Can't Be Satisfied (23 page)

In June of 1954, Muddy was the subject of a two-page spread in the national glossy magazine
Hue.
Directed at an African American audience, the short article emphasized Muddy’s sex
appeal, creating the nickname “Dreamy Eyes” for him. He was a star.

The night before “I Just Want to Make Love to You” debuted on the national charts — where it would stay all summer and into the
fall
— Muddy was playing the Zanzibar. About to leave for another tour, including a show before 30,000 people at another Alan Freed concert in Cleveland, Muddy was breaking in harmonica player
Henry Strong, known to everyone as “Pot” because of his fondness for reefer. The band’s music was locking together in intimate and complex ways. Muddy played the bottleneck slide
less frequently; often, he’d set his guitar aside and just sing, working the stage like a star, growling into the mike, shaking and rolling his head to create different vocal sounds, breaking
into a nimble dance or thrusting his hips with the beat, evoking squeals of delight from the ladies in the house.

As if to commemorate their success, the band paused during the evening to pose for a photograph. Jimmy and Muddy bookend the group, supporting it since its start. Muddy is playing a Les Paul
Standard, a solid body guitar he’d recently purchased. Its tone is dense, prototypically electric. Jimmy is playing a Gibson L-5, a hollow body with a woodier, more natural sound. Spann is
seated in the center, the new foundation; he plays an upright piano. Pot is on harmonica, twenty-five years old, seated in front, greeting his burgeoning career. A sign painter, Henry Armstrong,
who helped the band make posters in return for being allowed to sit in at gigs, was there on maracas, trolling for the band’s leftover women. Elgin, still playing on gigs even if he’d
lost his studio spot, stands at the rear, a distance between him and the group. They’re all wearing suits, long neckties, with neatly combed, close-cropped hair. The world may not be theirs,
but this club is, this one and every one on the big road that lies open before them.

After the gig, Jimmy gave Pot a ride home. Pot lived in an apartment building about two blocks from Muddy’s house, at 4554 South Greenwood, run by Leonard’s father. Leonard could
arrange digs there, and he’d helped Pot get a place, like he’d helped Wolf get a transitional place there, and Wolf’s guitarists Jody Williams and Hubert Sumlin, and a girlfriend
of Muddy’s whom Muddy was visiting after that night’s gig. “So I got him home,” said Jimmy Rogers. “Muddy was in the building. He wasn’t living there but he was
there. Muddy say he heard the rumbling going on. He heard somebody call,
‘Muddy!’ He went to the door, looked out, Pot was in the lobby on the marble floor. He
was bleeding like hell, didn’t have no shirt on. Muddy got a quilt and wrapped him up in it and carried him out there and put him in his car. Didn’t have time to wait for no ambulance
to come and get him.” Juanita, Pot’s wife, had been in the club that night, mad too, because she’d seen Pot speaking with his other woman. Muddy wheeled to the hospital, but Pot
was graveyard dead before they arrived. Juanita’s knife had penetrated his lungs. He was still wearing his gig pants.

The band was booked solid and needed a harp. Walter had made the instrument essential to any popular band. “Saxophone players were starving, piano players weren’t working at
all,” said Billy Boy Arnold, then a rising harp player. “At that time you couldn’t get a job without a harmonica player.” Jimmy Rogers contacted Little George Smith, six
foot two and lanky, who had been sitting in at various clubs, jamming with the Aces and Otis Rush. Rogers was recruiting personnel rather than Muddy, because Jimmy continued to hang out in clubs,
visit Maxwell Street, and jam with musicians. Muddy, with women coming at him, preferred to diddle rather than fiddle. “Muddy, man he didn’t hardly know what Maxwell Street was at that
time,” said Jimmy. “He didn’t know nothing about no musicians and places that we would go to. He’d go out to some woman’s house or take one to a hotel or something.
That’s where Muddy was.”

