Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  The Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy’s song and began performing in 1962. Their first album included the lead track from Muddy’s The Best of, “I Just Want to Make Love to You.” (The success of the Stones’ album meant a significant payment to Arc Music.) They toured the United States in 1964, stopping by the Chess studios to record in the same place as their heroes. At the time, Muddy was making his worst records; the horns on “Short Dress Woman” are heinous.

  “We pulled up with the equipment,” said Stones bassist Bill Wyman, “and we were out there putting the guitars in and the mike stands and amps. Muddy came walking down the street, and he helped us in with it. We were like [in awe]. And he was like, ‘Come on boys. Gimme that. I’ll help you.’ A while earlier, we had been thinking, ‘God, suppose we met Muddy Waters and those guys at the studio when we’re there?’ ”

  Richards’s memory is slightly different. “We walked down the corridor and there’s the assistant manager, here’s the studio manager, over there some guy’s painting the ceiling on a stepladder and as we’re walking by our guide says, ‘Oh, by the way, you might like to meet this guy — that’s Muddy Waters.’ And there’s Muddy in overalls and he’s whitewashing and I’ll never forget the image, Muddy’s great big beaming black face all splattered with whitewash and I’m looking at my man, right? This is America, right? This is the music business, right? We were going in to cut some of his songs in his own studio, but he ain’t selling records at that time. He came down off the ladder, chatted for a bit — there was no animosity, no bitterness. He was such a gentleman.” Muddy’s matter-of-fact demeanor was the outgrowth of his sharecropping years; most anything, good or bad, that was happening to him in Chicago couldn’t be as tough as the boss man’s tub of silver dollars.

  Unless he wasn’t painting the ceiling. “That’s some kind of Keith’s fantasy, and I tease him about that,” said Marshall Chess, who remembered the Stones “drinking straight whiskey out of bottles,” which helps account for the differing memories. “If you knew Muddy Waters, he just wasn’t in there painting the wall. Muddy was always dressed sharp as a tack. He wasn’t about to be getting no paint spots on his Stetson shoes or his custom-made suit.” (Several Chess employees find the painting story difficult to believe; one said, “Leonard would be the first one to say, ‘Get your ass down, I don’t want you falling off those damn ladders.’ ”)

  Meeting the longhairs meant little to Muddy at the time, though as their popularity grew, so did his respect and appreciation for them. Their first number-one song in the United States, summer of 1965, was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” a title directly inspired by Muddy’s “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” “The Rolling Stones created a whole wide-open space for the music,” said Muddy. “They said who did it first and how they came by knowin’ it. I tip my hat to ’em. It took the people from England to hip my people — my white people — that a black man’s music is not a crime to bring in the house.”

  Slowly but surely, gigs in white clubs were becoming more frequent. In Chicago, blues finally moved uptown when Big John’s opened in a white neighborhood on the North Side. Paul Butterfield began building his reputation there, inviting South Side blues players to his gig. Soon enough, Muddy was there on Wednesday nights, Wolf took Thursdays, and Butterfield had Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. “I lived about four blocks from there,” said Marshall Chess. “We would all sit around the table with Muddy. He was like a prince, this supreme, regal archetype bandleader. He was having his drink and looking for some pussy. He might not have said more than ten words. His presence — it’s the feeling you got from him that was an immense thing.”

  From Big John’s, the Butterfield Blues Band signed to Elektra Records and became stars with their song “Born in Chicago.” Steve Miller saw an article about them in Time magazine and moved to Chicago. “Muddy had the best band, the best material, and it was always an event when he came in,” Miller said. “I was in competition with him for the same gigs.” Muddy got the sympathy vote in Downbeat magazine’s 1964 Critics Poll: “Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition.”

  In 1964, a white guy working for Shaw Artists on the East Coast was looking at the company roster and was surprised to see Muddy among their clients. As rock and roll and then folk moved in, Shaw’s involvement in blues gigs had declined; they’d virtually abandoned him. “I called Muddy to see what he needed for a week in a club,” said Bob Messinger. “He said fifteen hundred bucks. He was very welcoming. He had already been to Europe, had a taste of the good life, and was interested in making progress. I started to get college dates for him right off the bat, one-nighters, which led me to believe the market was already there for him.” Messinger landed him a week in Boston at the Jazz Workshop, seven nights plus a matinee — for $1,750. For that kind of money, Muddy added a sax player.

