at bay, who knows.
Winter’s comeback was still underway at the time the book was published. It feels a little bittersweet — it was great to see him recover as well as he did, but it makes you wish he had never fallen so far. To her credit, Sullivan doesn’t cover the bad stuff up. It’s not all happy, but Winter says in the Foreword, “it’s exactly what happened."
Mary Lou Sullivan was Winter’s friend, not just his biographer. And she wrote with Winter’s cooperation — he even wrote an approving Foreword to the book. In it, he says, “To whitewash my life would have been horrible.” And Sullivan didn’t cover up the bad parts — the drug and general health problems, Winter's regrettable treatment of some of his bandmates and the women in his life, and the nightmarish treatment of Winter himself by at least one of his managers (Teddy Slatus).
Sullivan writes more like a friend, telling her friend’s story, than like a dispassionate journalist. I think that gives the book an emotional dimension that you don’t find in “just a biography."
The book is organized into three parts. The first covers Winter’s childhood and early part of his career. He was born into an upper middle class family, and both he and his brother Edgar were encouraged to pursue music. Their dad sang in a barbershop quartet. Johnny learned to play ukulele, among other instruments, and listened to the family collection of pop songs (maybe explaining Winter's early recording of “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” that I’ve always wondered about).
Of course, there was Winter’s albinism. He was picked on, bullied, and that sense of simply being different gave him the personal challenges of youth that his family’s comfortable economic situation didn’t.
Rock and roll was making its mark as Johnny grew up, and, although he was always drawn to the blues, he followed it. That tension between the commercial appeal of rock and Winter’s lifelong love of the blues is a theme throughout his career.
Winter went seemingly from nobody to famous musician suddenly. He joined or put together local bands for a while, like most, but when he broke he broke big. But the rockstar life seems to have undone him. Sullivan gives Winter’s own account of the drugs, groupies, and the fast pace. He went from aspiring Texas bluesman to rockstar rubbing elbows and other things with Janis Joplin, jamming with Jimi Hendrix, hanging out at the same clubs as the Stones, the Doors, . . . all the gods of sixties and early seventies rock and roll.
Parts one and two of the book are divided by Winter’s seeking treatment for heroin addiction in 1971 and a pretty long hiatus from recording while he was trying to get himself turned around. Quitting cold didn’t work, and Winter found what he thought was the solution in methadone.
For a while, Winter was able to devote himself to the blues, as he’d always wanted. His collaborations with Muddy Waters in the 70s revived both their careers and really helped Winter to establish himself as a blues musician. To his great credit, I think, he tried to do similar projects with other older blues musicians who had never been paid what their work was worth. His work with Waters, and their personal relationship, was one of the highlights of Winter’s life. Sullivan conveys the passion both Waters and Winter felt for their relationship.
Those years, as Sullivan recounts them, seem to have been Winter’s best years in some ways. He wasn’t the rock star he had been, but he was doing what he loved, and he was successful. He had the standing to resist the pull from his manager at the time, Steve Paul, toward rock, as he hadn’t when he was younger. In truth, I gather from what Sullivan can tell us of Johnny’s own thinking, that that tension between commercial success and staying “true to the blues” was as much a struggle within Winter’s own heart as one between himself and his management.
Part 3 is pretty dark. All those years, even while Winter was playing the music he loved and attaining the success he sought as a blues player, he was on a very bad road. Sullivan writes that, while most methadone treatments are short term, meant to wean a user off of heroin, Winter really just turned a 2 year heroin addiction into a decades long methadone addiction.
By the mid 90s, his playing had deteriorated badly, and he lived in a fog. He was on powerful anti-anxiety medications as well as methadone, not a good mix at all. He had always been always skinny, and now he was skeletal. He had breakdowns. He spent two stretches in the hospital for anxiety treatments. He was a mess that his manager at this point, Slatus, was, according to Sullivan’s account, trying to milk for everything he could get out of him.
There was a four year gap in recording. The over-medication in particular seems to have been what turned the high-energy, creative Winter into the slow-moving, physically decrepit, and musically fogged Winter of the 90s.
In assessing Slatus’s role, we should keep in mind that he and the author had a pretty major conflict. Sullivan says, in the book’s Preface, that Slatus became “threatened” by her relationship with Winter and forbade him from having any further contact with her.
