Can't Be Satisfied (61 page)
Read Can't Be Satisfied Online
Authors: Robert Gordon
184
“Back at his London hotel”: Wilmer, “First Time,” p. 87.
187
Upon returning to the states: Writer Peter Guralnick drove from Boston to Hunter College in New York for his first opportunity to see
Muddy perform, even though it meant staying up all night to drive back.
Muddy, when he declared that he had a black cat bone and a mojo too, and when he tilted his head to one side, assumed that quizzically stolid look, and roared out, “I
just want to make love to you”— Muddy might just as well have been eight feet tall, he was so majestic. On the last number of the set (it was his signature tune, “Got My Mojo
Working,”) he corkscrewed out one leg, hitched up his pants, and abandoned himself to a jitterbug, dancing with a concentration all the more remarkable in so stoic and ungainly a man. The
crowd went wild. (Peter Guralnick, “Muddy Waters, 1915–1983,”
Boston Phoenix,
May 10, 1983, Sec. 3)
Guralnick wrote of Otis Spann:
. . . a mournful, diminutive, and slightly bewildered-looking man. From his familiar position, half-hidden and pushed into a corner by the oversized grand piano, he would
hold court, carrying on a running conversation with the tables around him and offering well-meant, gratuitous advice to an audience that could barely pick up his words. He played with his head
flung back, swinging his legs loosely off the floor and facing that piano at an angle with a fine disregard for the microphone. (Guralnick,
Highway,
p. 289)
187
“a white is going to get it”: Bloomfield, “An Interview with Muddy Waters,” p. 7.
188
“From two blocks away”: Ward,
Michael Bloomfield,
p. 21.
Marshall Chess said of Mike Bloomfield: “When my dad started making money around the time of Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline,’ we moved from the South Side of Chicago to the
northern suburbs. Bloomfield went to the same high school, I was a couple of years older. Mike Bloomfield must have been fourteen, and I went over to his house and he had a cherry red Gibson and he
was playing Chuck Berry riffs and asking me about Chuck Berry and about music. I brought him a slide from the studio. He had never had a slide.”
188
“When we started the Rolling Stones”: Obrecht, “Muddy, Wolf, and Me.”
188
“When I got to hear Muddy Waters”: Bockris,
Keith Richards,
p. 38.
The Stones left Chess with an album’s worth of material, initially released as the EP
Five X Five.
“The Stones had one album out,” Marshall Chess remembered. “I
always was a Stones fan, they had something of Chess Records in their sexuality. I felt very comfortable with their music. At that time no one recorded at Chess but Chess artists. Andrew Oldham
called me and said, ‘We
are coming to America, can we record?’ And I talked to my dad and we let them record. They came to Chicago and I was shocked. They were
drinking straight whiskey out of bottles, and Brian Jones had the longest hair. Muddy came by, I remember Willie Dixon, because we were trying to hustle songs to them, by then we understood we
could sell hundreds of thousands getting our song in. I took Brian Jones back to his hotel in my 1964 red Porsche convertible. No one in Chicago had ever seen a man with long hair. People started
screaming, ‘You homos.’ ” Marshall does not remember Muddy ever painting a ceiling at Chess. He also discounts stories of the family hiring Muddy to bartend at private parties
during his lean years.
188
“We pulled up with the equipment”: Guy and Wilcock,
Damn Right,
p. 57.
189
“get your ass down”: Cohodas interview with Billy Davis.
189
“The Rolling Stones created a whole wide-open space”: Murray,
Shots,
p. 188.
190
“Muddy had the best band”: McCulley, “Father and Sons.”
190
“Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition”: Recognition wasn’t going to feed families, and there were more personnel
changes. Willie Smith initially quit in the mid-1960s to make more money hustling a cab. Clay came back, locked horns with Muddy, and left for the final time around 1967, which was when Willie
Smith returned. In May of 1963, James Cotton returned to the band, replacing Mojo Buford, who, in his first of several stints, had seen more of the inside of a station wagon than he’d
imagined possible. Cotton’s year off proved a learning experience. “I found out during that time I wasn’t a bandleader and people didn’t know who I was, so I went back to
Muddy to learn a few things.” When he left again in 1966, George “Harmonica” Smith returned to replace him.