The band returned in August, resuming their club gigs without missing a beat. On the first of September, they cut their first session at the new Chess studios, yielding their next hit,
“I’m Ready.” Harmonica player Willie Foster, who occasionally accompanied Muddy on the road in 1954, went to Muddy’s house one Friday at the start of a weekend jaunt. Willie
Dixon answered the door while Muddy was in the bathroom shaving. Foster recounts Muddy sticking his lathered face out the door, asking: “ ‘Are you ready?’ and I said, ‘Ready
as anybody can be.’ Muddy went back in the bathroom to wipe the shaving cream off his face. Then he came back out and said [to Dixon], ‘Willie, are you thinking about what I’m
thinking about? Let’s make a song out of it.’ We sat up there, I don’t know how long, trying to
figure out what to put on it, you know. It took [Dixon]
three days, I think, to finish it out.”

“Willie Dixon got credit for being a writer on a lot of songs he just played a part in,” said Jimmy Rogers. “But he made him some money that way. I had enough edge on him there
not to let him hook me up that way, but Muddy went for it.”

The drums on “I’m Ready” pound with a furor, one of Fred Below’s finest moments. Walter plays a wondrous chromatic harp solo, holding notes twice the duration expected,
then jiggling on down while Jimmy’s guitar supports him with a fancy dance. (The standard harp is like the white keys on a piano, but the chromatic includes the black; there’s a valve,
activated with the thumb, that makes the chromatic notes an inherent part of the instrument. It can be played in any key at any time. It puts more color, an extra flex, in Walter’s wailing;
the tone is different, more robust in a way.) Muddy sings with the force of a boxer; he’s not standing still enough to play guitar. “Muddy swings out. Lyrics are pretty potent and
Waters’s delivery is Grade A,” wrote
Cash Box,
an industry trade journal, reserving their heaviest jive for the band. “Beat is solid and ork-ing is torrid.” That
autumn, while the band was out on tour (at three months, their longest yet, including sixteen one-nighters with Little Walter, tearing up Texas like a tornado), “I’m Ready” hit
Billboard
’s charts, rising to number four over a nine-week stay.

The popularity of blues was crossing over to white audiences, opening up an incomparably large market. “It is becoming increasingly apparent these days that rhythm and blues is no longer
restricted wholly to a Negro audience,” stated
Billboard
in an article titled “Pop Music Rides R&B Tidal Wave.” The story tells of a jukebox operator who “does
a terrific business selling used jukebox records to [white] neighborhood kids. [He] claims the first items they ask for are numbers by such artists as Muddy Waters, Willie Mabon, and Ruth
Brown.” Muddy was ready as anybody could be, but even that wasn’t enough for what was coming over the hill.

Harmonica player James Cotton was in West Memphis, Arkansas, finishing a Friday’s work hauling gravel when a man approached, said, “I’m
Muddy Waters.” Cotton, who’d recently released a single called “Cotton Crop Blues,” had never seen a picture of Muddy Waters and had no expectations of meeting him. He
looked at the stranger, tapped the vanishing half-pint of Echo Springs in his back pocket, and said, “That’s nice. I’m Jesus Christ.”

Then Muddy’s driver came forward. It was James Triplett, who had grown up with Cotton. Years had passed, and Triplett told of his move north, hanging out on the South Side of Chicago, and
his recent employment with Muddy Waters.

Jesus Christ, it was Muddy Waters.

Muddy had been heading north from Florida when the harp position opened. “I had done got Junior back in the band, but he was running from the Army. We had a date in Memphis and James
Triplett, he say he knowed a boy could play real good over to West Memphis.” “Cotton Crop Blues” spoke directly to Muddy Waters when Sun Records released it six months earlier,
Cotton’s lyrics resonating deep within his being: “Raising a good cotton crop is just like a lucky man shooting dice / Work all the summer to make your cotton, fall comes it still
ain’t no price.” Pat Hare’s ultradistorted guitar played low-down blues that swung like striptease accompaniment. Hare, who’d known Cotton more than half his life, would
soon follow Cotton into Muddy’s band.

Cotton remembered, “We worked the Hippodrome on Beale Street Saturday night, that Sunday we played the state line of Arkansas and Missouri, and that Monday we was in Chicago. I moved in on
the second floor.”

Elgin and his wife lived in the upstairs rear, Triplett was in front with his girlfriend and her two children. He was driver, bodyguard, woman wrangler, and general factotum. He was tall and
slight, dressed like the knives he carried — sharp; he kept his fingernails polished and left the fisticuffs to others. The ladies called him “Killer” and so did the men.

