Album Review: Johnny Winter – The Johnny Winter Story

The phenomenon we call “overnight success” is, in reality, something that rarely if ever actually happens. It typically takes years for an artist to achieve a level of notability and success. And once they do, there’s a nontrivial segment of their audience that is curious and interested about the creative work they did before breaking through.

That helps explain the sustained interest in, say, those seven albums Bob Seger made before Night Moves (they’re nearly all out of print and likely to remain so; Seger largely disowns them). It also justifies the many reissues of pre-Allman Brothers Band recordings by Gregg and Duane Allman. And the surge of interest in the recently unearthed “Rockin’ Roxburgh” tape – a live Beatles recording from when the band was right on the cusp of fame – reminds us yet again that a certain segment of the public is curious enough to justify the reissue of little-heard material by their favorite artists.

Born in 1944, Johnny Winter’s musical career began when he was a teenager in Beaumont, Texas. He released his debut album The Progressive Blues Experiment on a small label in 1968, and shortly thereafter signed with Columbia. But Winter had been recording for years, and in the wake of his success, those early recordings found inevitable reissue as The Johnny Winter Story.

The 1969 LP was released on the GRT Records label. It featured 14 songs drawing from both original material and blues classics. Close on its heels came two other collections of juvenilia, 1969’s About Blues and Early Times from 1970. Winter had no involvement in the release of those records, and reputedly wasn’t happy about their existence. Today, used copies of those rushed-to-marked cash-in releases circulate, though on discogs.com, Early Times is blocked from sale, suggesting that it’s considered a pirate, bootleg or otherwise unauthorized release.

Winter passed away in 2014, and Paul Nelson – his late-period manager who helped him regain control over much of his catalog – left us earlier this month. Setting aside the question of how Winter and/or Nelson might have felt about it, in 2024, multiple Grammy-winning label Omnivore Recordings has managed to license the material from all three of those albums, bringing them together in a single package for what looks to be the first time. It’s likely the first legitimate/sanctioned release of the material.

Using a slightly modified title from that first collection (and its cover artwork as well, Omnivore has released the 2CD set The Johnny Winter Story (The GRT/Janus Recordings). Those new to this archival material shouldn’t expect production values or performances to rival Winter’s official catalog, but neither is this music any sort of embarrassment. For listeners who wish to place Winter’s high-profile Columbia (and post-Columbia) work in a larger context, these 31 tracks are revelatory.

Rather than commission a modern-day, retrospective liner note essay, Omnivore has instead chosen simply to reproduce the text form the original 1969 LP. Pete Welding’s essay attempts to place Winter’s work in historical context; as a result, Winter’s name isn’t mentioned – and then only briefly – until more than halfway through the essay. There’s no information at all regarding the when, where, who or how of these recordings. We do know that they were mostly cut in the first half of the ‘60s, some apparently as early as 1961. Welding does make plain that the goal (of Winter and/or whomever commissioned and paid for the original sessions) was little more than “trying to get a hit just like somebody else’s.”

Winter’s “Lucille” instrumental rewrite “Creepy” isn’t the most original thing in the world, but it does let us hear him play some tasty leads. And his old-school reading of Johnny “Guitar” Watson’s “Gangster of Love” (released as a single) is a great deal of fun. And there is one shocker: with its jangling guitar lines and close vocal harmonies, “Spiders of the Mind” sounds like a West Coast folk/garage band exploring the sonic space between The Leaves, The Byrds and Bob Dylan. Few who didn’t know would even identify the artist as Johnny Winter, and it suggests that he could have gone a very different musical direction, had he wished.

Overall, compared to Winter’s signature style of the ‘70s and beyond (including those ace Alligator releases), the tunes on The Johnny Winter Story are generally quite restrained and pedestrian. But they’re never less than interesting, and the concluding track (a reading of “Please Come Home for Christmas” that hints at the howling vocal character he’d eventually make a major part of his persona) is a delight.

These recordings are certainly more “commercial” minded than Winter’s more well-known material, trafficking in r&b and blues-pop styles. There are horn charts on many of the tracks, and Winter’s searing lead guitar appears only occasionally. But none of that takes away from the enjoyment of these recordings. As long as one considers them for what they are – archival audio documents of an artist still developing – the tracks on The Johnny Winter Story deserve the contemporary re-listens that this Omnivore release is most certain to encourage. As Welding writes about these recordings in the final sentence of his essay, “Enjoy them.”