If Teddy Slatus is the villain of the story, Paul Nelson is a hero. Nelson extricated Winter from Slater’s grip, weaned him away from his medications (something that was still going on when this book was published), and got him healthy enough and coherent enough to make a real comeback.
Overall the story leaves me with the impression that, as great as Winter was, he was never what he could have been. It wasn’t just the drugs, it was also that temptation towards commercial success. If he’d been able to play the music he truly loved, the blues, all his life, and had he been able to keep the devil at bay, who knows.
Winter’s comeback was still underway at the time the book was published. It feels a little bittersweet — it was great to see him recover as well as he did, but it makes you wish he had never fallen so far. To her credit, Sullivan doesn’t cover the bad stuff up. It’s not all happy, but Winter says in the Foreword, “it’s exactly what happened."
September 3, 2014
A rockstar unlike any other in my youth. An albino with the name Winter and played Chuck Berry and Dylan better than a ring in a bell. Now that was strange , intriguing and cool. I never knew what was under the skin of winter and this book gives some good insight into his childhood struggles and inspiration to play with Edgar along for a Free Ride (who I had also seen in a little bar play). The Muddy Waters portion was a thrill as he meets a hero and again it just sucks how all these guys get 'over medicated' in the rock world. I thought the author tried to 'force' the idea of Winter wanting to be a respected Blues player. I got the point without everyone interviewed repeating it. And the getting ripped off by the manager went on a bit at the end. Overall, I got the feeling it was a harsh winter for Johnny but I guess you need to suffer to play the blues.
January 18, 2011
This is an authorized biography, but to Johnny Winters's credit, he allowed Mary Lou Sullivan to include lots of unflattering details about his problems with monogamy and sobriety, which eventually are resolved at the end of the book. Not without continuing methadone maintenance, though.
The book is especially good on JW's fanatical obsession with blues of all varieties, and the sections about Johnny's recording projects with Muddy Waters (and his subsequent tight friendship with the sublime Muddy) and Sonny Terry are among the high points of the book. High without heroin, too.
Another big plus is the great photos, which if you're anything like me will leave you wishing you had a chance to see Johnny and the Jammers rock a southern juke joint in the late 1960s.
The book is especially good on JW's fanatical obsession with blues of all varieties, and the sections about Johnny's recording projects with Muddy Waters (and his subsequent tight friendship with the sublime Muddy) and Sonny Terry are among the high points of the book. High without heroin, too.
Another big plus is the great photos, which if you're anything like me will leave you wishing you had a chance to see Johnny and the Jammers rock a southern juke joint in the late 1960s.
January 30, 2014
My full and detailed review is on my site: http://rnrchemist.blogspot.com/2014/0...
Great book, one of the better authorized bios I've read and really gives Johnny his due as a blues and rock legend.
Great book, one of the better authorized bios I've read and really gives Johnny his due as a blues and rock legend.
August 9, 2010
Hippie rockers in redneck Texas, rock & roll excess, disgusting management stories - great read!
February 11, 2021
This book would have been well served with an edit job, both to assemble the material better and to abridge what's here--leading to a more focused, terse text.
That said, for all its occasional rambling and sometimes repetitive emphasis on addictions and misadventures in rehab, etc., those who admire the music of this bluesman and know little about him will find much that's worthy here. The sequence is chronological, and the book's main boast may be comprehensiveness about where he was just when, doing what, and with whom.
A great deal of detail can be found about his early band members, the ins-and-outs of moving on from them, the intricacies about releases of early material by opportunists, etc.
Good reference lists are added at the end, such as when and where he collaborated with Jimi, Duane & the Allmans, SRV, etc.
Less fortunately, if you'd like more than bare-bones accounts of how well or poorly an album did .commercially. upon its release, you'll have to look elsewhere. If it's analysis of how deeply Winter wanted to stay loyal to what we call the blues, yet how hard he found it to veer clear of rocking releases--perhaps the thematic dichotomy of this book, and perhaps of his life--again: that ain't here babe. No, no, no.
