Edgar Winter – HuffPost 7.7.14

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

Edgar Winter: 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.