Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  Muddy accepted Spann’s departure as he’d accepted all his other sidemen’s departures. “If you lose just an ordinary sideman you can pick them up anytime, but a real good man like Little Walter, Jimmy, and Otis, them was excellent men. It goes hard, man, but you have to get you another man, you just keep trying.”

  Muddy called on Joe Willie “Pinetop” Perkins. Pine was from the Honey Plantation outside Belzoni, Spann’s hometown, not far from Rolling Fork. He was a man of Muddy’s age and time, and shared Muddy’s quiet reserve. The two had a quick affinity and developed a lasting affection. Pine had played with Robert Nighthawk, the King Biscuit Boys, Ike Turner, and Earl Hooker. “Pinetop,” said Muddy, “he come from the part of the country that really know what he’s doing with the blues.”

  Pinetop was in fourth grade when farmwork claimed him: “I made a tractor do everything but talk.” He left home at seventeen, earning his nickname for his popular treatment of Pinetop Smith’s “Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie.” He played a more gutbucket style than Spann, fewer notes, fewer fills, but he understood Muddy’s sound and easily fit in. “I liked Spann’s piano, but I played different,” Pinetop said. “I played more of a bluesy type than Spann did. Spann put some jazz in his blues. I played more like Muddy’s cousin, Eddie Boyd. I taught myself off records, Memphis Slim, them old piano players, then added to it. Yeah, hard and loud, beat it to pieces.”

  Crowds on the road were good, and so was the pay — as high as $3,500 for a one-hour set. (And even then Muddy still hustled small change selling mojos — tiny textile sacks with a dried pea in them — to these young fans.) Stage restrictions loosened in 1969, while loose hair tightened. The natural came in, the process out. Muddy adapted to their fashion, dispensing with uniforms. He still favored a sports jacket and usually a tie, but he let his band unwind.

  In the college town of Ann Arbor, Muddy and Wolf shared the bill at one of the larger blues festivals. The old rivalry seemed at rest, and the two were photographed together, laughing and drinking beer. Then Wolf took the stage — on a motorcycle. He played a fiery set, ignoring the stagehands and running past his time well into Muddy’s. But thirty minutes on stage was just right for Muddy. He attacked the crowd with “Hoochie Coochie Man,” and punch to punch, in a third the time, cut Wolf at his own game.

  On the way to a show in Detroit, 1969, Muddy began bleeding from his nose. It kept up for a week, until blood came out of his eyes. Smoking, soul food, drinking, the wear and tear of the road — his blood pressure was out of control. “I used to be a good liquor drinker,” said Muddy, “but when the doctor told me to come off the liquor, I said this is it, no more whiskey.” He took up champagne. Clubs were told to have Piper-Heidsieck on hand, chilled, which Muddy could purchase as need be. “He was a champagne man, bought a whole truckload, put it down in his basement,” said Pinetop. “Look like he was selling it.” Muddy began to carry a penknife to whittle down the champagne corks so he could keep his bubbly fresh. His preferred pregig routine was to sleep three or four hours, then wake to a bottle of champagne. “Champagne for breakfast, champagne for lunch, champagne for dinner,” Muddy told a reporter, “and champagne before bed.”

  On one October 1969 stretch, they’d been “up through Maine, up into Canada, back to New York,” according to Muddy. “We ain’t slept nothing but in the car. That’s a grind.” A Saturday-night gig in Covington, Tennessee was their last, and the home bed was nearly palpable. They had paid for hotel rooms, could have slept there, then pulled home refreshed. But sleeping in Covington would have meant unloading and reloading the equipment one more time.

  John Warren, part-time driver, was especially anxious to see his wife. “Don’t worry fellas,” he said, sliding behind the station wagon’s steering wheel on the last day of his life, “you’re in good hands with Allstate.” He had Pee Wee next to him in the front seat, Muddy behind him, and Pinetop behind Pee Wee. Bo and the others followed in the yellowbird Jeep van Bo picked up when the Volkswagen van wore out.

