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a lot of pranks. Childlike in a very delightful way, very dirty mind. As a young man I
very much enjoyed the sex talk and humour. There was just a lot of that. He would
have a little Tanqueray [Gin, Ed] now and then and get kind of irascible, but mostly

if I could sit next to him at a diner,
I was so happy because I just

enjoyed him so much.

BiTS: You worked for him for three
years, I believe. Is that right?

JI: Yep, I joined his band. I moved

out on Valentine's Day 1994, so
February 1994, and toward the end

of 1996, I told him that I was going
to leave the band and that was
because it was a lot of touring.

There was a big blues boom then,
if you remember in the mid-90s,
and every show was sold out and

we were playing 150 times a year
or something like that. My wife had
moved out. We weren't married

yet, but my future wife had moved out from the East Coast to be with me, and this
was pre-cell phone. She was working a couple of jobs to kind of hold down the fort
here at home while I was out and I’m maybe calling her once a week with a phone

card. She wasn't so happy about it. Chicago was much colder than we were used to,
so we went somewhere warm every winter. Junior had it right.

We would go to the southern United States. We would go to Australia, we’d go to

South America, California. Just kind of as we say, get out of Dodge in the winter. She'd
be like going from one job to another without really hardly any friends in Chicago
[chuckles]. So that was tough on us and also when I joined the Junior Wells band, I

was in my early 20s and most of the musicians were well into their 40s. They were
alumni of the bands of James Cotton and Screamin’ Jay Hawkins and Buddy Guy and
even Magic Sam, B.B. King. The trombone player was B.B. King's band leader. If you

see TV footage of ‘The Thrill Is Gone’, when it was a new hit, this guy was in that
band, he was the band leader then. That was who was in the band when I joined. A
couple of years later in my third year, most of them had gone, had left the band for

whatever reason. Different stories, different people, and a lot of people would come
in, or more people like me, people my age and I just didn't feel as much as I had

anything to learn from it anymore and it was just a lot of touring. I actually chose to
leave the band in 96. Junior died in 98, and I used to say that he died of a broken
heart because I left, but that's not exactly true [chuckles].