Tthe venue was the Oakville Living Arts Centre which was great as I live in Oakville. The venue is small enough that you feel like you are in a small size theatre and the sound is really great there too. The show is about to start and we are sitting 5 rows up on the right side of the stage. Johnny walks out slowly on stage with the aid of his other band mate back hunched over holding his Erlewine Lazer that he has used since the early 90’s. This guitar looks like a Stienberger with its headless design. He sat down on his padded chair and played the concert sitting down. He was playing through a Music Man amp with a Boss Chorus pedal and that’s it. The amp has a tube power amp section and solid state preamp. I did find his tone to be a little oversaturated and compressed for my liking but heck, he’s fricking Johnny Winter!!! Who am I to tell a 68 year old guitar legend he needs to clean up his tone.

The show went on and I noticed that Johnny was not playing with a flat pick but instead a thumb pick and he picked in a circular motion. This man although pushing his 70’s had awesome guitar chops, I was pretty impressed that he could also sing too. They had played the whole night just under 2 hours and when they came out for an encore he had with him his 1963 Gibson Firebird. He played slide on this guitar and whoa was his tone ever better as soon as he played it. Cool thing about the encore was that he performed the entire encore standing up singing and sliding on the guitar. Its was truly an awesome evening, my friend Maria Borg got the tickets for me and earlier that week had won a contest to meet Johnny Winter backstage. So we proceeded to head backstage to meet the legendary Johnny Winter. Was truly a great legendary experience. Special thanks to Maria & Dan Borg for getting me the tickets for my Birthday.

Lou Roppoli