Can't Be Satisfied (29 page)

After Oliver, Chris Barber showed up with his wife, vocalist Ottilie Patterson, off for a couple days from their American tour. “It was always amazing,” said
Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie, “no matter how many of them came through or had to stay there, we always had room. Our dining room had a sofa in there, and in the living room there were
two sofas. That’s how Muddy was. We would have two or three people in there or any stray we would pick up, it wouldn’t matter.”

Muddy welcomed the Barbers like family, placing their wedding photograph on the living room mantle alongside photos of Little Walter, himself, and other family members. Geneva prepared pots of
food. “Chris Barber asked me to meet him at Muddy’s house,” said Bob Koester, whose Delmark Records was recording the contemporary blues scene. “Mrs. Morganfield insisted I
have some food and I was probably missing a few meals in those days.” Stuffed full, he, the Barbers, and Muddy were driven by James “Killer” Triplett to the F&J Lounge in
Gary, Indiana, where Muddy maintained a Tuesday-night gig.

The F&J Lounge was less a nightclub than a reception hall, densely packed with socializing people, the band an afterthought. “Muddy bestrode that stage,” said Koester,
“totally in charge. He had the entire audience in the palm of his hand.” During one set, when the band announced Muddy, he tripped on some wires as he stepped across them. “There
were all kinds of sparks and stuff flying,” said Koester, “and Muddy was just calm as hell, as if it was planned.”

Barber was wide-eyed watching Muddy strut about the stage for “I’m a Man.” The audience shrieked like the background voices on Muddy’s record of the song —
“The ladies would swing their purses, saying, ‘Sing it Muddy, sing it,’ ” another visitor remembered, “the whole crowd would just go nuts” — and it
climaxed with Muddy pumping up his machismo and taunting the ladies, egging them to egg
him
to reveal his manhood until, when the tension rose and could be no longer restrained, Muddy
would unzip his pants and let loose — a soda bottle fizzing over the top.

(After the show, Barber, Ottilie, and Koester went to a nearby
diner for breakfast. They were the only whites and the waitress ignored them until they selected several
plays from the jukebox, contemporary hits by Brook Benton and Muddy. Their order was taken immediately.)

Paul Oliver also went to the F&J, driven by Muddy himself. “He had the radio on real low, and if B. B. King came on, or Howlin’ Wolf, then he’d turn it up to maximum volume
and the whole car would fill with the sound and he would listen really hard. As soon as he heard Wolf’s voice, conversation stopped and he focused on that. And he’d mutter for a while
afterward.”

As the reigning king of Chicago blues, Muddy could have had his pick of musicians. Instead, he ran his band like a good ole boys club, letting members bring in friends. He
wasn’t looking for stars, just someone to fall in with his group and make the gig — dependability over musical ability. Spann stayed right by his side, but bass players came and went,
rarely taking Willie Dixon’s spot in the studio, but playing gigs and tours: Marcus Johnson, Mack Arnold, Jo Jo Williams, Smokey Smothers; only Jimmy Lee Morris stayed a while. “I
didn’t want to play Mud’s old stuff,” said Morris. “I was doing Bill Doggett, he was hot, or Jimmy Reed. But Muddy, Wolf, Jimmy Rogers — all that shit was dead.”
Cotton, who’d seen Jimmy Lee play in Gary, told the new guy he’d get to stretch out the better half of the night when Muddy was off stage.

Muddy took to Jimmy Lee and soon he was bandleader. Cotton didn’t like that, and he turned over the driving and loading to the new players, warming up his throat at Lake Park Liqueors,
where his friend was a bartender. One night, waiting out front for a bus and somewhat anesthetized, Cotton was shot five times by a crazed fan; when he recovered, he quit Muddy (he’d be back)
to reprise his teenage position as bandleader. In the studio, he was replaced by a horn section; on gigs, the job went to George “Mojo” Buford.

Muddy brought Buford up from the “junior” band, a group that included Willie “Big Eyes” Smith on drums; they took Muddy’s gigs
when he was on
the road. Buford, from Hernando, Mississippi, had been an upstairs tenant of Muddy’s. Willie soon followed Buford into Muddy’s band, replacing Clay. “At that time being a
musician,” said Willie Smith, “if you couldn’t play Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, and Elmore James, you couldn’t get on nobody’s bandstand.”
The young Muddy had played Son House, Robert Johnson, and Leroy Carr songs; by the end of the 1950s, he was part of the pantheon.

Smith had come to Chicago for two weeks in 1953 and never returned to Helena. Five years earlier, when he was about eight, he heard Muddy and the band broadcasting on KFFA. James Triplett had
been his baby-sitter back then; it was Killer who introduced him to Muddy. Smith and Clay, and sometimes drummer S. P. Leary, traded the drummer’s chair for the decade, until Smith settled
himself in. Buford and Cotton traded the harmonica spot; Buford was in and out of Muddy’s band over the next two decades.

The guitar position was also volatile, though not as volatile as guitarist Pat Hare. One December Minneapolis day in 1963, half tight and armed with a fresh half-pint and a pistol, Hare fired a
few shots at his girlfriend. She fled but returned to throw him out; guns and Hare were not uncommon. Neighbors phoned the police when more shots were fired. “The two officers, with [officer
James] Hendricks in the lead and carrying a shotgun, approached the apartment door, which they found unlocked. Hendricks opened the door and caught a glimpse of Hare standing behind it with an
automatic pistol in his hand,” the
St. Paul Dispatch
reported on December 16, 1963. “ ‘Give me the gun,’ Hendricks ordered.” Instead of complying, Hare
stepped around the door and fired three shots. Two of the .32 caliber slugs hit Hendricks in the chest and the other in the groin. Hendricks dropped to the floor and patrolman Langaard, immediately
behind him, fired three shots from his service revolver into Hare’s body at close range. “When the officers got there, Mrs. Winje [Hare’s girlfriend] was lying moaning on a
davenport.”

