Slide guitar maestro Johnny Winter teams up with the Derek Trucks Band for a blistering live performance of “Highway 61 Revisited.”
Bob Dylan’s 1965 classic, “Highway 61 Revisted,” has long been a staple in the repertoire of high-energy blues guitarist Johnny Winter. At one point, it’s said, Winter played the song with such blazing speed that he ran straight through it twice—apparently, just to make sure the customers got it all in. Now nearing his 70th birthday, Winter plays it with a little less speed, but with every bit as much intensity.
The Highway 61 in Dylan’s lyrics refers, of course, to the old U.S. Route 61 of pre-Interstate days, which runs 1400 miles from Wyoming, Minnesota (south of Dylan’s home town in Hibbing) all the way to New Orleans. Called the Blues Highway, the route loosely shadows the Mississippi River through St. Louis, Memphis, and down through the Delta country. In American musical lore, every blues performer must travel this road. It was at the crossroads of Routes 61 and 49 near Clarksdale, Mississippi, goes the battered old legend, that Robert Johnson traded his soul to Satan for his other-worldly guitar skills.
It is the crossroads legend for which Eric Clapton named his annual Crossroads Guitar Festival, which attracts the great blues artists to support the Crossroads Centre, the drug rehab facility he founded. This live performance is from the 2007 concert, with Winter backed by Derek Trucks, a masterful slide guitarist in his own right, and his band. Part of the fun in this clip is seeing the pure love for Winter painted on the faces of Trucks and his band mates as they perform. Watch and listen and you’ll feel it, too.
Poor old Johnny is looking frail – he hasn’t weathered all those wild years as freakishly well as Keef Richards. At first I thought perhaps that Derek and the bass player were sniggering at the old man but by the end I think it really was genuine affection.
To me Winters’ best works by far were his collaborations with Muddy Waters, those two seemed to work perfectly together. Thanks Mac.
JW has always been in poor health and has not been kind to himself at times. Now that Derek has quit the Allman bros. hopefully he’ll have time for his own music, including more projects with JW.