Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  “Johnny Winter inspired Muddy’s band to push Muddy,” said Cameron. “The studio we used was in Dan Hartman’s house, an ideal setting, so relaxed. Johnny was, at that point, straight as an arrow and fun to work with. You’d see Muddy and him feed off each other with this excitement going from level to level to level because they’d just keep pulling each other higher.”

  Hard Again affirms the advice Muddy held dear since Big Bill Broonzy spoke it in 1943: “Do your thing, stay with it, man. If you stay with it, you goin’ to make it.” Muddy was true to himself. Hard Again is the culmination of Muddy’s career, a modern and lasting interpretation of his achievement: it is an electric blues band that captures the force and emotion so much more easily achieved by a lone player baring his soul with just his voice and his instrument. The band becomes the instrument and Muddy plays them. “Every country has its own music,” Muddy said, getting to the heart of authenticity, “and I got the Delta sound. There’s so many musicians, they can sing and play the guitar so good, but they can’t get that sound to save their life. They didn’t learn that way. That’s the problem. They learned another way, and they just can’t get it.”

  Muddy’s new treatment of “Mannish Boy” rivals his earliest hits for passion and power. He sings the lines over air, night air, dusty air, Mississippi in New England and champagne air. The instruments lay out, except for the slide guitar, which dares only to snake between the lines. The single string’s reverberations hang like heat, shimmering and bending. Muddy’s voice is cavernous, huge, so full of character it’s impossible to believe he’s ever recorded songs where he wasn’t a hammer, and it’s downright depressing to think how long it had been since he sounded so good. There’s a quiver in his voice, the sound of the tones amassing as they travel up his chest and through his throat and out between his lips. The spiritual distance is even farther. There is no Leonard Chess on the receiving end, no Chess brother and no Chess son. The farm was sold and the straw bosses gone with it. Muddy was plowing old ground in the old harness with neither benefit nor burden of a furnish. On these tracks, and especially on “Mannish Boy,” the lead track, Muddy sings like a man freed to sing for himself. There is pride in this voice, independence, a drive, a declaration: everything’s gonna be all right this morning, yes I know.

  And that is just the first four bars. The Telecaster — it’s Margolin playing Muddy — hits a couple high notes, lingering like a question: band, are you ready? And like a freedman falling across the Mason-Dixon Line, their resounding answer is that there’s no stopping us. Muddy chuckles — not with laughter but with strength, and the story begins, an old story told anew:

  Now when I was a young boy [and the band hits]

  At the age of five, [and the band hits again]

  My mother said I was gonna be, [it’s music as boxing]

  The greatest thing alive.

  His mother was right. These were the greatest living blues. And the players knew it. The song’s close includes the studio jubilation that followed, the lightness they felt at realizing that the bleakness of the past couple years — the past couple decades — suddenly had lifted. Muddy yelled and clapped in the studio, grinned broadly, walked around with a bounce in his step. He said, “This stuff is so good, it makes my pee pee hard again.” And an album title was born.

  “What I really wanted to do as a producer,” Johnny said, “was to make Muddy feel comfortable and make his music sound as good as it used to. I felt that the real, raw blues and some early nasty rock and roll hadn’t been recorded right since recording techniques had gotten too good for that kind of music. We were all in one big room, there were almost no overdubs at all, practically everything was done at the same time, and there was a lot of room noise — instruments feeding through other instruments’ mikes. Everything that the normal studio engineer tries to make sure doesn’t happen, I tried to make sure that it did.”

  Perhaps most rewarding to Muddy was that the music achieved such a deep sound without his guitar. He had lived to hear his own legacy. Bob set up Muddy’s Telecaster right next to his chair, and it was there for him every day, but Muddy never picked it up. Both Bob and Johnny were surprised, but song playbacks confirmed that he was well covered.

  An inspired session under his belt, Muddy waltzed across the globe — Switzerland, France, Poland, Italy — while Levon Helm and fellow members of The Band planned their farewell concert. The concert, to be known as The Last Waltz, was set for Thanksgiving weekend in San Francisco, and featured some of the biggest — and most funky — names in popular music, such as Bob Dylan, Dr. John, the Staple Singers, Van Morrison. Muddy’s performance, preserved in the Martin Scorsese movie of the show, was riveting. A single camera holds on him, head and shoulders, occasionally tighter, sometimes looser, but unable to let go. No edits. No cuts. Nothing but the blues, nothing but Mud.

