You’ve barely had time to catch your breath when along comes Tribute to Muddy, a rootsy salutation to Johnny’s muse Muddy Waters (ahem, not too loosely-based, as it turns out, around Muddy’s own Catfish Blues).Īnother highlight, Black Cat Bone is a hell-for-leather tour de force which showcases Johnny’s astounding electric slide technique, and It’s My Own Fault is an extended wig out version of the B.B. On the opening cut, a screaming high-octane version of blues standard Rollin’ and Tumblin’, Johnny and the boys are white hot, and Johnny’s licks have to be heard to be believed. From the get go, the excitement never lets up. The funny thing is, The Progressive Blues Experiment is about ten thousand times better than Johnny’s major-label debut, exhibiting a raw vitality almost completely missing from the CBS album. The rest is history - Johnny went on to become the whitest, rockingest, most lightnin'-fingered axe hero around, a major concert draw and, after he’d conquered a career-threatening heroin addiction, the man behind Muddy Waters’ triumphant Grammy-winning comeback album Hard Again. Luckily CBS didn't lose faith in Johnny and his next album, Second Winter (a double album with, get this, only three sides!) went gold on the back of Johnny’s barnstorming appearance at the Woodstock festival. Johnny’s major label debut Johnny Winter was released on CBS near the end of that year, with Progressive Blues coming out at the same time, causing not only some embarrassment for Johnny and CBS but also poor sales. Shortly thereafter, an article in Rolling Stone magazine helped generate a great deal of interest in the group, and, thanks to impresario Steve Paul (credited as, er, 'organic advisor' on one of Johnny's later albums), Johnny suddenly found himself on the verge of major label stardom, signed by CBS and hailed as the fastest, coolest guitar slinger in America. In actuality it was a glorified demo intended to drum up some major label attention. They recorded The Progressive Blues Experiment (live, but with no audience) at the Vulcan Gas Company in Austin. In 1968, Johnny was playing in his first classic lineup with bassist Tommy Shannon and drummer Uncle John Turner. When I got to thinking about my own guilty pleasure, one choice stood out: the 1969 blues-rock classic The Progressive Blues Experiment, by “the whitest man ever to play the blues”, Texas albino guitar legend Johnny Winter. They were indivisible elements of a masochistic teenage rite of passage, so overblown and bombastic that only a true fan - a bona fide fanatic - could remain immune to their excesses. Sure, his friends thought they sucked, but that just made him like them all the more. Ted told me he derived a perverse satisfaction from records like these. We’re talking the spiritual prog-rock of Rundgren’s Initiation / Hermit of Pink Hollow period, and the woeful prog-anthem-fusion-rock of his Utopia project. Not the early masterworks on which the Runt built his early reputation - Something, Anything and A Wizard, A True Star. Ted’s secret shame was 70s whizz-kid Todd Rundgren. My friend Ted - a record company A&R guy - used to say that every music fan has at least one guilty pleasure stashed away in their record collection, an album or single so abominably uncool it's guaranteed to attract hoots of derision.
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