Johnny Winter performs "Be Careful With A Fool" live from Danish TV in 1970 with Tommy Shannon on bass and Uncle John Turner on Drums.
“I met Johnny at the Fog, at the same club where I met Stevie,” said Shannon, who later played with Stevie Ray Vaughan from 1981 to his tragic death in 1990. “I was playing eight hours a night in a band called the Young Lads, making really good money. Uncle John and Johnny came in one night and Johnny sat in. I had never seen an albino before. When he got up under the lights, with that long white hair he looked like some kind of god—I was mesmerized by him. I knew I was going to be starving my ass off but I had this feeling it was the right thing to do. I quit my band and joined up.”
As a blues trio, their gigs were limited to weekend nights, and Johnny’s income immediately plummeted from $150 to fifty dollars a week. The band still couldn’t play all blues, but worked blues into their sets, which included Top Forty songs, as well as Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” “Manic Depression,” and “Fire.” “Even Muddy was restricted to the amount of blues he could play on his own jobs,” said Turner. “People didn’t like blues. So Muddy stood in the background and acted like he was playing the guitar, and the band played a bunch of soul songs. Then Muddy did about fifteen minutes of Muddy Waters songs at the very last part of their show.”
Before they played their first gig, Johnny gave Shannon a crash course in the blues. “I didn’t know anything about blues when I first started with Johnny,” said Shannon. “I would look at a Cream album and see Robert Johnson and thought he was a friend of theirs. Johnny sat down with me one night and spent hours taking me all the way through the blues, from field hollers to the present. He had a wall of records and took me through his whole collection, playing and explaining each one. After that night, I understood what I was doing.”
Sullivan, Mary Lou. Raisin' Cain: The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter (Kindle Edition)
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