Music Review: Johnny Winter - Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience

When we look at the names of the acts who were performing at the Woodstock Music and Art Festival in 1969 we see them as we know them today. To us Santana, Johnny Winter, Crosby, Stills, & Nash, and others are established stars who headline festivals all the time. However this was forty years ago, and even the most established star had to have his or her early career when they weren't well known. According to the liner notes accompanying the Legacy Recordings release, Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience, the producers of the Woodstock festival had been very deliberate about booking bands who were relatively unknown at the time to mix with the established groups.

One of those unknowns was the young man from Mississippi Johnny Winter who had only just released his first album, Johnny Winter, earlier that year. Now if you had asked me if Winter had played at Woodstock, I would have said no way, because up to now there has been no record of his having appeared on stage at the festival. He hadn't been on either of the albums, or any version of the movie, released. So the Johnny Winter: The Woodstock Experience package represents the first time his eight song performance from August 17, 1969 has been heard. As with all the other packages of this type being released the manufactures have also included a copy of the album he had released earlier in the year, the above mentioned Johnny Winter, and a poster made from a photo taken during his concert.

Now I have to admit to never having really listened to Winter's music before, as I had wrongly assumed it was along the lines of so many other rock power trios, or even his brother Edgar's power pop. I hadn't known that Johnny has always considered himself a blues player and nothing else. So for the first time I actually sat down and listened to his music and discovered that although he doesn't play a type of music that I would listen to everyday, what he does play is some really well executed electric blues.

It's pretty normal today for there to be white electric blues players, but in the late sixties it was nowhere near as common, especially for young men from Mississippi, to want to play the blues. However, as teenagers Johnny and his brother Edgar had hung out in the black bars and catch performances by people like Muddy Waters and BB King. He actually began his performance career on the ukulele at the age of ten on a children's television show and switched to guitar when he was a teenager. He appeared on two recordings prior to his own release; a forty-five by Roy Head and The Traits and another album called The Progressive Blues Experiment

Article Author: Richard Marcus

Richard Marcus is the author of the What Will Happen In Eragon IV? and The Unofficial Heroes Of Olympus Companion, both published by Ulysses Press. He has had his work published in print and online all over the world including the German edition of Rolling Stone Magazine and www.Qantara.de. …

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