Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  When Muddy played Atlanta, his son Big Bill heard about the gig on the radio. “My daddy had moved from Chicago to Westmont and the number I had was no longer any good. I thought my daddy changed his number and didn’t want me to bother him. So for years I didn’t try to bother him. I went to see him in Atlanta and he hugged me. His words were, ‘You’re Mary’s boy?’ I said yeah. He hugged me, said, ‘Well you’re my boy too.’ I got goose bumps. I still get goose bumps. I sat there in the dressing room with Bob Margolin, Jr. Johnson, Pinetop Perkins, Jerry Portnoy, and they kept saying, ‘Man, you look just like Joe.’ My daddy sat there in his chair, he had a little lady on each side of him, he just sat there staring. Staring.” Big Bill’s words, which began fast and furious at the clear memory, slowed as the memory crept from the shadows, as its edges and wholeness came to light. Big Bill took a breath, but breath wouldn’t come. Tears did, in a steady stream, and he buried his head in his hands. “Man, you know, it hurts. It’s a hurting thing.”

  When the tour came through Memphis, Muddy arranged to have the day free. He and Bo took the white Cadillac down Highway Sixty-one, the road of Golden Promise, past their old stomping grounds and all the way to Issaquena County. A field hand named Robert from the Esparanda Farm remembered seeing the big white Cadillac pull up. “The farmer sent me in a pickup truck to find out who was looking around,” he said. “It was Muddy Waters, and he was with Carrie Brown, his cousin who lived near Glen Allan. I was trying to like Carrie at the time. We all went up to Glen Allan after sun — we were working sun to sun — drank some beers, then he left for a gig.” At home, horsepower had replaced the horse, but little else had changed.

  On June 5, 1979, in Chicago, Muddy married Marva Jean Brooks. He’d sat up in bed a few mornings earlier and announced his intentions to her. “It was spontaneous,” Marva remembered. “Me and Cookie were running around trying to get everything ready. It was a simple house wedding. I didn’t want anything fancy and Mud wasn’t that type.” It was her twenty-fifth birthday, he was sixty-six. The small ceremony was held at Muddy’s home. In addition to his band mates, his manager, and other friends and families, the party included Clapton and his entourage; Johnny Winter flew out for the occasion. Muddy ordered steaks from a butcher that Willie Dixon recommended, and there was lots of champagne on ice. “It was a big party. At the time, ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ was a hit, and that was one of my favorite songs,” said Joseph Morganfield. “All my friends were riding bikes by, trying to peek through the fence. What stands out in my mind is Clapton went swimming in our pool in his underwear.” What stands out in Eric Clapton’s mind is Muddy “riding around on his tricycle and it was like, ‘This blues singer is behaving like a clown.’ He was just a regular guy at home.”

  During the Clapton tour, Muddy had joined the Rosebud Agency for booking, run by Mike Kappus. Kappus put champagne on Muddy’s contract, a clause reading, “One (1) fifth of either Piper-Heidsieck Gold Label Brut (1971, 1973, or 1975); Krug (1971, 1973, or 1975); or Dom Perignon champagne, iced and with at least six (6) champagne glasses.” Said Kappus, “The champagne on the contract rider was an extra stretch for promoters when Muddy’s demand was not at its peak, but Muddy always wanted his champagne. Turned out, if they didn’t have it, Muddy had several bottles that he would sell to them to give to him.”

  Though things were getting better for Muddy, the band was not sharing in the reward. “Muddy wouldn’t say nothing about it,” said Pinetop. “He was making plenty of money. He got a whole lot of money off Chess Records since Scott got in there.”

  “Conditions for us stayed about the same,” said Fuzz. “Hotels were going up and up. The Holiday Inn in 1971 was something like twenty-two dollars a night, it got to be sixty or seventy dollars. We would get a double, wasn’t able to be in no single.” Muddy made no attempt to rectify the situation; he’d turned all his business decisions over to Cameron.

