Can't Be Satisfied (64 page)
Read Can't Be Satisfied Online
Authors: Robert Gordon
Oscher’s departure from the band in 1971 — a beautiful swan dive into a murky swamp — came soon after. He caught a cold that turned to pneumonia and he returned to Brooklyn to
heal. But a week after arriving home, he found his harmonica talents mysteriously transformed. “There’s a lot of strange things that happened to me,” he said, his tone getting
hushed. “I don’t know if I really want to get into it, but a week after I left Muddy, my skills were stolen from me. I had to go through a relearning how to blow.”
Oscher would be replaced by Mojo Buford, the replacement man, who this time stayed with the band nearly three years. His stint would not start, however, until after a West Coast tour that
brought George “Harmonica” Smith back into the fold. That tour was documented by a film crew. An edited version of their footage has been released on videotape by Vestapol as
Muddy
Waters in Concert 1971.
The audio portion is available through Blind Pig on an enhanced CD titled
The Lost Tapes.
The live footage, shot with several cameras, does a very good job of
intimately capturing Muddy and the band. The film crew’s documentary footage, shot mostly in the station wagon while driving on the highway, is less professional, with horrific road noises,
an interviewer’s head disembodied by the car seat before him, and a line of questioning that reveals more about the crew’s lack of preparation than about Muddy. By virtue of its
proximity, however, it does open a window into Muddy’s life on tour. Big Mama Thornton is seated next to him, drunk and interrupting, her frequent demands for a bathroom stop unheeded; she
threatens to pee on the floor. Muddy retains his composure, except to shout cautionary warnings to the driver — his accident was recent.
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“sunup and sundown here in the house”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
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“I’m up and around”: “Back on His Feet,”
Rolling Stone.
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news about Otis Spann: By 1970, Spann was living a block from Muddy at 4311 S. Greenwood. Boston guitarist Peter Malick stayed there
the last couple months of Spann’s life:
Spann’s home was a two-room apartment, a bedroom with a kitchenette and a living room with a cot. There was one bathroom for all six apartments. There were
cockroaches, flies too. No screens on the windows. You lay there at night and cockroaches might crawl over you. There wasn’t a whole lot you could do about it. . . . Spann and I played every
night in his little apartment. Part of it was that he needed a way to pay the rent. People would come over and leave a couple of bucks. That’s how he got by but that’s also what he
loved to do. (Brisbin, “Malick”)
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“A skeletal-looking man”: Guralnick,
Lost Highway,
p. 294.
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“There are some beautiful white bands”: “Rebirth of the Blues,”
Newsweek.
He told a 1971 documentary crew, “I like to get the Mississippi tone, the down South tone. I like to play an open sound, not playing flats and sharps. I stay with the natural keys like E
natural or A natural. I think your instrument and you, when you’re singing the type blues that I sing, [it should sound] like some people arguing. I talk to it and it talk to me.”
(Wyler and Ragsdale interview with Muddy Waters.)
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“He strolled on stage with a crutch”: Random Notes,
Rolling Stone,
July 23, 1970.
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“As we go to press”: Blues News,
Living Blues,
winter 1970–1971.
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“Lucille got in the wrong crowd”: Cookie confirmed Willie’s assessment of Lucille: “An older girl that rented
upstairs at Lake Park, Doris Priestly, told me then that C. D. had turned Lucille on to drugs.”
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“They’re all new people”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
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According to the papers that Muddy couldn’t read: If Muddy had higher literacy skills, a clause such as this may have prompted
a question: “The Compositions, including without limitation, the lyrics, music, titles, and characters described therein shall be and are the sole and exclusive property of the Employer,
together with all copyright rights therein and all other rights thereunder. . . .” (U.S. District Court, “McKinley Morganfield v. Arc.”)
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“Muddy emotes warmly”: Charles Giuliano, “Muddy Waters at Jazz Workshop,”
Boston Herald Traveler,
March 19, 1971.
“The Jazz Workshop was a tough week,” said Dick Waterman, who co-owned another Boston club. “It was a Monday to Sunday seven-night week with a Sunday matinee. My club,
Joe’s Place, was working a five- or six-night week, with no matinees. I never asked Muddy to play, and when we were talking, he said, ‘Back when not too many people knew my name, Freddy
Taylor [at the Jazz Workshop], Freddy wanted me to play.’ He said, ‘Now I like Freddy. Freddy work you hard. But I got to show the man the consideration.’ ”
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“He was in as fine a form”: Jon Landau, “A Man of Great Pride, Great Dignity,”
Boston Phoenix,
March
23, 1971.
