Old Gods Almost Dead (2 page)

Rolling . . .

Gonna Be a Rollin' Stone

The Delta
is a low, flat water world of bayous, creeks, levees, and dikes holding back the river from flooding some of the best land in the world for growing cotton and rice. The blues comes from a landscape of cotton fields, gravel roads, groves of pecan trees, kudzu vines, canebreaks, sharecroppers' cabins, tenant farmhouses, flooded rice fields, and an immense white sky full of water and dust. When the cotton is high, it's a hundred degrees in the shade.

One hot day in July 1941, an old Ford raised a yellow cloud of dust on the gravel road leading to Sherrod's Plantation, near Clarksdale, Mississippi. A tall black farmer, twenty-six years old, named McKinley Morganfield became alarmed when the car turned off the road and headed for his cabin behind a row of trees. He worried the car contained Mississippi state revenue agents looking for the corn liquor still, hidden in a thicket nearby, that supplied a juke joint he ran on the side.

But inside the car was Alan Lomax, a young folklorist collecting field recordings from southern plantations and prison farms for the Library of Congress. Lomax had heard of Morganfield's singing fame on the streets of Clarksdale, where he was known as Muddy Waters. That afternoon, after hours gaining his trust, Lomax recorded Muddy Waters for the first time, performing Robert Johnson's “Walkin' Blues,” which Lomax retitled “Country Blues No. 1.”

Lomax questioned Muddy closely about Robert Johnson, the flamboyant slide guitar prodigy, who was rumored to have cut a deal with the devil at a deserted gravel crossroads, trading his immortal soul for mastery of his instrument. Johnson played on street corners in Delta market towns like Clarksdale and Helena, Arkansas, where he was discovered by a talent scout in the music store where he bought his strings. He played his rawboned country blues in backwoods juke joints, fish fries, house parties, levee camps, taverns, lumber camps. He could light a fire under dancers high on corn liquor with propulsive rhythms and a tapping foot. His own songs were a mix of psychic torment and funny imagery full of salacious metaphors for sex.

Johnson's archetypal recordings—“I Believe I'll Dust My Broom,” “Stop Breakin' Down Blues,” “Love in Vain,” “Walkin' Blues,” “I'm a Steady Rollin' Man,” “Hellhound on My Trail”—became the structural template on which future musicians built the rhythm and blues, rock and roll, and eventually rock music that captured the cultural arenas of the West forty years later. Robert's uncanny guitar often sounded like two or three people playing together, and the rhythms he tapped out with his right foot anticipated the R&B band arrangement. “Bach on the bottom and Mozart on top,” as Keith Richards put it.

Muddy insisted he had never actually seen Robert in person, but had been taught Robert's songs by the older bluesman Son House. Much later, Muddy did remember seeing Robert Johnson playing on a street corner in Friar's Point, Mississippi, with a big crowd around him. But, he said, “I got back into the car and left, because he was a dangerous man. He was really
using
that guitar . . . I crawled away and pulled out, because it was too heavy for me.”

Before Lomax left, he also recorded Muddy singing “I Be's Troubled,” the emotional ancestor to “(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction.” Late in 1942, Muddy left the Delta and took the country blues off to wartime Chicago, where a mass migration of black southerners working in war industries had created a cash market for down-home musicians like himself.

But Chicago showed Muddy Waters that his country style was already old-fashioned by the time he arrived.

Blues singing had originally evolved on the plantations of the Mississippi Delta in the late nineteenth century as the secular expression of the first generation of African Americans born out of slavery, but still tied to the land in agricultural peonage. As it developed early in the twentieth century and began to be heard via recordings (called race records), blues singing—slow tempos, flattened thirds and sevenths, moaning lyrics of yearning, melancholy, and remorse—remained a vivid minority music in the American South. Sometimes blues styles surfaced into the commercial mainstream of American music as a featured style or a passing fad, but its origins and its stars were ignored by the outside media until the wartime migrations of the 1940s brought the blues onto the radio and the jukeboxes.

But the blues needed a drummer and amplifiers to be heard above the din of crowded cities. Muddy built his first Chicago band around Little Walter Jacobs and his brilliant amplified harmonica. Extremely popular on the South Side, they were recording by 1946, and soon started to work for two white Polish immigrants, Leonard and Phil Chess. The Chess brothers, who ran several bars and clubs on the South Side, built a studio in 1947 when they realized that the wildly popular black musicians they employed didn't have recording contracts.

