In the beginning, they were brothers — just two brothers born in the 1940s in the Southeast Texas town of Beaumont. They looked different from the other kids, both with severely pale skin and strikingly blond hair. Visual impairment is also a byproduct of the congenital condition known as albinism, and when vision is diminished, hearing is enhanced and rendered more sensitive to all sound. Differences like these drew Johnny Winter and his little brother, Edgar, closer to each other and closer to music. They were both playing music in clubs and doing so together before either of them could drive. “Johnny and I were inseparable as kids,” Edgar told Goldmine. “We grew up playing together. We had a sort of telepathic communication.”
In the middle, they were brothers, pursuing different but parallel paths in music, overlapping when they could, sometimes making music together, other times inspiring and informing each other’s work in the studio or on the road.
At the end of the line, they’re still brothers. Fifty-five years after he started playing music for an audience, Johnny was on the road headed for another gig when he passed in his sleep at age 70 in 2014. But that hasn’t kept Edgar Winter from still being Johnny’s brother, musically connected forever. Edgar, an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and literal monster hitmaker (“Frankenstein” and “Free Ride”), is still making music that defies simple categorization but clearly lands under the rock umbrella.
And he’s doing it for his brother.
“ I always thought of myself as an instrumentalist. My first and biggest song, a No. 1, is an instrumental. That was unheard of for an instrumental. ”
— EDGAR WINTER
“Johnny has always been my all-time musical hero,” said Edgar. And with the new release Brother Johnny, Edgar Winter keeps his brother alive and well with an all-star tribute record that celebrates the larger-than-life blues/rock body of work of the rock and roll legend.
I only got to see Johnny Winter perform once, and he was simply amazing. He was not in great health at that time in 2006, but there he sat in a chair onstage, wiry, fragile and still untouchable with the most amazing guitar work I’d ever seen, most notably on his fiery version of Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61 Revisited.” Two years later, I got to see Edgar and his band turn in an equally powerful set at an outside gig in downtown Austin, Texas, still looking like his brother with that long flowing blond hair.
As a huge fan of both Edgar Winter and Johnny Winter, I had a journalistic thrill talking with Edgar, especially to do so in a way that dealt primarily with the lifelong musical kinship that he shared with his late brother.
“To me, albums are sort of like snapshots