  “Muddy didn’t want to go and boy I remember Paul Butterfield got really, really mad at me on the phone,” said Cameron. “Begrudgingly, Muddy went. He wasn’t happy about the show, but it did wind up being the very first royalty check from a record company he ever got. It was the first one. He got a royalty on the soundtrack album.” A lifetime in the business, and finally a proper royalty check.

  (Marshall Chess dissents: “When the Chess artist got their statement, there would be a page called Writer’s Royalties, so if the record sold twenty thousand, he would get one cent, two hundred bucks, the writer’s part of it.” A payment of one cent per song per sale was, then, not an uncommon payment.)

  On December 23, 1976 (the thirty-fourth anniversary of Muddy’s second marriage), before the release of Hard Again or The Last Waltz, Scott Cameron filed a lawsuit on Muddy’s behalf in U.S. District Court against Muddy’s publishing company, Arc Music. Cameron simultaneously filed one for his other client, Willie Dixon (who’d signed with Cameron at Muddy’s suggestion).

  The essence of the lawsuit is found in the section titled “The Conspiracy and the Acts in Furtherance Thereof,” which states,

  [D]efendants Gene Goodman, Philip Chess, and Harry Goodman together with Leonard Chess entered into a plan and scheme to prey upon plaintiff’s [Muddy’s] inability to comprehend the nature and terms of agreements relating to musical compositions composed either in whole or in part by him, and to divest plaintiff of his rights therein and the benefits flowing from the commercial exploitation thereof. . . . Arc Music was formed for the purpose of divesting plaintiff of his rights in and to musical compositions composed by him. . . . [As for songs recorded by Chess artists on Chess or affiliated labels] no royalties would be payable to Arc Music with the result that Arc Music would make no payment to plaintiff. . . . any royalties which might otherwise be due plaintiff pursuant to his agreements with Arc Music would be substantially understated on or omitted from the royalty payments rended by Arc Music to plaintiff, and the amount of such underpayment would be retained by Arc Music for division among [the defendants].

  The lawsuit also notes that, as for the $2,000 annual salary, “at no time since the initial payment on April 23, 1973, has plaintiff ever received any of the ‘salary payments’ by way of an advance of the sum of $2,000.”

  When Arc began there had been no real model to look toward. The world of independent record labels had grown quickly and been thrust from the margins into the mainstream with little warning. When the Chess brothers first entered the business, they had no publishing agreement because they didn’t know what it meant. There had been, however, plenty of time to rectify that. But proving the rip-off was not going to be easy; trying to make sense of the Chess family’s peculiar accounting — taking from the hits to give to the legends, paying on demand rather than on schedule — was made impossible when GRT threw away the files that the company had accumulated. “Cartons and cartons and cartons of all the back shit that was up in the mezzanine of that building were trashed,” said Marshall. (In their response, Arc denied most everything and stated, “It was the intent of the plaintiff and Arc Mu
sic to formally bring plaintiff into the employ of Arc Music. . . ,” but failed to explain why they never acted on their intent.)

  The lawsuit asked for a total of 7.5 million dollars and the absolution of the agreements between Arc and Muddy. Within five months it was settled out of court, the terms confidential. One result was apparent: when the copyright renewal came up, ownership of Muddy’s songs went from Arc to Muddy and Scott’s Watertoons Music. The victory, like everything else in Muddy’s life, came on shares: Muddy received partial payment, the manager got the rest.

  In the early spring of 1977, Hard Again was released to wide critical acclaim. The package befitted the man. The cover photo was an exquisite black and white, a near full-body shot against a white background, Muddy in a camel hair winter coat and a three-piece suit — his buttons glimmering, his hat atop his head. It’s from a large-format negative (taken by fashion photographer and portraitist Richard Avedon), so the detail on his face is intimate: the bristles of his graying mustache, the shaving bumps on his cheeks. His thumbs are hooked into his vest pocket and he’s got slightly more than half a smile, as if he knows something, knows we know it, but knows we know only something less than half. The photograph is a kind of a capsule summary of his aura; it bespeaks elegance, and also hard work.

