A Conversation with Edgar Winter – HuffPost 7.7.14

A Conversation with Edgar Winter

Mike Ragogna: Edgar, there’s a new album, Superstars Of Classic Rock Honor The Music & Legacy Of The Doors, and you played on “The Crystal Ship” with Chris Spedding. How did you get invited and what do you think of this project?

Edgar Winter: I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we’re all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The forties and fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the sixties and seventies of rock. To me, they’re really unparalleled. I was not that familiar with The Doors on the east coast, they were more of a west coast band. I’m from Texas originally and I moved to New York right out of high school and lived there for twenty plus years until my wife Monique and I moved out here to California. So I’m a New York Texan living in Beverly Hills. When the Doors thing came along “Crystal Ship” was still available, and that was one of my favorites so I said, “Hey, I’m in.”

MR: How did this Chris Spedding collaboration happen?

EW: With the modern miracle of Pro Tools all of these things usually end up happening without the usual interaction between musicians. That track was already done and sent to me, I loaded it into Pro Tools and did it. It’s not as glamorous of a story as I’m sure you’d like to hear, but that is the truth of the matter.

MR: What do you think of you and your brother’s contributions to rock music history?

EW: It’s an honor to be a part of it. There are a lot of reasons for the magical quality of the music that occurred at that time, and I think that a large part is that there was so much freedom. Music was not that commercial yet. The record companies weren’t really looking over your shoulder, and there were also the political aspects of music. There were a lot of people writing and performing songs that they really believed in. There was the whole hippie movement. Drugs contributed a great deal to mind expansion. It started out really more innocently and then spiraled out of control, but when all of that started, it really fueled that sort of musical revolution and a consciousness revolution.

Johnny and I are very different and very much the same. If there’s any common thread that moves through all of my music, it’s the blues. I’m primarily thought of as a rock guy, largely because of “Frankenstein.” “Frankenstein” is interesting because, as far as I know, it’s the first instrumental to feature the synthesizer as a lead instrument, and I also happen to be the first guy to get the idea of putting a strap on the keyboard. It seems like something that was really obvious and would have been thought of, but no one had done it. I’ll never forget walking out on stage for the first time… [crowd noises] It was just one of those moments where the crowd just went crazy. “Frankenstein” was written to feature the synthesizer.

Johnny and I grew up together, and I just love playing with Johnny. He’s my musical hero. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be where I am. He was the ambitious one when we were kids. Johnny loved American Bandstand and read all the magazines. Cool Johnny Winter with the shades and the guitar and I was the weird kid that played all the instruments. In all of our bands, Johnny was the front man singer and I just loved to work on the arrangements and show Johnny the parts. It worked out as a good division of labor. Then in my teens, I got really interested in jazz and classical. I was more of a jazz/classical guy than a pop guy. With Johnny’s popularity, he invited me to come to New York and play on his first few albums and then his manager Steve introduced me to Clive Davis, the president of Columbia at that time. Clive offered me a record deal. As they say, the rest is history!

I should mention that Johnny and I are touring together. There was a long period of time where we hadn’t played together in twenty plus years, and then over the past three or four years we’ve started doing stuff together again. We’re doing Rock N Blues Fest, which will be Johnny’s band, my band, Vanilla Fudge, Rare Earth and Kim Simmonds from Savoy Brown. My band is sort of the nucleus for two or three of them, Rare Earth and Vanilla Fudge are a couple of guys being supplemented by my band. That’ll be a lot of fun, we’ll do that tour and jam together at the end of it. I’m looking forward to that.

MR: Will Rick Derringer be joining you guys?

EW: He did it a couple of years ago, but he’s not in it this year. Rick and I, of course, are still best of friends. We probably do fifteen or twenty shows a year together, but he’s not on that particular tour. Rick’s in Florida now. I think you’ve spoken with him as well.