191
Muddy squeezed in an Apollo gig: “I met Lou Rawls at the Apollo and Gladys Knight and the Pimps (
sic
),” said
Lucille. “Gladys Knight’s brother thought I was Muddy’s daughter, asked Muddy if he could take me out. Muddy told him, ‘This is my wife!’ Sammy Lawhorn got drunk,
started cussing and act like he was fixing to jump on Muddy and Bo jumped on him. Bloodied his nose. Muddy cussed him out. Muddy was good for cussing.”
191
“We were boogying”: Von Schmidt and Rooney,
Baby,
p. 253.
192
basis for rock and roll: Buddy Guy toured Europe with 1965’s American Folk Blues Festival, and after playing a song as close to
James Brown’s funk as to Muddy’s blues, Buddy explained: “That’s a little touch of the blues,” but then he corrected himself and added, “or should I say Chicago
blues,” and then he considered that that definition wasn’t accurate either and added, “with the beat to it.” He used the same words Muddy had used when differentiating his
style from his antecedents.
193
Batt’s Restaurant: “We didn’t have a coffee machine at 2120,” Marshall Chess remembered. “I walked
across that fucking street fifty times a day, for my father and Phil, bringing the coffee. We’d go to Batt’s all the time. It was a Jewish restaurant. Chuck would order strawberry
shortcake and then bacon and eggs, all backwards. If Muddy came in at lunchtime, ‘Let’s go get a sandwich.’ And we’d walk across the street. We were regulars, every waitress
knew us, we had our own tab.”
193
“I had a lot of people listen at me:” O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
194
Muddy, Brass, & the Blues:
Most of the songs get in an unadulterated verse or so before the
parade comes through. Several of the tracks have, over the years, been issued as “hornless remixes,” and nothing makes plainer how unnecessary the overdubbed instruments are. Spann
plays chunky piano parts, knowing the horns will be all over the songs’ turnarounds and spaces; the guitars mostly lay back. “Black Night” breathes like a moonless sky,
Cotton’s harp sounding like a distant cicada hopping trees until it’s in Muddy’s backyard.
194
“My Dog Can’t Bark”: The song was recorded on May 18, 1965, and “Highway 61 Revisited” was recorded on
August 2, 1965. Bloomfield was living in Chicago and went to New York for the Dylan sessions.
194
“you’re going to get a whuppin’ ”: Jones,
Melody Maker,
p. 29.
12: R
OLLIN’
S
TONE
1967–1969
Electric Mud, After the Rain,
Marshall Chess, and the Players:
“Look,” the Chess Records advertising manager said in 1967, pointing to the inside front
cover of a successful teen record magazine. “There’s my first Muddy Waters ad for the teeny boppers.” (Brack, “No Credibility Gap,” p. 62.) Teeny boppers never really
happened for Muddy, but the hippies did, a youth market that Marshall Chess reached out to. Marshall was raised in the business. His earliest memory is being tossed by his father to his Uncle Phil
when shooting broke out at the Macomba. Wolf urged Marshall early to get laid. “Wolf once told me — and I remember this because I was so little and it was so shocking — ‘The
best pussy is wino pussy. You want to take them in the alley and fuck them and then you leave. They don’t be bothering you.’ ”
Before producing
Electric Mud,
Marshall had previously packaged straight blues albums in psychedelic covers “to get them into the blues.” The goal was similar for
Electric Mud
and
After the Rain,
though the methodology was inverted. The low-key, black-and-white covers don’t hint at the non-Muddy content within, except perhaps for the
hideousness of the frog and slime showered on Muddy for
After the Rain.
(The inner spread of
Electric Mud,
however, is very nearly worth the price of admission: a black-and-white
photo essay of Muddy having his hair processed at a parlor that boasts, “World’s largest in beauty.” He is regal even with rollers in his hair.)
When the finished
Electric Mud
was presented to Muddy, he couldn’t get past the idea that, if it became popular, he would be unable to replicate the sounds from the stage; how, in
1968, could he re-create the backward tape on “Mannish Boy”? Then again, “Chess thought they could make some money off of those,” said Muddy, “and hell I could use
some money too.” (Murray,
Shots,
p. 190.)