  “Willie [Smith] said it was around six o’clock at night,” said Oscher. “I thought it was real early in the morning.” According to the police report, it was a bright, clear and dry 11 A.M. on October 27. The band was on Highway Forty-five, a two-lane road, not far from Champaign-Urbana and going north when a young couple — he was twenty-three and she was eighteen — coming the opposite way veered off the road, then overcompensated and nearly went off the other side. Muddy’s brand-new Chevy station wagon had skidded sixty-three feet when the careening Pontiac struck it head-on.

  “All you heard was a big loud noise, and then Bo shouted out, ‘Lord have mercy!’ ” Paul remembered. “Then all that debris started coming over our van.” Bo veered to the right of the accident, and the van halted in a field. His passengers, unhurt, ran to the scene. “We had to pull Muddy out of the wreckage,” Oscher continued. “Warren was dead. The bone was coming out of his leg, the steering wheel was pressed up against his chest, and Pee Wee was smashed up against the windshield. Me and Sammy pulled Pinetop and Muddy out of the back and laid them on the grass. They were both conscious. Muddy was saying, ‘I’m broken up real bad.’ And I remember Muddy saying to Bo, ‘Is my face messed up?’ ”

  “That steering wheel knocked the breath out of Warren,” said Pinetop. “I was in the hospital, these knees was all messed up. My head knocked on the ceiling. Brand-new car, man. Guy that hit us, he was driving sixty, seventy miles an hour, head-on collision. I couldn’t see the girl in the front seat, she must have been going down on him.”

  Pinetop, fifty-six, and Pee Wee, thirty-three, were released two days later. John Warren, thirty-eight, was dead at the scene, as were the young lovers from the other car. Muddy, fifty-six, was taken to Carle Hospital in Urbana. Three ribs and his pelvis were broken, his hip shattered, his back sprained. Immediate surgery lasted three hours. Doctors told him he’d have to stay there for several weeks. “I ain’t dying,” he told a reporter, “but I ain’t feeling so good.” His hands were numb, he was unable to roll over in the bed, unable to feed himself. Muddy would remain hospitalized nearly three months.

  “When Muddy had his accident, Bo was our rock,” said Cookie. “He made sure that we got back and forth to see Muddy often. He was a very good friend to Muddy.” Bo’s shuttle service was also a screen, keeping certain parties from meeting in the hallway. “When he had that accident, I was pregnant with our third child,” said Lucille. “I went to the hospital twice to see him.”

  “Muddy had the shorts — he was living week to week,” said Messinger. “He asked us to get some money from Chess. I had never met either of the Chess brothers. I talked to Willie Dixon and Willie ran the ball. We arranged ten thousand dollars. Muddy’s wife picked up the money and delivered it.” There was a new family in the Chess big house, but the bills were still being paid.

  CHAPTER 13

  EYES ON THE PRIZE

  1970–1975

  Muddy stepped out of the hospital and into the 1970s on January 8. He moved slow, walking with a cane. His sides were sore, his knees weak, his hip held together with steel. He watched a scar form over his left eye. His left hand, on which the guitar made more demands, had suffered the greater injuries. “If I could get out and go around it would be okay,” he said, “but sunup and sundown, sunup and sundown here in the house.” But the swelling in his hands was diminishing, the numbness beginning to dissipate.

  The hospital bills had all been paid by Chess Records. Muddy had no insurance, no safety money in the bank, just two decades of a working relationship with Len, Phil, and Marshall. Now Leonard was dead, Phil was gone, and Marshall had a few months left at the company; he departed in mid-1970 to start a record label for the Rolling Stones. (On his first visit to the band’s rehearsal hall, he noticed a poster on the wall — from the Electric Mud album.)

  Recuperating at home in February, Muddy enjoyed a Grammy Award nomination (Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording) for the Sail On album — containing material from
as early as the 1940s. (Don’t tell Muddy Waters his music don’t last.) And if he listened at all to pop radio, he would have noticed something familiar in one of the contemporary hits. It was not a blues song per se, though some lyrics had been copped directly from his “You Need Love,” especially the new song’s catchphrase, “way down inside.” Muddy may have heard Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” like the English initially heard his 1958 tour: screaming and howling. But without him, it would not have come to be.

