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Blues guitarist Johnny Winter dies
7/17/2014 9:34:02 AM
- A new Johnny Winter album with Eric Clapton, Joe Perry is due in September
- Rolling Stone ranks Johnny Winter at 63 on its list of 100 greatest guitarists
- Winter was 15 in 1959 when he began playing guitar in Texas clubs
- Another big year for Winter was 1969 when he played at Woodstock
(CNN) -- American blues guitarist and singer Johnny Winter died Wednesday in a hotel room in Switzerland, his representative said Thursday. He was 70.
"His wife, family and bandmates are all saddened by the loss of their loved one and one of the world's finest guitarists," his spokeswoman, Lori Haynes, said.
Winter was in Zurich, Switzerland, as part of a tour of Europe, although he was scheduled to return to the United States for shows later in July, according to his official Facebook page.
Winter first gained national attention when Rolling Stone magazine featured the the Texas music scene in a December 1968 cover story. It captioned his photo: "Johnny Winter, Albino Bluesman." The article said guitarist Mike Bloomfield considered the young Winter the "best white blues guitarist he had ever heard."
Rolling Stone now ranks Winter 63rd on its list of 100 greatest guitarists.
Winter's family moved from Mississippi to Beaumont, Texas, when he was an infant. Johnny and brother Edgar, who was nearly three years younger, both were born with albinism, a melanin production deficiency that left them with little color in their hair, skin and eyes.
Winter was just 15 in 1959 when he began playing guitar in Texas clubs. It was also the year he started drinking and smoking.
"It seemed a big year for me," Winter told an interviewer for the documentary "Johnny Winter: Down & Dirty." The film was released this year.
Another big year for Winter was 1969, when he played at the Woodstock festival.
"One week we're playing clubs for about 20 people and in a matter of a few months we're playing Woodstock," bassist Tommy Shannon said in the documentary.
Columbia Records won a bidding war for Winter that resulted in a self-titled debut album, followed by a second titled "Second Winter" in late 1969.
Though none of his several dozen albums earned a Grammy, he shared three for producing blues legend Muddy Waters in the late 1970s.
Winter announced this year that he had another album ready for release in September. "Step Back" will include contributions from guests including Eric Clapton, Joe Perry and Dr. John, according to his official website.
His summer tour schedule was filled with shows, including 15 concerts planned across the United States in August.
Winter was asked in the documentary if he every dreamed that playing a guitar would take him around the world.
"I was almost always sure it would," Winter said. "I was sure I was going to be successful.
"It's the only thing that I've really been good at."
Winter opened up about his heroin, prescription pill and alcohol addictions that derailed his career in the 1980s and 1990s in an authorized biography "Raisin' Cain - The Wild and Raucous Story of Johnny Winter," published in 2010.
His resurgence began after he fired a longtime manager in 2005 and hired fellow musician Paul Nelson to guide his career.
"I think that Johnny now is really coming back to being himself," brother Edgar Winter said in the just-released documentary.
People we've lost in 2014
CNN's Joan Yeam contributed to this report.
Is MH17 disaster a tragic blunder?
7/18/2014 1:25:31 AM
- Malaysia Airlines passenger plane possibly was shot down in Ukraine
- Michael Desch: If true, Russia and its local allies could be blamed
- Desch: If a Russian missile did bring down MH17, it likely was a tragic error
Editor's note: Michael Desch is a professor and chairman of the political science department at the University of Notre Dame. He specializes in international security and American foreign and defense policies. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- In the last few days, two Ukrainian warplanes were brought down over Eastern Ukraine (one allegedly by a Russian jet) and on Thursday a Malaysia Airlines passenger plane crashed in the area, apparently with the loss of all 298 souls on board. If it turns out that the unfortunate civilian airliner was also shot down, Russia and its local allies could again be implicated. Understandably, the international community will wonder whether this portends an escalation in the Kremlin ambitions there.
Vice President Joe Biden is already sure he knows what happened, telling an audience in Detroit on Thursday that the plane has "been shot down, not an accident. Blown out of the sky." Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko calls this "an act of terrorism" and is pointing the rhetorical finger at Moscow.
While all the facts are not yet in, it is indeed possible that a Russian surface-to-air missile brought the civilian plane down. If so, Russia or its Ukrainian separatist allies bear heavy responsibility for this tragedy. But that would not indicate that Russian President Vladimir Putin's overall strategy in the region has changed.
If a Russian missile did bring down MH17, it is likely that it was the result of a tragic error, a case of mistaken identity, rather than an intentional act by either the Russian military or their Ukrainian separatist allies. Such accidents are sadly not unprecedented.
In 1983, Soviet Air Defense Forces tracking an American electronic reconnaissance plane operating near their naval facilities on the Kamchatka Peninsula mistakenly shot down Korean Airline Flight 007 with the loss of 269 passengers, including a hard-line anticommunist U.S. congressman. And during the Tanker War in the Persian Gulf in 1988, a U.S. Navy AEGIS cruiser -- the USS Vincennes -- mistook Iran Air Flight 655 for an attacking Iranian warplane and shot it down, killing 290 civilians. Such tragic accidents happen in wartime or periods of heightened international tensions.
If it turns out that this is what happened in this case, the Russian military and their Ukrainian allies will suffer a well-deserved black eye. The Russian Air Defense Forces ought to have been able to distinguish a civilian airliner, operating on a previously filed flight plan and with its electronic identification systems operating, from Ukrainian warplanes. If they gave a high-altitude system to the Ukrainian separatists, then they also should have anticipated that an accident like this could have happened given that the Donetsk Republic has only primitive radar systems.
But there is blame to go around. Why did MH17's flight path take it right over a war zone in which two warplanes had just been shot down? You have to wonder what the airline and the Ukrainian and Russian civilian air controllers were thinking.