Between the two Muddy sessions, Wolf was brought in for his psychedelic album, an experience he hated. Guitarist Pete Cosey recalled, “When we did the Howlin’ Wolf session, the Wolf
was outraged at all those electronics. He was angry. He didn’t consider that the blues. During the sessions he would scowl. Phil Chess came in and tried to console him. Wolf dropped a real
good lug on me. I had a real long beard, my shades, a big natural. The Wolf looked at me and he said, ‘Why don’t you take them wah-wahs and all that other shit and go throw it off in
the
lake — on your way to the barber shop.’ He just wiped all the shit out in one stroke.” Cosey continued, “Charles Stepney’s arrangements were
beautifully tight, yet open enough to let the guys do what they do. He had the patterns written; the groove on ‘Herbert Harper’ was locked. The other things were relatively simple by
comparison. I did a lot of overdubbing on
After the Rain,
where on
Electric Mud
I only overdubbed once or twice. I got to use the bowed guitar on
After the Rain,
as I did
with the Howlin’ Wolf album. I did a little solo bowed guitar on ‘Bottom of the Sea’ and ‘I Am the Blues.’ ‘Rambling Mind,’ when Muddy did that before, he
played traditional blues. But Charles utilized a line from a classical piece as a turnaround. The song was in twelve-bar blues, but when we came to the turnaround, instead of using the fifth and
the fourth, we played the classical line. That was a really funky groove.”
Bassist Louis Satterfield told Matt Sakakeeny, “The spirit that we came with — me, Pete, Charles Stepney — we were talking about being free and that’s what it is. Free.
When you’re recording music, all you can put on a record is vibrations. How you vibrate determines how well people will receive it. They can’t see you, they don’t know nothing
except how they feel when they hear it. We did not deviate too far away from the original, but we did stretch it out. You listen to it, Muddy was coming real strong. He hasn’t changed
anything in how he’s singing. We called it preaching, how exuberant he was, how he could reach out and touch people. Muddy was a very witty guy. He would sit there, always positive, always
dressed up. Sometimes when he would really get sharp he’d put on a blue suit and a white shirt and a red tie and red socks.”
The photo session for
After the Rain
still rankles Cosey. “They sent us to Victor Screbneski, a famous photographer in Chicago known worldwide for doing fashion layouts. They
wanted us to pose nude from the waist up and with creatures. Satterfield and myself refused to do it. They had some sort of liquid they wanted to smear the body with. We didn’t think that was
in good taste. Muddy did it for the cover. Phillip Upchurch was into snakes, so he took a picture with a snake and used it for his own album.”
Electric Mud
is Muddy’s most polarizing record. It attracted a new audience in the hip-hop era. “To me it’s a brilliant record,” Chuck D. told me.
“I’ve played it a thousand times. The voice and the character of Muddy Waters stand above the new music. Muddy’s vocals
project.
That’s what created a hook for me
to get into it: these vocals are actually pulling the music.
Electric Mud
introduced me to other Muddy Waters stuff. It took me a while to warm up to traditional blues. A whole new world.
But the automatic thing that struck me right away was the
Electric Mud
thing.”
Fathers and Sons:
“Bloomfield,” said Marshall Chess, “he was always emotionally a basket case. During
Fathers and Sons,
he was so scared of
playing with Muddy a couple of times that he took heavy tranqs. He had a lot of soul but he was a troubled, pained person, like a lot of blues singers are. And he liked drugs and alcohol, just like
them.”
The Thursday-night show at Chicago’s Auditorium Theater drew an almost all-white audience of 2,800. Billed as the Cosmic Joy–Scout Super Jam, it blended deep hippie culture with deep
blues. As fans found their seats, a lone musician
plucked an African finger piano. According to Don DeMichael’s review in
Rolling Stone,
“His
ping-a-dinging sounded like there was a little air in the radiators.” After the hippie mish-mash speech that followed (“thousands of years ago there were one people, one tongue, and
three Faces. . . .”) came a group so bad (The Ace of Cups) the critic wondered if it was a put-on. (DeMichael, “Muddy Waters Week,” pp. 12–13.) Finally the
Fathers and
Sons
band took the stage and warmed the house. Then Muddy toasted it. He was playing to a younger audience, many seeing him for the first time. “On ‘Mojo’ he put his guitar
down,” said Marshall Chess, “he did a dance and he was Rudolf Nureyev for fifteen seconds. It was like he was a ballerina, lightness on his feet.”
