Can't Be Satisfied (21 page)

Still in Shreveport, the band went to get new outfits. They’d left Chicago’s cool summer unprepared for the swamps of Louisiana. “It was so hot down there that we got little
stuff you could wear and rinse out, it’d be ready to go the next morning,” said Jimmy. They bought seersucker suits, short-sleeved eggshell-colored shirts, and beige pants. The tailor
told them everything would be ready that afternoon. “When we got back to the hotel, oh man, the girl up at the desk said, ‘The little guy with the checkered hat on’ — that
was Walter — ‘he said for you to take care of his amplifier. He had a terrific nosebleed, he’s goin’ back to Chicago.’ ”

It was true that Walter suffered nosebleeds, and the band worried for him. For the moment, however, there was nothing to do but book a saxophone player to finish the tour — no other
harmonica player could command Walter’s big sounds. “We made out with him,” Rogers continued. “Picked stuff you could kind of handle pretty good to make the
nights.”

Back in Chicago, Walter immediately powwowed with the Myers
brothers. He was ready to walk away from Muddy’s old-fashioned slow stuff, jumping to bring in the new.
When Muddy’s band returned, they found their harmonica player in good health, if a little bigheaded (he tried to get his share of the pay for the gigs he’d missed), and they resumed
playing — for about a week. When Walter jumped from Muddy, Junior Wells jumped toward him. Muddy never missed a beat, and Walter gained one: the East Coast–based Shaw Artists
Corporation, booking and promotion, opened a Chicago office and signed Little Walter to a five-year contract; the Aces became the Jukes. Walter’s debut single spent twenty weeks on the
R&B charts, where it hit number one.

Junior Wells was grounded in the country and the city, traveling between his father in Arkansas and his mother in Chicago. As a child, he remembered visiting a place where he
saw the people dancing wildly, heard the hollering, and told his mother he liked that blues joint. “She said, ‘You wasn’t at no blues joint, you was at a sanctified church.’
”

Born December 9, 1934, he was raised in Marion, Arkansas, near West Memphis — a barefoot kid getting dusty with another future blues star, Junior Parker, the two jamming on
twenty-five-cent Marine Band harmonicas they bought at the Rexall drugstore. Junior and guitarist Earl Hooker learned to please crowds on the Chicago streetcar, riding “from one end of the
line to the other, takin’ up a little change from it. We had a guy played the tub with that rope broom for a bass.”

As a teenager, Junior tried to buy a harmonica at a Chicago pawn shop, but didn’t have enough money. He took the instrument anyway and tried to raise the difference by playing for spare
change outside the store. The salesman had him arrested and Wells was taken to court. Muddy signed papers as his guardian. “The judge asked me to play the harp,” Wells said, “and
when I did, the judge gave the salesman the fifty cents and hollered, ‘Case dismissed.’ ” Then Muddy took him outside and popped him on the forehead.

“I raised Junior Wells from about a kid,” said Muddy. “He was in my band. He was too young to be in the clubs. I had to be his guardian. I had to keep
him down because first thing you know he’d wanna fight!” Spann worked Junior into the band, as he would for each successive member, harpist or otherwise, teaching the songs and
Muddy’s way of toying with the beat. But harmonica players were especially close to Spann’s heart. “I figure the harmonica is the mother of the band,” he said. “Once
you get a good harp lead off, you in business.” Junior was young and quick. Within a month of joining, he was in the studio. He was seventeen and played amplified harmonica like he’d
been playing it for all his seventeen years. His screaming harp on “Standing Around Crying” is every bit as exciting as Walter’s playing. Junior pushes the amplified harmonica
till it wails in pain, then pulls it softly to make it purr. There was soon an irony to the title. Out one weekend with the band, Junior scored a girl and took her back to the hotel after the gig.
Muddy’s date had fallen through, and not long after Junior entered his room, Muddy knocked on his door. When Junior opened it, Muddy barged in, threw Junior out, and locked the door. Junior
was left standing around crying.

