My review of True to the Blues: The Johnny Winter Story, today at All About Jazz.
With the release of From His Head to His Heart to His Hands earlier this year, Legacy Recordings proved it was possible to put together a career-spanning retrospective, even if the artist's discography—in this case, the late blues guitarist Mike Bloomfield—spanned several disconnected labels. Now, less than one month later, Legacy does it again with yet another bluesman who, over the years, has also lost much of the visibility and a lot of the commercial success he achieved from the late '60s through the '70s—a time when so much more seemed possible, and before so much music turned niche. The big difference, however, is that Johnny Winter remains alive to this day—the release of True to the Blues—The Johnny Winter Story coinciding, almost to the day, with his 70th birthday—unlike Bloomfield, who died too young in 1981 at the age of 37, under mysterious circumstances surrounding his increasing substance abuse.
True to the Blues—The Johnny Winter Story does, indeed, focus heavily on the albino Texan's first and most successful decade—and, most assuredly not coincidentally, the time when he was, also like Bloomfield, signed to Columbia Records, a label then prepared to put serious money behind him, and ultimately yield significant success. Still, this four-disc/four-and-a-half hour collection does manage to include, on the fourth CD, at least some representation of Winter's post-Columbia discography for labels like Alligator and Virgin, straight through to his 2011 Megaforce release, Roots. There's also a couple of tracks culled from The Progressive Blues Experiment, released by Liberty Records the same year as Winter's Columbia debut, Johnny Winter (1969), and which was, in actual fact, a demo recording—albeit a powerfully assured one that, combined with his first Columbia release, delivered a strong one-two punch that made clear the 25 year-old guitarist wasn't ascending towards arrival; he was already there.
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Originally Posted by gpeccary
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