Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  Like on the farm, don’t cross the boss. “A lot of people go in for [the effects] and I just tried to dedicate them a recording,” Muddy said not long after the record hit the market. “Really I was shooting for the hippies with that.” Electric Mud is remembered more for its over-the-top electronic effects than for its high points, which is not fair. True, the album is so full of screeching instruments and pulsating organs that it parodies the avant–Miles Davis sound it was emulating, but there are tracks, such as “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and “Herbert Harper’s Free Press News,” that achieve a unique artistry. If the record lacks subtlety, as a historical document it has a certain charm. Muddy’s facial expression on the album’s back cover is a Mona Lisa cipher; is he smiling or is he wincing?

  (Pete Cosey was later told by Jimi Hendrix’s valet that before he’d perform, Jimi would play “Herbert Harper’s Free Press News” from Electric Mud for inspiration. “The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters,” Hendrix said. “I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death, because I heard all of those sounds. ‘Wow, what is that all about?’ ”)

  Electric Mud became Muddy’s first album to hit the Billboard (and Cash Box) charts, where it stayed for two months. After the Rain, recorded half a year later — soon after Electric Mud’s release — repeats the concept, though slightly toned down. “I’ll never forget,” said guitarist Cosey, “as soon as I walked into the studio for the follow-up and Muddy saw me, he threw his arms around me, said, ‘Hey, how you doing, boy, play some of that stuff you played on that last album.’ ” On After the Rain, Muddy is given more of a voice and has Spann and Oscher in his corner; he is allowed lead guitar on several tracks. He contributes three new songs, though there is no recorded evidence of his ever playing them again.

  Though Electric Mud shipped to retailers like a success and initially sold well, critics in America panned it. “It was the biggest Muddy Waters record we ever had at Chess,” said Marshall, “and it dropped instantly. The English accepted it; they are more eccentric.” The adulteration was so dense, the reviews so disappointing, and the warehouse returns so heavy that Muddy expressed his frustration, though he waited long enough — until 1970 — for whatever sales might occur to taper off: “They got this funny thing going, man. Every time I go into Chess to record, they are going to put some un-blues players with me. And it ain’t that they’re not good players, those boys can play just about anything, they some of the top-notch guitar players in Chicago, but they can’t get that blues sound. And if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man.”

  Near the end of his life, he was even harsher: “That Electric Mud record I did, that one was dogshit. But when it first came out, it started selling like wild, and then they started sending them back. They said, ‘This can’t be Muddy Waters with all this shit going on — all this wow-wow and fuzztone.’ ”

  Chess was not done conceptualizing, though their next effort was nearer to Muddy’s mind. Instead of bending Muddy to fit the contrivances of the hippies, they would bring the hippies to Muddy. The idea for Fathers and Sons was conceived by Michael Bloomfield and producer Norman Dayron. Muddy and Spann were the elders, and in addition to Bloomfield, the accompanists included Paul Butterfield on harmonica, Sam Lay on drums — musicians from the Chicago scene with whom Muddy was familiar — and bassist Duck Dunn, from Memphis soul group Booker T. and the MGs. Every cut on the two-album set is a remake of a Muddy classic. Half the album was recorded in the studio over three days in late April of 1969, and half is drawn from a concert that the studio group performed the day after the studio session was done. “We did a lot of the things over we did with Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers and Elgin on drums,” Muddy said during the making of the album. “It’s about as close as I’ve been to [that feel] since I first recorded it.” And, in fact, it is a real fine treatment. The “sons” had enough age and experience not to rush the music; when Muddy introduces the slow, slow tempo, they’re dragging it right beside him. (Bloomfield’s heroin habit, which soon would kill him, contributed to his leisurely crawl.)

  They ably backed him at the live show. “Muddy’s got everybody crazy,” the reporter sent by Rolling Stone wrote. “He ends it, turns on his heel, and makes his way through the throng of musicians and followers who have come out of the wings and onto the stage. Pandemonium. He reappears. Chaos.” For nearly ten minutes after he left the stage, the audience roared its delight. They stomped, shouted, clapped, whistled, screamed, jumped up and down in aisles and on seats. Backstage, Mud was heard to mutter, “It’s just like Newport out there.”