In New York, Muddy played the Gaslight Theater, a burgeoning blues club — even if it was in the basement. “There was no backstage, it was a kitchen,” said Willie Strandberg,
fan and friend of Paul Oscher. “Muddy was like a regal king. He was sitting up on the stove, he had a big fur coat on, a Tiparillo sticking out of his pocket, and I said, ‘Hey, Muddy,
nice to meet you.’ He said, ‘Oh I love these waitresses, the hippie chicks.’ ”
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The London Muddy Waters Sessions
: Rory Gallagher said:
I learned a lot watching him tune his guitar and watching the way he sang and performed. . . . The hardest thing was to get the drums and bass in sync with Muddy’s
type of rhythm guitar. . . . A couple of times Muddy would stop the song if he didn’t like the way it was going, but a few suggestions were made by Steve Winwood as well and Georgie Fame,
who was playing piano. But with a lot of these types of sessions, there’s not all that much verbal communication. A lot of it’s just stop and start again: “Can you pick up on
that?” or “Can you start in a different key?” (Skelly, “Muddy Waters”)
Carey Bell played on and off with Muddy’s band over many years. He’d come to Chicago from Mississippi and had gotten his start with pianist Lovie Lee, who later joined Muddy’s
last band. Bell got guidance from Little Walter, and was strong enough to record with Earl Hooker, subtle enough to record with Honeyboy Edwards.
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Can’t Get No Grinding:
“ ‘Can’t Get No Grinding,’ ” said Muddy, “I heard that from
Memphis Minnie a thousand years ago.” Which doesn’t stop him, in the blues tradition, from putting his name on the song. (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”)
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circuit of higher-class cabarets: Some of his higher-class gigs: On the fifth day of 1973, he played the Avery Fisher Philharmonic
Hall on a bill with John Lee Hooker and Mose Allison; he returned two months later, playing another “Blues Variations,” this time with Lightnin’ Hopkins and Bonnie Raitt. Both
shows were sold out. He also played the larger Carnegie Hall on June 29.
The New Yorker
covered Muddy when he played Mick Jagger’s twenty-ninth birthday party on July 26 at the prestigious St. Ritz Hotel in New York. “Andy Warhol had been taking
Polaroid pictures. Lee Radizwill began to take Polaroid pictures. Then Muddy Waters came on with his band.” He dedicated “Hoochie Coochie Man” to the Rolling Stones and to
Marshall Chess and Chess Records. “Muddy Waters, businesslike, packed up his equipment after his set was over. He and his musicians sat at a table near the bandstand. Muddy and his band were
geared for rapid appearances, rapid setups, and rapid departures. They were on the road. ‘We’ve been in Chicago, we’ve been up to Iowa,’ he said, ‘We’re going
out to Washington.’ ” (Trow, “Ahmet Ertegun,” pp. 66–67.) The venue was nice, Muddy later told a New Zealand writer, but said he was most impressed by a naked woman
who leapt from a cake and made each breast move in opposite directions. (Nicholls, “Strangers.”)
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“For a blues band such as Mr. Waters’s”: John S. Wilson, “Blues Band,”
New York Times,
December 21, 1972.
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“the essence of the black man in Chi Town”: Bims, “Blues City.”
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“if they’d thrown me out the fourth one”: Nicholls, “Strangers.”
A few days before departing for a European tour behind the
London Sessions,
Sammy Lawhorn dove into double trouble. He told Pee Wee Madison he’d had a skirmish with some furniture
movers. “The guys said, ‘You got to give us more money.’ He said, ‘I ain’t got no more goddamn money.’ They grabbed him, stripped him down, went through his
pockets, locked him in the
bathroom. They was trying to figure out what to do with him, and when he heard the guy coming at him, Sammy say he had no choice but just dive out
the second-floor window, naked. Broke him all up. He was pretty lucky, though. To live.”
Sammy told Bob Koester (and also Calvin Jones) that he’d come home and someone was robbing his house. They put him in the bathroom and scared him so bad that he jumped out a third-floor
window and broke both his legs. Whatever the cause, whatever wrong Sammy had done, the negotiating was over. He was forced out of his clothes and locked in the bathroom for safekeeping. His
apartment was ransacked, presumably in search of the goods in question. When nothing was found, Lawhorn heard the thugs discussing his fate. And when a decision about terminating his fate was
reached, the two or three stories between him and the ground seemed a much shorter distance than the hell that loomed. And so he leapt. He’d recuperated enough to travel to New Zealand, where
a reporter noted his difficulty hobbling to a press conference. “Muddy doesn’t ask much of the band off the stand, but if he does, they do as they’re told.” (Nicholls,
“Strangers.”)