Still, ladies would come and go, and Junior had no reason to leave the band. When the army drafted him on his eighteenth birthday, he ignored the notice and was carted off by military police. He
went AWOL and had to be hauled back once again. “Every time we’d look around,” said Muddy, “two of them big mens there looking for him, and he used to run ’tween their
legs.”

About three months after Little Walter’s defection, Jimmy signed his own deal with the Shaw agency. His singles weren’t as popular as Walter’s or Muddy’s, but as
bandleader he was better paid. Steadfastly holding to his formula, Leonard tried to keep the core band together in the studio. “We was running in and out of town,” said Jimmy Rogers,
“and sometimes we’d meet up in Chicago and get a chance to cut a session.” He continued to make club appearances with Muddy; when his own gigs conflicted, guitarist Eddie Taylor
filled his role.

Muddy’s selflessness made his sidemen more satisfied while in his
band, but it encouraged their solo aspirations, creating an instability in his lineup: someone was
always thinking about going out on his own. Those who wanted independence would want it anyway, and Muddy, despite the repercussions and the personal pain, remained undeterred in sharing the
spotlight with his band members. “If somebody can shine, put the light on them, let them shine. It makes a better feeling in the band. [But] it goes hard when you get used to one sound and
you have to go and get into another one,” said Muddy. “See, we knew one another’s thing, and we had no trouble out of that. When it fell apart, it went hard.”

S
ong publishing is a complex and slippery aspect of the music business, but it is where most of the money is made. Artists recording songs written
by others must pay a copyright fee — for the right to copy the song — to the publishing company, and the publisher pays the writer. (So, when rock bands began covering songs Muddy
wrote, there was money for Muddy and his publisher — though the publisher kept it until a lawsuit in the late 1970s. When the Rolling Stones would record a Muddy Waters hit written by Willie
Dixon, however, no matter how much they copied Muddy’s arrangement, the publishing payment would go only to Dixon, as writer, and his publisher — not to the original performer.)

Muddy’s phenomenal success caught the attention of Gene Goodman in New York, brother of Benny Goodman and a wealthy song publisher. He approached the Chess brothers and was surprised
— and no doubt pleased — to learn that they had not been publishing their music. “They came to my father,” said Leonard’s son Marshall, “asking, ‘Who is
handling your stuff internationally? Who is hustling your stuff with cover records? What about performance fees?’ We didn’t know about any of this, and my father thought it was better
to have half of something than all of nothing.” The Chesses and Gene Goodman incorporated the publishing company Arc Music (an acronym for Aristocrat Record Corporation) on August 1, 1953.
Leonard bought his first Cadillac soon after.

For Muddy and his band, not much changed immediately. When a session was completed, the artists lined up to sign or make their mark on union forms and receive their forty-one dollars in session
money (double for the bandleader). Songwriters signed a publishing form, a penny per sale — to be paid later. The band’s money, their living money, still came
from gigs, which paid better when records sold better.

Songwriting styles were changing. Jimmy’s solo success and Walter’s popularity indicated the record-buying audience was developing a taste for a more urban sound. Sensing that his
star artist was on the verge of becoming the new “shoe stump” music, Leonard finally acceded to Otis Spann’s presence in the studio. In late 1953, they cut the two-sided classic
“Mad Love (I Want You to Love Me),” which featured a stop-time rhythm (several unified beats followed by a pause for the vocalist), and “Blow Wind Blow.” On a club’s
jukebox, either side of this one would have filled the dance floor. Walter howls like a tornado siren. Spann’s playing is perfect — nearly invisible. He rolls under lyrics, anticipates
the guitar riff, hides beneath it, bolsters the harp: he is generally all over the place without seeming to be much of anywhere. “People were wondering at first because I have short
fingers,” Spann once said. “They figured I couldn’t physically play that much piano. But you can make a piano do what you want it to do. The piano is made for both hands.”
(James Cotton, who would join Muddy’s band the following year, remembers Spann having the webbing between the base of his fingers surgically opened.)

