Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
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LP, Toshiba EMI Liberty, Japan, LLS-80023 (1973)
Transcribed by Lester Bangs Archive management
Sleeve Notes
Johnny Winter doesn't mess around. He plays a mean, fluid, slicing blues guitar fueled by a sense of primal drive that somehow reaches all the way back to the earliest moans and unites them with the hardware of the Seventies in a unified musical entity, diverse in its source but poised to attack.
This is the music of a driven man—guttural, edgy, an unbroken rush of pulsating funk. It's the product of growing up doubly alienated in Texas, an albino who found the only equivalent identifiable experience in black music, learned guitar and plowed his way through the roadhouses and jukejoints of the Lone Star state, building authority as a bluesman and refining his guitar style until he was a legend. Northerners like Mike Bloomfield[1] jammed with him and circulated reports of this incredible musician, verging on a real guitar breakthrough and quite obviously ready for stardom.
This album is the product of that burgeoning, expectant time. Johnny Winter had recorded before, but this recording, made in 1968, was the first to reveal him at the peak of his powers and to allow him to stretch out on guitar to the fullest extent of his rampantly roughshod imagination.
The special strength of Austin, Texas is its total rawness, the fresh fury of a talent unleashed and ready to maul the world. It's strutting, back-alley, no-frills music, much of it essayed with an especially fierce pride in honoring Johnny's heroes and mentors: Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, B.B. King, Howlin' Wolf.[2] Most of the songs are blues standards that have been done and redone by their inventors as well as by white British and American Blues-bands by the scores. But there is something totally unique and brutally authentic in Johnny's versions that makes them jump out, thunderous and vibrantly alive, on the first hearing, and helps them to sustain that power so that they sound just as fresh, just as Edge City right now as they did when they first came out.
Johnny Winter is back with us now, after a brief hiatus in limbo owing to personal problems and the inevitable incursions on any touring musician' well-being. It's great to have him back, but one listen to this album and you'll know he's never really been away. Because music this strong is not locked into a time, an era, or even its obvious stylistic roots. It's for everybody, and forever. So pick up on it, and give yourself a treat. Get ready to stomp and shout and moan. Get ready for razor-flashing Texas roadhouse funk. Get the real wrenching message of the blues. Get down.
Lester Bangs
CREEM Magazine
[1] Successful blues guitarist and session musician Mike Bloomfield was first drawn to blues as a teen in Chicago's South Side blues clubs, where he played guitar with notable bluesmen. Among his early supporters were B. B. King, Muddy Waters, Bob Dylan. (See below; see also Bob Seger's Smokin O.P.s.)
[2] Notable blues luminaries: 1) Muddy Waters, "father of modern Chicago blues"; 2) Sonny Boy Williamson, American blues harmonica player, singer and songwriter; 3) B.B. King, American blues guitarist and singer-songwriter considered one of the most influential blues musicians of all time and inducted in 1987 into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; and, 4) Howlin' Wolf (a.k.a. Chester Arthur Burnett), booming-voice Chicago blues singer, guitarist and harmonica player.
Debora Curry
English Dept - Administrative Assistant
Email: debora.curry@gcccd.edu
Office Hours: Monday-Friday 8am to 10am and 2pm to 4pm - email Debora for link for her Zoom Office hours
8800 Grossmont College Drive
El Cajon, California 92020
619-644-7000
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