  “I saw a whole new life breathe into Muddy,” said Cameron. “He was finally getting crowds, he was finally making money. In the early seventies, you’d see fifty people in a club and the club owner’s up there saying, ‘You gotta give me a break, I’m losing so much money.’ And later the same club owner was screaming about why he can’t get him back because his club doesn’t hold enough people.”

  In March, Muddy embarked on a Hard Again tour with the recording band. They were crackling, and Epic recorded many dates. (When Marva would join Muddy for several days on the road, Leola would come to the house to stay with the kids.) Portnoy and Fuzz were left at home, on retainer. “I got a band and they’re on vacation now, with pay — and hell, I ain’t never had a vacation with pay!” Johnny Winter, thrilled to be performing with his hero, remembered picking up Muddy’s guitar. “You couldn’t play his guitar to save your life,” Winter said. “It was impossible. He had his strings so high off the neck, and he used such heavy-gauge strings too, you just couldn’t play it. Muddy said to me, ‘When you pick up somebody else’s guitar it’s like somebody else’s woman that doesn’t want you. The guitar is telling you, “Leave me alone, I don’t want you.” ’ ” They sold out the Palladium in New York, a large hall known for rock acts. In Boston, Peter Guralnick went backstage to say hello and found Muddy talking to a woman whom he introduced as Robert Johnson’s sister. “ ‘Here, show him. Show him the picture,’ ” Guralnick remembered Mud saying. “From her wallet Anne Anderson drew a picture of a man with a guitar: it was indeed Robert Johnson. ‘You see, man? You see?’ said Muddy with a proud, almost proprietary expression on his face. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Isn’t that really something?’ ”

  Peter had his young son with him, who’d been allowed to bring a friend. They were thrilled to meet a celebrity and, reacting like many children do — and before Peter could stop him — the friend asked Muddy for his autograph. Graciously, Muddy asked if he had a piece of paper. The boy produced a bar napkin. Writing was not a simple task for Mud. He looked at the cocktail napkin, then at the kid, and pronounced, “That’s a mighty shitty piece of paper you got there.”

  The band stayed on the road, playing Hawaii, Africa, and Europe. They played a tribute to the pop band Foghat, who’d rocked up Muddy’s version of Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You” and sold it to another generation. In October of 1977, they sold out 6,000 seats at Radio City Music Hall, sharing the bill with B. B. King, Albert King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

  From Radio City, the band continued north, returning to Dan Hartman’s studio in Westport to make another album with Johnny Winter, this one titled I’m Ready. Not long before, Bob Margolin had gone from Boston to Rhode Island to hear Jimmy Rogers, who was also enjoying a second career. “I had to call Muddy the next day, so at the end of the night I asked Jimmy, ‘Is there anything you want me to tell him?’ He said, ‘You tell him anytime he wants to get together and play those old blues like we did, I’d like to do that again.’ I got goose bumps — the combination of Muddy and Jimmy playing together is a large thing in my life. If you have a house or a car, this was bigger in my life than your house or your car are in yours. So when I told Muddy the next day, he said, ‘Boy that would be great, I’d love to do that, maybe we could do a record with him sometime.’ So I called up Johnny Winter, and he arranged for that to happen. While we were at it, I said, ‘Little Walter’s gone but Big Walter’s still around,’ and we got him too.”

  At the studio, Margolin set up Muddy and Jimmy’s guitars. “I tuned them and set them for big fat heavy sounds. Johnny Winter was up in the control booth and he said to them, ‘Guys, those are really distorted, is that the way you want them?’ They both go, ‘Yeah! Yeah, that’s it, that’s the shit.’ They always used really big fat sounds — the sound of an amp turned all the way up.”

