Can't Be Satisfied (42 page)

Muddy assembled a band in Westport, Connecticut, for a week’s recording, October 4 to October 10, 1976. From his own group he brought Pinetop, Margolin, and drummer Willie “Big
Eyes” Smith.
Pine, like Spann before him, had become an anchor to Muddy’s sound. He’d learned to play in the same school as Muddy — a cotton field,
where the conjugation was done with a hoe and the school lunch was a fish sandwich and homemade whiskey. If Pine brought the root, Margolin brought the licks. He’d seen a cotton field only on
television, but he’d studied it, brother, watching Mud’s fingers night after night, bugging him at Westmont, playing the old tapes. Big Eyes brought the delay, and that delay is what
moved behinds. Muddy called him “the greatest Saturday-night drummer alive,” and a Saturday-night record was his intention. Harp duties went to James Cotton, a natural choice.

“Johnny Winter inspired Muddy’s band to push Muddy,” said Cameron. “The studio we used was in Dan Hartman’s house, an ideal setting, so relaxed. Johnny was, at that
point, straight as an arrow and fun to work with. You’d see Muddy and him feed off each other with this excitement going from level to level to level because they’d just keep pulling
each other higher.”

Hard Again
affirms the advice Muddy held dear since Big Bill Broonzy spoke it in 1943: “Do your thing, stay with it, man. If you stay with it, you goin’ to make it.”
Muddy was true to himself.
Hard Again
is the culmination of Muddy’s career, a modern and lasting interpretation of his achievement: it is an electric blues band that captures the
force and emotion so much more easily achieved by a lone player baring his soul with just his voice and his instrument. The band becomes the instrument and Muddy plays them. “Every country
has its own music,” Muddy said, getting to the heart of authenticity, “and I got the Delta sound. There’s so many musicians, they can sing and play the guitar so good, but they
can’t get that sound to save their life. They didn’t learn that way. That’s the problem. They learned another way, and they just can’t get it.”

Muddy’s new treatment of “Mannish Boy” rivals his earliest hits for passion and power. He sings the lines over air, night air, dusty air, Mississippi in New England and
champagne air. The instruments lay out, except for the slide guitar, which dares only to snake between the lines. The single string’s reverberations hang like heat, shimmering
and bending. Muddy’s voice is cavernous, huge, so full of character it’s impossible to believe he’s ever recorded songs where he wasn’t a hammer, and
it’s downright depressing to think how long it had been since he sounded so good. There’s a quiver in his voice, the sound of the tones amassing as they travel up his chest and through
his throat and out between his lips. The spiritual distance is even farther. There is no Leonard Chess on the receiving end, no Chess brother and no Chess son. The farm was sold and the straw
bosses gone with it. Muddy was plowing old ground in the old harness with neither benefit nor burden of a furnish. On these tracks, and especially on “Mannish Boy,” the lead track,
Muddy sings like a man freed to sing for himself. There is pride in this voice, independence, a drive, a declaration: everything’s gonna be all right this morning, yes I know.

And that is just the first four bars. The Telecaster — it’s Margolin playing Muddy — hits a couple high notes, lingering like a question: band, are you ready? And like a
freedman falling across the Mason-Dixon Line, their resounding answer is that there’s no stopping us. Muddy chuckles — not with laughter but with strength, and the story begins, an old
story told anew:

His mother was right. These were the greatest living blues. And the players knew it. The song’s close includes the studio jubilation that followed, the lightness they felt
at realizing that the bleakness of the past couple years — the past couple decades — suddenly had lifted. Muddy yelled and clapped in the studio, grinned broadly, walked around with a
bounce in his step. He said, “This stuff is so good, it makes my pee pee hard again.” And an album title was born.

“What I really wanted to do as a producer,” Johnny said, “was to make Muddy feel comfortable and make his music sound as good as it used to. I felt that the real, raw blues and
some early nasty rock and
roll hadn’t been recorded right since recording techniques had gotten too good for that kind of music. We were all in one big room, there were
almost no overdubs at all, practically everything was done at the same time, and there was a lot of room noise — instruments feeding through other instruments’ mikes. Everything that
the normal studio engineer tries to make sure doesn’t happen, I tried to make sure that it did.”

Perhaps most rewarding to Muddy was that the music achieved such a deep sound without his guitar. He had lived to hear his own legacy. Bob set up Muddy’s Telecaster right next to his
chair, and it was there for him every day, but Muddy never picked it up. Both Bob and Johnny were surprised, but song playbacks confirmed that he was well covered.

An inspired session under his belt, Muddy waltzed across the globe — Switzerland, France, Poland, Italy — while Levon Helm and fellow members of The Band planned their farewell
concert. The concert, to be known as
The Last Waltz,
was set for Thanksgiving weekend in San Francisco, and featured some of the biggest — and most funky — names in popular
music, such as Bob Dylan, Dr. John, the Staple Singers, Van Morrison. Muddy’s performance, preserved in the Martin Scorsese movie of the show, was riveting. A single camera holds on him, head
and shoulders, occasionally tighter, sometimes looser, but unable to let go. No edits. No cuts. Nothing but the blues, nothing but Mud.

