Edgar Winter from the cover of his 1972 album, "They Only Come Out at Night.""Are y'all ready for the monster?" Edgar Winter will drawl when he's about to perform "Frankenstein," the chart-topping jazz-rock instrumental he unleashed 40 years ago.
The song shares some traits with the fictional creature it was named after. Winter's "Frankenstein" almost never saw the light of day. And it was pieced together using a sharp instrument.
"The amazing thing about 'Frankenstein' — you would listen to it and think, because of the title and the concept, that it was an idea that was developed," said Winter. "But in point of fact, it was actually a concatenation of weird, unrelated circumstances that just happened to fall together."
Multi-instrumentalist Winter is due in Red Bank on Aug. 21 as part of Hippiefest 2012. The Texas native, 65, will be joined by his brother, guitarist Johnny Winter, and a longtime collaborator, guitarist Rick Derringer.
Winter explained that "Frankenstein" began as a jam he played with his brother's trio.
"I came up with this riff," he said. "We used to call it 'The Double-Drum Song,' because I did a duel drum solo with Johnny's drummer, Red Turner, and I played Hammond B3 and alto sax as well. So it was sort of a showcase for me.
"We performed it all over the world, and then it was gone and forgotten for years — until the advent of the synthesizer."
Here's where a bit of rock history was made by Winter. It began when Winter purchased a then-new synthesizer, the ARP 2600, which had a keyboard connected to the "brain" of the instrument via a cable.
"Since it wasn't the whole unit — it was just the remote keyboard — it was relatively light," Winter said. "I thought, 'Wow, looks like you could just pick this thing up, put a strap on it and play it like a guitar!' I was the first person to have the idea of playing the keyboard in that fashion. I was like, 'Wow, I'm free! I'm not stuck behind this bank of keyboards, where I can't move and people can't see what I'm doing.'
"It was like the greatest release, and it really changed my approach toward the keyboard and toward the synthesizer and toward music in general."
But what song would be best suited to play in this fashion? Winter remembered the untitled jam he used to play with his brother.
He recalled: "We played it. It sounded great. I substituted timbales for the drums, to solve the problem of having two drum kits onstage. Made it much easier and, actually, more interesting. I like the interplay with the different texture of the timbales with the drums."
But Winter — who was recording his 1972 album, "They Only Come Out at Night" — still thought of the piece as a live song, not a studio song.
"We still had no intention of recording it," Winter said. "We just called it 'the instrumental.' But tape was always rolling when any jamming was going on. It was one of our favorite things to play, to warm up on. We'd usually play through that when we came in.
"We had this thing laying all over the control room," said Edgar Winter of splicing together his No. 1 hit, "Frankenstein.""So we had, like, three or four long, 20-, 30-minute versions of it. Rick Derringer and I were talking about it toward the end of the project. He said, 'Surely, we've got enough to edit something together into some kind of usable form.' I said, 'I don't know. That doesn't sound like anything else on the album.' But I said, 'Well, why not? I love the song. Let's try it.' "
There was a fringe benefit.
"Also," Winter said with a laugh, "it was a great excuse to get more blasted than usual at the big editing party, you know, to kind of wrap things up at the end of the session."
The editing of the song, in fact, yielded its title.
"In those times," Winter said, "the only way to edit something was to physically cut the master tape into pieces, and then rearrange them and put 'em back together with splicing tape. So we had this thing laying all over the control room — on the console, draped over the backs of chairs, rolled up on the couch. We were saying, 'Well, here's the main body here, and I think that's the head over there.' We were trying to figure out how to put it all back together.
"And the drummer, Chuck Ruff, mumbled the immortal words, 'Wow, man, it's like Frankenstein,' drawing the analogy of an arm here and a leg there and pasting the thing back together. So the monster was born."
HIPPIEFEST 2012
Who: Johnny Winter, Edgar Winter, Rick Derringer, Leslie West and Kim Simmonds
Where: Count Basie Theatre, 99 Monmouth St., Red Bank
When: Aug. 21 at 8 p.m.
How much: $25 to $75; call (732) 842-9000 or visit countbasietheatre.org
Mark Voger can be reached HERE.