  During the making of Fathers and Sons, word spread that Leonard was thinking of getting out. He promptly received an offer from the General Recorded Tape (GRT) Corporation. They manufactured audiotape and were ready to own a catalog of material to stick onto that tape. They offered 6.5 million dollars plus 20,000 shares of GRT stock for Chess Records and its associated labels and hard assets (excluding the publishing arm of Arc). For that, Leonard was ready to move on. He’d accumulated three radio stations and his eyes were on bigger horizons. “My dad’s plan with the GRT money was black TV,” said Marshall. “He was going to leapfrog from radio to TV, starting with Chicago.” Unlike at the radio stations, most of the executive staff at Chess Records was white, drawing intense pressure from the Black Power movement. “Jesse Jackson used to try to force me to hire more blacks,” said Marshall. “That movement was centering on Chicago. But we gave back a lot to the black community. The radio station used to give tons — tons — of food away for Thanksgiving and Christmas. My father gave to the Urban League, NAACP, Martin Luther King’s first radio show, scholarship funds.”

  “I made my money on the Negro,” Leonard told the Chicago Daily News a couple years earlier, “and I want to spend it on him.”

  Muddy was a dedicated hand. The Chess family, like the Stovalls, would never let him starve, and that was Muddy’s bottom-line concern. He’d seen starvation, in Mississippi and in Chicago. “I’ll be with Chess as long as there’s a Chess in the company,” Muddy said at the time of the sale. New ownership seemed to affect him little; the push was on for Fathers and Sons, which was an expensively packaged double album. Muddy didn’t need literacy to read the commitment in that. It wasn’t famine on the farm, just progress. And the boss man was always available for a draw.

  Leonard never got the chance to parlay his way into television. On October 16, 1969, driving to the radio station, he was hit with a massive heart attack and died behind the wheel. He was fifty-two years old. WVON ran a live tribute to its founder, and Muddy called in to make a statement. The host began, “You were one of the recording artists —” but Muddy interrupted. “I was one of the main artists. We got acquainted in forty-six, we were pretty close always down through the years. I think if he was livin’, he would say what I’m sayin’ now: he made me and I made him. So I lose a good friend.”

  The family cleaned out Leonard’s office and found in the safe thousands of dollars in IOU notes. “I wish I had what we called the red book,” said Marshall, “with all the advances in it. We used to say they hundreded you to death.” In her biography of the Chess brothers, Spinning Blues into Gold, Nadine Cohodas writes, “What [the musicians] were paid was based more on what they asked for than what they might be owed under a contract.” But with Leonard gone and GRT in charge, that wouldn’t last.

  Peter Guralnick visited the Chess offices while the company was in transition, late 1969 or early 1970. His interview with Phil Chess was interrupted by a phone call. “You know we sold the company,” Phil said on his end. “Joe, Joe, you know we sold the company. No, man, we can’t do that. I’m telling you, babe, we can’t do that no more. No. I can’t give you that kinda bread unless you come across with some shit first.” Phil listened for a while, unable to get in a word, finally saying, “You know it ain’t like the old days, it ain’t like the old days, babe.”

  “[GRT] cou
ld have been in the tomato business just as well as the recorded tape business,” said Malcolm Chisholm, a former Chess producer. Phil Chess was invited to stay, but when GRT named Marshall as Leonard’s replacement, he could read the handwriting on the front door. Phil took over the radio stations. “They decided they wanted to get rid of my uncle,” said Marshall. “That was stupid. They made me president and then they proceeded to destroy the company.”

  However his recorded sounds changed, Muddy’s live music stayed fundamentally the same. “The beat is almost like somebody falling off a bar stool,” said Oscher. “It’s not a straight, steady thing. The blues is like preaching, you mess with the time to draw people in. Muddy worked the audience, and he used time to do that. He’d sing, ‘You say you love me baby . . .’ and he’d wait, drag that shit out. There was no time there, you’d just wait on him. ‘Please call me on the phone sometime.’ He’d wait till he thought it was right to tell the story. When you’re locked into that straight meter, you can’t get your words out, you can’t tell the story the way you feel it.”

  Concerts were booked through ABC Booking (which also booked B. B. King and Bobby Bland), while chitlin circuit gigs, Muddy’s bread and butter, came through him directly. He’d stop a card game to answer the phone; others knew it was about a gig when he’d say, “When’s this for?” And the next line was always the same: “Yeah, well you got to come up with a little more bread this time.” Muddy’s constant retooling of his lineup kept his band contemporary. Luther “Georgia Boy” / “(Creepin’) Snake” Johnson had joined Muddy when bassist Jimmy Lee Morris returned to the steady pay of a factory job. Johnson aspired to guitar, which he played when Sammy was drunk or Pee Wee was on the outs. Snake would be the first to dress mod, to wear a big afro and small shades; his stage manner was so exciting that Muddy often kept all three guitar players.

