When Johnny hit big, the tape vaults of the tiny labels he’d cut for underwent a thorough scouring so their contents could quickly be assembled on LPs attempting to cash in on Winter’s meteoric rise to fame. He’d cut a stack of regional 45s ranging from lowdown Gulf Coast blues to brassy, soul-slanted R&B to crunching psychedelic rock for local producers, confirming over and over precisely how astonishingly versatile the guitarist was despite his tender years. Perhaps only his friends, family, and rabid fans back home knew that Winter had already amassed a sizable recording legacy over the previous eight years. His ascension to stardom was nearly instantaneous. The following year, the flashy fleet-fingered axeman from Beaumont released a spectacular debut album on Columbia Records and blasted his in-your-face fretwork inside a host of major venues across the country. I was lucky enough to be able to get a contract the way I wanted it, where I could put out the kind of music that I wanted completely.” Everybody wanted me, and I wasn’t under contract to anybody.
“So it was just at that point of checking it out and taking the best offer-not the most money, but the person who I really thought could do the most good. And overnight, people that wouldn’t even talk to me were calling me from New York, California, Europe, every place, man. And there was a big picture of me, talking about how great I was. “It was just about Texas people, how many good people had made it from Texas and how many good people there still were in Texas undiscovered. “The Rolling Stone article came out about Texas musicians, saying that I was the greatest thing in Texas still starving to death,” recalled the late Johnny Winter. The piece touted a newly unearthed young blues-rock guitarist whose insanely speedy licks were stirring up a veritable Lone Star tornado. The Decemissue of Rolling Stone published an extensive feature on the wide-ranging scope of contemporary Texas music.
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