Johnny Winter - The Progressive Blues Experiment (1972)

 (U.S 1959 - 2014)

Originally released in 1968 on small Austin, TX label Sonobeat Records in a small pressing of 100, Winter sold the rights to Imperial Records for wider release.

Give the press a lead on an up-and-coming blues musician who isn't black, and you can be sure that someone, somewhere is going to use the phrase 'Great white hope'. And, to be fair, it's hard to resist it when your up-and-comer is Johnny Winter, whose whiter shade of pale is the first thing you notice about him. Until he starts playing, that is. Then, the only thing that strikes you that has anything to do with colour is how naturally this man turns blue.

The blues was not exactly in the doldrums in the late '60s, but it was hardly a booming business. The time was ripe for new heroes, and during the winter of 1968-69 Rolling Stone devoted at least two articles to placing bets on one such. In a feature on Texas music, Larry Sepulvado and John Burks invited the magazine's readers to 'imagine a 130-pound cross-eyed albino bluesman with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest blues guitar you have ever heard,' a trailer that hauled the 24-year-old Winter to prestigious New York gigs and lengthy contractual negotiations as several labels scuffled to sign him. CBS won and his debut album, simply called Johnny Winter, arrived in the spring of '69, sparking a long fuse of gigs that ended in explosive summer performances at Woodstock and Detroit's Motor City Rock Festival. 

Over the next five years Winter's records and appearances would establish him as one of the biggest draws on the blues-rock circuit. After several gear-changes and some stops on the road, not to say crashes, he still commands a substantial fan base and his career is carefully charted at at least one extensive website.

Just before the 'official' debut album hit the shops, another piece of Winter's work was exhibited by Imperial Records: an album he had made earlier for a small Texas label, Sonobeat, under the provocative title The Progressive Blues Experiment. Although the CBS release occupied most of the fierce spotlight that was being trained upon Winter, and prompted even hard line critics like Blues Unlimited's Mike Leadbitter to call him 'the best male, white blues guitarist there ever was', some reviewers - among them Rolling Stone's Pete Welding - preferred the rawer production of the Imperial set, and it has continued to find admirers ever since.'As murky as hell but fresh and powerful in approach', wrote Charles Shaar Murray recently. And here it is again.

It's Johnny Winter's earliest album as such, but by no means his first recording: he'd been in that game since his mid-teens. Born in 1944, he grew up partly in his father's hometown of Leland, Mississippi, and partly in his mother's, the Texas Gulf Coast city of Beaumont. As a youngster he played clarinet, then ukulele, before taking up guitar. With his three-years-younger brother Edgar he had a preteen group modelled on the Everly Brothers, then in high school in Beaumont they formed Johnny & The Jammers, with Edgar playing keyboards, and recorded a rock 'n' roll single, 'School Day Blues', for the Dart label, which got them some attention. Johnny quit technical college to go into music full time, and for most of the next ten years he was in and out of studios in Houston and Beaumont, making singles for local labels under a variety of names, or playing guitar on sessions with other artists - blues, R&8, rockabilly, pop, whatever.

Meanwhile the club work went on and on, sometimes in white joints, sometimes black. Johnny had loved blues since he was a kid, had hung out with Beaumont's Clarence Garlow, of 'Bon Ton Roulet' fame, and had spent some time visiting the blues clubs in Chicago, and he took every Opportunity of playing both with local black artists and with visiting out-of-towners like Jimmy Reed' Johnny & The Jammers were transformed into other entities: around '65/'66, they were Johnny Winter & The Black Plague, wearing black, playing in black light.

By '67', Uncle John'Turner was in place as the group's drummer, and soon afterwards Tommy Shannon (later a charter member of Stevie Ray Vaughan's Double Trouble) joined on bass: this is the rhythm section heard on The Progressive Blues Experiment. The album was recorded at the Vulcan Gas Company, a club in Austin, Texas, in 1967 or '68. Though a version has circulated with crowd-noise on it, implying a live recording, the original tapes, as heard here, indicate that the only audience in the club was the guys doing the recording.

Winter playing his National Steel Guitar

The influence of Muddy Waters (whom Winter would later produce, in a fine series of albums for Blue Sky) hangs over the proceedings like a dark blue cloud, from the opening 'Rollin'and Tumblin" through the tribute track - actually 'Still a Fool, Muddy's take on'Catfish Blues - to the acoustic 'Bad Luck and Trouble', which is pretty plainly modelled on Muddy's early sides with Little Walter. 0n this track Johnny plays the harmonica and mandolin as well as the National steel guitar. The National is also heard on'Broke Down Engine', where Johnny seems to apply the style of Robert Johnson to a theme by Blind Willie McTell. 'l Got Love If You Want it' came from Slim Harpo, 'Help Me'from Sonny Boy Williamson ll, 'lt's My Own Fault' from B.B. King and'Forty-Four' from Howlin' Wolf, 'Mean Town Blues' uses the riff from Slim Harpo's 'Shake Your Hips' - or Little Junior Parker's 'Feelin' Good, or John Lee Hooker's'Boogie Chillun', take your pick. Johnny sounds as if he has Hooker in mind: listen to his guitar solo, especially the passage from 1.52 onwards.

But the sources of Winter's material are much less the point than the skill with which he shifts his technical gears, from the throbbing slide lines of the Muddy tracks, through those Hookeresque chords, to the lissom single-string picking of 'It's My Own Fault'. In my own mind, I was the best white blues player around,'he would say later. A lot of white players have come down the blues highway in the last 30 years. Some of them, no doubt, have had chops to rival his.

But how many of them give you live blues action as incandescent as this? [Liner notes by Tony Bussell, July 1999]

This post consists of FLACs taken from my newly acquired CD (another great flee market find) with full album artwork for both vinyl and CD.  Winter's earlier material is certainly his strongest and this release is testament to this by far.  Absolutely brilliant and Blues at its Best.

Tracklist

01 Rollin' And Tumblin' 3:09
02 Tribute To Muddy 6:20
03 I Got Love If You Want It 3:52
04 Bad Luck And Trouble 3:43
05 Help Me 3:46
06 Mean Town Blues 4:26
07 Broke Down Engine 3:25
08 Black Cat Bone 3:46
09 It's My Own Fault 7:20
10 Forty-Four 3:28

The Winter Band:
Johnny Winter - Vocals, Guitar, Mandolin, Mouth Harp
Tommy Shannon - Bass
John 'Red' Turner - Drums

Johnny Winter Link (293Mb) New Link 26/03/22

Jimi Hendrix with John McLaughlin / Johnny Winter - Jam Sessions at The Record Plant (1969) Ex Bootleg

(U.S 1967-1970)
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Jimi Hendrix jammed with numerous artists during his 'experience years' but regrettably many of these sessions were never recorded or have yet to surface. Artists such as Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce (Hendrix was a big fan of Cream and included 'Sunshine of your Love' in his earlier gigs), Jim Morrison from the Doors, B.B King, Roy Buchanan, Jeff Beck, Stevie Wonder, Peter Tork from the Monkees (who toured with the Experience in their early stages) and Eric Burdon and War at Ronnie Scott's Club, the night on which he died.
Jim also jammed with John McLaughlin (from Mahavishnu Orchestra) and Johnny Winter (the master of the Blues and slide guitar) at the Record Plant and these sessions were recorded for prosperity.
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John McLaughlin Sessions:
"In 1969, guitarist John McLaughlin, who had just signed with Alan Douglas, began working at the Record Plant on the album 'Devotion'. Joining John McLaughlin on the album were Buddy Miles on drums and Larry Young on Keyboards. While this album was being recorded in the Record Plant's lower level, Hendrix worked in the studio upstairs.

.On one fortunate occasion, the two guitarists met. A few days after his arrival in the US, John McLaughlin recorded with Miles Davis for his 1969 album 'In a Silent Way'. He later jammed with Hendrix at NY's Record Plant, where Hendrix was playing with Buddy Miles, bassist Roland Robinson, and guitarist Jim McCarty (of BM Express). At the request of Mitch Mitchell, John McLaughlin went to the Record Plant with the intention of jamming with Hendrix, not recording.
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In 1996, Steven Roby interviewed John McLaughlin and asked him how the jam with Hendrix took place.
'It was through Mitch Mitchell. Mitch and I go back to working with Georgie Fame in the early 60's. In 1969, I was playing with Tony Williams. Mitch was a big fan of his and would come to see us play at the Vanguard. One night Mitch invited us to the Record Plant. I came down with Larry Young and Dave Holland (MD's bassist 68-70). Basically, we played, but it was difficult because at the time I was using a hollow-bodied acoustic.....like a country guitar. The volume on it was so low and Buddy Miles was playing drums so loud. Dave Holland was there and Jimi played electric. It wasn't really a playing session....it was just hanging out....having a good time. I've only heard a little bit of tape, about two or three minutes, that's all they sent me. It sounded terrible to me.' An energized Hendrix and Buddy Miles dominated the three jams based on blues riffs, and McLaughlin's guitar static was too distracting to make this a great moment in rock history.
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In 1974, Alan Douglas discovered the tape of of John McLaughlin and Hendrix jamming and was ecstatic: 'the tape we have of them together is not only a historical thing, it's very exciting. It's going to have a heavy impact on the musical audience. It's Jimi playing in a way that's never been released before'. Douglas quickly drew up a promotion campaign and started feeding the press teasers about the jazz-fusion material he had on tape between John McLaughlin and Hendrix. Oui magazine reported in Feb1975 that Reprise would release one album of this material and Nemperor Records (McLaughlin's manager's label) would come out with an alternate one. After hearing a sample of these jams, rock critic Dave Marsh wrote in Penthouse Magazine: 'The McLaughlin/Hendrix tapes are reportedly ten hours long.....once they got started, McLaughlin and Hendrix achieve the sort of interplay that producers of super-sessions always seek but rarely discover'.
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Mysteriously, neither record was released and the boasts about hours of recordings full of non-stop jamming were silenced when archivist John McDermott explained in his book "Sessions": 'All that remains of this special summit (March 25 1969) is one thirty-minute reel of recording tape.' No one seems to know what happened to the recordings that inspired Douglas to say, 'I felt like I had been to Tibet.'