  With Messinger at Shaw making the calls, glamour gigs on the East Coast picked up. At Muddy’s first of two nights at the 1965 New York Folk Festival, held in Carnegie Hall, Muddy shared the bill (“The Evolution of Funk”) with Son House, among others. House, who was tall and boney, walked backstage with his loose gait and one of Muddy’s band members nudged another, then imitated the man’s walk. “Muddy moved across to that guy quick,” said Dick Waterman, Son House’s manager. “Quick! And Muddy grabbed him. ‘I seen you mockin’ that man. Don’t you be mocking that man.’ And everybody fell back. He said, ‘When I was a boy comin’ up, that man was king. King! If it wasn’t for that man, you wouldn’t have a job. If it wasn’t for that man, I wouldn’t be here now.’ ”

  Also in New York, Muddy squeezed in an Apollo gig with B. B. King, T-Bone Walker, Bo Diddley, and Bobby “Blue” Bland. Feeling good in the Big Apple, he bought Lucille a diamond ring — on the street. They rushed to a jewelry store to have it appraised. Muddy was an international star, but he was a rube country boy at heart: cut glass.

  The big gig that summer of 1965 was Newport, a bill titled “The Family of Jazz.” Muddy shared the lineup with Dizzy Gillespie, Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, the Les McCann Trio, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Pete Seeger, and Big Joe Williams. His set included a jam with Dizzy Gillespie, but the real action took place with Butterfield, who upset folk stalwarts with his electric approach to blues. Introducing Butterfield, Alan Lomax lamented the band’s lack of purity and bemoaned the future of the blues. His concerns were not shared by the audience (“We were boogying and totally blown out by the Butterfield Band,” recalled blues artist Maria Muldaur) nor by Albert Grossman, who was managing Bob Dylan and about to sign Butterfield. The hefty Grossman took umbrage at Lomax’s words, and in short order, the two gray-haired men were rolling and tumbling in the dust, fisticuffs.

  In the blues arena, Muddy had settled the dispute over electricity and authenticity long ago in Chicago and in England more persuasively than he’d realized in 1958. Seven years later, America was coming to grips with its division and collision of cultures; what it meant for black people to bring their music — their lives — into white venues and white neighborhoods; and what it meant for whites to co-opt the culture. At a concert, this turmoil led to a fistfight; in the larger community, it led to riots. Martin Luther King came to Chicago in the mid-1960s, purchased an apartment building on the West Side, and began rehabilitating it. When Mayor Daley would not recognize him, he held a rally at Soldier Field, July 10, 1966; the 40,000 who attended got Daley’s attention, but all he gave King was an audience. Two days later, police arrested West Side kids who were playing in a fire hydrant to keep cool, and the neighborhood, already steamed, blew its top; riots destroyed whole blocks. The city restored calm by promising movement toward open housing. A decade later the United States Justice Department found Chicago the most segregated city in America.

  But in many ways, Muddy’s black audience had aged with him; the next generation’s black youth identified with the burgeoning soul sound. Electric or not, blues was stigmatized as their parents’ music and, with Civil Rights assuming its just role in
the era of black pride and nationalism, blues was shunned for its connection to slavery. For whites, the music’s reach into the past validated it, giving it a vitality of generations. (B. B. King, too, was breaking into a white audience with his Live at the Regal.) The fact that it was the basis for rock and roll and allowed for solos that were emotional, fevered, and expansive — and soon indulgent — made it all the more alluring. Controversy put a sheen on it. Sizzling moments were naturally attractive to Bob Dylan, so he enlisted Butterfield and his drummer Sam Lay and guitarist Mike Bloomfield to accompany his sidemen Al Kooper and Harvey Brooks at the 1965 Newport festival. Together they put the rock in folk and ratcheted up the decade’s energy level. The chain was direct: Muddy, Butterfield, Dylan.

  January of 1966 marked the release of Muddy’s first LP in two years, The Real Folk Blues, a compilation of mostly electric and rocking material recorded — and released as singles — between 1947 and 1964. The concept, scrawled on the back of a menu at Batt’s Restaurant across the street from the Chess offices, was the same as 1958’s The Best of, and if it didn’t cause as much sensation as that reintroduction had, it did reach its intended audience. The folkies were still catching up to the Muddy 78s and 45s that had predated their interest. The success of this album initiated a series of such compilations for other Chess blues artists.

