Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  Jimmy Rogers, too, respected Wolf. “Wolf was better at managing a bunch of people than Muddy or anybody else. Muddy would go along with the Chess company, Wolf would speak up for himself — and when you speak up for yourself you’re automatically gonna speak up for the band. Muddy would go along with Chess because Chess was gonna give him the money to pay his car note if he needed to cover a bill.”

  The yoke of sharecropping — and the nominal protection it offered — never fit Wolf. A huge and hulking man, he moved about like he was breaking shackles: on stage, he seemed assembled from boxcars. “Wolf would be sitting in the corner with his spectacles on in intermission,” recalled Billy Boy Arnold, “studying his book; he went to night school, he took music lessons, he was always trying to advance.” Muddy had made a life in the plantation South. He played guitar, ran a bar, drove a car. His pockets jingle-jangled with silver and scrip. Muddy not only sought a relationship with the boss man, but was sheltered by it. It was how he lived.

  “The difference was,” continued Billy Boy Arnold, “if you played in Wolf’s band and got fired or quit, you could draw unemployment compensation. If you walked up to Muddy and said something like unemployment compensation they’d think you were crazy — ‘What the hell’s that?’ ”

  Smitty’s closed in 1961, but at Pepper’s more and more white faces appeared. Muddy’s name was painted on the front of the building and the club was easily accessible from the Forty-third Street el stop. Charlie Musselwhite had come up the hillbilly highway from Memphis in 1962, and he saw the sign while driving an exterminator company truck. Poking around, he began to frequent the place and got friendly with a waitress named Mary, who, one Wednesday night, told Muddy that he should check out the honky on harmonica.

  “So Muddy called me up to sit in,” said Musselwhite, “and at this time, blues was out of fashion. I was eighteen and they thought it was funny I knew anything about it. So any time I was in Pepper’s Lounge, he’d have me sit in and word got around. People started offering me money to play.”

  Musselwhite got to know everyone in the band, but was closest with Spann. If it was wet, Spann drank it, and Musselwhite was into that. “Spann liked me and would introduce me to women, ‘Charlie, I want you to meet my wife.’ It would be a different woman every night. And he was always fixing me up with other ladies and we’d go out. Pepper’s was open until four in the morning, but there was a whole other scene that happened after that. There were these private clubs that were open till the next afternoon. Anybody could pay the door fare to get in, and they served alcohol. Then we’d get a hotel room and flip a coin to see who got the mattress and who got the springs. Spann and his lady would be on one and I’d be with my lady on the other. He called me his fucking-buddy.”

  Muddy was still consigned to black clubs, where the young audience considered him old-fashioned but where he was sought out by white kids who were exploring the roots of their music. White guitarist Elvin Bishop was led to Pepper’s by the black cafeteria employees he befriended at the University of Chicago. “Muddy Waters was playing at Pepper’s and man what a scene,” said Bishop. “Completely packed, all the chicks up front, he had on a fine suit, a nice process, a little narrow mike, little narrow tie, sharp shoes, and he was sweating away singing ‘Rock Me’ and ‘Mojo Working.’ The place just rocked. He didn’t do a whole lot of jumping around, but he was intense. He’d have a grip on that microphone, standing back the length of his arm — he had a powerful voice — and he was standing straight up, dignified, sweating from every pore. Every once in a while he’d jerk his body, ja-pow, he was one hundred percent into it.”

  The circle drew tighter and yet more diverse, whites and blacks, old and young. Charlie Musselwhite became friendly with Big Joe Williams, the rambling Delta blues guitarist who would record for Testament and Delmark Records. “I’d go in Pepper’s with Joe,” said Musselwhite, “and as soon as Muddy would see Joe he’d make a big fuss, get him a place to sit, buy him a bottle and have them bring over a setup, which was a bowl with ice and tongs and a couple little red cherries to make it classy. He’d announce from the stage that Big Joe Williams was in the audience and he wrote ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go.’ Muddy would act like a little kid around Joe, and Joe loved to be treated like that.”

  Pepper’s served home cooking, allowing patrons to fill up before tanking up. If the kitchen closed and you were still hungry, a man with a cart would appear out front selling pig-ear sandwiches. “That opened about midnight,” said Elvin Bishop, “because the idea of eating a pig-ear sandwich doesn’t get appealing unless you’ve been drinking till then.”