Even if events transpired as Biden and Poroshenko surmise, it's unlikely to indicate any major change in the Kremlin's ambitions in Eastern Ukraine. There is no evidence that Putin has deviated from his strategy of keeping the pot boiling in the region and begun moving toward something more ambitious.
Indeed, all the evidence suggests that he understands that the Donetsk Republic is not the Crimea. The best he can hope for is to use the pro-Russian insurgency as a lever to pry Kiev out of its increasingly Western orientation and as a bargaining chip with the new Ukrainian regime to get it to adopt a more federal political system that will keep Ukraine suspended between East and West.
This is, of course, a cold-blooded Machiavellian strategy of realpolitik. But such a cynical approach to the Eastern Ukraine is not incompatible with this event being nothing more than a tragic blunder.
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Does Dick Cheney 'believe his lies?'
7/18/2014 6:04:53 AM
- Paul Begala says he is appalled by Dick Cheney and his relentless effort to revise history
- Begala: Cheney won't admit any error, misgiving or remorse or apologize for any mistake
- Begala: Cheney misled, lied and did anything to drag America into a war with Iraq
- He says whether Cheney is a liar or fool; thousands of troops are dead; Iraq is a disaster
Editor's note: Paul Begala, a Democratic strategist and CNN political commentator, was a political consultant for Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 and was counselor to Clinton in the White House. He is a consultant to the pro-Obama super PAC Priorities USA Action. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author.
(CNN) -- As an American, I am appalled by Dick Cheney and his relentless, pathetic and ultimately doomed effort to revise the history of his failures.
But as a Democrat, I am thrilled that an incompetent, dishonest and reviled figure is hell-bent on making himself the face of the Republican Party, hogging the spotlight from rising stars like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio -- and eclipsing more honorable Republicans from the Bush era, like Colin Powell.
Cheney's endless media appearances, including this remarkable interview with CNN's Jake Tapper, reveal a nearly sociopathic refusal to admit any error, express any remorse, apologize for any mistake.
And so let us review the Cheney record: No vice president has done more damage to our country, not even Vice President Aaron Burr, who shot and killed Alexander Hamilton 210 years ago.
In the first months of the Bush-Cheney administration, Cheney was ordered to convene a task force on terrorism. Instead, he ignored the problem, the Cheney terror task force never met, and the warnings about an impending terrorist attack were ignored.
Later, instead of apologizing, Cheney cravenly blamed the White House counterterrorism czar (PDF), Dick Clarke, who had tried to warn anyone who would listen that an attack was coming.
"Richard Clarke was the head of the counterterrorism program in the run up to 9/11," Cheney said. "He obviously missed it." Blaming the guy who did his job when you're the one who didn't do yours.
From there, it was off to the races, as Cheney did and said anything to drag America into a war with Iraq. The good folks at the Washington Post's Vox have compiled a damning indictment of Cheney's deep dishonesty about Iraq. In the interest of brevity, let me focus on a few lowlights:
He said the lead 9/11 hijacker "did go to Prague, and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service ... several months before the attack." Wrong, according to a Senate Intelligence Committee report.
He said Saddam had "an established relationship with al Qaeda." Wrong (PDF).
Cheney claimed there was "irrefutable evidence" Saddam had reconstituted his nuclear program. Wrong.
He said Saddam "had an established relationship with al Qaeda, providing training to al Qaeda members in areas of poisons, gases and conventional bombs." Wrong (PDF).
He said there was "overwhelming" evidence of ties between al Qaeda and Iraq. Wrong.
He said that we'd be "greeted as liberators" and that the insurgency was in its "last throes" nine years ago. Wrong and wrong.
And that's just on Iraq. Need I mention that, as CEO of Halliburton, Cheney opposed President Clinton's sanctions on the terrorist regime in Iran, calling the Clinton administration "sanctions-happy"? And he breezily defended doing business with the terrorists in Tehran -- through an overseas-based subsidiary -- explaining that "the good Lord didn't see fit to always put oil and gas resources where there are democratic governments."
Need I mention he told Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill that "deficits don't matter"?
One can debate whether Cheney's misstatements were the result of willful mendacity or incompetence. I believe the former. But at a deeper level, it does not matter. Regardless of whether Cheney is a liar or a fool, thousands of heroic American troops are dead. Tens of thousands are injured. Iraq is a disaster -- and will be for years to come. And America is weaker and poorer because of Cheney.
I know that powerful people don't like admitting error. But Hillary Clinton did so in her new book, candidly admitting that in voting for the Bush-Cheney war in Iraq, "I got it wrong. Plain and simple."
Cheney, however, has no room for such candid introspection. When he turned 70, he was asked his greatest regret. He did not mention the death and devastation he brought to Iraq or that he and others ignored the terror threat before 9/11. He didn't mention his votes in Congress against banning plastic guns or opposing the release of Nelson Mandela.
He said, "My misspent youth." Seriously. A three-word oblique reference to a couple of drunken driving incidents a half century ago are the biggest regrets of this man's life. Other than that, Cheney sees his life as a flawless, virtuous existence.
Were it not for the tragedies of 9/11 and Iraq, perhaps the thing Cheney would be remembered for was that he was the second vice president to shoot a man, albeit Cheney's was in a hunting accident and Harry Whittington, thank God, survived.
Still, as a longtime quail hunter, I have no doubt Cheney was in the wrong. Every hunter is responsible for knowing where his buddies are. And Cheney violated a cardinal rule: He was drinking before he picked up the gun. (He claims to have had only one beer, but even one is too many when you're hunting.)
But here's the thing: Even after Cheney shot him in the face, there's no indication he ever apologized to Harry Whittington. I suppose being a sociopath means never having to say you're sorry.
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