Edgar Winter: Re-entrance The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame consistently ignores true legends, inducting instead egomaniacs who don't deserve the honor and privilege yet in their careers. A group of musicians who have been eligible for many years have still gone unrecognized. Edgar Winter is a true innovator in music. For over four decades, he's explored multiple music styles and experimented with instrumentation that transcends time, space and genre. I had a chance to sit down and listen to him tell his story about his life and music. MD: In 1971, you formed an R & B band called White Trash, and released your next two albums, White Trash in 1971 and Road Work in 1972. The styles on White Trash and Road Work were very different from Entrance, How did you make the adjustments and how did you adjust to this transition? EW: The first album Entrance, to go back there, was a unique album and I don't think that anything like it has been done before or since. One of the sides was a twenty-five minute continuous piece that I refer to as a symphonette and had seven movements. MD: Why don't you do more of that album live? EW: For a while I was, and when I toured Europe I did some of Entrance. They are much more receptive to Jazz in Europe and Japan in general then are the audiences here. The people in America, they like to rock; they like to get down and boogie. The deal was when Johnny became the new hot Texas guitar swinger, I played on his first several albums. I then met his manager Steve, who introduced me to Clive Davis, who at that time was the president of CBS. When I talked to Clive, I explained to him that my music was entirely different and was not particularly Blues. I told him that I loved Blues but I didn't want to confine my style to that. I explained about the Entrance concept and I told him that it was an experimental thing and it was going to have no commercial value. I didn't expect to sell records with it but it was just something that meant a great deal to me personally. Clive understood this and let me go ahead and make the Entrance album, which I am forever indebted to him for doing because I think had I not, he could have very easily said, "well give us a couple of commercial things first and then we'll talk about that". If I had not done that album at that time, I probably would never have gotten to that point in my musical thinking and evolution, so it is one of my favorites as well. So after having done that, the next thing I wanted to do is put together a real group. I went all over the Untied States looking for musicians. Up to this point, I never realized that the area I'm that I'm from in Texas has such a unique musical style. It took traveling all over to bring me to that realization and understanding. A lot of the guys that I had played with in high school were in White Trash. They were theory majors and they went to Berkley, which is a great music school in Boston. They played the clubs and then saved up enough money and then Jerry La Croix, the other singer in White Trash, is a great talent. We'd play the clubs, save up enough money for a semester, go back to Boston and eat mayonnaise sandwiches, and then come back and then start the process again. MD: Were you trying to attract a younger audience with White Trash? EW: No, what we wanted to do, I loved and still love. If there is one common thread that runs throughout all my music it's Blues, and that hints this Blues trilogy that is the most current thing that I am working on. Whereas Johnny gravitated towards the really primitive acoustic style, he loves Lightning Hopkins. Johnny really understands that Blues slide style with the alter tunings and stuff. I think he is one of the greatest living exponents of that and there aren't any black people doing that, so it's really a dying art. It's too bad to see that. The only point that I was making, is it's because Muddy Waters and Lightning Hopkins and Howling Wolf and all those guys that I heard from the time I was little, while Johnny went that way, I loved the more urban Blues like Bobby Blue Bland, Ray Charles, and B.B. King. We used to sneak into the Black tent revivals and listen to the Gospel music and the thing that I loved, if I had to pick one person, it would be Ray Charles as my primary influence. He was a piano player who played organ and electric piano, too. He had a great Jazz band, with horn players Hank Crawford and Fathead Newman. They were doing the Newport Jazz Festival in the 50's and 60's and so forth, so you know he was blending Blues, Jazz, Gospel and he had The Raylettes. This three-part Gospel harmony was the basis of the sound of The Supremes and groups like that. He had the Latin rhythm thing going on and he did Country after that. His sheer intensity, his soulfulness and the believability of his singing affected a whole generation. Everybody, whether or not they attempted to really imitate Ray Charles, were subliminally influenced by him. His influence, I think, is just sort of incalculable. And so when I put together White Trash, after going all over the country looking for the best musicians, I realized that the guys that I grew up playing with had a very unique, specific feel and just a whole different approach. They had different roots and listened to different records and I just didn't feel at home playing with anybody else other than those guys. I went back home and looked all of them up and found out where they were. Jerry was in New Orleans. None of them were far from home- they were all in that area Beaumont, where I grew up. It's right on the Louisiana line and I played in Louisiana probably more even than in Texas because the liquor laws over there were 18 as opposed to 21. So we had all the clubs right across the river where all the kids would go to raise hell. We all loved Ray Charles and Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and all of the R&B soul music. We were white kids playing black music and we couldn't refer to ourselves as black so we figured, well the next best thing is "White Trash". We wanted to bring that excitement to our music. I really believe that Gospel is the most overlooked and least acknowledged and understood style. It is the flip side of Blues. All the great Blues people were church. As far as I am concerned, the whole style of Rock singing was derived from the great black charismatic preachers- Gospel singers like Ray Charles, Sam Cook, Al Greene and Aretha Franklin. All of those people had that Church-Gospel thing going on. So what we wanted to do was to try to bring that intensity to our music. I don't know if you have ever been to one of those Pentecostal tent revivals, but if you think Rockón-Roll has energy, it pales in comparison to that. We wanted really powerful songs with strong guitar and strong vocal harmony and put all of that together and bring it to people in a Rock context. MD: White Trash broke up and in '72 and then you formed The Edgar Winter Group with Dan Hartman on vocals, Ronnie Montrose on guitar, Chuck Ruff on drums and in 1973 you released They Only Come Out at Night, which produced Frankenstein and Free Ride. Frankenstein, in my mind has always been the most popular instrumental of all time and entered the Billboard Top 40 charts on April 21, 1973- the same exact day as another great Rock instrumental, Hocus Pocus, by the Dutch band Focus. They managed to hit the Top Ten, while Frankenstein hit number one .Did you find this period of time particularly receptive to instrumental Rock? EW: Looking back on it, absolutely. There was also another instrumental, remember that Billy Preston song, Space Race? That one and Hocus Pocus were nominated for the Grammy that year. Frankenstein was nominated and it was actually contested because it has a yodel. Was it really an instrumental? We don't know. I think Frankenstein should have won. It's pre-fusion, and almost a precursor of Heavy Metal because it has really powerful riffs. It's interesting in that I wrote that song even before White Trash when I was in my brother Johnny's Blues band. We called it The Double Drum Solo because I did a dual drum solo with his drummer. I read Uncle John Turner and I also played a Hammond B3 and alto sax and you know that we played it all over the world without a name. It was never recorded. With the advent of the synthesizer at the time I put together the Edgar Winter Group. Basically my aim was to create the quintessential All-American Rock band, and I was looking for people who were great writers and singers with stage presence- anyone one of whom could lead their own group. I wanted it to be a really a cooperative kind of situation. I thought that the potential really was for its songs, co-writing with Dan Hartman. I saw Free Ride as the single, and that's interesting because Free Ride was released first and didn't go anywhere. With re-release after Frankenstein, it became a huge hit. I never intended to put Frankenstein on the album at all. Why the transition, why the switch from White Trash to the Edgar Winter Group? The synthesizer was part of it, but a lot of the guys in White Trash didn't want to expand musically. I wanted that band to evolve like the Beatles. In other words I wasn't content just to play R&B. It's not that I wanted to stop doing the R&B stuff, but Jerry and the rest of those guys were really die hard R&B guys and they were content just to do Otis Redding covers and Can't Turn You Loose, and it was a lot more of a club kind of vibe translated into a concert kind of thing. They just, in my way of thinking, weren't adventurous enough in wanting to take that next step. Also, I wanted to get into the synthesizer and it was difficult stylistically. It wouldn't have been if they had been open to that. If you look at how the synth has been employed in really funky music like Parliament and that kind of stuff. There was another way to do it, which was the direction it would have gone in if the band had stayed together, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be. Jerry wanted to go off on his own and he felt that he wasn't getting the recognition that he deserved. Since I wished them well, I said that I wasn't going to use the name and they could continue with the White Trash tradition, which they did for a while after the quit occurred. Jerry did and he probably got that Second Coming album that they did as White Trash. Great album. MD: Were you surprised that Ronnie Montrose left the group after experiencing that kind of success and what did you think of the success that Ronnie had after leaving your band? EW: I was very happy for him, and very gratified. I hadn't realized at the time, but I think he felt stifled in the group because there was so much emphasis on the co-writing between Dan Hartman and myself. I didn't find out until years later that he felt that way. I told him, "Ronnie, I wish you had told me then that was in your mind because I certainly never wanted to engender that kind of restriction." If anything, I wanted a band where everybody had an opportunity to write, and we did write a couple of songs together. Sometimes those things just involve delicate chemistry and a lot of egos and the fragility that groups have. I thought Rock Candy was just so cool. I loved all that. I like everything he is doing. He is a great player. I love his kind of reckless abandon as a guitar player. He is very different. Rick Derringer is a more complete guitarist and stylistically he really understands the Blues, having played with Johnny a lot. He's a great Rock player. He plays great pedal steel Country guitar and he can do faux finger picking stuff. Rick is pretty much a guitarist for all seasons. On