It may perhaps result from how Winter gave this author full and open access, but the lingering impression is that the focus on him and his doings exceeds much reflection about, let alone a razor focus on, the key thing, the man's music.
Frankly, that's what I want in a book about a musician: a discussion of the music. A connoisseur showing if I'm on the money or all wrong (and how) to reckon that Leland Mississippi Blues, on 'Johnny Winter,' is a breakthrough song in anti-pop music. Or if she or he sees Winter's Drown in My Own Tears, as I do, as every bit as good as what Joplin was putting out. Or some account for why his three closing studio albums were outstanding, and if they were a return to the blues? What happened to prompt that? Do they rise to the level of his initial goals, or was there some compromise? Etc. Insights.
Expect only as described above.
That said, for all its occasional rambling and sometimes repetitive emphasis on addictions and misadventures in rehab, etc., those who admire the music of this bluesman and know little about him will find much that's worthy here. The sequence is chronological, and the book's main boast may be comprehensiveness about where he was just when, doing what, and with whom.
A great deal of detail can be found about his early band members, the ins-and-outs of moving on from them, the intricacies about releases of early material by opportunists, etc.
Good reference lists are added at the end, such as when and where he collaborated with Jimi, Duane & the Allmans, SRV, etc.
Less fortunately, if you'd like more than bare-bones accounts of how well or poorly an album did .commercially. upon its release, you'll have to look elsewhere. If it's analysis of how deeply Winter wanted to stay loyal to what we call the blues, yet how hard he found it to veer clear of rocking releases--perhaps the thematic dichotomy of this book, and perhaps of his life--again: that ain't here babe. No, no, no.
It may perhaps result from how Winter gave this author full and open access, but the lingering impression is that the focus on him and his doings exceeds much reflection about, let alone a razor focus on, the key thing, the man's music.
Frankly, that's what I want in a book about a musician: a discussion of the music. A connoisseur showing if I'm on the money or all wrong (and how) to reckon that Leland Mississippi Blues, on 'Johnny Winter,' is a breakthrough song in anti-pop music. Or if she or he sees Winter's Drown in My Own Tears, as I do, as every bit as good as what Joplin was putting out. Or some account for why his three closing studio albums were outstanding, and if they were a return to the blues? What happened to prompt that? Do they rise to the level of his initial goals, or was there some compromise? Etc. Insights.
Expect only as described above.
December 8, 2017
Mary Lou Sullivanin kirjoittama Johnny Winterin elämäkerta on tylsähkö ja puuduttava läpiluenta albiinon blueslegendan elämästä. Kirjassa painottuu Winterin ja hänen monikymmenvuotisen managerinsa symbioottinen ja kieroutunut suhde. Elämäkerran mukaan lähes kaikki Winterin uran managerit aivan viimeisiä lukuunottamatta lähinnä tuhosivat muusikon mahdollisuuden kasvaa todelliseksi bluesin superstaraksi.
Vasta aivan viimeisinä vuosinaan Winter pääsi eroon kolmekymmentä vuotta kestäneestä metadoni-hoidostaan, johon yhdistetyt mielialalääkkeet tekivät hänestä lähes soittokunnottoman. Vahinko, että muutaman vuoden tämän jälkeen aika jätti Winterin ja ehdimme saada vain viitteitä hänen uudelleen syttyneestä palosta kitaran soittamiseen.
Jotenkin elämäkerran sisältö ei tunnu olevan tasapainossa. Oleellisimmat tai lukijaa kiinnostavimmat asiat käydään hyvin pintapuolisesti. Sullivan keskittyy läpi koko kirjan todella pikkutarkasti kaikkiin Winterin soittokavereihin, jotka kuitenkin mielestäni ovat sivuseikka blueslegendan elämäkerrassa. Jotkut levyt käydään hyvin tarkasti läpi ja toiset taas lähes olankohautuksella.
Tasapainoton tekele siis.
Vasta aivan viimeisinä vuosinaan Winter pääsi eroon kolmekymmentä vuotta kestäneestä metadoni-hoidostaan, johon yhdistetyt mielialalääkkeet tekivät hänestä lähes soittokunnottoman. Vahinko, että muutaman vuoden tämän jälkeen aika jätti Winterin ja ehdimme saada vain viitteitä hänen uudelleen syttyneestä palosta kitaran soittamiseen.