  In Chicago, his fans had an extra treat: Muddy took a job as a disc jockey on WOPA, where his old friend Big Bill Hill was king. He was on from two till four in the afternoon, playing blues, but he wasn’t cut out for it. “I had a lot of people listen at me ’cause that phone jump off the wall when I got on the air with ’em. And I was playing it for them, too. But I couldn’t make no disc jockey. I’m tellin’ you I can’t wear but one shoe. At night I’d be hoarse, so I give it up.”

  In the spring of 1966, the Shaw Artists Corporation closed its doors. Muddy was playing Boston and, with a line forming at the door, Bob Messinger approached him. He was clean, sharp, spoke with a Cape Cod accent. There was culture and money around him like Muddy hadn’t known. Messinger proposed becoming his manager. “Muddy said, ‘What you gonna charge me?’ ” recalled Messinger. “I said, ‘Union says I can charge you fifteen percent. I’ll charge you ten percent on nightclub dates, and fifteen percent on concerts and colleges.’ He said, ‘That’s more than fair, you got a deal.’ ”

  Muddy kept Messinger closed out of his business with the Chesses. “Muddy kept his relationship with them very personal,” Messinger said. “Whatever went on there, it was his business only.” Muddy got money and legal counsel, but most importantly, he got security, a furnish, from Chess — his bills would not go unpaid. With a manager, Muddy could create a more formal relationship with the label, but he was allowing no manager to get between him and the Chesses. So Messinger exploited his strength, which was booking.

  Chess’s latest idea was to sell Muddy to B. B. King’s audience, which was older blacks and younger whites. King played uptown blues, his stinging guitar runs couched in urbanized horn arrangements. “I play cotton-patch music, cornfield, fish fry,” Muddy said. “B. B. and Albert [King] are a different style, a higher class of people’d see them.”

  To attract that audience, Chess devised Muddy, Brass, & the Blues, a concept album that didn’t change Muddy’s cotton patch so much as tried to hide it. Muddy and the band recorded their parts — about a dozen tracks — on Wednesday, June 22, 1966, and the horns came in the next day. Like a second project laid atop Muddy’s, they overdubbed on every song; an organ was also added on four. The brass is crisp and tight, with lots of flash, but it says nothing about Muddy Waters or the blues; the horns don’t belong. The Brass & Blues sessions were Cotton’s last with the band for about four years. It was obviously time to leave.

  Sandwiched between the ill-fated Muddy, Brass, & the Blues and an insipid session with clarinets, Muddy unleashed a burst of independence, a song called “My Dog Can’t Bark,” a track so explosive it’s like a telegram to Chess Records — with music, because he wouldn’t say it with words — that he was a BLUESMAN, that trends would come and go, that some sounds would get popular and other sounds would fade, but his sound was drawn from the eternal well, that it could be played solo and slow or fast with a group, and in case you forgot what that sounds like, dig this — motherfucker. “Down through the years you’re going to get a whuppin’ and I got mine good,” Muddy said. “’Cause those record companies will whup you to death. You believe me. I know.” Recorded at a Chess session, “My Dog Can’t Bark” chases bad blues up a tree. Muddy plays like he’s actually got a tiger in his pants, not like he’s just singing about one. Instead of Dixieland horns appended, Muddy revs and revives his slide, darts like a fishtailing skid. (It’s the same slide guitar sound heard on Bob Dylan’s “Highway 61,” which came out ten weeks later, with Marshall Chess’s high school chum Michael Bloomfield playing it.) Cotton’s harp runs across his lips like each note is giving him electric shock. Muddy sings, “The people they’re talking about me and you / I done got tired, I’m gonna talk some too.” But Chess wasn’t listening and Muddy capitulated, making more of his career-worst records.

  Muddy’s music wasn’t the only thing suffering. The rough life began to take its toll on the drinking and smoking Otis Spann. On October 9, 1966, while touring in California, he suffered a heart attack and landed in the hospital. A few days later, playing at the Troubadour in Los Angeles, Muddy was reunited with Pete Welding, who’d spent half a decade on the South Side and earned Muddy’s trust, representing him in some business dealings when asked. (His Testament Records recorded some of Muddy’s and his band mates’ finest material.) Welding’s review of the show in the jazz magazine Downbeat provides a window into Muddy’s deep blues (a window Chess Records did not see):

  Earlier in the week, Otis Spann had suffered a mild coronary attack and had been hospitalized for a few days. He was eager to play, despite his weakened condition, but Waters forbade it — except for one feature, “Five Long Years,” and Spann, though obviously shaky, turned in his usual impeccable job. . . . [Muddy’s] singing was a revelation — strong and direct, refreshingly free of the artifice and gimmickry that has marred a good bit of his vocal work over the last few years. . . . His voice is still full of dark, smoldering power, bristling with emotion, with a sharp edge of pain to it. At the end of a superbly sensitive “Blues Before Sunrise,” he surprised his listeners with two choruses straight out of Robert Johnson — sung in the high aching falsetto of that master of the Delta blues. They were a vivid reminder of Waters’s own deep roots in the music of his native Mississippi.

  His bottleneck playing was excellent, recalling his prototypical work in this genre on his early commercial recordings in the late 1940s and early 1950s. . . . The high point of the evening was Waters’s solo performance of “Country Blues,” his personalized adaptation of Robert Johnson’s “Walking Blues.” On this piece, the bottleneck playing, in open tuning, was by far the most compelling of the evening, harking back as it did to Waters’s earliest and most expressive use of this old Delta technique.

  Muddy’s return to his early style was probably, in part, a direct nod to Welding. Welding’s record label, Testament, was responsible for Down on Stovall’s Plantation, an LP of most of the Fisk–Library of Congress recordings, reminding fans and newcomers alike of the depth of Muddy’s blues. The release was set in motion a couple years earlier in Chicago, when Welding played Muddy three of the Stovall tracks from a blues compilation. “Muddy asked, ‘Where is the rest of them?’ ” said Welding. “He told me he had done a whole bunch of those for Mr. Lomax on two separate occasions. Muddy didn’t bullshit, so I believed what he said. We sent to the Library of Congress and requested a copy. A few weeks later we received them and had a listening party. Muddy said, ‘We got to get this stuff out.’ He thought it was wonderful. But Leonard Chess did not want to put it out. He thought the sound was terrible, it was too old-fashioned, and besides, he had lots of other Muddy recordings
that he hadn’t released.”

  What Muddy had done on a summer day a quarter century earlier was now of interest well beyond his old circle of Friar’s Point and Rena Lara. People all over America and beyond were interested in hearing what he’d done. It made his life seem very very large, and also very very small. What had happened to McKinley Morganfield? The world knew Muddy Waters, bluesman, but what of Della’s grandson, what of “Stovall’s famous guitar picker”?

  CHAPTER 12

  ROLLIN’ STONE

  1967–1969

  In the editor’s note of the first issue from late 1967, Jann Wenner wrote about his new magazine directed at the mushrooming youth market, “The name of it is Rolling Stone, which comes from an old saying: ‘A rolling stone gathers no moss.’ Muddy Waters used the name for a song he wrote; the Rolling Stones took their name from Muddy’s song, and ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ was the title of Bob Dylan’s first rock and roll record.” To the un-generation, characterized by rebellion and rejection of their past (and expressing it across Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention), Muddy presented a heritage far from their suburban homes, a life of experience — unsuburban, unmodern, unmanufactured: real. That didn’t mean they preferred buying his records over those released by the younger artists he influenced, but it meant both respect and increased sales.

  Chess Records, in high-concept mode, realized that an album cover with several of its stars’ names could move some of this new market’s disposable income from their blue-jean pockets to the company coffers. At the start of 1967, Muddy, Bo Diddley, and Little Walter created Super Blues, an album that rocked up the blues and tried, unsuccessfully, to create an intimacy between the artists. “Hey Muddy,” thuds Bo, “my baby got a mojo.” Walter rasps like he needs medical treatment. The package was successful enough to repeat half a year later, this time replacing Walter with Wolf. Though still not a crowning musical achievement, the Super Super Blues album was an improvement. Putting Muddy and Wolf in the same room was sure to create sparks, and it did: Wolf begins taunting Muddy, “I’m the king, I’m the king.”