“Muddy didn’t want to go and boy I remember Paul Butterfield got really, really mad at me on the phone,” said Cameron. “Begrudgingly, Muddy went. He wasn’t happy
about the show, but it did wind up being the very first royalty check from a record company he ever got. It was the first one. He got a royalty on the soundtrack album.” A lifetime in the
business, and finally a proper royalty check.

(Marshall Chess dissents: “When the Chess artist got their statement, there would be a page called Writer’s Royalties, so if the record sold twenty thousand, he would get one cent,
two hundred bucks, the writer’s part of it.” A payment of one cent per song per sale was, then, not an uncommon payment.)

On December 23, 1976 (the thirty-fourth anniversary of Muddy’s second marriage), before the release of
Hard Again
or
The Last Waltz,
Scott Cameron filed
a lawsuit on Muddy’s behalf in U.S. District Court against Muddy’s publishing company, Arc Music. Cameron simultaneously filed one for his other client, Willie Dixon (who’d signed
with Cameron at Muddy’s suggestion).

The essence of the lawsuit is found in the section titled “The Conspiracy and the Acts in Furtherance Thereof,” which states,

The lawsuit also notes that, as for the $2,000 annual salary, “at no time since the initial payment on April 23, 1973, has plaintiff ever received any of the ‘salary payments’
by way of an advance of the sum of $2,000.”

When Arc began there had been no real model to look toward.
The world of independent record labels had grown quickly and been thrust from the margins into the mainstream
with little warning. When the Chess brothers first entered the business, they had no publishing agreement because they didn’t know what it meant. There had been, however, plenty of time to
rectify that. But proving the rip-off was not going to be easy; trying to make sense of the Chess family’s peculiar accounting — taking from the hits to give to the legends, paying on
demand rather than on schedule — was made impossible when GRT threw away the files that the company had accumulated. “Cartons and cartons and cartons of all the back shit that was up in
the mezzanine of that building were trashed,” said Marshall. (In their response, Arc denied most everything and stated, “It was the intent of the plaintiff and Arc Music to formally
bring plaintiff into the employ of Arc Music. . . ,” but failed to explain why they never acted on their intent.)

The lawsuit asked for a total of 7.5 million dollars and the absolution of the agreements between Arc and Muddy. Within five months it was settled out of court, the terms confidential. One
result was apparent: when the copyright renewal came up, ownership of Muddy’s songs went from Arc to Muddy and Scott’s Watertoons Music. The victory, like everything else in
Muddy’s life, came on shares: Muddy received partial payment, the manager got the rest.

In the early spring of 1977,
Hard Again
was released to wide critical acclaim. The package befitted the man. The cover photo was an exquisite black and white, a near
full-body shot against a white background, Muddy in a camel hair winter coat and a three-piece suit — his buttons glimmering, his hat atop his head. It’s from a large-format negative
(taken by fashion photographer and portraitist Richard Avedon), so the detail on his face is intimate: the bristles of his graying mustache, the shaving bumps on his cheeks. His thumbs are hooked
into his vest pocket and he’s got slightly more than half a smile, as if he knows something, knows we know it, but knows we know only something less than half. The photograph is a kind of a
capsule summary of his aura; it bespeaks elegance, and also hard work.

“I saw a whole new life breathe into Muddy,” said Cameron. “He was finally getting crowds, he was finally making money. In the early seventies, you’d see fifty people in
a club and the club owner’s up there saying, ‘You gotta give me a break, I’m losing so much money.’ And later the same club owner was screaming about why he can’t get
him back because his club doesn’t hold enough people.”

In March, Muddy embarked on a
Hard Again
tour with the recording band. They were crackling, and Epic recorded many dates. (When Marva would join Muddy for several days on the road,
Leola would come to the house to stay with the kids.) Portnoy and Fuzz were left at home, on retainer. “I got a band and they’re on vacation now, with pay — and hell, I
ain’t never had a vacation with pay!” Johnny Winter, thrilled to be performing with his hero, remembered picking up Muddy’s guitar. “You couldn’t play his guitar to
save your life,” Winter said. “It was impossible. He had his strings so high off the neck, and he used such heavy-gauge strings too, you just couldn’t play it. Muddy said to me,
‘When you pick up somebody else’s guitar it’s like somebody else’s woman that doesn’t want you. The guitar is telling you, “Leave me alone, I don’t want
you.” ’ ” They sold out the Palladium in New York, a large hall known for rock acts. In Boston, Peter Guralnick went backstage to say hello and found Muddy talking to a woman whom
he introduced as Robert Johnson’s sister. “ ‘Here, show him. Show him the picture,’ ” Guralnick remembered Mud saying. “From her wallet Anne Anderson drew a
picture of a man with a guitar: it was indeed Robert Johnson. ‘You see, man? You see?’ said Muddy with a proud, almost proprietary expression on his face. ‘Didn’t I tell
you? Isn’t that really something?’ ”