Muddy's first record for Chess was a reworked version of “I Be's Troubled” called “I Can't Be Satisfied,” paired with “I Feel Like Going Home.” It was Delta blues greased with electric buzz, and an immediate smash in the summer of 1948. When Muddy added a drummer, the whole Chicago blues thing took off. The new rhythm and blues was dark, sweaty, jumped-up: the dusty mojo of the country hopped up to the violent, frantic pace of the city. The records the Chess brothers made with Muddy and his band sold as fast as they could be pressed. By 1950, Muddy Waters was the undisputed king of the blues, and his band—Muddy on slide guitar, Jimmie Rodgers on second guitar, Otis Spann on piano, Little Walter on wailing, demonic harp, and drummer Elgin Evans—was the most popular group in Chicago.

In 1950, Muddy reached back into the Delta for an old song called “Catfish Blues.” Played slow and solo on the bottom strings of his guitar, retitled “Rollin' Stone,” the record eerily prophesied the future and a new blues generation, telling in a possessed, mysterious chant of “a boy child coming, gonna be a rollin' stone, gonna be a rollin' stone.”

The rest is legend, as Muddy gathered the best musicians around him in the early 1950s. Junior Wells replaced Little Walter on harp. The Chess brothers' bass player and arranger Willie Dixon wrote “I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man” for Muddy, another smash hit. Chester Burnett, known as Howlin' Wolf, arrived in Chicago from West Point, Mississippi, in 1953 and lived with Muddy, who showed him around. A huge man famous in the Delta for performing on his hands and knees, baring his teeth and howling out pure murder, Wolf soon began a rivalry with Muddy that lasted as long as both lived.

By 1955, Muddy was in his prime, full of regal authority, Cadillacs, and women. But in 1956, Elvis Presley, Little Richard, and Bill Haley took over pop music, speeding up R&B with a faster, rocking backbeat. Rock and roll damaged the market for blues records. Muddy Waters and his band still ruled in the taverns of Chicago and in the urban South, but now the Chess brothers had to find a new sound to stay in business.

The diddley-bow is an ancient Delta poverty slide guitar, a one-stringed instrument made from a two-by-four, a couple of nails, some broom wire, and a crushed snuff can. You use a nail or a bottle cap for a slide and you get this piercing African tone that can carry for a hundred yards across a cotton field.

Bo Diddley was born Otha Ellas Bates McDaniel in southwest Mississippi in 1928 and arrived in Chicago at the age of seven to live with his grandmother. When he was twelve, his sister gave him a guitar. “I'm completely self-taught and I don't play like nobody else,” he says. “I was
all
rhythm, and I could drive you right out of your tree with
chords
and that fast wrist work.” He grew up as a ghetto fighter and street musician in the 1940s, playing with little groups called the Hipsters and the Jive Cats. Handy with tools, he was building his own electric guitars and amplifiers as Muddy's band began taking over the professional blues scene. But “Mac” and his friends were half a generation younger; they began speeding up Muddy's rhythms, and adapted the post-bop swing of hepcats like bandleader Louis Jordan and Nat Cole. A throbbing tremolo electric guitar gave the music an exotic, primitive edge. Since drums were hard to deploy on street corners, Mac used maracas for percussion, which gave his music an irresistible African sizzle and drive.

In February 1955, he walked into the Chess studio on South Cottage Grove Avenue and tried to interest the man sitting at the counter in a demo recording of a song called “I'm a Man.” But Little Walter, who was helping around the office for pocket money, told Mac to go away. As he was leaving, Phil Chess came out and said he could play the tape. Within a month, they changed Mac's name to Bo Diddley and released “I'm a Man” as a single, with “Bo Diddley” on the A side, and a new sound was born: an updated version of the shave-and-a-haircut rhythm, a grungy tremolo guitar, and the greasy buzzing of the maracas. This was early black rock and roll, and it was an instant hit on the radio. Soon every young band in America realized that the “Bo Diddley beat” could really jungle up a dance, and the rhythm just exploded. Other masterpieces followed: “Diddley Daddy,” “Pretty Thing,” “Who Do You Love,” “Hey Bo Diddley,” “Cops and Robbers,” and especially “Mona,” a love call to a young stripper Bo liked. Most of these were recorded later by the Rolling Stones, and Bo Diddley probably would have been their biggest influence if the Chess brothers hadn't released “Maybellene” only two months after they put out “Bo Diddley.”

                

Chuck Berry
was born in St. Louis in 1926, a carpenter's son, and he grew into a tall, handsome young man with a quick wit and huge hands capable of really strangling a guitar. When he was eighteen, a judge gave him ten years for a robbery spree across Missouri. Doing his time, he began to entertain the other prisoners with music, impressed the warden, and eventually got paroled.

In late 1952, Chuck met piano player Johnnie Johnson and joined his band, Sir John's Trio. Three years later, in 1955, he visited Chicago for the first time. He went to hear the greats: Howlin' Wolf, Elmore James, his hero, Muddy Waters. When Chuck pushed his way through the crowd to ask Muddy whom he should see in Chicago about cutting a record, Muddy told him about Leonard Chess.

Two weeks later, Chuck Berry walked into the Chess studio, tape reel in hand. “Leonard listened to my tape,” Berry later wrote, “and when he heard one hillbilly selection I'd included called 'Ida Red' played back on the one-mike, one-track home recorder, it struck him most as being commercial. He couldn't believe that a 'hillbilly song' could be written and sung by a black guy. He said he wanted us to record that particular song, and he scheduled a recording session for May 21, 1955, promising me a contract at that time.” They cut “Ida Red,” but Leonard Chess told Chuck to come up with a better title. So Ida Red became a car and got her name changed to Maybelline.

“Maybelline” was a national hit record, and Chuck Berry never looked back. His humor and wit overlaid a light, swinging kind of rockabilly that teenagers liked to dance to. “Around and Around,” “Reelin' and Rockin',” “Carol,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Days,” “Little Queenie”: over the next five years, Chuck Berry wrote thirty-five songs that became the cornerstone of the new pop music, a huge influence on John Lennon and the Beatles, and the main inspiration of Keith Richards's drive to power up the early Stones.

The Blitzkrieg and the Blues

And the guns start to roar / From the ship to the shore /

And the bombs start to fall / As we crouch in the hall . . .

“War Baby,” Mick Jagger

Adolf Hitler
and Nazi Germany declared war on England in 1940 and began bombing English cities and the countryside. English children born during the war spent their earliest years stressed and sleepless because of the banshee air-raid sirens, bursting incendiary and high-explosive bombs, wailing fire engines and ambulances. Charlie Watts (born June 2, 1941), Brian Jones (February 28, 1942), Mick Jagger (July 26, 1943), and Keith Richards (December 18, 1943) heard the fuzz-toned reverb of the Luftwaffe's buzz bombs and doodlebugs, the chugging AA batteries, the wild feedback of V-1 flying bombs, and the almost silent whoosh of V-2 missiles. Overhead, the insect whines of Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes could be heard as they dueled with Messerschmidts and the German bombers. Bill Wyman, older than the rest (born October 24, 1936), remembers hearing Winston Churchill on the radio: “Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Commonwealth and its Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.'”

Keith's family's house in Dartford, Kent, was badly bombed. His father was wounded in Normandy later in the war. Food was scarce and heavily rationed. Meat, eggs, sugar, and fruit were rare treats, and the English people were deprived of protein in favor of those fighting in the war. The Stones and their generation were slight of stature, thanks to Hitler and his armies.

The war ended in 1945, but England was devastated, and rationing continued. Candy—sweets—didn't reappear until 1953, and children rioted when the shops finally opened. London, Liverpool, Manchester were pocked by gutted buildings and the gaping holes of bomb craters. The urban landscape was one huge building site as the poverty-stricken kingdom tried to rebuild. It's no accident that for their first promo pictures as a five-piece group, the Stones were photographed on a London bomb site, almost twenty years after the end of the war, as if they identified themselves as a new generation emerging from the rubble of the old.

                

Cold War.
The American B-29s landing in the late 1940s were the first occupying force in Britain for a thousand years. The American servicemen brought their music with them: country music and the blues, sounds the English began to love. But the British music union was protectionist, so one didn't hear much on BBC radio. Country blues came to England in 1951 when Big Bill Broonzy arrived with a touring jazz show. Broonzy played up-tempo city blues when he performed in Chicago and New York, but in England he only did the old Delta songs he thought the British jazz audience wanted to hear.