  Within a couple months, Muddy began appearing in area clubs and was filmed for the documentary Chicago Blues. He hobbled in on crutches, requested a stool for the stage, and though his hands were not yet right, he played short sets. “I’m up and around, and I ain’t runnin’ yet,” Muddy told Rolling Stone. “I only play about thirty minutes. My hands are all swollen, and the doctor said it’ll take a while before they can be fixed.”

  Muddy’s release from the hospital coincided with news about Otis Spann: the thirty-nine-year-old blues pianist was diagnosed with liver cancer. Peter Guralnick flew to Chicago on assignment for Rolling Stone: “When I arrived at Spann’s home, a dilapidated apartment whose walls were covered with pictures of dogs, I sat in the living room talking to a woman and a male neighbor,” Guralnick wrote.

  A skeletal-looking man in a bathrobe sat drowsily on the sofa half-asleep. We made small talk, I wondered to myself when Spann would be coming back, and then the man on the sofa, too weak to do anything more than mumble faintly, said something. It was only when I heard the ghost of his familiar, husky voice that I realized that this was Otis Spann.

  A few days later, on April 24, 1970, Spann died in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. He’d played behind — or beside — Chuck Berry, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Johnny Shines, and many others in addition to Muddy. He’d shared his technique with sideman after sideman, stranger after stranger, giving away all he knew. He had a wife, he had three kids, and he had no money; he’d let his musician’s union dues lapse so there was no headstone. “I remember walking by Muddy’s car at Spann’s funeral,” said Charlie Musselwhite. Muddy’s hip kept him car-bound. “He had the window down, looked really, really sad. I said, ‘It’s a sad day.’ He said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ We shook hands through the window. And that’s all we said. Everybody loved Spann. He was just drenched in blues. He was the blues walking and talking.” Friends held a benefit to help defray funeral expenses; Muddy performed.

  Gone was Little Walter. Gone was “Elgin” Edmonds, Big Crawford, Baby Face Leroy Foster, Johnny Jones. Of Muddy’s early Chicago playing partners, only Jimmy Rogers and Sunnyland Slim were alive. “Muddy never showed his emotions,” said Paul Oscher. “When Spann died, he must have felt that. He was with the guy seventeen years, but Muddy just said, ‘There’ll never be another Otis Spann.’ Muddy didn’t let you know.”

  “Muddy took it real hard,” said Lucille. “He’d be sad, want to be by hisself. He mostly hold things tight.”

  So much feeling had gone from Muddy’s bones into his early records, feelings that were hard to express unaccompanied by music. “He knew my music better than any man alive,” Muddy said of Spann. “There is no one left like him who plays real, solid bottom blues like he does. We’d better raise another before it’s too late.”

  Muddy didn’t need Spann’s death to tell him it was a changing world. For that, he had his cane, a bunch of unmod suits in his closet, and bookings in small clubs, while younger white people played their versions of his music in massive arenas for big pay. The question repeatedly asked of Muddy was, “Do you think a white boy can play the blues?” The question was poorly phrased; what’s meant is, “Why is it different when a white person plays the blues?”

  “There are some beautiful white bands,” Muddy explained, but he distinguished them as unauthentic. “[T]hey didn’t go to the Baptist church like I went. They didn’t get that soul down deep in the heart like I have. And they can’t deliver the message. They’re playing the white folks’ blues. I’m playing the real blues. I’m singing the same thing the old master liked to hear when you’re working for him.”

  Johnny Winter had recently made headlines signing his first major recording contract — for $300,000 (though reports were quickly exaggerated to a cool million). “Just one thing makes me a little mad,” said Muddy. “These young white kids get up and sing my stuff, and other people’s stuff that I know, and next thing is they’re one of the biggest groups around and making that real big money. Sometimes that makes me mad because we’ve been struggling so long, fighting for a little recognition.”

  As blues had seeped into other genres of music, losing its community, the bluesman or -woman no longer needed impoverishment or geography for substantiation. Lack of plumbing or a childhood in the cotton fields was no longer required to sing the blues; the style was enough. Muddy’s popularity was curtailed by the same thing that made him king: the Delta soil that clung to him now threatened to inter him. He had become an institution. Institutions were honored, and forgotten.