  After “The Muddy Waters Twist,” the next manipulation Muddy subjected himself to was overdubbing vocals on instrumental tracks by Earl Hooker, creating “You Shook Me” and “You Need Love.” These, however, worked surprisingly well, due in large part to the musicians’ shared background. Hooker was a Clarksdale native, younger than Muddy, who successfully adapted his slide work to the electric guitar. He stood out even among his peers, who included Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Matt Murphy, and Freddie King; he recorded mostly instrumentals and thus his name recognition was as limited as his vocal range. These tracks move at tempos comfortable for Muddy, leaving room for him to build words from moans, to stretch his vocals like he would his guitar strings, and to add emphases and emphatic pauses. (“You Need Love” was later interpreted by Led Zeppelin as “Whole Lotta Love” and resulted in a lawsuit and payments to Willie Dixon, the songwriter.)

  Muddy recorded one of his deepest blues in the spring of 1963, “Five Long Years.” Maybe because it was written by Muddy’s cousin Eddie Boyd, Muddy felt a kinship to the song. Spann’s dark piano roll sets the mood. The pace is slow and unhurried. Cotton, back in the band, stays simple, playing accompaniment rather than lead. (“Phil wouldn’t put reverb on my harmonica,” Cotton remembered. “Said people wouldn’t be able to tell me from Walter. That let me know I was doing pretty good.”) The session continued well, and after a couple more tracks, everyone in good humor, Muddy dipped back to his youth and, like a band entertaining the boss man on Stovall, they cut “She’ll Be Coming Around the Mountain.”

  A concert recorded by Chess a couple months later reveals the stylistic spectrum of blues at the time. The label’s biggest traditional stars — Muddy, Wolf, and Willie Dixon (Walter was scheduled but didn’t show, and Sonny Boy Williamson was actually recorded separately) — were backed by its upcoming bright light, Buddy Guy. Guy’s band segues the performances with instrumental riffs — taut, slashing, and very electric — an emerging blues-rock style tagged the “West Side sound.” Chess ultimately packaged the same album with two different titles and different artwork. First a more conservative one (Folk Festival of the Blues) on Argo, the jazz and folk subsidiary, and later a flashier one on Chess (Blues from Big Bill’s Copa Cabana).

  Buddy Guy had come to Muddy’s attention shortly after his arrival from Louisiana. Muddy had Bo drive him to the 708 Club, then waited in the red station wagon while Bo fetched Guy. “I walked out and he was sitting in a station wagon in the front seat, so I attempted to get in the back,” Guy writes in his autobiography, Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues. “ ‘Don’t get in the back. Get in the front,’ he said. So I got in the front. And he’s sitting up there eating a baloney sandwich. ‘Go ahead on, get you some baloney,’ he said. ‘Make a sandwich.’ So I started thinking, ‘This cat here is better than I thought he was.’ I thought he was going to be saying, ‘Look man, I’m Muddy Waters.’ But he was down to earth and I thought, ‘Wow, what else can you ask for?’ ”

  Chess remained anxious to capitalize on the folk craze; Muddy’s Folk Singer album, recorded in September of 1963, was probably named before it was recorded. But now young whites looking for more passion in their music increasingly turned toward the blues. Rock and roll had dissipated from the force of “Great Balls of Fire” and “Hound Dog” in the mid-1950s to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and “Let’s
Do the Twist” in 1960; the British Invasion was still nascent.

  Chess’s next concept was to record Muddy with either a peer or one of his mentors, both on acoustic guitars. For Leonard, it was a return to 1947, when he’d first recorded Muddy — something in the Lightnin’ Hopkins or John Lee Hooker vein. The idea must have appealed to Muddy, certainly more so than another twist record. Besides, he was returning to England in October and needed to brush up on his acoustic guitar; he wasn’t making the same mistake of playing a screaming guitar over there again.

  The resulting album is an intimate, if imperfect, portrait of Muddy. The sounds are crisp, clean, and close; the microphones have been chosen and placed with care. Sensing the possibilities, Muddy accents his singing with hums and moans, the occasional side comment, and whispered lines. It is mostly great listening, though running underneath and surfacing occasionally (“My Captain,” for example) is the sense that maintaining the conceit of his nearness has deflected Muddy’s attention and diminished his feeling.