  Rehearsals continued to be infrequent and ill defined. (“Only thing like a rehearsal,” says Oscher, “was him in the car making a humming sound, aah ha ha hmm to open up his voice.”) When the band gathered, Muddy kept tabs on who was late and would leave the basement when it was time to play, hollering instructions from the living room. “We always knew if they had a big gig or were going out of town because then Muddy would stay down there,” said Cookie. In summers, when the basement was too warm, they’d run extension cords out the kitchen door and play outside; Spann played his beat-up electric piano, a Band-Aid stuck on the top where he’d written his name. “When we were young we didn’t think they were real musicians,” Cookie said. “We’d be going, ‘Oh god, they’re playing this sorry stuff.’ But if they picked up a little speed, we liked that. Otis Spann knew my girlfriends loved Aretha Franklin so he would have them play ‘Respect’ and that would drive us crazy.”

  Occasionally Willie Dixon would teach the group a new song. “One time Willie came to Muddy’s house,” Oscher recalled. “Then Spann’s ex-wife Marie came by, said, ‘I need to talk to Spann.’ They went in the back room, had a big argument, Marie came out with a long butcher knife, said, ‘I done killed that motherfucker.’ And then left. Spann came out, his hands were cut up where he had stopped the knife. We rarely rehearsed, and that one only lasted about an hour till that shit happened.”

  On the road, twenty-three hours of the day were spent waiting for the one hour of work, and the grind could be maddening. Bo, as illiterate navigator, memorized roads, highways, and routes. Having previously entered Canada through Niagara Falls, he turned a 500-mile straight shot from New York City to Montreal into a grueling 800-mile trip. “Everybody just twisting and turning, trying to get off of that ass,” said Willie Smith. “You were riding two-lane highways all day and all night.”

  To pass the time, they’d talk trash. “Willie Smith said to me,” recounted Oscher, “that when he was making love, he knows whenever he made a baby. I said, ‘Willie, I don’t think you can do that.’ Willie said, ‘Motherfucker, you ain’t got nair child and I got thirteen children, you gonna tell me how to make a motherfucking baby?’ I couldn’t argue with that shit.”

  Nor could Paul argue with Bo’s late-night jive. “Bo would go, ‘Whoa! I see the moon and the moon sees me, God bless the moon and God bless me.’ Then Bo would take a swig of gin, say, ‘Wake up, motherfuckers, wake up, y’all sleeping while I got to work.’ Then Sonny would say to Bo, ‘Shut the fuck up, you ugly motherfucker. We the stars.’ Then Bo would turn around to Sonny and say, ‘Ain’t but one star in this band and that’s Muddy Waters.’ And that’s the way the motherfucking shit would go.”

  Doo rags on their heads, processes beneath, guns at their sides, the Muddy Waters band, integrated, was a sight to see. At a truck stop in east Texas, the whole room shut down when the band walked in; they opted for takeout. They stopped for gas in Michigan, late night, and the lady pulled down the shades. On their way to Tupelo, Mississippi, they passed a billboard in the middle of the night. Instead of THE ROTARY CLUB WELCOMES YOU or an invitation to a Kiwanis meeting, this one read, BEWARE! YOU ARE NOW ENTERING KLAN COUNTRY. A hooded figure sat atop a rearing horse. The silence in the van thickened.

  They were much more welcome in St. Louis, where Muddy had a longtime friend, platonic, named Goldie B. Abram. She’d met him at a gig in 1964 and would often host him during his visits. “He liked fish,” she remembered, “and I’d take him and Otis Spann and some of the other guys to a fish market. They’d get live fish, Spann would kill and gut them, and I’d fry ’em at my house. We’d have a little feast in the backyard.”

  “One of the first times I went to St. Louis,” Oscher recalled about another kind of visit, “we pull up to a hotel on Delmar Boulevard, they got prostitutes on all the corners, they hike up their skirts, start shouting out, ‘Muddy Waters in town!’ After the gig we stayed up all night with those girls. There was a piano in the back of the place, Spann would play, we’d all be drinking tall glasses of whiskey, shooting dice.”