MR: I have in the past, but I haven’t interviewed him yet. He’s someone I would absolutely love to interview. I especially love his Guitars And Women album. Anyway, you and Johnny…

EW: In the beginning of our careers, Johnny wanted to be sure that we maintained our separate identities and I said, “Johnny, I think everybody knows who we each are.” What we’d done was so different, though we did do that Together album in the seventies, which I loved. That was really so much fun, reprising a lot of the songs that we used to do in clubs together growing up, in our teenage years. But he didn’t want us to become known as The Winter Brothers. I love The Winter Brothers myself.

MR: That’s terrific you have such a solid relationship with him. By the way, I remember in 2011, you toured with Ringo Starr’s All Starr entourage.

EW: I did indeed! It was just one of the most rewarding experiences, and just fun. I toured with the All-Starr band in ’06, ’08, ’10 and ’11. Usually, Ringo doesn’t invite people back more than one time. I think his twenty-fifth anniversary of doing that is coming up and probably a lot of the people that have done that over the years will be there and I’m really looking forward to it. I think in discussing that whole era, The Beatles were, of course, at the forefront. To me, The Beatles were bigger than music. They changed the mindset of the entire generation. They brought about a revolution without firing a single shot. They really changed the world and Ringo is still, to this day, such a heartfelt advocate of peace and love. Every year on his birthday, wherever he is, usually in that tour, somewhere, he does a deal where at noon, he invites everybody to stop whatever it is that they’re doing and just think “Peace and Love.” That’s such a simple yet powerful thing. Being all hippie myself and having played Woodstock with my brother Johnny, that really resonates with me. Ringo is just the greatest. He’s just an amazing guy. It was one of the thrills of my life. On his seventieth birthday, we played Radio City Music Hall–and this was a surprise that Ringo was completely unaware of–at the end of the show, Joe Walsh came on and Paul McCartney came out and we did “Birthday.” I thought, “I can’t believe it, I’m on stage with two of The Beatles!” It just blew me away.

MR: Awesome. You also were on William Shatner’s album Ponder The Mystery. Were you with him during the recording of that?

EW: Nope! Same situation. It was sent to me and I got to work with that one. It’s amazing how much you can do with computers today. They are an amazing tool. When you have the session, you can listen to the individual parts, mix it exactly the way that you want to, and re-record examples of things that you might want to change. There is interaction to the extent that you can pick up the phone and make suggestions and email things back and forth. That one was really a lot of fun for me to work on. I liked it because it was really atmospheric; it had a mood that I really liked. That’s what I tried to do with the song melodically. Rather than just playing a typical solo I wanted to get a melodic hook that would exemplify that mood. That was my direction on it.

MR: Are you working on a new Edgar Winter album?

EW: Yes, I am. Since you bring up the question, I’ll just tell you what I’m up to these days. First of all, I have a book of poetry that actually started as lyrics that I had and had not written music to. But as I was on the road, I just started getting really interested in poetry as opposed to music. My wife Monique and I have been married for thirty-five years. Without her, I don’t think I would have survived all of this. She’s really the love of my life. A lot of times, I would be out there on the road and I would think, “I’m going to write her a poem.” I’d done that for three or four years and I realized, “Wow, I’ve got over a hundred of these and put together with some of these lyrics, it would make a nice book.” So I decided to title it The Songs That Never Were. I found this amazing sense of freedom. There is a real formula to writing music, verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge. It’s very formulaic. The subject matter that you can address in pop music is somewhat restricted. It just doesn’t allow that same emotive quality that you can put into poetry. It was really a liberating feeling for me, so that’s one thing that I’m doing.

Then I have a musical comedy version of “Frankenstein,” a Broadway-style show that I’ve been working on, where the doctor is a posh Park Avenue plastic surgeon. He would’ve done Michael Jackson and all the guys. It’s sort of a social satire. That’s something that I have in the works. Also I have some short stories that I’ve been writing that occur in this mythical realm called The Shadow lands. They’re sort of fantasy sword and sorcery works and I have some music that’s going to go along with that called Shadow Dance. When I release the short stories, they’ll have some music to go with them. I’ve been doing Shadow Dance musically, but I do have all kinds of songs. I have always more than enough songs to put an album together. Rebel Road, the last album that I did, was sort of inspired by how we play a whole lot of biker shows. We did the Sturgis Buffalo Chip thing, I did the Love Ride when Jay Leno was doing that. I think rockers and bikers have a lot in common as far as disregard for the authority of the powers that be. We’re definitely not nine-to-fivers. The idea of that is just basically I’m not going to be told who I am or how I’m supposed to live.

