Port Arthur, Texas, Bowmont, Texas, a 100 miles apart on the same flat Gulf Coast plane bracketed by refineries and the smell of oil and the specific weight of a landscape that has very clear ideas about what a person should be. In Port Arthur, a girl with wild curly hair listening to Bessie Smith records in her bedroom.
In Bowmont, a boy with white hair and extraordinary hands learning the blues on a guitar that was already too small for what he needed to say. Neither of them knew the other existed. Both of them were wrong for Texas in the same specific way. Both of them were going to end up on the same stage at Madison Square Garden.
This is the story of Janice Joplain and Johnny Winter. Johnny Winter was born in Bowmont, Texas on February 23rd, 1944, a year and a month after Janice Joplain was born in Port Arthur. He was born with albinism, white hair, pale skin, eyes sensitive to light in the small Texas cities of the 1940s and 1950s.
This made him different in a way that was not comfortable. He was stared at. He was kept apart. He found his way to the guitar, the way certain people find their way to the thing that will carry them through the thing that is otherwise uncarryable. He played the blues because the blues was the honest music. The music that said, “I know what it is to be the wrong kind of person in this world.
I know what it costs. Here is what it sounds like.” He had been hearing the same music Janice Joplain was hearing, the same radio stations, the same tradition, the same Gulf Coast air, bringing the same sounds through the same windows. They just hadn’t found each other yet. By 1969, they had both made it out. Janice had been in San Francisco since 1966, had done Monteray, had released Cheap Thrills, had become the most famous female rock singer in America.
Johnny Winter had been discovered by a Rolling Stone writer who heard him play in Texas and wrote about him in 1968. The article caused a sensation. Every major label in America wanted to sign him. He signed with Colombia Records, the same label as Janice, for what was reported as the largest advance in Colombia’s history at that time, $600,000.
Two Texas kids from the Gulf Coast on the same label, in the same city, in the same world. They found each other the way people from the same place find each other when they’re far from it. With immediate recognition the specific warmth of someone who understands without explanation where you came from. He understood Port Arthur because he had grown up in Bowmont.
She understood Bowmont because she had grown up in Port Arthur. The same flat world, the same refinery smoke on the horizon, the same weight of being wrong for the place you were born. December 19th, 1969, Madison Square Garden, New York City. Janice Joplain was performing with the Cosmic Blues Band.
The tour had been running since January of that year, the first full year of her solo career, the year she had been building the Cosmic Blues sound, refining what she wanted to do after Big Brother. Johnny Winter joined her on stage and Paul Butterfield, three musicians who had come from different corners of the American blues tradition, finding each other in the largest arena in New York.
The photographs from that night exist. Johnny’s white hair unmistakable beside her wild curls. Two Texans on the Madison Square Garden stage. The Gulf Coast was a long way away. They had brought it with them anyway. The story that Johnny Winter told about them, the one that has been documented and repeated and that captures something essential about who they were when they were together, is the story of the Myra Breenidge premiere.
Myra Breenidge was a film based on Gore Vidal’s novel, a controversial transgressive piece of Hollywood filmmaking that starred May West, Raquel Welsh, and a cast that represented the specific wild end of 1970 Hollywood. It was exactly the kind of event that Janice Joplain would attend. She asked Johnny Winter to be her date. He said yes.
He remembered it this way. Janice and I were so dressed up. She was wearing her big cape and had all these feathers in her hair. I was all in black velvet. Boy, they arrived at the theater. The lights, the Hollywood crowd, the photographers, they walked down the aisle to their seats and suddenly there was applause. He remembered.
We looked at each other because we knew it couldn’t be for us. Then we heard somebody say something and we realized they had thought I was May West. Johnny Winter in his black velvet with his dramatic white hair and pale skin had been mistaken for May West. How many times do you get to see May West and Raquel Welch in one evening? He said, “And we felt we were just a couple of freaks in the middle of that.
Two freaks from the Gulf Coast of Texas in the middle of Hollywood dressed up being mistaken for movie legends looking at each other and laughing. That is who they were together. What Johnny Winter and Janice Joplain had in common was something that went deeper than the music, though the music expressed it completely.
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They were both people the world had looked at and decided, “You are the wrong kind of visible.” Her wildness, her refusal to be pretty the way Texas wanted her to be pretty. Her face and her hair and her voice and her opinions, all of it wrong by Port Arthur’s accounting. His albinism, his whiteness that was too white even for white Texas, his strangeness, his difference that had no easy category.
Both of them had converted that wrongness into music. Both of them had taken the specific pain of being wrong for the place they were born and had found the tradition, the blues, the honest music, the music that says, “I know what this costs and had let it carry what they needed carried.” When they were together, they didn’t have to explain any of that.
They were from the same 100 miles. They already knew. October 1970, Janice Joplain died. She was 27 years old. Johnny Winter had said in the months after her death that he fully expected to be the next casualty himself. He was not. He survived the 1970s which killed many of the people around him. He survived addiction. He survived decades of touring and recording.
He kept playing the blues that he had learned in Bowmont, Texas on a guitar that was already too small for what he needed to say. He died on July 16th, 2014. He was 70 years old. He outlived Janice by 44 years. Port Arthur has a Janice Joplain Museum. Now Baymont has a Johnny winter memorial. The Gulf Coast is the same flat landscape, the refineries still on the horizon, the same weight of a place that had very clear ideas about what a person should be.
Two people who were wrong for that place in different ways grew up a 100 miles apart and never knew each other until they were famous. Then they walked down an aisle at a Hollywood premiere in their finest clothes and someone mistook one of them for May West. They looked at each other. They knew it couldn’t be for them. They were right.
They were just a couple of freaks from the Gulf Coast making it count. Subscribe. The next story goes somewhere nobody has taken you