  Geneva paid him a surprise visit in St. Louis one time. “Grandma came all the way to St. Louis and had everybody running,” said bassist Jimmy Lee Morris. “Mud had his girlfriend with him, her stuff in his room, we had to get her stuff out, stalling Grandma downstairs, and move her in with Spann.” (He advised one of his band mates never to admit to infidelity even if caught in the act: “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?”)

  Sammy Lawhorn, who worked in a photography store when he wasn’t traveling, had a talent for coaxing his dates to pose nude. In addition to his road shots of the band and their famous friends (a collection long since lost to poverty), he amassed a collection of his conquests, supine. “He was a camera bug,” said Pee Wee. “He’d have your picture, you wouldn’t even know it. He’d snap pictures of everybody. He’d show his naked ladies pictures in the hotel room.” He also made movies, and he bought a voice-activated tape recorder, which he kept hidden under his bed.

  Pee Wee had his own habits. “He used to antagonize other people,” said Paul. “Pee Wee stepped on my mike cord in the middle of my solo, unplugging it. And when you’re playing blues, if you want to fuck somebody up during the solo, you turn over too fast, short step ’em. He’d cut out my spot so there was nowhere I could go but follow him. Another thing, he’d learn my solos, play what I’m about to play, force me to jump to another place.” At Symphony Hall in Newark, New Jersey, Paul and Pee Wee, who usually caroused together, drew guns and were circling each other when Muddy defused the situation: “First motherfucker that hits a lick is fired.”

  The band traveled down the East Coast to Washington, D.C. Alan Lomax, in 1968, was asked by the organizers of the Poor People’s March on Washington to book “culturally relevant entertainment.” Among those he hired was Muddy Waters. “He immediately agreed to come,” Lomax writes in The Land Where the Blues Began. He quotes Muddy: “Sure we’ll help out. We’ll just drive on down overnight and get to town the morning of the concert.” On the designated morning, Lomax spied a Cadillac parked in the shade, feet poking out the open windows.
“Muddy was snoozing at the wheel. He looked up with that sleepy, crooked grin of his. ‘Hi, Lo,’ he said and we laughed.”

  Later that summer and back up the coast at the Newport Folk Festival, Muddy sat in for an ailing Son House and, as a tribute to his mentor, performed the celebrated “Walkin’ Blues,” a song that ran from House to Robert Johnson and Muddy. Bonnie Raitt brought it to a popular audience.

  When the band flew to the Montreal World’s Fair for a short set, the landing gear failed. In Boston, Paul Oscher and John Lee Hooker, shopping in Lord & Taylor, were trailed by store dicks, suspicious of a black man and white man together. In Austin, Muddy heard Johnny Winter opening the show and walked out front for a closer listen. “It was thrilling to me to meet him, he was one of the first bluesmen I heard on record,” said Johnny Winter. “I was playing slide, had a National backstage, and he said he’d had one. I’d already learned most all of his licks.”

  Spann was on wife three, or three thousand three. Or three million three. His alcoholism was raging. “One time we were on the side of the highway in the desert, and I was helping Spann’s Lucille get back into the van,” said Oscher. “Spann was drunk. He lowered his head and looked through the top of his eyes, said, ‘You fucking with my wife.’ This came out of nowhere. His eyes were rolling out the side of his head. He looked so mean, so dangerous, terrible.” Muddy’s Lucille remembered a California trip when Spann brought his girlfriend; the two ladies skipped a gig and went out on the town. “When we got back she didn’t have a chance to take her clothes off and Spann came home and he pitched a move and when she woke up she had a black eye. Spann talking about how she must have walked into the door.”

  Perhaps it was inevitable that with the explosion of interest in Muddy would come an explosion of his band. James Cotton had recently signed with manager Albert Grossman. That got Spann’s attention, or his wife Lucille’s anyway. After seventeen years of sitting quietly and taking it all in, Spann, in 1969, stepped out on his own — or as Lucille Spann’s accompanist. Lucille had sat in on some of Spann’s sessions, heard her voice on record, and wanted more of that. With Muddy, Spann had the best of both worlds — regular gigs through his boss and the opportunity to open many of the shows and to record numerous solo albums, establishing his own name. Muddy even shared billing (“Muddy Waters featuring Otis Spann” was typical). But Muddy wasn’t ready to take Lucille — an unimpressive vocalist — into his band.