The house is an easy hour by car from the wall-to-wall insanity of midtown Manhattan, situated in one of the bedroom communities just over the Connecticut line. It’s not an especially palatial house — the wing which houses the indoor swimming pool cost as much to build as the main structure — but it’s certainly comfortable enough, and serves its function well. Its function these days is to accomodate a man who SB not so very long ago was at the center of the game of madness that lives across the bridge in New York,

But that game has a way of closing in for the kill on even the wisest and most experienced of players. The player in this instance is Johnny Winter, and perhaps the only thing that separates his story from those of a thousand other casualties is the simple fact that he’s still around to* tell it. For the last two years he hasn’t been around, but the story of those years^ is only the epilogue to a build-up of events and circumstances which began much earlier. In some ways, it was the only possible conclusion to the rock & roll myth we built for ourselves in the Sixties.