Can't Be Satisfied (35 page)

Near the end of his life, he was even harsher: “That
Electric Mud
record I did, that one was dogshit. But when it first came out, it started selling like wild, and then they
started sending them back. They said, ‘This can’t be Muddy Waters with all this shit going on — all this wow-wow and fuzztone.’ ”

Chess was not done conceptualizing, though their next effort was nearer to Muddy’s mind. Instead of bending Muddy to fit the contrivances of the hippies, they would bring the hippies to
Muddy. The idea for
Fathers and Sons
was conceived by Michael Bloomfield and producer Norman Dayron. Muddy and Spann were the elders, and in addition to Bloomfield, the accompanists
included Paul Butterfield on harmonica, Sam Lay on drums — musicians from the Chicago scene with whom Muddy was familiar — and bassist Duck Dunn, from Memphis soul group Booker T. and
the MGs. Every cut on the two-album set is a remake of a Muddy classic. Half the album was recorded in the studio over three days in late April of 1969, and half is drawn from a concert that the
studio group performed the day after the studio session was done. “We did a lot of the things over we did with Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers and Elgin on drums,” Muddy said during the
making of the album. “It’s about as close as I’ve been to [that feel] since I first recorded it.” And, in fact, it is a real fine treatment. The “sons” had
enough age and experience not to rush the music; when Muddy introduces the slow, slow tempo, they’re dragging
it right beside him. (Bloomfield’s heroin habit,
which soon would kill him, contributed to his leisurely crawl.)

They ably backed him at the live show. “Muddy’s got everybody crazy,” the reporter sent by
Rolling Stone
wrote. “He ends it, turns on his heel, and makes his way
through the throng of musicians and followers who have come out of the wings and onto the stage. Pandemonium. He reappears. Chaos.” For nearly ten minutes after he left the stage, the
audience roared its delight. They stomped, shouted, clapped, whistled, screamed, jumped up and down in aisles and on seats. Backstage, Mud was heard to mutter, “It’s just like Newport
out there.”

During the making of
Fathers and Sons,
word spread that Leonard was thinking of getting out. He promptly received an offer from the General Recorded Tape (GRT)
Corporation. They manufactured audiotape and were ready to own a catalog of material to stick onto that tape. They offered 6.5 million dollars plus 20,000 shares of GRT stock for Chess Records and
its associated labels and hard assets (excluding the publishing arm of Arc). For that, Leonard was ready to move on. He’d accumulated three radio stations and his eyes were on bigger
horizons. “My dad’s plan with the GRT money was black TV,” said Marshall. “He was going to leapfrog from radio to TV, starting with Chicago.” Unlike at the radio
stations, most of the executive staff at Chess Records was white, drawing intense pressure from the Black Power movement. “Jesse Jackson used to try to force me to hire more blacks,”
said Marshall. “That movement was centering on Chicago. But we gave back a lot to the black community. The radio station used to give tons — tons — of food away for Thanksgiving
and Christmas. My father gave to the Urban League, NAACP, Martin Luther King’s first radio show, scholarship funds.”

“I made my money on the Negro,” Leonard told the
Chicago Daily News
a couple years earlier, “and I want to spend it on him.”

Muddy was a dedicated hand. The Chess family, like the Stovalls, would never let him starve, and that was Muddy’s bottom-line concern.
He’d seen starvation, in
Mississippi and in Chicago. “I’ll be with Chess as long as there’s a Chess in the company,” Muddy said at the time of the sale. New ownership seemed to affect him little;
the push was on for
Fathers and Sons,
which was an expensively packaged double album. Muddy didn’t need literacy to read the commitment in that. It wasn’t famine on the farm,
just progress. And the boss man was always available for a draw.

Leonard never got the chance to parlay his way into television. On October 16, 1969, driving to the radio station, he was hit with a massive heart attack and died behind the wheel. He was
fifty-two years old. WVON ran a live tribute to its founder, and Muddy called in to make a statement. The host began, “You were one of the recording artists —” but Muddy
interrupted. “I was one of the main artists. We got acquainted in forty-six, we were pretty close always down through the years. I think if he was livin’, he would say what I’m
sayin’ now: he made me and I made him. So I lose a good friend.”

The family cleaned out Leonard’s office and found in the safe thousands of dollars in IOU notes. “I wish I had what we called the red book,” said Marshall, “with all the
advances in it. We used to say they hundreded you to death.” In her biography of the Chess brothers,
Spinning Blues into Gold,
Nadine Cohodas writes, “What [the musicians] were
paid was based more on what they asked for than what they might be owed under a contract.” But with Leonard gone and GRT in charge, that wouldn’t last.

Peter Guralnick visited the Chess offices while the company was in transition, late 1969 or early 1970. His interview with Phil Chess was interrupted by a phone call. “You know we sold the
company,” Phil said on his end. “Joe, Joe, you know we sold the company. No, man, we can’t do that. I’m telling you, babe, we can’t do that no more. No. I can’t
give you that kinda bread unless you come across with some shit first.” Phil listened for a while, unable to get in a word, finally saying, “You know it ain’t like the old days,
it ain’t like the old days, babe.”

“[GRT] could have been in the tomato business just as well as the recorded tape business,” said Malcolm Chisholm, a former Chess
producer. Phil Chess was
invited to stay, but when GRT named Marshall as Leonard’s replacement, he could read the handwriting on the front door. Phil took over the radio stations. “They decided they wanted to
get rid of my uncle,” said Marshall. “That was stupid. They made me president and then they proceeded to destroy the company.”