  Muddy took a break from the road for about three months at the end of 1979, and the band put together a tour of their own, billing themselves as Muddy introduced them: The Legendary Band. They asked Muddy if they could use one of his suburbans; he refused. Squeezing into Fuzz’s Cadillac, they hit the road for holiday money.

  When they recorded in Westport in May of 1980, the tensions were high and the spirits were not. It was the road band (and Johnny) only, no substitutes, no guests. As if trying to get comfortable, Muddy, in addition to the full-on band, worked with smaller units. “Mean Old Frisco Blues” is inflected with rockabilly innocence, hearkening to Elvis’s interpretation of another Arthur Crudup tune. “I Feel Like Going Home,” pulled from the Hard Again sessions because there wasn’t enough from this session to make a whole record, is all acoustic. The textural differences on King Bee were, to some degree, a result of the simmering feelings. Margolin remembers suggesting that less might be more on some songs and Muddy fired right back at him: fine, you sit out.

  There was hardly a break between the sessions and the resumption of the endless tour. They started on the East Coast, went up into Canada, then down into middle America. They went to Europe in July, back to Canada, and over to Alaska, where Cotton’s band opened their shows. One bleary night on the road, when somewhere felt like nowhere, Muddy got “belligerent” in the dressing room, according to Bob Margolin. “The uncomfortable business situation was the developing split. I stood up and elaborated on a problem, and he just quietly answered, ‘Oh, I can understand that.’ He drank a little more than usual that night after the show, and the band got in his two vans for the ride back to the hotel. Muddy and I were in one of the vans with Luther driving, and Muddy’s depression overtook him. With Luther and me, caring friends, he ran down a long list of things with health, personal life, and business that were going wrong and really weighing on him. It was heartbreaking to see Muddy so down, and to know that all of his success and greatness and the world’s love couldn’t comfort him. He was coping fine by the next day, but his problems were real, and eventually they did get the better of him. Soon he did lose the band, and his health, and that is nothing less than tragic.”

  “We were playing a place called Harry Hope’s out in Cary, Illinois,” recalled Scott Cameron, “an old ski lodge. I think it was a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and we were scheduled to leave on either the following Monday or Tuesday for Japan. The tour manager came up to the dressing room and said that the guys in the band would like to talk so I went downstairs and out to the van. I didn’t have any idea why they were calling me downstairs. No idea at all. And they all demanded double the money or they weren’t going to go.”

  “Conditions wasn’t what it was supposed to be,” said Willie Smith. “The real issue was, on our days off we had to pay our hotel. Muddy done got big so he was kind of picking gigs, getting the good ones, and you might be off two or three days. All we was asking for was half of the hotel fare, we’d all share rooms. But they didn’t compromise. Scotty said it ain’t a man here that can’t be replaced. Everybody started getting in an uproar. He was right in a way of saying it, but a band has been with you so long through thick and thin and then all of a sudden there’s no man that can’t be replaced, there is a principle that goes along with that, too. Muddy didn’t deal with it. And Scotty said, ‘You take it or leave it.’ ”

  New visas could not be arranged on such short notice, so the band got their double pay. But when they got home, Cameron, at Muddy’s request, informed Jerry Portnoy, pegged as the ringleader, that his services were no longer required. “And within the next twenty-four hours,” Cameron remembered, “I had a call from another member of the band saying if this member was gone he was gone. And then I had a call from another member of the band that if any of the members were gone they’re all gone.” And they were. As a bandleader, Muddy was like Duke Ellington: he turned out other bandleaders. The bands that backed B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and a host of major blues stars remained faceless musicians. From his first band to his last, Muddy produced stars. The Legendary Band fol
lowed suit, quickly recording an album and hitting the road.