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Geneva died on March 15, 1973: Mike Kappus of the Rosebud Agency, which later booked Muddy, was handling a club in Milwaukee in 1973,
and he recalled Muddy playing there the week of Geneva’s death. “Muddy had done a night or two,” said Kappus, “then his wife died and he took a night or two off and he
finished the week.” Scott Cameron independently corroborated Kappus’s account. “I said let me call up and cancel it,” said Cameron, “and Muddy says, ‘No, I need
to do this.’ I think it probably was better for him emotionally to ride that van to Milwaukee and play that date, release some of this tension, whatever emotional pressure he was under, then
ride back home with his band members instead of having to sit in that house all by himself and think about what had just happened.”
Willie Smith’s memory supports Cookie’s claim of Muddy being home. “He called me up that morning,” said Willie Smith. “He told me she was dead, so we wasn’t
out. We might have just come in that night or that morning. She had done got to the point where she would go on off in a trance, wasn’t talking, didn’t know nobody.” Muddy’s
friend Al Perry came to the funeral. He asked who picked out the plot and was told, “The Old Man had picked that spot out because it was right in the front by the gates so people
wouldn’t have to look hard to find him.”
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Watertoons: Muddy was not fully disentangled from the Arc and Heavy publishing companies at the time, and so he could not put his own
name on the Watertoons songs. Instead, he used Cookie’s real name, Amelia Cooper. “I figured,” said Terry Abrahamson, who shared songwriting credit with her, “that a little
girl wasn’t writing any of these songs.”
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“I started to play ‘Can’t Be Satisfied’ ”: Margolin, “Can’t Be Satisfied”; author
interview with Bob Margolin.
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Unk in Funk:
It is astonishing that, with expectations high and money spent on these sessions, Chess would release a cut as
flawed as this seven-minute version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” which is actually the song played twice. About
three minutes in, as the track is
winding up, Ralph Bass bursts in, waving his arms and stomping. Startled, the players stop and the song falls apart. “Everybody,” Muddy shouts, “come on in,” and the players
resume, running through the song again. Afterward, Bass explained he was trying to throw some excitement into the song. There is some life in the moment — the brief moment — when the
song falls apart, but it’s not any musical magic. The seven minutes would have made an interesting outtake; its inclusion, as reviewers noted, just sounded sloppy.
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Terry Abrahamson: Abrahamson explains how he met Muddy: “I met Muddy at Alice’s in Chicago, a coffeehouse, around 1970.
It was a small room, and very narrow. You entered through the front, the stage was at the back, there were seats along the walls, and everybody else sat on the floor. We’d get there early to
sit up front. People piled in behind us, so, to use the bathroom, we had to walk across the stage and use the band’s bathroom. I go backstage, start talking to the guys. In between nights, I
talked to my dad and he said his friend Hy Marzen used to own a bar where all these guys played. It turned out to be the Zanzibar. So I told Muddy that I grew up down the street from Hy Marzen.
Muddy misinterpreted this and thinks I’m Hy’s son, and introduces me like that. I said, ‘No, I’m not Hy Marzen’s son.’ Muddy said, ‘Oh you don’t have
to lie to me, boy, he didn’t rip me off that bad.’ ”
Abrahamson pitched his song to Muddy before a gig. “I said, ‘What do you think of this: ‘The men call me Muddy, the women call me Electric Man / When I plug into your socket /
I’ll charge you like no one else can.’ He said, ‘That’s good shit, boy, you write that down.’ I was twenty-two years old and I knew that that would be the artistic
peak of my life.”
Getting to know Bo proved almost as exciting as getting to know Muddy. “Bo was so entertaining, he was like watching a TV show,” Abrahamson said. “He was black as night, his
eyes were little red slits. You didn’t see any eyeball, just little pockets of red, like blood, above his nose. And when he talked, it was a deep growl, and all mumbles. If you didn’t
know him, you’d be terrified of this guy. Bo loved to goof on people by getting them scared.” (Bob Margolin said of Bo: “This was when that song ‘Bad Bad Leroy Brown’
came out, and it’s like it was about Bo.”)
