Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  In Muddy’s personal life, Lucille had followed Lois, his previous girlfriend, down the poppy path, and the kids he’d had with her were taken by the state and put into foster homes. “Lucille got in the wrong crowd,” said Willie Smith. “She was leaning pretty much in that direction. When you’re dealing with that kind of people, you got to pay back one way or the other.”

  Muddy could find no comfort in the situation at Chess. The label had been moved to New York, the Chicago office was empty, the studio a rental facility for other labels. “They’re all new people,” Muddy said. “I don’t know nobody and nobody knows too much about me.”

  The new Chess repackaged the old repackagings — The Best of, Real Folk Blues, and More Real Folk Blues — as McKinley Morganfield AKA Muddy Waters. Its liner notes, by Mike Leadbitter, the founder and co-editor of the British blues magazine Blues Unlimited, were scathing and captured the dire feeling of Muddy’s traditionalist fans:

  His friends are dead and gone and there is no competition. Competition led to the great Muddy Waters. Muddy’s endless variations on old themes and lack of new material, coupled with a stage routine that has become almost mechanical, indicate that the great days are gone for good. . . . Perhaps whites put up with a lot of mediocrity when it is presented live, but this does not mean that they will buy it. Thus the great years of Muddy were between 1948 and 1958, a decade of varied, distinctive, amplified “country” blues. It is to this decade that we dedicate this album and when one plays it, the horrors of Electric Mud and the like are banished completely and we can really appreciate just why Muddy is, and was, one of the major blues artists of the postwar era.

  A few days after writing Messinger, Muddy was given a document to sign by GRT, the new Chess owners. It was nothing he could comprehend, who knows what he was told — except that a check would follow soon after his signature. The bean counters at GRT had discovered that many of Muddy’s compositions had never been published, and with the Rolling Stones and other million-selling bands covering Muddy’s songs, they smelled money. The document put Muddy’s publishing with their organization, Heavy Music, Inc.

  The sharks at Arc, who still owned Muddy’s publishing, went for blood. On March 3, 1971, while touring the East Coast, Muddy was told to appear at the New York offices of Arc Music, the longtime Chess Records publisher. What transpired there is described in the lawsuit filed on Muddy’s behalf against Arc half a decade later. “Upon his arrival in the offices of Arc Music,” the lawsuit stated,

  plaintiff [Muddy] was handed a check in the amount of $10,200.76, which purportedly represented the royalties due him for the six-month accounting period ending December 31, 1970, together with a statement which reflected the computation of the royalties. At the same time, defendants Gene Goodman and Philip Chess tendered to plaintiff a typewritten agreement and told plaintiff that this was “a new exclusive songwriter’s agreement” and “the old one had run out.” Defendants Gene Goodman and Philip Chess told plaintiff that “this was more money than you ever got in your life” and that he was being “protected” and “looked after” and that they would “do right” by him and made references to the “big check” as proof of their good intentions.

  According to the papers that Muddy couldn’t read, signing made the songs the property of Arc Music. (Gene Goodman dealt with GRT’s claim and soon had them convinced to “relinquish its claim in and to the musical compositions.”) Muddy’s status with Arc would be “employee for hire,” implying that Arc Music had paid him a regular salary to compose songs. Lastly, the document was retroactive, dating back almost twenty-five years to grab the hits.

  Muddy did what anyone working for shares would do if handed a check for ten grand: he signed the papers, signed away ownership of his songs. Again, what he was actually told is Merlin the Magician’s guess, but it tells the power of money that they dared inform him the ten grand represented his earnings over the past six months. Muddy couldn’t read or write, but if he was owed ten grand for that half year, he must have — MUST HAVE — been owed something for the half year before that, and each one previous. But he took the check and he didn’t ask.

  The Arc document refers to an attached schedule, which, had it had any writing on it — for it did not and was completed later — would have been a list of songs Muddy wrote and recorded. The defendants, the lawsuit stated, “feared that, although plaintiff was barely able to comprehend the written word, he may have been able to see a schedule consisting of many of the compositions composed by him . . . and thereby have made certain inquiries, the responses to which defendants wished to avoid.”

  The lawsuit was organized by the man who had become Muddy’s new manager. In the spring of 1971, a friend of Muddy’s sought help through Scott Cameron at Willard Alexander, Inc., a booking agency strong on ghost bands such as Glenn Miller’s, whose leader was dead. “Asking do I want to book Muddy Waters was like asking a chocoholic if he wants a Hershey bar,” said Cameron.

  Cameron was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, where life was all Patti Page and the Mills Brothers until, fiddling with his radio dial one night, he picked up WLAC out of Nashville. That blew a new hole in his Swiss cheese. He cut a couple rock singles as a vocalist, but wound up in the hotel business, managing a unit in Omaha, Nebraska. In the lobby one night he spied five guys with their hair painted silver, “and I was back in the music business in a heartbeat.” In June of 1969, he took over Willard Alexander’s Chicago office.

  Scott phoned Muddy and they arranged to meet at the Chess building. Cameron was approaching the East Twenty-first Street office as Muddy was getting out of his car. Cameron’s distinguishing physical characteristic is his height: he stands barely five feet tall. “When I met him,” said Muddy, “I’m looking to meet a MAN, I didn’t look to meet a little bitty. And I was getting out of the car, and he was going in, and he said, ‘You’re Muddy Waters?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘I’m Scott Cameron.’ Great big voice. I looked down, said, ‘Yeaaah?’ ” Muddy laughs. “You hear him on the telephone, he sounds like he’s a dynamo. He’s roaring like a lion, rrroarrr! And I see this little fella, and said, ‘Man, you wanna manage ME?’ ”

  Cameron returned from Chess and phoned Willard Alexander in New York. “I was really excited. I told him I’d just signed Muddy Waters. Willard’s response was, ‘Great blues singer but he’s a has-been.’ ” Cameron laughed. “I set out to prove him wrong.”

  Muddy’s association with Cameron would last the rest of Muddy’s life (and, contractually, through the lives of their descendants). “At the time, Muddy was at his real low ebb,” said Cameron. “His only regular performance was at the Quiet Knight next to the el tracks for the door on Monday nights. My psychology was, it’s because of this guy that we have Rolling Stone magazine, that’s why we have the Rolling Stones — the common thread through all these guitar players was Muddy Waters. And much to the chagrin of the blues freaks, instead of playing the forty-, fifty-, sixty-seat local blues club, I began putting him in the showcase room where the rock and roll bands were playing, getting him in front of the people that were buying records, associating with acts that spawned from Muddy Waters.” Scott became a link to the other side. If rock stars were going to stand on the shoulders of giants, the giants were entitled — at least — to the runoff. Cameron lined up a spring tour of the East Coast. Fifteen months after his accident, Muddy was revitalized by his relationship with Cameron, and critics began to notice that something had changed. “Muddy emotes warmly and relates to his listeners in the opposite manner of B. B. King, who has allowed himself to become a professional, slick charade of himself,” wrote one reviewer. “He was in as fine a form as I’ve seen him since the days of his legendary Club 47 appearances in the midsixties,” wrote Jon Landau in the Boston Phoenix.

  For the first time in years, he no longer confined himself to playing his best-known songs. In his first set he offered up a tune called [“Clouds in My Heart”] that had been recorded in [1955] and had never be
en issued as a single. He had completely reworked it. As Muddy talked about thunder and lightning, drummer Willie Smith and white harpist Paul Oscher created some special effects that worked perfectly.

  In the second set, Muddy ran through the story of his accident — using the incident as the basis for a story: “Some of you may know that Muddy Waters was laid low with an accident a while back. Before it happened I had recorded this song. Didn’t think much of it at the time. Afterwards, I thought better of it.” The song was a rare nonblues for Muddy, “Goin’ Home.” Its melody line was reminiscent of “Bring It on Home to Me”— pure gospel. The band offered up a low-key vocal response to Muddy’s lead lines that created a wistful mood that fully expressed the frustration of the song. From there he moved into something more familiar, “Have you ever been mistreated / then you know what I’m talking about,” and then into a fine “Live the Life I Love.” With that over, he did a burning “Mojo” and was gone. Extended applause and a near standing ovation didn’t bring him back. The set was a brief but successful tour de force.