  There were black musicians younger than Muddy and Wolf who knew the blues and the commerce of music. Buddy Guy, for one, was raised under circumstances very similar to those of his influences and could play their style very well. But when it came time for Buddy Guy to make his own mark on the music world, the Muddy Waters style was claimed — by Muddy Waters. Guy could back Muddy and demonstrate his down-home chops, but to make his own statement, he had to respond to the new world. And that was a world of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, of James Brown and Creedence Clearwater, of blues licks on overdrive and blues licks on acid. That’s where the spotlight — and the money — was.

  In the spring of 1970, Muddy flew to Lehigh, Pennsylvania (the band drove). Rolling Stone covered his arena appearance at the Philadelphia Spectrum: “He strolled on stage with a crutch under his arm, put down the crutch and picked up his Fender, hobbled to a stool and opened with ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ He played a restrained, careful set, nothing fancy, and later told us that his hands were still partly numb from nerve damage. Doctors have told him that the deadening will go away at the rate of half an inch a month.” Muddy Waters had big hands.

  By year’s end, Muddy was booked for three weeks in Europe. He’d begun picking up the pace and if he had to go out for a long haul, Europe was a better prospect: the drives between gigs were not so far apart, clubs treated the musicians better, and the audiences did too. The band parked the cars at Bob Messinger’s New Jersey home, instructing him to send weekly payments home from the deposit he’d received. Muddy had checks sent to Geneva and smaller checks to Lucille.

  The tour, which included Paris, Stockholm, and London, was well received. Muddy, still using crutches, was often asked about his accident. (He told his friend Max Jones, a British journalist he’d met in 1958, that his accident happened “a year and a month and five days ago.”) The excitement of the tour distracted him from the pain in his hands and before the trip was over he’d taken to performing a solo version of “Walkin’ Blues.”

  The English writer Charles Shaar Murray saw Muddy on a rainy night at a small club with a leaky roof, “in this filthy room with pools of water all over the floor.” Thinking of how those who’d copped his licks no longer needed such gigs, Murray asked him “how he felt about being ripped off. I was thinking culturally, but he interpreted it as financially and said, ‘If you don’t rip me, he gonna rip me, and if he don’t rip me, someone else will, so if you can’t deal with that, don’t get into the music business.” Don’t matter where you farm, the ’cropper’s deal was never square.

  “As we go to press,” Living Blues magazine, the new bulletin board and blues family newsletter, wrote in its fourth issue, winter 1970–1971, “Muddy Waters has not yet been paid for his tour of England in November and December. Muddy is unable to contact his booking agent [sic], Bob Messinger, who was supposed to have met him in New York with the money. As a result, Muddy used personal
funds to partially pay the members of his band.”

  It was bad timing to be screwed out of the tour money — it didn’t make for a happy Christmas — but it gave Muddy a place to vent. So much had changed: the big house that had been Chess Records had turned cold. Machinations and whispers sprouted like bad plumbing leaks. Leonard and all the Chesses were gone and the cooks in the kitchen didn’t feed the hands like they used to. Muddy was pissed off, confused, frustrated, and he had nowhere in-house to express it. When he wrote Bob Messinger on January 11, 1971, Muddy was fed up with being taken, was frightened of losing his furnish, felt he was owed the farm, and knew he was entitled to a piece of it. The handwritten letter — feminine script, Geneva’s probably, or Cookie’s — on notebook paper burns with rage, explodes like a letter bomb. So that he wouldn’t be misunderstood, so that his intention and desire would be clear at that moment and clear decades later, he drove home his main point by printing in all capital letters: “I WANT MY MONEY!”

  Breakups are not pretty. Exactly what happened is difficult to discern. Someone screwed Muddy out of some cash, and Muddy fired his manager. Those are facts. Messinger put the blame on the British road manager, then on the American promoter: “Apparently the road manager disappeared on the last day or next to last day of the tour. They came back with enough money to get home to Chicago and that was it.” The missing money was a drag, and so was the resulting lack of management. “Muddy started booking dates himself,” said Paul Oscher, who would soon quit the band. “We started going to the state of Washington, then Texas, then Montreal, to Virginia. We would go zigzagging all over the place.”