I’ve always considered myself something of a musical rebel. When I did “Frankenstein,” the record company said, “Now you can do ‘Dracula’ and ‘Wolf Man’ and we’ll call the whole thing Monster Rock!” and I said, “No, that’s not going to happen, I’m not going to do that.” I kind of enjoy defying categorization. I love music in and of itself. I love the beauty of harmony and rhythm. You’ll never hear Edgar Winter talking about a farewell tour! I come from that old blues man mentality. I’m in it ’til the end. I’ll die with my boots on as they say down in Texas. The thing that has been so inspiring to me over the years is to exercise that freedom. Honestly, I just like to play whatever it is at the moment that’s meaningful to me. I’ve never thought of music as a career in the commercial sense for very long. When I put together The Edgar Winter Group, I did Entrance, which was an interesting experimental album. Then I did White Trash, which was really all the guys that I grew up playing with, doing gospel R&B. I said, “I’m going to put together the quintessential All-American rock band.” I had a lot of fun doing that, but I didn’t want to continue doing that forever. That’s the key to the whole thing to me, that’s what keeps me inspired and interested in music, being able to exercise my freedom to do what I feel at the time.

MR: Edgar, what advice do you have for new artists?

EW: I would say to follow your heart and play the music that really means something to you. The perfect example of that, I think, is “Frankenstein.” That was something we really worked up as a live song, really a vehicle for the synthesizer, and it was a riff I had written a long time ago when I was playing with Johnny. I wrote that back when I was playing with Johnny as a walk-on. Nobody even knew I existed. He would say, “Now I’m going to bring on my little brother Edgar,” and I would walk out and they’d say, “Wow, there’s two of them!” I played Hammond B-3 and did a sax solo and a drum duo and we did a very primitive version of the song. We used to call it “The Double Drums Song” back then. But anyway, the point it being advice to new artists is that song was a song we worked up just to feature the synthesizer when I got the idea of putting the strap on the keyboard. We never even intended to record it. We just evidently had long versions, like fifteen or twenty-minute jams of that song. Back in those days, one of the other things that made the seventies so magical was the fact that bands would go into the studio with two or three songs and actually create an album.

All of that changed. As the record companies became more obsessive about that stuff, they demanded that you submit demos of everything. You had to have everything approved before you get into the studio. Back in those days, it wasn’t like that. We had these versions of what were just calling “The Instrumental” and then Rick Derringer said, “We could probably edit that into something to put on the album.” I thought, “Uh, that’s kind of crazy, but we do play it live enough and I like crazy ideas,” so it was a great excuse to get even more blasted than usual and have a big editing party. We figured out how to do it eventually. We all thought that “Free Ride” was the song with real single potential. We released that one and it really didn’t do anything, didn’t go anywhere. Then about the third or fourth single in, “Frankenstein” was a B-side and it just started getting underground FM radio play. All of a sudden, it was a huge number one hit. Then we re-released “Free Ride” after that and it became a big hit. The point that I’m making is that was a song that we did with no commercial intent. It was just for fun, it was a song that we played live. That’s my advice, just do the stuff that you feel is fun to play and means something to you.

MR: Nice. “Free Ride” is another song that’s been immortalized in pop culture. And think about how it was used in Dazed & Confused. That re-immortalized that song.

EW: Yeah, and it was also in Air America with Mel Gibson. And of course “Frankenstein” was in Wayne’s World 2. It’s great to walk into a theater and hear one of those songs on a soundtrack.

MR: Good for you, man! So have I forgotten anything to badger you about?

EW: [laughs] Before I go, I want to take this opportunity to thank all my fans out there for following my career as well as that of my brother Johnny. It means the world to us to be able to do what we most love and see you all out there rocking and having a great time. I look forward to seeing you all out there on this tour, and keep on rocking!

Transcribed by Galen Hawthorne