Johnny Winter has been maturing for a long time, as the Imperial Sonobeat and GRT releases show; the latter is an unmitigated abortion, an offal-heap of very early tries for the Top 40 that sound like nothing so much as some nasal kind laboriously aping Jimmy Reed. That it was released at all is a travesty, and a triumph of the recording industry's undying tradition of greedy entrepreneurship.

The new Columbia release is a universe apart—a solid advance over his first set for the label—an unrelenting flood tide of throbbing, burning sound, a work of folk art which captures the tradition of blues and rock from the prehistoric Delta bottleneck sundown moans to the white-hot metal pyrotechnics of today and tomorrow. Winter has recognized that the blues is fluid and everpresent, from Robert Johnson to Little Richard to Dylan to the rampant feedback exorcisms of the Velvet Underground. He doesn't need to plow the same old pastures. Second Winter features few of the blues standards which glut releases from the Canned Aynsley Mac slaveyard. Beginning with Percy Mayfield's "Memory Pain," he wails through new, soon-to-be-classic versions of "Slippin' and Slidin'," "Johnny B. Goode," and "Highway 61 Revisited." Winter is stunning, with imaginative arrangements of very familiar material, ginmill earthy musicianship, and definitive rock and roll by anybody's standards.

Take "Highway 61 Revisited." Few but the Byrds seem able to transform a Dylan song into anything but a demonstration of self-consciouness. Folks strain their imaginations to smithereens trying to conceive an alternative approach that might measure up to that of the composer. But Winter doesn't need to sight it from such a self-defeating angle: he just takes the song and bends it to his own cry as he would any other, forgetting about Dylan entirely, for the moment. The performance is a masterful processing of the blues tradition that bodes new idioms by simultaneously sounding like everything that the blues emotionally is while sounding like no blues we've ever heard before. The cut sounds nothing like Dylan's version while it rumbles unmistakably with Dylan's deepest ethos. Winter is an alchemist mating paradoxes.

Winter's own compositions also show a distinct advance over the first Columbia release, when his songs sometimes came across as little more than uncredited cops from his black mentors. Here he quashes categories with a stunning succession of musical constructions that are often trailblazing, sometimes standardized, but always overwhelming. "I Hate Everybody" is a woolly ramble that builds one of the most banal fifties riffs—resounding waves of basic sock-hop bop—into a roaring musical juggernaut—Bill Haley preaching Armageddon and pressing on toward electronic renaissance. The album's most fully realized experiment, "Past Life Rider," is built from Bo Diddley drums and changing modern blues guitar into a ripping, searing improvisational foray aeons removed from the amphetamine strain of most "heavy" music. It's a triumph.

It's a joy that Johnny Winter has been brought among us, however irritating the hypes that accompany him. All the bullshit becomes meaningless now, precisely because the forced enthusiasm of flacks and ad copy is so totally antithetical to the vibrantly instinctive eruption of his talent. (RS 49)

LESTER BANGS