The piano’s percussiveness created a need for more complex timekeeping; the fills were no longer so obvious. Walter’s drummer, Fred Below, came up with the Myers brothers, and both
Muddy and Leonard had watched him. Like Elgin, he came from a jazz background, but his youth lent an innovation to his style. “I put a little swing into [the blues] to fill out the rest of
the measure. I was dropping bombs in there to make phrases, sort of punctuating the end of the sentence. Sometimes I have to phrase to pick up the harp player and then push him into another phrase,
because he’s breathing in and breathing out.” Below, who’d met the Aces through Elgin, began replacing him on Muddy’s recordings.

“Mad Love” proved a test run for Muddy’s biggest hit. “Hoochie Coochie Man” was brought to Muddy by Willie Dixon, a bassist and
songwriter
who would, within a year, bring Muddy other songs that solidified his hoochie coochie image: “Just Make Love to Me,” “I’m Ready,” and “Natural Born Lover.”
Dixon untied, sorted, and repackaged songs, lyrics, toasts, children’s games, and an array of quips and boasts, putting his name on them and creating a catalog of his own, which other, more
dynamic singers made into hits. He drew heavily from traditional sources, the era of recording and mass distribution codifying what had been a loose and communal pool of melodies and lyrics.
“There was quite a few people around singing the blues,” he said. “But most of ’em was singing all sad blues. Muddy was giving his blues a little pep, and I began trying to
think of things in a peppier form.” And of course a hit benefited its author as much as its performer (sometimes more so).

One night Dixon came to Muddy’s Zanzibar gig. The band was drinking and working up the audience, until the heat and sweat was too much, the cigarette smoke too thick, and they needed a
break. Women and fans always surrounded Muddy after each set, and he greeted them politely, though his eye was on making his way to the bathroom. Dixon saw him enter and followed him in. “I
was in the men’s house when Willie Dixon came in and said he had a song he wanted me to look at,” recalled Muddy. Dixon’s reputation was established among Chicago’s blues
musicians, and Muddy knew he’d recently got tight with the Chess brothers. Dixon ran down the song’s lyrics; if he had them on paper, they did Muddy no good. Muddy liked what he heard.
(One commercial aspect of the song was that it had a chorus; many of Muddy’s tunes, even hits such as “Long Distance Call,” were built on a feeling and did not even have a
refrain.) “He got his guitar,” said Dixon, “we was standing up in there playing and practicing.” Willie Dixon was a behemoth of a man, over six feet tall and topping three
hundred pounds. It was hard to find a space he didn’t crowd, the cramped quarters of the Zanzibar men’s room no exception. One imagines Muddy leaning against the hand sink, his feet
beneath Dixon’s girth, his head back against the mirror; Dixon, for whom this moment is initially more important — he’s doing the pitching — with his head at an odd angle
around the hand towel
dispenser, pressing back his weight to give Muddy’s guitar room. He told Muddy, “Well, just get a little rhythm pattern y’ know. You
can do the same thing over again, and keep the words in your mind.” Muddy reached back to “Mad Love” (still selling rapidly) and reworked the stop-time rhythm. It fit.

Suddenly the noise in the Zanzibar seemed to die away, the stench of old beer and gin-soaked floorboards dissipated, the smoke dispersed. Muddy’s only concern was to gather the band and
hit the stage before he forgot the lyrics. He told Dixon he was going to open the set with it. Muddy gave the band the key, played them the pattern.
Repeat it, here’s where it changes,
listen at me
— they knew how to back him. After several rounds of exchange, they fell in together. “Oh man, the people went crazy,” said Muddy. Dixon remembered, “He
done it two or three times that night.” Like his grandaddy with an ox and whip, Muddy could bring a song down.

Lyrically, “Hoochie Coochie Man” was perfectly suited to the stop-time rhythm. The first pause follows quickly on the song’s opening notes, a tease for the listener —
what was that? And when it happens again, it’s like a game, the band messing with the audience. Walter’s playing may be his most saxophone-like ever. Muddy Waters sings sex and
seduction, boasting and braying, preening like a peacock, voodoo imagery enhancing his masculine power: