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.

Johnny winter live