Hare’s 1954 recording, “I’m Gonna Murder My Baby,” proved prescient. He’d killed his girlfriend with shots to the upper chest and
abdomen. In
the one-day trial he pleaded guilty to murder in the third degree and received a life sentence. In the pen, he formed a band, Sounds Incarcerated.

Hare’s replacement was James “Pee Wee” Madison, a left-handed upside-down guitarist who’d been playing modern stuff with Jimmy Lee Morris. “I played a couple sets
with Muddy,” said Pee Wee, a demure, soft-spoken man with red skin, a quick grin, and a penchant for danger who’d come to Chicago from Osceola, Arkansas, and practiced guitar to Little
Walter records. “That was my first real gig. He made the set easy for me, until I caught on.” Nevertheless, Pee Wee kept small change taped to the front of his guitar, possibly so
he’d have carfare home in case he got fired.

Also coming into the picture was Sammy Lawhorn. He was in his early thirties, but had matured impressively around Helena, Arkansas, rooting his modern guitar style in Muddy’s Delta sound.
He learned to swing with the beat, sway with the heat. There was just one thing: “He was a hell of a guitar player,” said Jimmy Lee Morris, “but he had a sleep disease.”
Maybe.

“Did I have the impression that he was narcoleptic?” asked Elvin Bishop, who took lessons from Sammy. “No. You see a guy passing out, and a couple hours before, you see him
drink two half-pints, narcolepsy is not the first thing that leaps to your mind.”

“All of us was drinking,” said Jimmy Lee Morris. “Everybody would be drunk. They’d call us the Muddy Waters Drunken Ass Band. Shit man, when you’re playing blues
all night long, that’s life, man.”

McKie’s Show Lounge on the South Side was a new club popular with the younger African American set. To fill a week, they sometimes booked a blues band, though their crowd
associated blues with their parents. Muddy took a gig there one Monday, and between sets, Willie Smith sat at a table with a couple young ladies. “Once you get in that position where pretty
women are steadily flashing you, it’s pretty hard to not touch,” Smith said. “That’s the way that was.”

“I had just moved in that neighborhood, my first little apartment,” said Lucille McClenton (then Lucille Dease). “I was seventeen. I had two children.
Willie was already at the table. Muddy asked was this my first time down there, and he asked me how old I was because I looked real young to be in a lounge. I told him I was eighteen going on
nineteen. And he bought me drinks. I was drinking pea pickers then, a lot of gin and a little lime juice. And we started seeing each other. About a week later he asked me did I want to go out of
town with him, he’d pay for my baby-sitter and stuff.”

Muddy had recently parted ways with Lois. Suspecting another mule in his stall, he told her he was going on the road, then opened her door to find her messing with his valet, C. D. (pronounced
“seedy”). Under Muddy’s nose, C. D. had been pushing heroin, Lois a recent customer. “C. D. was a little pimp on the South Side,” said Cookie. “As I got older
and was developing, I remember Muddy telling me, ‘Don’t ever go by that C. D. Don’t ever have anything to do with C. D.’ ” Lois died a decade later from a drug
overdose. “She was on furlough from prison,” said Mercy Morganfield, her daughter. “It was self-inflicted. She was set outside by a hospital dumpster, where she was
found.”

For nearly all of the 1960s, Lucille Dease was Muddy’s main road wife. She rode in the Cadillac to out-of-town gigs, was picked up in the Cadillac for local gigs, hung on Muddy’s arm
and hung out with his friends. “I think Muddy always had high regards and respect for Leola, that was probably the only one he respected,” said Cookie. “But I think Lucille Dease
was the love of his life. Lucille was his mistress all through my childhood. He was married to Geneva and she raised me, and just to see the hurt and the pain — how a man could do that to a
woman who is supposed to be his wife — it was very disrespectful to Geneva and I felt he must have loved Lucille a lot to put Geneva through this.”

“I learned a long time ago that the only thing a black man have is his lady,” B. B. King reflected. “Nothing else. If he got his lady, he’s happy — as long as that
lady’s happy. We still try to make some money because we know if we don’t, somebody else will and she’ll go
over there. But I think from the days of
slavery, the black male want to do everything he can to make her happy.”

“He was amazed I’d never heard of him,” Lucille said. “ ‘I’m Muddy Waters,’ and I’d say, ‘So fucking what?’ As the years went on, it
hit me but then I didn’t give a shit who he was.”

There were other changes in Muddy’s personal life. He was in the South, March of 1962, when he got word that his father died. He’d visited Ollie the previous fall.
With his brothers and a nephew, he was a pallbearer. “Ollie was a converted man when he passed away,” said Robert Morganfield, Muddy’s half brother. “He was a
Baptist.”

Not quite his son. In Muddy’s household, “Geneva and I were at eleven o’clock church on Sunday,” said Cookie. “Geneva was a very, very strong Christian believer.
Muddy’s grandmother raised him as a strict Southern Baptist. But I lived with him twenty-something years and I never seen him go to church or belong to church. But Muddy could quote the
Bible. I think he still had the belief. When his cousins would come in, the reverends, there wouldn’t be the drinking around the house or none of that.”