16/10/2024
Another La Cave story - here's how things ended in June 1969.
Johnny We Hardly Knew Ye
Everyone was jazzed about the upcoming weekend. Johnny Winter was raw white boy blues energy. One reviewer described him as “a rail-thin blues guitarist known for his scorching riffs, flowing white hair and gravelly, hard-times voice.” Born with albinism which left him legally blind, Johnny had begun playing guitar early. At age 15 he won a talent contest for his song “School Day Blues,” which shot to number eight in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas. In early ’69 he jammed onstage at the Fillmore East with Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, and when Johnny ripped through B.B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault,” Columbia Records execs flipped their wigs and gave Johnny the biggest advance in the history of the music industry, a stratospheric $600,000.
Larry Bruner pulled out all the stops. He printed up 1,500 tickets and hit the five music stores selling La Cave tickets. They responded by selling over 400 tickets to one of Johnny’s six scheduled set over three days. He made sure that Nelson’s $1,500 advance check to Johnny's agent did not bounce.
Everything was set. Johnny and his band would arrive early on Monday the 7th of July to sound check and rehearse, and was slated to play the 8th through the 10th.
There was only one problem: the band never showed up. Larry recalls, “Johnny Winter was a big gamble for us. We’d agreed to a $3,500 guarantee for three nights, more than we’d ever spent before and, without publicizing it, scheduled them as our last shows. The dates were cancelled for no good reason we could tell except that he seemed to be getting bigger fast.”
It’s true. Johnny was blowing up. With his brother Edgar on keyboards and the ubiquitous Willie Dixon on electric bass, his album featured songs that would become Johnny Winter classics, such as, "Sonny Boy" Williamson's "Good Morning Little School Girl", and B.B. King's "Be Careful with a Fool.” In less than six weeks he would explode into the consciousness of millions of record buyers after a truly incendiary set on the Woodstock stage.
Nelson faced the problem head-on, filing a suit to collect on the deposit and projected lost profits. In part, his pleading said, “[La Cave] further claims that it had been the intention of the defendants…to cancel this contract and all other club concerts for reasons that defendant, Johnny Winter, suddenly discovered that he could make more money elsewhere.”
Sure enough, as Larry concurred, “[the] Belkins announced a concert with him at [the 3,000-seat] Music Hall.” This kind of poaching wasn’t limited to La Cave. In the lawsuit, Nelson said, “in fact, said defendant did cancel other contracts elsewhere in the United States.”
Larry wrapped it up in a tidy bow, writing, “Nelson was outraged, and sued for the contract price, won a judgment, and went with the sheriff and got the Music Hall gate receipts confiscated. We collected.”
It was a Pyrrhic victory. The joyous sounds of live music never again reverberated off the damp, clammy walls and nicely swept but sticky La Cave floorboards. Never again would young Clevelanders be beckoned by Sue Crutch’s dayglo mural to “Feed Your Head.” No plots would be hatched, no 3.2 beer guzzled, no furtive joints inhaled, no boy meets girl, and none of the shared glory of impressionable young adults being innocently, or not so much, instilled with a sense of freedom, confidence and activism that wasn’t available at home.
And maybe, in the bright light of hindsight, it was all for the best. The world was about to turn mean, and the lessons lived and learned in the basement, far from the prying eyes of those across the gulf of the generation gap, would turn into action in the streets and courtrooms of America. There was a war on, killing other young Americans, to stand up against, and civil rights, voting rights, and gender equality to stand up for. The ‘60s were a time of growing: less than a year later, on 4 May, 1970, four Kent State students lay dead, with thirteen more injured by the thirty-ought-six cartridges fired at them under the orders of the Governor and possibly the President. Two weeks later, more students lay dead or dying at Jackson State. The time for innocence and growth was over: it was now time to put the lessons learned at La Cave into action, or else the future would become a very dark destination.