  Nonetheless, losing his longest running unit must have left Muddy with a sense of isolation. Marva was there to brighten his dark moments, and old and new friends rallied ’round him. But there was hardly time for such thoughts. He called Mojo Buford, and within days a new band was assembled. Bassist Earnest Johnson brought the old feel of Smitty’s Corner with him because he’d absorbed it there. Lovie Lee slipped onto the piano bench, occasionally replaced by Lafayette Leake, who’d recorded with Muddy in 1955. Buford played harp and Ray Allison quickly found his way to the drums. Guitars were handled by Jimmy Rogers, who forsook an East Coast tour to help out his old friend, and by the young John Primer, who mentored in Chicago with Sammy Lawhorn. (Guitarist Rick “Junior” Kreher assumed Jimmy’s guitar spot after the tour.) Muddy Waters kept on rolling.

  Back home, Bo’s breathing had become increasingly strangulated, and finally he consented to visit the doctor. “Bo was a veteran and I went with Muddy to take him to the VA Hospital,” said Cookie. “They ran the tests and when they told him it was lung cancer, black people during that period, the word cancer was death to them. And Bo deteriorated really fast after that. I remember a sister of his came and they were going back and forth about who was going to pay this, and Muddy standing in the middle of the floor told the sister, ‘How dare could you ask that? Everything will be taken care of,’ and we buried Bo.

  “Muddy took it very hard. It was the third time I’d ever seen Muddy cry. The first time was when my mother died, the second time when he took me to the hospital to say good-bye to Geneva, and then when Bo died in his Westmont bedroom. Those were the only times.”

  He had work to distract him. In April of 1981, King Bee was released, and Muddy set out again to promote the record on the road. His Beacon Theater show was reviewed in the New York Times. “It was hard to believe that the great blues master will be sixty-six [sic] years old on Saturday. Both vocally and instrumentally, he completely dominated his six-piece band and outshone his special guest, the Texas guitar virtuoso Johnny Winter.” (At his birthday party that year at home, the centerpiece on the dining room table was a champagne fountain.)

  In July, the new band played festivals and clubs across Europe, from Finland to the Hague, Austria to Italy; James Cotton opened a string of shows. In August, their blues festival gig was broadcast on National Public Radio. In September, they hit the West Coast, including a relaxed date on a mountaintop near Saratoga, California, at the Paul Masson Winery. “There was a winding road up there, and the stage was beneath a backdrop of a church brought over stone by stone from Europe, then partially rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake,” said Mike Kappus, who booked the gig. Sharing the bill were Willie Dixon, John Hammond Jr., Sippie Wallace, Clifton Chenier, Albert King, and James Cotton. Johnny Winter flew in at his own expense. “I just wanted to be with him some more,” said Johnny. “I liked Muddy, he was a good guy.” The winery hosted the musicians at their chateau, complete with a pool and a chef. Muddy, particular about his champagne, snuck his own bottles in; when he sat by the pool, he’d hide the label because he didn’t want to offend the hosts. “At the end,” Kappus continued, “they broke out some estate-bottled champagne, shared it with all of us. When Muddy tasted it he said to me, ‘Oh, if I’d known they had this I wouldn’t have been sneaking in my own bottles.’ ”

  That same month, Muddy was booked for a Mississippi homecoming, headlining the fourth annual Delta Blues Festival held at Freedom Village near Greenville. He’d taken the gig at the behest of his daughter Mercy, who was in college nearby and was about to graduate magna cum laude. The day before, he traveled to Jackson for a reception in his honor at the governor’s mansion. Muddy wore a white suit with a Hawaiian shirt. The next month, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame at the Blues Foundation’s first ceremony.

  When the Rolling Stones next returned to Chicago, arrangements were made in advance to film an unrehearsed jam with Muddy at Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge on Sunday, November 22. The club, at 423 East Forty-third, was housed in a former automobile repair shop and was next to a car wash. Muddy’s band was playing, and the Stones joined them for what would be the last time Muddy was ever recorded. The meeting of generations was more than a passing of the torch, it was a real fun time. Muddy holds the microphone for Mick Jagger while the two hoochie coochie men share vocals on “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Keith Richards studies Muddy’s fingers while they share guitar duties on “Baby Please Don’t Go.” The music is loose and fun, transforming the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago into a Mississippi Delta Saturday-night fish fry.