Cotton paid Muddy twelve dollars and fifty cents a week for a
room. “Paid it whether we was in town or on the road. No food with it, but by me knowing Triplett good
as I did, I could cook in his kitchen anytime I wanted.” He was sent to the fabric shop at the corner of Halsted and Maxwell Street and fitted for two uniforms from the same bolts of cloth as
the band. “Muddy paid for it and I started paying him back.” Cotton was in the music business and back on a furnish.

Cotton was a car man (he wrote one verse of “Rocket 88”), and Muddy liked that. While Bo was off chasing tail in Flint, Michigan, Cotton took to driving Muddy around Chicago at
night. They’d talk about Sonny Boy II — Cotton (born near Tunica, Mississippi, July 1, 1935) was nine when he became Sonny Boy’s protege, covering the door while Sonny Boy played,
covering the stage when Sonny Boy drank. They’d talk about Wolf — Cotton had recorded with Wolf at Sun. And they talked about the record biz — the Sun label was Memphis’s
version of Chess and had released some heavy blues records. “It started because I was a pretty good driver,” said Cotton. “When Muddy would drink, I didn’t have anybody to
go home to and if he wanted to stay out two days, I’d hang right with him. We’d just ride and drink gin. Muddy would never buy no more than a half-pint at a time. The guy at Forty-third
and Drexel knowed him. Was a drugstore, hotel, whiskey store all in one. The store part was open all night, selling cookies and cold drinks. Muddy would come in, signal the guy with one finger, and
the guy would slip him one. We also knowed a bootlegger right up the street from Muddy’s house. He didn’t make his own, but you could go after hours and get it. Muddy would go on these
drinking sprees and he’d do a couple days — a half a pint at a time.”

As if filling Walter’s shoes was not intimidating enough, Cotton was promptly put on his toes. Jimmy Rogers picked up Cotton’s harp, said, “Let me show you something,”
and dazzled him with his own playing. “Muddy sitting there,” said Cotton, “he [Muddy] grabbed it, played ‘Baby Please Don’t Go.’ ” Cotton played like Sonny
Boy — straight notes — where Walter made the harp swing. When Cotton asked Walter how he did it, Walter turned his back and
demonstrated. “It hurt me so bad
I never asked him again. Spann was sitting there and Spann said, ‘Come on, Bro Cotton, I’ll show you.’ He played triplets on the piano and I started playing them on the harmonica.
Spann learnt me how to play with Muddy. We were so close on him, we knew what he could and couldn’t say. Like, Muddy lisped and couldn’t say ‘trouble.’ Spann would say,
‘Watch him on the third verse, he’s gonna jump time.’ We knew how to catch the man.”

Spann coached Cotton during the day, and they caroused at night. “Me and Spann used to go all over Chicago together. Muddy’d get off the gig and go his way, we’d go our way to
other clubs. Chicago never closes if you know the right places. Spann had been there for years, and he knew all the places. We drank so much Seagram’s gin till I sat in the theater one Sunday
evening on Forty-third Street, and I could smell it coming through my skin, Seagram’s gin and grapefruit juice.”

Gigs were still plentiful. A night would have three or four sets, sometimes six. The band would play the first one themselves, warming up the house, passing the spotlight, each member singing
and soloing on his favorite songs of the day — some blues, but also their treatments of popular songs, from ballads such as “Misty” to the more rocking Lloyd Price numbers. When
it was star time, Jimmy Rogers would hype the audience; if he wasn’t on the show, Spann would take it; if Spann was too drunk, Cotton emceed. The audience would put their hands together,
all the way from Chicago’s South Side, Chess Records’s most famous recording artist, do you feel like going home? Are you ready? The Hoochie Coochie Man himself, Muddy Mississippi
Waters.
The band would launch into “I’m Ready,” their rhythm as crisp as the creases in Muddy’s tailored suit. Heading toward the microphone, he acknowledged the
audience with a nod of his head, acknowledged the band with the rhythmic tapping of his foot. As he’d lean into the mike, he’d bend his right arm at the elbow — your maître
d’ for the evening, fine blues our specialty — and snap his fingers. The night’s special: nourishment for the soul.