  The next month, October of 1963, Muddy returned to Europe with the second American Folk Blues Festival, an annual tour that ran into the early 1970s. In London, the first of the seventeen dates — they’d also play Belgium, Germany, France, and Denmark — Muddy strode on stage and sat down. He strummed his acoustic guitar, perhaps mentioned how nice it was to be back, and then he moaned his way into the recently cut but as yet unissued “My Captain.” Applause was not thunderous. Holding back nothing, he reached into his repertoire for a surefire winner and delivered a deep, solo version of “Rollin’ Stone.” Response was polite. Then the band joined him for quiet versions of “Five Long Years,” “Blow Wind Blow,” “Trouble No More,” “My Home Is in the Delta,” and “Mojo.”

  “Back at his London hotel after the concert, sharing a bottle of Johnny Walker with Memphis Slim, Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy, and me, [Muddy] sat shaking his head in disbelief,” recounted photographer Val Wilmer. “His wide, fine-featured face with its high New World Indian cheekbones seldom betrayed his emotions; now a look of genuine puzzlement disturbed it. Just what did they want, these [British] white folks? He’d brought along the acoustic guitar they’d demanded. He’d given them the old down-home country blues this time — and now all they could ask him was, ‘Why’d you leave the Telecaster behind?’ ”

  Show after show he tried to win them over, but found that while Americans were digging the rootsier acoustic sounds, the British were still catching up with Muddy’s last visit, buying electric guitars and cranking their amps. Muddy’s catalog had become widely available in England through an improved licensing and distribution deal Chess struck with Pye Records in 1959. Muddy was unaware of his influence; one British band (with David Bowie) was named the Manish Boys (maintaining the typo on the original release’s label), another was The Mojos, and a third was the Rolling Stones, who’d already achieved a hit covering Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” with Muddy’s “I Want to Be Loved” on the flip side.

  Anxious to crank his axe and rejuvenate his former image, he readily agreed to return to England in the spring of 1964. This tour would run a couple weeks, climax with a TV special, then hit Paris for a night. Dubbed “The Blues and Gospel Train,” it also featured Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Reverend Gary Davis, Cousin Joe Pleasant from New Orleans, and Otis Spann. Joe Boyd was hired as tour manager; he had just finished his studies at Harvard, where, using the space beneath his dorm bed as a warehouse, he’d become the Boston-area distributor for Delmark Records. Boyd went on to become a pioneer of folk-rock, producing artists as diverse as Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and REM; he also founded the Hannibal label. “I’ve been associated with a lot of interesting things since this tour,” he said, “but in my view of my career in the music business, it was hard to top that first job. I’ve never really been associated with anything that beat it.”

  Like the Folk Singer sessions that had anticipated the sound of his 1963 tour, the two songs Muddy cut a couple weeks before leaving in 1964 indicated this year’s audience would find Muddy in top form. “The Same Thing” and “You Can’t Lost What You Ain’t Never Had” were a return to the blues that had put Chicago on the map. “What make men go crazy when a woman wear her dress so tight?” Muddy asks in the first line of “The Same Thing” (writing credited to Dixon). The music is a perfect accompaniment, haunting and dark, energetically restrained and full of latent power. Pee Wee Madison makes his first studio appearance, his inexperience serving him perfectly as a rhythm player; no sparks or West Side flash distract. There’s also no harmonica player, which forces Muddy’s slide guitar to the fore. He shies not one bit from the challenge, establishing the song’s mood with his opening guitar solo — exactly four notes, letting each one pierce like a knife puncture’s pain, pushing the lingering sound with his slide as if twisting the weapon.

  Less than three weeks later, on April 29, Muddy was on a stage in Bristol, two hundred miles from London, a crowd filling the large hall. For Joe Boyd, the tour’s first night was a watershed experience. “Here were these guys who could barely fill a 150-seat coffeehouse in America and there the hall, with nearly 2,000 seats, was packed. Teenage girls were queuing outside the dressing room for Muddy’s autograph. The kids were knowledgeable and really into it.”