the other hand, Ronnie had an unpredictable sort of rebellion vibe that Rick didn't have, and that's what I liked about Ronnie's playing. It was like a real perk kind of thing that you never knew what was going to come out. So that made him a lot of fun. MD: So Rick Derringer replaced Ronnie for your next album, Shock Treatment, in 1974. EW: That's correct. And Rick also played guitar after Floyd Radford in White Trash and producing. He ended up playing in most of all of my bands at one point or another. MD: Well, he's pretty much well known for his songs dating back to the early years of the McCoys, rather than his ability as a producer. Do you think his exceptional talent as a player paved the way for his success in production? And what impact did your friendship and frequent partnership have on your career? EW: Well, I just felt such a commonality with him, and Rick was one of those players that although we weren't from the same area, as soon as I heard him play and played with him, there was just an instantaneous recognition of that -just a synergy and understanding that you know when playing with certain musicians you sit down with and you feel that, it's there. And with Rick, the prevailing wisdom was artists should not produce themselves. I just figured that if I was going to have a producer, I wanted to have someone that I knew understood where I was coming from and what I was doing. I felt that a lot of the producer's responsibility was really getting the sound, which is engineering, but it is part administrative, it's part artistic, it's very broad and it covers a lot of areas. A lot of producers have different strengths in different areas. With Rick it was really musical because he understood what we were doing. His approach was just to let it happen naturally and don't get in the way of it. Whereas a lot of producers will go in and start trying to to change and alter direction- "Well, I don't know about this song and let's try this and let's try alternate writers." And it can go on and on. MD: In 1976 you reunited with your brother Johnny for a live album called Together, which I thought was great. It seems like so many brothers who play in Rock bands, such as Ray and Dave Davies, of the Kinks and Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crows have problems getting along with each other. Meanwhile, on the surface at least, it appears that things are always so smooth with you and Johnny. Was there ever any sibling rivalry or competition between you two growing up? EW: No, that's one of the most frequently asked questions I get. There was none when we were growing up. As far back as I can remember, he was Johnny Cool Daddy Winter. He had sunglasses and a pompadour, and I was the weird kid who played all the instruments. Johnny always wanted to be famous and I had no desire whatsoever in that direction. I just loved music in and of itself. I loved the beauty of rhythm and harmony and it was more of an internalized thing with me. It was like my private world. I could escape into and it just really became that for me, sort of a refuge that I could always turn to. I think Johnny and I have reversed personalities now. He was an extroverted kid. If anything, I have become more comfortable with the spotlight. Johnny, on the other hand, after he achieved the success that he so much wanted, didn't seem to enjoy that role. Woodstock really changed my life. It showed me that music has the ability to transform and to take you outside yourself. After Woodstock, I could see that other than just as entertainment and an art form, that music could really have a cultural impact, change people, bring people together and transcend all boundaries. It was just after that I wrote Dying to Live. I was a new artist and I hadn't recorded anything yet. The song, Dying to Live, more or less came to me in a dream. I got up, worked on it a little at the piano and went back to sleep. When I woke up, it had pretty much written itself. I was proud of as a writer. Even though the song was never a hit and it never got much airplay, it is one of the songs throughout my career that people would keep playing. Folks will come up and say "Oh Dying to Live, I just love that song." A perfect example of this: I got a letter from a young boy who had a severe facial disfigurement he had been contemplating suicide. He said that after he heard that song, it completely changed his life and he went ahead and had whole series of operations and now he's a successful commercial artist. That just meant so much to me, so much more than any kind of award that you can ever get for a song. That you can write something that touches someone on a personal level and help him in a profound way- that's the spiritual nature of music. We've talked about the indestructible monster Frankenstein and Free Ride and how much those songs are still a part of the universal consciousness of music. It's just amazing to me that Dying to Live, having never been a hit, or had a great amount of airplay, is now in the Tupac Resurrection movie. What happened is that Tupac Shakur, Biggy Smalls and Eminem produced the track, and so there's a Tupac rap and a Biggy rap and then the sample of the chorus from Dying to Live. Eminem got the idea of thematically connecting those raps. It's just such an interesting idea, because at the time I wrote it, it was right after Woodstock, against the social backdrop of the civil rights and the peace movement. And if anything, it was a very personal statement and also I thought of it as an anti-war song. I thought that if it was going to be used in a movie, it would probably be a war movie. I never would have thought of the spin. It's really an interesting spin to think of street gangs and violence in that respect. But, if you think about it, really whether you're fighting to defend your country or just to