  After stepping up Muddy’s road gigs, Scott Cameron coordinated a three-week stint at an old-school upscale Chicago club, Mr. Kelly’s, which marked a turning point in Muddy’s career. This was a venue on Chicago’s Gold Coast, the expensive side of town. Frank Sinatra performed there, Lena Horne, Barbra Streisand. There was a doorman who wore a uniform and stood beneath a portico. There was valet parking, a sign that had all its lightbulbs, a marquee with letters as tall as a doorway. For twenty-one days in June of 1971, those letters spelled Muddy Waters. Pee Wee Madison, for one, was impressed. “Mr. Kelly’s was a nice big club, expensive club. Lot of high-class people. Wasn’t like the ghetto.”

  Paul Oscher knew something was unusual when Muddy called a band meeting before the first night. “Muddy took all of the guys into the kitchen and said, ‘Now I ain’t taking no alcoholic band into this gig so you guys better think about that.’ So we were cool. The first set, Muddy was very laid-back, like he was afraid to sing. By the end of the night, he was doing his shit and people were going wild. Bill Cosby came down, Nancy Wilson was there.” So was Bobby Stovall, who remembered the Chinese lanterns being hung at his father’s house for Muddy’s performance there in 1943. He sent a note up to the bandstand. “I had gotten divorced about that time,” said Bobby, “so I would go see him and take a date. His way of finding me was to go through this drill from the stage where he’d say, ‘Everybody has some luck in their life. Mine was living on a good man’s plantation, he really took care of me, I remember him always, and his family is here, y’all stand up and take a bow.’ The light would find us so he’d know where we were sitting. I told Muddy he did more for my sex life than he could ever know.”

  Mr. Kelly’s was a beginning and an end. The Quiet Knight, the White Rose, Pepper’s, the Urbanite, Silvio’s — these were places that were about to become part of Muddy’s past, his pre–Mr. Kelly’s days. “I think I saw the last real regularly booked black Chicago club that he played,” said Jim O’Neal, one of the founders of Living Blues. “It was New Year’s night, 1971. I kept up with the club scene because we printed the listings in Living Blues, and the only time that I can remember that Muddy played at a black club in Chicago after that was if a film crew set it up.”

  Live (at Mr. Kelly’s) was his first album of new recordings since Fathers and Sons two years earlier. It had been five years since Muddy recorded with his own band for Chess, and they’d been nearly obscured by brass. Live (at Mr. Kelly’s) both countered the dire outlook of the AKA Muddy Waters liner notes and declared that Muddy had recovered from his accident. He is full voiced, plays stirring slide, and leads a solid band. Muddy was back.

  Not only was Muddy’s career changing, so was the city. Chicago’s white population, by the new decade, diminished by half a million, while the black population rose by 300,000. The city became nearly one-third black. The most momentous change on the expanding South Side came in 1970, when Congressman William Dawson died. This twenty-eight-year politician had maintained his control of the whole area’s vices, including the policy game, and secured power that Daley’s machine could not ignore. Upon Dawson’s death, Daley restructured the district, thereby dividing the power and preventing a single African American from having such wide control. Gangs, especially since Martin Luther King’s assassination, took a stronger hold and made the streets more dangerous; band members walked with their guns drawn at night. Shops, in the wake of so-called Urban Renewal, boarded up, and many neighborhoods were plowed under or irreparably split by the construction of highways on their spines.

  In early December of 1971, Muddy went overseas for The London Muddy Waters Sessions. Accompanying him were guitarist Sammy Lawhorn, harmonica player Carey Bell, and producer Esmond Edwards from Chess’s New York office. The band awaiting him was Georgie Fame on piano, Rory Gallagher and Rosetta Green on guitars, Rick Grech on bass, and drummers Mitch Mitchell and Herbie Lovelle; not everyone played both nights.

  Sending Muddy to England was an expression of Chess’s confidence in their original hitmaker (and would get them a good catalog item with steady sales). “It was basically a love session,” said Edwards, who would return to London to produce similar records with Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. “Muddy was so revered by those guys. Many may have had bigger names than him but they were in awe of being on his session. Their attitude was, ‘Let’s do what we can to make a great album for and with Muddy.’