John McLaughlin was happy that this project was aborted. 'They were looking to squeeze as much money as possible out of what to me was a scam', he later explained. 'Jimi had already been scammed by these people, because most people will want to buy something on the strength of the name. Jimi's name and my name, and who ever else was there - it was just a scam. For me, I would have been delighted to see something good to have resulted from it, but it wasn't a recording session. I didn't play very long. There were other guitar players down there. They were all playing good and Jimi sounded great. Jimi was a revolutionary like Coltrane. He could do things with the guitar that nobody has ever done before. We all owe him a great deal' [Extract from : 'Black Gold - The Lost Archives of Jimi Hendrix', Steven Roby 2002]

Footnote: These thirty minutes of the McLaughlin/Hendrix jams have surfaced in the collector's network and apparently this is all that remains of the loosely organised jam that John McLaughlin said 'lasted from two til eight in the morning'. If other reels exist from the 6-hour session, they have not surfaced. Since John McLaughlin was not too thrilled with the short sample tape that Alan Douglas gave him, it is unlikely he would ever approve a future release. The songs that appear on the thirty minute tape are "Drivin' South", "Everything's Gonna be Alright" and are included in this rip.
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Johnny Winter Sessions:
In New Musical Express (NME a UK music magazine), the 6 Feb. 1971 issue there is an interview with Johnny Winter -
"I first met Jimi Hendrix at The Scene [popular New York City nightclub that his manager Steve Paul had in 1968]. I was a Jimi Hendrix groupie, and he was a Johnny Winter groupie. ....
We jammed together at The Scene a good bit; Jimi jammed with anybody who stayed there long enough. What we would often do after the club closed is go over to a studio where he had recording time booked regularly, and play around with things, maybe play for several hours and then some other day listen to the tapes to pick out the good parts for ideas to work into songs.
One of the things that the studio people were interested in putting out from the jams was an old Guitar Slim tune "The Things I Used to Do." I was playing slide and Jimi Hendrix was playing regular guitar and singing. It was just playing around, but it was a lot better than some of the stuff that was put out after he died. Some of that stuff should never have been released. The trouble when we played together was that we both respected each other's playing so much that we'd each lay back and wait for the other to play lead.
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I never really learned much from playing with Jimi Hendrix, though, because we had both learned from the same people; we had the same influences - but the music evolved in different ways. I guess I did learn from him some, however, though I didn't want to be copying him. It's just that any guitar player can learn from someone who has that many ideas and can do so much."
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Then Johnny Winter talks about how they went into the Record Plant Studios in NY and jammed...
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"We didn't play any particular tunes. It was just an extended guitar workshop. I mean, you just couldn't show that man anything new. It was just a case of Jimi watching how I used a bottleneck when playing. All I was doing was more or less demonstrating the basic technique to him."
And Johnny Winter goes on: "I guess Jimi Hendrix and I must have played together for at least two or three hours that day. Now...if someone was to do a professional job of editing those tapes, I'm sure we could get a good album out of them. If they're good, then I'd really like to see them come out for everyone to hear. I know I shouldn't say it, 'cause I'm under contract to another company and all that stuff, but really, I'm not bothered if I don't make a penny from them. It's just that I liked him so much."

.In another interview with Johnny Winter, this time in UniVibes (issue 4, November 1991), Winter was asked - You're sometimes credited as playing on a Jimi Hendrix bootleg called `Sky High' along with Jim Morrison and others playing `Red House', `The Sunshine Of Your Love' and several other songs...
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Winter responded - "Oh, I never even met Jim Morrison! There's a whole album of Hendrix and Morrison and I'm supposedly on the album but I don't think I am `cause I never met Jim Morrison in my life! I'm sure I never, never played with Jim Morrison at all! I don't know how that rumour got started".
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All tracks ripped at 320kps and full album artwork is included (with alternative covers) - source unknown.
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Track Listing:
01. Drivin' South
02. Everything's Gonna Be Alright/Jam
.Studio Recording (March 25, 1969 Record Plant, New York, NY)
Jimi Hendrix - guitar
John McLaughlin - guitar
Dave Holland -on bass
Buddy Miles - drums
Mitch Mitchell - drums on final part
Bass ?
03. Instrumental Jam 1
04. Earth Blues Jam
05. Instrumental Jam 2
06. The Things I Used To Do (Take 1)
07. Ships passing The Night
08. The Things I Used To Do (Take 2)
.Studio Recording (May 7th 1969 Record Plant, New York, NY)
Jimi Hendrix - Guitar, dialogue
Johnny Winter - Slide guitar
Steve Stills - Bass
Dallas Taylor - Drums
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Hendrix Jams Link (58 Mb) REPOSTED 06/11/2012
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