make it one more day on the street, the theme is survival. And it's something we all face; it's the universal theme. I think it's just amazing that Eminem would come up with that idea and I just want to thank him for hearing the pain and the joy and the humanity of that song and transforming it in a way that I never would have imagined because stylistically it started out as a ballad with just piano and strings. It sounds really Classical, like Chamber Music with a Blues vocal and now its got a Hip Hop beat. It's transcending all of those boundaries. That's really amazing, after thirty years, it's going through its resurrection. You know, Tupac Resurrection and the resurrection of that song. Oh, another thing, I'm working on a Broadway musical that I'm going to be writing because I really like going into different areas. MD: What do you listen to these today? There's not much around. EW: I love and still listen to a lot of Jazz. I will listen to Nat King Cole and Ray Charles. MD: So you basically listen to the older Jazz. EW: Listen to old stuff. I like people like Sting who have a Jazz sensibility, who have been around for so long, or say like a Bruce Hornsby. You might think that Country and Jazz are opposites, because it is what I meant when I said that part of what my career has been about is trying to not only to broaden musical horizons, but also break down some of what I consider senseless musical prejudices. I don't see why people who love Classical can't appreciate Rock, Jazz and Country. Country people think Jazz is just a bunch of noise and Jazz people think Country is so simple. EW: There are certain things. I like Nirvana; I liked Nirvana when they came out. I listen to everything that's going on, certain things that I really love. MD: What do you think of Hip Hop and Rap? EW: I think that both of them are the next things of what folk has evolved into rhythmically and it is really a cultural thing. I think that certainly, when Rock-n-Roll started out, its whole point was rebellion. It was there to alienate the older generation and make them say, "Turn off that stuff! You call that music?!" . And Rap is doing that and it's the only thing that folks are trying to do in a new way. Rap obviously, even though it is harder for me to relate to because I'm not black and although I love Blues, I understood that I grew up in a middle class family, with that kind of love and security. But there are certain elements in Rap I like and some I don't. Some of it just seems like senseless violence. I don't just discount rap; it is a valid art form of its own. It's modern poetry and it certainly has a voice, and it's not just for white people. It wouldn't be as popular as it is. I want to try to understand it and see. I like some of the rhythm of it. A lot of it is too repetitive for me. MD: The only thing I really don't like about it is the sampling. I think people should come up with their own musical ideas, like you. You've been in music for what thirty-something years and you've come up with your own unique ideas throughout your entire career and you're still doing it. You broke through with the use of the synthesizer as the lead instrument and you invented the body strap. In the 80's, New Wave bands like Devo and Gary Newman all used synthesizers as lead instruments. What is your impression on that period of music? Did you think synthesizers were being over-used? EW: Well, see I am variously acclaimed and accused of ushering in that whole synth era- acclaimed in that I was on the cutting edge of the newfound knowledge. I was accused because people used the synthesizer to emulate the sounds of already existing instruments like the piano or string sections, and horns and it put a lot of musicians out of work. They also started sequencing with the synthesizer and doing loops that were repetitive and just brought about a whole sort of a dehumanizing influence in music. My whole approach to the synthesizer comes from my love of Science Fiction. I am a Trekkie and I love Sci-Fi. My whole approach to the synthesizer is experimental, "Here's a new instrument, let's see we can use it to create new, unusual, never-before-heard sounds" and that's pretty much stayed constant. I've got keyboards like everybody has to get my normal piano and organ sounds, piano, organ, horns, strings, but the synth that I enjoy most is currently the JP8000 and that's what I used to do Frankenstein, which is just a knock off - a digital version of an analog. The old analog synths are still around and they sound great. It has the same architecture, the same oscillators where you select the waveform. It is set up just like an analog synth so you can use it very similarly. I believe the synthesizer is just another instrument and the people that say it's dehumanizing just really don't understand that it can be used in a unique way. MD: I always saw you using it with a range of different instruments, like the guitar. EW: It's just like with computers-it's garbage in, garbage out. It's whatever you put in. Synthesizers have evolved now to the point that you are able to get out as much out of them as you are willing to put in. If you create a dumb, unimaginative loop and play it over and over then that's what you get. Synthesizers are great because you can make them sound like just about anything you want. You can bend a note. Endless diversity is there. It is a great instrument, but it depends on how you approach it. MD: Where do you see yourself in the future? EW: Well, I'm just going to continue to try to blaze new trails. After I do Jazz and the Blues, I'm working on Rock and the Blues and that's going to be the most, almost Heavy Metal, very aggressive, a lot of blaring guitars and slamming drums, a whole cacophony of insane asylum synthesizers. I'm just going to really go over the top and go back to the Frankenstein