  “Muddy was a very quiet man. He would sit in his seat in front of his microphone and things would swirl around him. When I worked with Chuck and Bo, they were more imperious in their manner, much more outspoken than Muddy. Muddy might say, ‘Maybe it’s a little too sad or too slow,’ something like that. But Muddy was easygoing and mellow, almost ignorant of the awe that the other guys held him in.”

  The London Sessions is a good meeting of the minds. Muddy’s guitar parts are easily distinguishable from those of his guests; the generational disparity, the cultural difference is a significant part of the record’s subject. But when the tapes were brought back to New York, what might have been a great album was degraded by overdubbed horns. In the mixes of the songs before they were made hip, the excitement between the artists is tangible, their blending of blues and rock, black and white, England and America. The sassy horns cover that like water on fire. (Several hornless mixes have been released posthumously by MCA / Chess.)

  Muddy’s return to the United States was more auspicious than that of his tapes: he won Billboard magazine’s Trendsetter Award, which called him “a father figure of electric blues.” There were other signs of his influence too, notably Etta James’s answer song to Muddy’s “Mannish Boy,” “W.O.M.A.N.” Three months later, after an album of previously shelved tracks, They Call Me Muddy Waters, won Muddy his first Grammy Award (Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording) and even before London Sessions was released, Chess put him back in the studio for Can’t Get No Grinding. Again he was allowed to use his road band (with Cotton in the harmonica chair).

  The album, which got a top rating from Rolling Stone (despite a grating electric piano) and was nominated for a Grammy, is decent midperiod Muddy, though it pales next to his classic sides. It establishes the standard for blues in the last third of the twentieth century: the performances are strong, but the emotion is pallid; you can’t hear the artist falling to his knees, drawing power from the earth as he sends his plight heavenward.

  Cameron continued to come through on the gigs, doing his best to expand Muddy’s audience. The Mr. Kelly’s gig led to performances at Carnegie Hall and a circuit of higher-class cabarets. In December of 1972, the Hoochie Coochie contingency found themselves at the St. Regis Hotel in New York, settling into suites for an extended engagement at the hotel’s classy Maisonette Lounge. The accommodations lacked for nothing, but Muddy couldn’t get comfortable. “For a blues band such as Mr. Waters’s to make the transition from a blues club or concert situation to the more formal
atmosphere of the Maisonette requires some adaptation on both sides,” wrote the New York Times.

  Mr. Waters’s only apparent concession is to play a relatively calm, couth set, avoiding the raw, boiling drive that he usually generates. He is not a vivid and visually communicative showman, such as B. B. King or Big Joe Turner. He simply sits down with his guitar and sings his blues, his round face almost expressionless except for an occasional rolling flicker of the eyes. . . . It is an uncharacteristically placid performance that is not helped by the lack of any verbal communication — by Mr. Waters, by his sidemen, or by anyone representing the Maisonette — which might help to draw the audience into an understanding of what Mr. Waters is doing.

  By the time of his 1972 return to Europe, promoting London Sessions, Muddy was committed to the times: he was sporting an afro and wearing loud suits. A journalist for Ebony, a magazine directed at African Americans, described him as “the essence of the black man in Chi Town.” He was able to carry the feeling overseas. “One of the best Muddy Waters shows I saw was at the 100 Club on Oxford Street,” said Frank Weston, a writer and longtime British fan. “They were literally hanging from the rafters. It must have been the nearest thing England ever got to hearing what he sounded like playing in a Chicago club. That was the full band going full throttle. By then, there really was a blues audience, they were queueing out around the block. They had to turn people away that night.”

  The main event of the trip was an appearance at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, but the highlight was an intimate recording made of a Swiss radio broadcast. The eleven songs, available on the posthumous Muddy compilation One More Mile, are as near to sitting around with Muddy Waters as anything since his early days. His slide work is full of personality and humor, his vocal phrasing is sensual and gripping. It’s a side of Muddy not revealed on any other recordings of the era, nor in interviews. He sounds perfectly relaxed and comfortable, his electric guitar turned way down, accompanied by Louis Myers on acoustic guitar and Mojo Buford on harp. (Oscher had taken a sick leave from which he never returned; Sammy Lawhorn, a couple days before departure, pissed off someone and had both his legs broken. “They threw me out the third-floor window. I never had time to get right so I could land balanced. Would’ve been different if they’d thrown me out the fourth one, I betcha.”)