  A couple of weeks later, Muddy was with Marva, Cookie, and Leola, shopping at his favorite South Side produce store. Without warning, he passed out in an aisle. “He came to within seconds,” said Cookie, “said he was okay, that I would have to drive home. He had high blood pressure and said he’d been eating too much pork.” He went to the doctor for a physical and some tests, and just days before Christmas the doctor asked him to come see an oncologist. “They told him they saw cancer on his lungs. Cancer, that’s the only thing I ever saw Muddy afraid of, because Geneva died of cancer and she went completely out of her mind towards the end, and then it killed Bo too.”

  “When Mud first found out that he had cancer in the lungs, it was a shock for all of us,” Marva recalled, “but he never felt defeat. He was a strong man. He stayed in good spirits.” Doctors removed part of Muddy’s cancerous lung, and he began radiation treatment. They recommended chemotherapy too, but “he got up one morning and said he wasn’t going for chemo,” Marva continued. “He had made peace with the Lord and all he wanted was to be home with his family.”

  Mike Kappus went to visit him during a hospital stay. Muddy was lying in the bed, his back raised, and his spirits were high. “We were talking about John Lee Hooker, and he was imitating John’s voice and joking about how each of them would try to one-up the other, which was the first one to get a Cadillac, the first to get a Mercedes, the first to get a phone in the car. The visit was really positive.”

  “I’d stop by the hospital,” Rick Kreher, Muddy’s last guitarist, remembered, “and bring him Living Blues magazines. He liked to look at the pictures, talk about the people, pick his spirits up. He always thought he was going to get better. He had that will to live, that kind of guy. He didn’t want to give it up.”

  “I had no idea my daddy had cancer,” Big Bill Morganfield said. “I talked to him after he got out of the hospital and I said, ‘Daddy, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I just had an operation, they cut me.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘It’s all right.’ He wouldn’t tell me. I knew he was sick because he had a bad cough from deep inside him.” Muddy had been unable to tell his son about his illness, and he asked his manager to keep the news from the public. “For some reason, Scott did not want the nature of Muddy’s illness known,” Kappus said. “We were not to say that he was ill and by all means not reveal the nature of the illness.”

  Muddy got a morale boost when Columbia Records, more than thirty-five years after the fact, released his sessions with Mayo Williams. When Jim O’Neal was given a tape of an old 78 that sounded like Muddy, even though his name was nowhere on it, he sent it to Westmont. It was the James “Sweet Lucy” Carter “Mean Red Spider” session, Muddy’s first ever in Chicago. “He hadn’t heard it,” said O’Neal. “He said he didn’t realize it had ever come out. He had forgotten all about it.”

  And there was more good news: doctors told him his cancer was in remission. By late spring of 1982, Muddy was feeling stronger and a new tour was booked. Eric Clapton was playing in Miami on June 30, and Clapton’s manager arranged a surprise visit. Marva, Scott, and Muddy hopped a plane. Clapton had incorporated Muddy’s “Blow Wind Blow” into his set, and when he began it, Muddy stepped onstage. “Eric was clearly in shock,” said Kappus. “At the end of the song, Muddy left the stage and Eric said to himself as much as to the audience, �
��That was Muddy Waters!’ It was a tremendous surprise for him. We were thinking that Muddy was bouncing back, but he was not there yet.”

  Upon his return home, Muddy coughed up blood. The cancer had returned, but Muddy’s body was not yet strong enough for surgery. “If he had been able to build up his strength, maybe they could have operated again,” said Kappus, “but his spirits were down. There had been an optimism that everything was going to be okay. After the Clapton show, there was a realization that that wasn’t going to be the case.”

  “When they told him it came back, I think Muddy felt he couldn’t fight it anymore,” said Cookie. “He did the radiation, and took the medication, but he wasn’t the same after it came back the second time. His clothes were hanging off him. I got him a suit that would fit, but he would just lay on the couch. My twins were nine months old, and I was raising Muddy’s grandchild, the same age, and I brought them over there and I felt so bad. Here was their great-grandfather and he was so ecstatic, but I could see that he was unable to enjoy it.”