vibe, which I never did. When I did Frankenstein, I never intended to put that on the album. It was just a song that was fun to play and we would work it out as a live song, as a vehicle for the synthesizer. It still didn't have a name and toward the end of the project, Rick Derringer and I were discussing it and back in those days you would actually go into the studio with three or four songs and you didn't have to submit demos and have everything approved and there wasn't as much intervention from the record companies. You could actually go into the studio and create an album in the studio and write. Consequently, tape was always rolling and we played, since we were doing that song we just called it The Instrumental Band. We were doing it live and never intended to record it. We had all these fifteen and twenty minute versions of it. Rick suggested that we mix a version of the song, and I said that I didn't know about that because it sounded so different from everything else that we were recording, but so what. I loved the song. It seemed like a great excuse to have a big party. And I said, "Yeah, I like it. So lets wind things up, so what, we'll get more blasted than usual. Let's go in there and just have a good time." So, back in those days, the only way to edit stuff was to physically cut the master tape and rearrange the pieces and put it back together with splicing tape. We were all there in the studio, rolled up on the couch and draped over the back of the chairs and on the console. And when it was all over, we were thinking out loud along the lines of, the main body is over there, and I think that's the head. We were singing that old "neck bone is connected to the head bone" Gospel tune. Chuck Ross, the drummer, said "Wow man, it's like 'Frankenstein'", drawing the analogy of an arm here and a leg there. As soon as I heard, "Wow Frankenstein!" I thought that was perfect. I mean, just the visual imagery of the song. I couldn't have written a more perfect song to sound like Frankenstein if I had set out with that purpose in mind. The monster was born. But getting back to what we were talking about. You were asking me about what I was going to do. I was going to do a continuation of that, but after that came out the record company said, "Oh, how about The Wolfman, and then Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman and then a whole Monster Rock series." I'm never going to do another one of those. I've always flown in the face of that. I kind of take a perverse joy in doing unpredictable things. I just do what I want. If I look at music like a careerÖ MD: That's a hobby that you actually got very fortunate in working in it. How do you feel about hearing your classics being used to promote products on television? EW: I love it, if there was a beautiful ballad like a love song or something that I felt really personally attached to then I might, I can imagine feeling differently. But with Frankenstein and Free Ride, I think they're perfect for that and I once again, it really depends on the way the song is used. I think some of the coolest music is used in commercials. There's a lot artistically going on. I like a lot of commercials. I think some of the music in commercials is better than some of the stuff I'm hearing on the radio. You know, I'd like to write for commercials, but I love seeing Frankenstein used in ads. It's got that aggressive edge to it and it's easy to see why it would be used for commercials. Free Ride has a universal appeal. It just has that classic, signature guitar. Every time you hear that guitar lick it makes me smile. I never would have imagined that those songs would still be around thirty years later. They are very much in the collective music consciousness. MD: When can we expect a new studio album? EW: I am working sort of concurrently on two. The last one that I did before Live at the Galaxy was a studio album called, Winter Blues. That actually brings me to movie connections starting out with the song Good Old Shoe that I wrote for the movie Wag the Dog with Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman and Willie Nelson singing with Pop Staples and the Staple Singers. I hadn't realized it when I recorded that album part of what my career has always been about is trying to broaden musical horizons and expose people to really a wide variety of music. My very first album was Entrance. It was sort of a synthesis of Blues, Rock, Jazz and Classical. Although I am primarily known as and considered a Rocker, I really love Jazz and Classical. I always wanted to do a Jazz project. The next one that I have is actually being released in Europe. I have a deal with SPV, which is a German-based label and it will probably become available here. It is going to be released in the first quarter and the title of that is Jazz And The Blues. I'm also concurrently working on the third part of what I am thinking of now as The Blues Trilogy which is called Rockin' the Blues. It's sort of a concept that when I did Winter Blues after having recorded that song for Wag the Dog, it really dealt like gut bucket back in the alley- primitive, Delta Blues. It's great to see Blues getting the recognition it so much deserves. I believe that Blues and Jazz are the two uniquely American contributions to music. What I wanted to do is to demonstrate the variety of styles that have evolved within Blues, so I did. I started with that primitive Delta Blues and I did a sort of a Jazz, Jimmy Smith P3 organ-style Blues and a sleazy sort of Rolling Stones Rock, electric Rock-Blues and a really up-tempo Gospel Blues. People tend to think of Blues as something that has already happened, as opposed to something that is very much alive and well and with us today. The Blues still exerts a profound influence on every style of music. Back to Mark After Dark BACK TO HOME