However his recorded sounds changed, Muddy’s live music stayed fundamentally the same. “The beat is almost like somebody falling off a bar stool,” said Oscher.
“It’s not a straight, steady thing. The blues is like preaching, you mess with the time to draw people in. Muddy worked the audience, and he used time to do that. He’d sing,
‘You say you love me baby . . .’ and he’d wait, drag that shit out. There was no time there, you’d just wait on him. ‘Please call me on the phone sometime.’
He’d wait till he thought it was right to tell the story. When you’re locked into that straight meter, you can’t get your words out, you can’t tell the story the way you
feel it.”

Concerts were booked through ABC Booking (which also booked B. B. King and Bobby Bland), while chitlin circuit gigs, Muddy’s bread and butter, came through him directly. He’d stop a
card game to answer the phone; others knew it was about a gig when he’d say, “When’s this for?” And the next line was always the same: “Yeah, well you got to come up
with a little more bread this time.” Muddy’s constant retooling of his lineup kept his band contemporary. Luther “Georgia Boy” / “(Creepin’) Snake” Johnson
had joined Muddy when bassist Jimmy Lee Morris returned to the steady pay of a factory job. Johnson aspired to guitar, which he played when Sammy was drunk or Pee Wee was on the outs. Snake would
be the first to dress mod, to wear a big afro and small shades; his stage manner was so exciting that Muddy often kept all three guitar players.

Rehearsals continued to be infrequent and ill defined. (“Only thing like a rehearsal,” says Oscher, “was him in the car making a humming sound,
aah ha ha hmm
to open
up his voice.”) When the band gathered, Muddy kept tabs on who was late and would leave
the basement when it was time to play, hollering instructions from the living
room. “We always knew if they had a big gig or were going out of town because then Muddy would stay down there,” said Cookie. In summers, when the basement was too warm, they’d
run extension cords out the kitchen door and play outside; Spann played his beat-up electric piano, a Band-Aid stuck on the top where he’d written his name. “When we were young we
didn’t think they were real musicians,” Cookie said. “We’d be going, ‘Oh god, they’re playing this sorry stuff.’ But if they picked up a little speed, we
liked that. Otis Spann knew my girlfriends loved Aretha Franklin so he would have them play ‘Respect’ and that would drive us crazy.”

Occasionally Willie Dixon would teach the group a new song. “One time Willie came to Muddy’s house,” Oscher recalled. “Then Spann’s ex-wife Marie came by, said,
‘I need to talk to Spann.’ They went in the back room, had a big argument, Marie came out with a long butcher knife, said, ‘I done killed that motherfucker.’ And then left.
Spann came out, his hands were cut up where he had stopped the knife. We rarely rehearsed, and that one only lasted about an hour till that shit happened.”

On the road, twenty-three hours of the day were spent waiting for the one hour of work, and the grind could be maddening. Bo, as illiterate navigator, memorized roads, highways, and routes.
Having previously entered Canada through Niagara Falls, he turned a 500-mile straight shot from New York City to Montreal into a grueling 800-mile trip. “Everybody just twisting and turning,
trying to get off of that ass,” said Willie Smith. “You were riding two-lane highways all day and all night.”

To pass the time, they’d talk trash. “Willie Smith said to me,” recounted Oscher, “that when he was making love, he knows whenever he made a baby. I said, ‘Willie,
I don’t think you can do that.’ Willie said, ‘Motherfucker, you ain’t got nair child and I got thirteen children, you gonna tell me how to make a motherfucking baby?’
I couldn’t argue with that shit.”

Nor could Paul argue with Bo’s late-night jive. “Bo would go, ‘Whoa! I see the moon and the moon sees me, God bless the moon
and God bless me.’
Then Bo would take a swig of gin, say, ‘Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up, y’all sleeping while I got to work.’ Then Sonny would say to Bo, ‘Shut the fuck up, you ugly
motherfucker. We the stars.’ Then Bo would turn around to Sonny and say, ‘Ain’t but one star in this band and that’s Muddy Waters.’ And that’s the way the
motherfucking shit would go.”

Doo rags on their heads, processes beneath, guns at their sides, the Muddy Waters band, integrated, was a sight to see. At a truck stop in east Texas, the whole room shut down when the band
walked in; they opted for takeout. They stopped for gas in Michigan, late night, and the lady pulled down the shades. On their way to Tupelo, Mississippi, they passed a billboard in the middle of
the night. Instead of
THE ROTARY CLUB WELCOMES YOU
or an invitation to a Kiwanis meeting, this one read,
BEWARE! YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KLAN COUNTRY
. A
hooded figure sat atop a rearing horse. The silence in the van thickened.

They were much more welcome in St. Louis, where Muddy had a longtime friend, platonic, named Goldie B. Abram. She’d met him at a gig in 1964 and would often host him during his visits.
“He liked fish,” she remembered, “and I’d take him and Otis Spann and some of the other guys to a fish market. They’d get live fish, Spann would kill and gut them, and
I’d fry ’em at my house. We’d have a little feast in the backyard.”

“One of the first times I went to St. Louis,” Oscher recalled about another kind of visit, “we pull up to a hotel on Delmar Boulevard, they got prostitutes on all the corners,
they hike up their skirts, start shouting out, ‘Muddy Waters in town!’ After the gig we stayed up all night with those girls. There was a piano in the back of the place, Spann would
play, we’d all be drinking tall glasses of whiskey, shooting dice.”

Geneva paid him a surprise visit in St. Louis one time. “Grandma came all the way to St. Louis and had everybody running,” said bassist Jimmy Lee Morris. “Mud had his
girlfriend with him, her stuff in his room, we had to get her stuff out, stalling Grandma downstairs, and move her in with Spann.” (He advised one of his
band mates
never to admit to infidelity even if caught in the act: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”)