Gettin’ Biznified With Johnny C
By: William, Dollar Bill
Tags: Music, Inspiration, Music Business, Relationships, Culture

Gettin’ Biznified With Johnny C

Playing with a blues legend before he became one

Joey Nicotra — Unsplash

While I did have the opportunity to play behind many of the recording artists who provided the background music for my tween and teen years, there weren’t a whole lot of real blues guys I ever got to meet.

JOHNNY WINTER came to jam with the band I joined after exiting graduate school. And I was once introduced to DOCTOR JOHN (if you want to call him blues) at a record company office. But otherwise, I mostly picked in blues anonymity. Still, there was one guy I knew well before he became the stuff of legend.

Dorian Burton (not the guy I just mentioned) was a journeyman songwriter who you might have mistaken for Little Richard if you didn’t look too closely. He lived in a shitty rooming house in Midtown Manhattan and basically lived to drink liquor, smoke weed, write songs, and crash on young boys (not necessarily in that order).

Notwithstanding his subsistence lifestyle, Dorian had had a few hits and thus, publishers would answer their phones when he called — and wannabe songwriters wanted to write with him for his connections — if not his talent. I was one of them.

Despite the fact that there were about four of us who competed for Dorian’s time, nobody got jealous — as he was so difficult to write with. We all understood that working with Dorian daily would have been madness.

So one day, I went up to Dorian’s hovel to write, when I ran into a new guy Dorian had just met. As co-conspirators in search of fame and fortune, we all related and were more than happy to listen to what each other had written. I cannot remember what Dorian and Johnny had just been working on and performed that day. I just recall being blown away by Johnny’s voice and authenticity. I wasn’t all that impressed by D’s other partners. But this guy was special. I went home that night and called a friend to say “I just met WILSON PICKETT’S doppelganger. This guy is the real deal! And he’s up in Dorian’s shithole trying to write a hit record with a drunk.”

Around this time, my father had a crappy office at 1650 Broadway, a space he’d rented to mount a comeback in the music business (an unsuccessful one). Rather than tote around my Gibson acoustic (which I used to write with in Midtown), I stashed it at the old man’s office.

Bad move! My father, who lived on Long Island in a safe boatyard and thus never locked his door, left his office door unlocked and my precious Gibson walked. To this day, it’s the only guitar I’ve ever had stolen.

I didn’t really need a first-rate instrument to write with Dorian…so I bought a hundred-bucker to beat on, and left it at Dorian’s crib where guess what happened. That one was stolen as well.

One day soon after the theft, Dorian called to say that Johnny had a guitar he could sell for $150. So I got on the phone to tell Johnny I'd give him a c-note if I liked it. Johnny copped an attitude and told me to take a long walk off a short pier. But later, he called back. He'd take the hundred after all. And it turned out that his hundred dollar guitar was actually a brand new Aria Pro with a hard shell case that itself was probably worth a hundred bucks.

And I mean…this instrument was pristine. Like it had never been played before. I asked no questions — if you get my drift. It is now over 50 years later. I still own that guitar! Mind you it’s a warped egg slicer by now and not worth its weight in firewood. But in its day, it wasn’t a bad instrument.

Johnny didn’t stay affiliated with Dorian for very long as he was a performer who could sing and play in clubs and earn a living on the circuit. Time marched on as it always does. Dorian died and I was playing with the SHIRELLES when one day, the bass player picked up a copy of The New York Times to show me a picture on the cover of the paper’s second section, espousing the musical genius of the guy in the photograph. And it was Johnny as in JOHNNY COPELAND.

I exploded in laughter. “Dude! that’s the guy who sold me my acoustic for a hundred bucks! Johnny fucking Copeland. I knew that guy had it the minute I heard his voice. Look there.” Well…Johnny got his 15 minutes of fame before dying of congestive heart failure at age 59. And deservedly so. I could listen to him sing all day.

And now to the title of this essay. One night Johnny, Dorian and I were hanging in D’s joint. Johnny was bemoaning his relationship with a female manager who was giving him the cold shoulder behind his philandering. Johnny was not happy:

“The woman got all biznified on me! She all biznified now,” he lamented!

My very own mother had ambivalent feelings about the many ways I found to make a living which required not one day of the formal education I’d had. And she could never quite resolve whether to laugh or cry at the many anecdotes with which I regaled her. But when I called her up the next day and hit her with my new favorite vocabulary word, it was over. Mom was a strict grammar student and teacher all her life. And she was about as vanilla as they come — but not above a word or expression with a ring to it. And “biznified” rung that bell!

She simply couldn’t stop laughing and repeating the word.

And so it turns out that I did play with a legendary bluesman after all (Johnny and I did do one recording session together). It’s just that he wasn’t a blues legend at the time. Which makes it that much sweeter in retrospect.