  After a show at the Hammersmith Odeon, some students came backstage for autographs and invited the players to a party in the suburbs. Spann, always up for a good time, accepted when told there would be girls. Reverend Gary Davis too. Boyd joined them, and Muddy came along. “There were all these students gawking and for a split second I think Muddy got the idea that there might be some pussy here,” said Boyd. “He started chatting with some girl but I think he realized that it probably wasn’t on, that this was a bunch of innocent kids who were just blues fans. He always maintained this extraordinary dignity.”

  Spann began doing a featured spot, and on May 4, one of two days off, cut an album for English Decca, Half Ain’t Been Told, backed by Muddy, Ransom Knowling, and Willie Smith (produced by Mike Vernon). A casual and relaxed session, the kinship between Muddy and Otis is easy to hear; with only a small rhythm section, the two exchange licks and riffs like old friends sharing a bottle, Muddy careful not to steal the spotlight. True to the Muddy band tradition, Spann cut a rocking version of the contemporary hit “Pretty Girls Everywhere,” changing the verb from “see” to the more autobiographical “got”: “Everywhere I go / I got a pretty girl there.”

  From outside, the blues world seemed small and intimate. But Joe Boyd realized from the start that the narrative he’d constructed about the artists was just that: a construct. “It came as a great shock to me that they didn’t really know each other’s music. Brownie and Sonny knew Gary from New York and from South Carolina but Cousin Joe was from another planet. The Chicago guys knew each other but Ransom wasn’t that close to Muddy or Otis particularly. These were disparate universes that had no connection.

  “The first morning in the hotel, Sister Rosetta and her manager/husband — she had a fur coat and he had a camel hair — she found herself sitting across the table from Reverend Gary. I thought, ‘Well these two will get along because they’re from this deep South gospel tradition.’ Gary, he orders two fried eggs and he kind of feels the plate — he’s blind — picks up one of the fried eggs and has yolk spilling down his front and drops it in his mouth. Sister Rosetta went, ‘Puhlease!’ She said, ‘I don’t ever want to sit at the same table as that man again.’ ”

  Nevertheless, the disparate musicians began to draw together. On May 7, in an abandoned railway station, Granada TV staged a concert; it was Muddy’s second appearance on English television within a year. “By the end,” said Boyd, “Rosetta had done a 180-degree turn on Gary and decided he was the deepest man she had ever met. The last night she told me, ‘When he does “Precious Lord,” get me a microphone off stage.’ He starts into this incredible version and Rosetta is on her knees backs
tage moaning right straight out of Arkansas, like she’d sang with her mother. Gary heard the voice and said, ‘Sing it, Rosetta.’ It was just incredible. And Muddy was in the wings watching all of this. I vividly remember him doing ‘Long Distance Call’ and he drew out that line ‘another mule kicking in my stall’ for ages, shaking his head from side to side. It was the height of the blues boom.”

  Upon returning to the states, Muddy played some East Coast dates, dancing his jitterbug. “I have a feeling a white is going to get it and really put over the blues,” Muddy told guitarist Michael Bloomfield in a 1964 interview. “I know they feel it, but I don’t know if they can deliver the message.”

  Muddy had seen Bloomfield around South Side clubs since the late 1950s, when the teenager used to take a bus and two trains to see — or hear — his hero. “From two blocks away, you’d hear that harmonica,” said Bloomfield, “and then you’d hear Muddy’s slide, and I’d be like a dog in heat.” When the doorman refused entrance to the kids, they sat outside and listened. One time Muddy came out and shook their hands.

  In England, there was a generation of kids who’d have relished being turned away from the door of a South Side club. All they had was the vinyl experience, none of the flesh, none of the smoke or the spilled drinks or the ladies hiking up their dresses and dancing dirty, cinder-block buildings made intimate by beer signs and precious little light.

  “When we started the Rolling Stones, we were just little kids, right?” said Stones guitarist Keith Richards. “We felt we had some of the licks down, but our aim was to turn other people on to Muddy Waters.”

  Indeed, the band had formed after Richards bumped into Mick Jagger, who was carrying two albums: Chuck Berry’s Rockin’ at the Hops and The Best of Muddy Waters. “When I got to hear Muddy Waters,” said Richards, “it all fell into place for me. He was the thing I was looking for, the thing that pulled it all in for me. When I heard him I realized the connection between all the music I’d heard. He made it all explainable. He was like a codebook. I was incredibly inspired by him as a musician.”