  “Copper Brown” was cowritten with Marva. “Any time a song would come in his head, he’d get me up,” she remembered. “ ‘Wake up, Marva, wake up, you gotta write.’ I always kept a pen and a pencil by. He’d tell me what to write and I would write it. I’d be half ’sleep and nodding, but I’d be writing. ‘Deep Down in Florida,’ he did that with me, ‘Who Do You Trust,’ ‘Copper Brown.’ ”

  The mood at the sessions was similar to the previous year and achieved solid, though different, results. There’s a restraint that makes this album a bit more mature, and a bit less powerful. With Muddy playing, there’s another guitar sound woven in, and Jerry Portnoy sometimes joins Big Walter. (“I used to drink with Big Walter in Chicago,” Portnoy said, “so recording together was a gas.”) The sound, however, is less dense, more intricate. I’m Ready was released in February of 1978 — on the heels of Hard Again winning a Grammy Award, Muddy’s fourth, and also winning street credibility with the Rolling Stone Critic’s Award. I’m Ready would earn Muddy his fifth Grammy Award.

  On July 9, during a stint at the Quiet Knight, Terry Abrahamson was backstage talking to Muddy. “Willie Dixon was there,” said Abrahamson, “and the backstage door opens, in comes Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. I love the Stones — if I’d never heard the Stones, I’d have never gotten into Muddy. Keith Richards walked over to Muddy, kneeled down, and kissed his hand.” Said Margolin, “Muddy knew Mick and Keith very well, but hanging out after the show, he kept addressing Charlie Watts as ‘Eddie.’ Charlie didn’t correct him, and seemed really tickled to be around someone who didn’t kiss his ass.”

  During an extended gig at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., Muddy’s presence in town came to the attention of a fellow southerner who was also on an extended stay, President Jimmy Carter. He invited them to play the White House. “They wanted me and my band,” a somewhat incredulous, and very proud, Muddy told a documentary film crew. “From where I’m from, a black man couldn’t even get inside a white man’s front room.” So on a hot August afternoon, 1978, the vans drove through White House security, set up their equipment, and watched bomb-sniffing dogs smell their gear before they played. “Muddy Waters is one of the great performers of all time,” said the president. “He’s won more awards than I could name. His music is well known around the world, comes from a good part of the country, and represents accurately the background and history of the American people.” The president and first lady were treated to, among others, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “The Blues Had a Baby,” and “I Got My Mojo Working.”

  “We didn’t know about the show until about a day before,” said Calvin Jones. “We didn’t get paid nothing. Shit no. I got pictures with Jimmy Carter and all of us. Somebody got paid but I don’t know who it was. Playing for the White House, don’t make no money — that’s tough, ain’t it? They didn’t even give us good dinners,
give us some hot dogs.”

  In the fall of 1978, Muddy announced a European tour had come together for the next month “with some rock guy,” Margolin said. “When I got over the shock of realizing I’d have to change a lot of immediate plans, I asked Muddy who we’d be playing with. He said, ‘I can’t call his name — it’s one of those guys who was on that Last Waltz.’ I named off a bunch of them and when I got to Eric Clapton, he said, ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’ ”

  The first few nights, Muddy returned to the hotel after his own set. “One day, over breakfast in Germany, he asked me about Eric’s music,” Margolin continued. “That night, Muddy stayed. Two things Eric played really nailed Muddy: he did a very soulful version of Big Maceo’s Chicago blues classic, ‘Worried Life Blues,’ which the late Otis Spann used to play when he was with Muddy. And Eric did a killer open-G slide guitar ‘Come See Me Early in the Morning,’ in which he used a trademark Muddy Waters turnaround lick. Muddy got a big smile and said, ‘That’s my shit!’ From then on, they were close, and Muddy used to call Eric ‘my son,’ his highest compliment to a younger musician.”

  The partnership worked well for both parties and was reconvened in North America on March 28, 1979, for a forty-seven-city tour. Muddy’s label had issued Muddy “Mississippi” Waters Live, featuring live renditions of songs from the previous two albums — and the requisite chestnuts. The live material featured his touring band, along with three songs drawn from the tour with Johnny Winter and James Cotton. The crowd’s reaction to Muddy’s slide work — you can hear their eyes lighting up like Christmas trees — confirms the eternal power of his playing. Half a century before, he’d drawn the same reaction from a juke house full of field hands, the same way Son House had drawn it from him. Going up the country, don’t you want to go? The live album won Muddy his sixth Grammy. The wide exposure brought by the Clapton dates promoted sales of his recent releases, which were readily available, and of the older material, which was slowly being repackaged and rereleased by All Platinum.