This is from Johnny Winter’s fifth studio album, and his first since “Johnny Winter And” almost three years earlier. It was released by Columbia Records in 1973. Many of the songs on the album have a more rock-oriented power trio sound, with Randy Jo Hobbs, formerly of the McCoys, on bass. He also gets some help from Rick Derringer—a former McCoy as well—on electric, pedal steel, and click guitars; Todd “Hello It’s Me” Rundgren on keyboards; Mark “Moogy” Klingman (later of Rundgren’s Utopia) on piano; and Jeremy Steig on flute.

The Winter brothers, Johnny and Edgar, were born in the mid-1940s in Beaumont, Texas, hometown of The Big Bopper and Blind Willie Johnson, and both attended special education classes in high school. Edgar, a musical child prodigy, mastered a plethora of instruments, while Johnny—the elder brother by two years—focused on the guitar, mandolin, and harmonica.

Johnny recorded his first single at 15, and released his first LP in 1968, after Columbia Record execs caught the Fillmore East gig that same year at which Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper invited Winter on stage to jam. Within a year he was playing Woodstock, and recording on and off with brother Edgar, and by 1970 he was incorporating rock into his blues. He was sidetracked for several years by a bad heroin habit, but cleaned up his act just in time to record 1973’s Still Alive and Well

The fast and furious “Still Alive and Well” opens with Winter saying, “I’m hungry, let’s do this fucker,” at which point his guitar takes over. Meanwhile he sings like a survivor:

Did you ever take a look to see who is left around
Everyone I thought was cool is six feet underground

And even throws a joke at his own expense into the chorus:

I’m still alive and well, still alive and well
Every now and then I know it’s kind of hard to tell
But I’m still alive and well

He plays a pair of flabbergasting solos, and barks and screams, and I’ll be damned if this isn’t the best song about doing junk and living to tell about it since Dion’s great “Your Own Backyard.”

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