Jotenkin elämäkerran sisältö ei tunnu olevan tasapainossa. Oleellisimmat tai lukijaa kiinnostavimmat asiat käydään hyvin pintapuolisesti. Sullivan keskittyy läpi koko kirjan todella pikkutarkasti kaikkiin Winterin soittokavereihin, jotka kuitenkin mielestäni ovat sivuseikka blueslegendan elämäkerrassa. Jotkut levyt käydään hyvin tarkasti läpi ja toiset taas lähes olankohautuksella.
Tasapainoton tekele siis.
August 1, 2021
I play guitar and Johnny Winter was one of my gods. I saw him perform live three times, and tried to play some of his riffs and wished I could get them down as fluidly as JW could. After 50 years I'm still in awe of his virtuosity, despite all the other hot-shot guitarist that have since come and gone. This biography was made before he died and received Johnny's thumbs-up. In his words it tells the whole story -- the good and the bad. I once hoped to be a musician (and instead became an electrical engineer), but the musician biographies I've read make me glad I didn't take that route. Despite skyrocketing to fame, Johnny Winter struggled with substance abuse, compromised personal relationships, an abusive and predatory manager and other social sharks. His is the oft-told tale of a celebrity who misses the simple joys of a trusting friendship, and of companions that will look out for his best interests. Those concerns form the background of a life full of successes and setbacks, moments of brilliance and adulation, and periods of despair. Johnny lived a very interesting life.
February 18, 2021
I learned a lot about Winter from this biography. It was finished in 2010, so his death and the last four years of his life are not included. Sullivan established a good relationship with Winter, who cooperated with her as much as his manager Teddy Slatus allowed. I think there's a little bias towards Johnny as a result. I found the details of his youth particularly interesting - how he and Edgar were bullied as kids for being albinos, and the general loving and established family life they had. His attitude towards and treatment of women were disappointing. The book gives good detail on Winter's discography.
October 15, 2017
I found it fairly average overall. It was best when Johnny Winter was the direct source. Being from Southeast Texas I enjoyed the Texas references and stories. Johnny Winter at Hofeinz Pavilion in 1972 was the first concert I attended (opening act: Foghat).
July 7, 2013
Since the author and Johnny Winters collaborated on this book, it was pretty tame. I thought his life was pretty bland reading, even when they recounted his drug use and womanizing. This is what happens when an authorized version of a biography gets released - the dirt gets swept under the carpet.
From a musical perspective, it was an interesting read, especially his relationship with Muddy Waters. The best recordings in both of their careers occurred when they collaborated. Their music together was truly magic.
From a musical perspective, it was an interesting read, especially his relationship with Muddy Waters. The best recordings in both of their careers occurred when they collaborated. Their music together was truly magic.
November 21, 2013
Good, full account of Winter's life in music, from boyhood to the present. Many interesting stories, although the use of multiple sources, while providing insight into the "real" story, makes the narrative a tad tedious, as does the frequent "this guy didn't have Johnny's interest at heart." One comes away with a sense of knowing the man.
February 15, 2015
Wow, I am so glad Mary Lou Sullivan published this book. Raisin´ Cain tells in details the good and the bad moments of Johnny Winter´s personal life and career. From his rise as a rock guitarist to the recognition as a blues man, Johnny Winter lived all a life of success, music and drugs has to offer.
This is a great book and a must read for every music fan.
This is a great book and a must read for every music fan.
April 15, 2014
I grew up listening to Johnny Winter and thought I had some wild times back in the 70's, but damn, this guy is lucky to be "Still Alive and Well" after the life he has led. Plays a mean guitar, though.
October 21, 2013
Early life and muddy stories were interesting and informative. The author's lack of understanding regarding drug addiction made for some bizarre loose ends in regards to JW's later career .
July 18, 2018
Good overall (authorized) perspective of Johnny and his career. Johnny is refreshingly honest and matter-of-fact. Hopefully, more will be written about this great legend.
December 26, 2018
I love Johnny Winter and think Mary Lou did a great job writing the book. I enjoyed learning about how all of his records were made, his drug addiction, and his love life!
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews