Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  163 post-Levittown affluence: By the decade’s end, the Second City theater group, with Elaine May, Mike Nichols, and Ed Asner, was putting on a new, progressive kind of comedy show in Chicago.

  164 “Folksong: ’59”: At Lomax’s “Folksong: ’59” in Carnegie Hall, April 3, 1959, Muddy brought Spann and Cotton and was provided a New York rhythm section. He did “Hoochie Coochie Man,” then belted out “Walkin’ Through the Park” before being joined by Memphis Slim, who did an instrumental that featured he and Spann trading licks on two pianos. Muddy stayed for Slim’s two remaining numbers, providing sinuous backing on Slim’s mellow interpretation of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” and a lonesome slide feel to “How Long Blues,” the Leroy Carr song he’d told Lomax was the first he’d tried to learn. He leaves no doubt that he’s mastered it. The songs were originally released on the 1959 United Artists album Folk Song Festival at Carnegie Hall, and have since been reissued as part of the Capitol Blues Collection (Chicago Blues Masters: Muddy Waters and Memphis Slim) on a CD that includes a set of studio collaborations the pair recorded in New York a couple years later.

  164 “Big Bill Broonzy had recently died”: Broonzy died August of 1958, and Muddy, along with Spann and Clay, had been among the pallbearers. Brother John Sellers, Tampa Red, and Sunnyland Slim were the other pallbearers.

  165 Atlantic Records: Following Ertegun’s visit to Smitty’s Corner, Atlantic engaged Chess in a discussion about Muddy recording two dozen tracks with Atlantic’s John Lewis; each label would release an album. (Gart, First Pressings Vol. 8.)

  165 “increasing numbers of whites — Americans and Europeans”: The winter before, in 1957, the Belgian fan Yannick Bruynoghe and his wife documented their prolonged stay in Chicago.

  166 “I believe whitey’s pickin’ up on things that I’m doin’ ”: Murray, Shots, p. 187.

  11: MY DOG CAN BARK 1960–1967

  Newport: Richard Kurin, in Smithsonian Folklife Festival (p. 105), provides a brief history of the Newport festivals:

  The Newport Folk Festival evolved from the Newport Jazz Festival. The Jazz Festival was initially an idea of Elaine and Louis Lorillard — tobacco heirs — to enhance the summer life of Newport’s residents. They enlisted jazz impresario George Wein to produce the festival, beginning in 1954. After years of successful festivals, Wein, interested in the roots of jazz and in attracting college-student fans of popular folk groups such as the Kingston Trio, held the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Festivals in 1959 and 1960 were thought by people such as Pete Seeger to have too many city, professional performers and not enough folks. The Newport Folk Festival was reorganized in 1963 as a nonprofit foundation, with a board of directors including Seeger, Peter Yarrow, Theodore Bikel, Jean Ritchie, and others.

  “[By the late 1950s], they started offering gigs at Carnegie Hall and Newport,” Francis Clay remembered. “Muddy had never heard of them. He said, ‘Man, you’re driving me crazy with that Newport stuff.’ ” A festival atmosphere was not Muddy’s normal environment, nor was the outdoors, nor was the daytime, nor the Northeast. The little pay barely made the great distance worth it. He was convinced by the other names on the bill: John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Rushing, Sammy Price, and fiddle and guitar duo Butch Cage and Willie Thomas.

  European Friends: The Frenchmen Demetre and Chauvard were in America from September 10 to October 10, 1959. In a review of their book on its republication, Alan Balfour wrote, “Just how much information they gleaned from all those with whom they spoke is astonishing; information which laid the foundation for all future research into Chicago blues.” (Balfour, “Land.”) (Land of the Blues by Jacques Demetre and Marcel Chauvard is available through Soul Bag / CLARB, 25 rue Trezel, 92300 Levallois–Perrett, France. 176 pages, 94 photographs. Price: 190 French francs [postage included] payable by IMO or Visa / Mastercard.)

  A longtime friendship was established the same year between Muddy and Georges Adins from Belgium. Adins had followed Muddy’s 1958 British tour, talking with him in hotel rooms. Arriving in Chicago from the South — he’d hung with Lightnin’ Hopkins in Houston and Sonny Boy Williamson in east St. Louis — Adins was invited by Muddy to stay at the Lake Park house, and he spent two weeks there. He fell right in, traveling to gigs with Muddy, joining him after Smitty’s to visit a Jimmy Rogers set at Pepper’s, then coming home to eat Muddy’s corn bread and eggs in the wee hours. Muddy made him Cookie’s godfather.

  Georges and I hit it off quick; in September of 1998 he wrote, “I have of course a lot of family shots as well as pictures taken at club appearances in case your book would contain any pictures. Most of my collection is pasted in albums. . . . Maybe you can let me know how many you want for the book, if you prefer family pictures and others, if you want them glossy or matte, and also what size.” News of his death came in May of 1999, as our friendship was blooming. I have tried, diligently but unsuccessfully, to locate his trove of material. Muddy’s estate, Muddy’s family, and various of Georges’s friends have some of his photos, but these amount to a small percentage. Fellow researcher Robert Sacre has also tried to find the family, and he holds money in escrow as he searches.

  Paul Oliver remembered Muddy’s pride during his interview. “He didn’t use any complex language but he’d stop and think and reply in a very considered way. It wasn’t exactly spontaneous but I got the impression that it was important to him, and he respected the fact that I was a BBC reporter; he knew what the BBC was because he’d visited England.” Oliver had further observations about other band members: “At the Tay May I became aware of how well Pat Hare played. His face was kind of scrunched up and he looked very, very mean onstage. I thought he was about fifty and actually he was about thirty-five; it was something deep-seated in his personality. Muddy liked to maintain the tension in his performance, Pat Hare worked up to it and then dropped back. Cotton also wouldn’t play all the time. He liked to take two steps forward and cup his hand around the mike and scream out the choruses and then step back. When I saw Little Walter, he wouldn’t stop playing. Walter came alive through his harp. He was difficult the rest of the time.”

  On Chris Barber’s American visit, he sat in with Muddy in Gary, Indiana. “I knew how to play those blues,” he said. “At the end of the first set, I put my trombone down, and this elegant black girl — the only people in America who looked smartly dressed to us Europeans were black people, everyone else wore Bermuda shorts and floral shirts — she leaned back in her chair and said, ‘Say, are you Chris Barber?’ I said yes. She said, ‘Is that your record, “That Petite Fleur”?’ I said yes. She said, ‘I don’t like it.’ ” Robert Koester also remembered Barber sitting in. “I went to the washroom and a guy came up to me and said what the hell is that strange horn that guy is playing?” Barber remembered: “Another funny thing, Muddy bent down on one knee, and he hitched up his trouser so it wouldn’t get dirty, but he hitched up the wrong one. Also, Muddy would always talk confidentially to you, covering his mouth with his hand, but he’d cover the wrong side, blocking his mouth instead of concealing it.”

  Barber and Ottilie were also at Muddy’s Carnegie Hall show in 1961 and followed the band to their penthouse suite at the Theresa Hotel in Harlem. “They were playing up there till five in the morning,” said Barber. “Muddy sent his bodyguard [Bo] out to buy food periodically, and they got Ottilie to make bacon and eggs.” When they’d slept it off the next afternoon, the musicians drove back to Chicago the way they’d come out: directly. Just another one-night stand.

  Harold Pendleton, Barber’s partner, also visited Chicago: “Our drummer Graham Burbridge was asking Francis Clay about triplets, because no one over here knew how to play them. As a result of our trip to Chicago, we left skiffle — Lonnie Donegan was by then singing songs like ‘Does Your Spearmint Lose Its Flavor on the Bedpost Overnight.’ We found Cyril Davies, who played mouth organ in a folk club, and we found Alexis Korner, who understood blues, and we added them to the Chris Barber Band for a blues set at
the Marquee on Wednesday nights. Because our clubs were not licensed [for alcoholic beverages], an evening had two sets, with an interval set in between, so the main act could go to the pub. But the twenty-minute interval kept getting extended and we eventually gave Cyril, Alexis, and Long John Baldry Thursday night. Alexis could never find a drummer, Graham Burbridge was the only one who could play that style — because he’d been trained at Smitty’s Corner. They did eventually find a drummer in the name of Charlie Watts. The Rolling Stones became the interval group on Thursday nights.”

  Europe in the 1960s: Willie Dixon told this great Sonny Boy story in his short-lived column, “I Am the Blues,” in Living Blues:

  Sonny Boy had a big coffee pot and this particular coffee pot he used for cookin’. One mornin’ in Baden-Baden [1963], we just played a concert and we was intending to eat but wasn’t no other place open. Just about time we were beginning to sleep, we smell something reeeal good. Somebody cooking onions or garlic and everybody was hungry anyways. So people went down to the restaurant, thought maybe the restaurant had opened back up. So finally everybody got to sleep. Then I heard a rumbling in the hall, everybody goes to the door, some of the guys have knives. Sonny Boy got a little short German feller by the collar in one hand, his knife open in the other hand. This little guy he’s tryin’ to explain to Sonny Boy that he’s the hotel detective but Sonny Boy can’t understand. Sonny Boy said, “This guy a peepin’ Tom, because this guy is goin’ around peeping through the keyholes.” He was smellin’ around the doors to see if he could find out where it is the aroma was comin’ from. Finally they pry Sonny Boy aloose from this guy and tell him, “Man, he’s the house detective and he’s tryin’ to find out somebody cookin’ around here.” This guy had on a little red tie. He’s much smaller than Sonny, he’s pullin’ back, he’s tryin’ to explain. This guy was pullin’ so hard. Sonny Boy took this guy’s tie with his knife and cut it off, right up to his neck, and this guy tumbled backwards down the steps. . . . So about time it got good and quiet again . . . this aroma is still smelling gooood. So I ease up and pull the door open real slow and look down the hall, there was Sonny Boy barefoot in a night shirt — it was just about up to his knees. And he beckons for me to come over there. “Hey, come on in here, man, get some of these pig tails.” This guy, in this very big coffee pot of his, he’s cookin’ pig tails in beans. With onions and everything.

  Joe Boyd visited Chicago a month before the 1964 tour and saw Muddy at Pepper’s. “We were the only white people in the place. That tour was right along a cultural fault line for the blues. Within a year or two, the black audience fell away and the white audience soared and that cannot help but change the music.”

  In a 1978 backstage interview, Muddy was asked by a reporter for Dark Star magazine about the Rolling Stones. “They helped turn the white people around in America,” Muddy answered, “recording our records and putting our names on them. When I first came out on records, white people didn’t want their kids to buy my records, called it ‘nigger music.’ Said, ‘Blues is nigger music.’ ” The interviewer interjected, “Race music,” and Muddy answered, “They wouldn’t say ‘race,’ say ‘nigger.’ ”

  Paul Butterfield and Newport: An Elektra Records executive flew to Chicago to hear Butterfield’s band at Big John’s on New Year’s Eve, 1964–1965. The group was racially mixed, with Elvin Bishop, Jerome Arnold, Sam Lay, and, in short order, Michael Bloomfield. “I heard the most amazing thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Paul Rothchild said. “I said to myself, ‘Here is the beginning of another era. This is another turning point in American music’s direction.’ ” (Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, p. 248.) They promptly cut “Born in Chicago,” which sold 200,000 copies and established the band’s reputation.

  “What we played was music that was entirely indigenous to the neighborhood, to the city that we grew up in,” Butterfield said. He continued:

  There was no doubt in my mind that this was folk music; this was what I heard on the streets of my city, out the windows, on radio stations and jukeboxes in Chicago and all throughout the South, and it was what people listened to. And that’s what folk meant to me — what people listened to. Lomax implied in his introduction that this was how low Newport had sunk, bringing an act like this onto the stage, and our manager, Albert Grossman, said, “How can you give these guys this type of introduction? This is really out of line. You’re a real prick to do this.” They got into a fistfight, these two elderly guys, right there in front of the stage, rolling in the dirt while we were playing and I was screaming, “Kick his ass, Albert! Stomp ’im!” There was bad blood rising, you could tell. (Ward, Bloomfield, p. 44)

  Butterfield’s first album, recorded directly after Newport 1965, included Muddy’s “Got My Mojo Working.”

  Shortly after Newport, Butterfield played three nights (one hundred bucks each night) at a Cambridge coffeehouse, Club 47. “He told me that I should get some of the other bands from Chicago, starting with Muddy Waters,” said Jim Rooney, who was managing the club. The afternoon of opening night, Rooney phoned Muddy at the Hotel Diplomat. “I said, ‘What kind of coffee would you like?’ and he said, ‘TSIVAS.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘TSIVAS.’ ‘What?’ ‘TSIVAS! Tsivas Regal!’ And I said, ‘You’ve got it.’ That night he got a bottle of Chivas Regal and everything was straight.” (Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, p. 270.)

  “[At Muddy’s show] I walked into the men’s room of the Club 47,” said Peter Wolf, later vocalist with the J. Geils Band. “I had heard about Butterfield through the grapevine. In person, it was incredible. It seemed that all the Chicago bands started coming to town. . . . and there was Cotton, Spann, and S. P. Leary all gathered around a pint. They are my idols, so I picked up my cue real good and ran out and scored a couple of pints, and after the next show they were all over me, and my apartment was only four blocks away.” (Ibid, pp. 268 and 272.)

  1966 Gigs: In January of 1966, Muddy brought most of the band to Toronto for the taping of a CBC–TV special, “Bell Telephone Presents the Blues.” In addition to performing, Muddy and Spann informally exchanged stories with Willie Dixon and Sunnyland Slim. The highlight of the performances is Spann solo, the whiskey on his breath nearly tangible, singing “Tain’t Nobody’s Business (If I Do).” A motto, clearly.

  In April 1966, while touring with Big Mama Thornton — also managed by Bob Messinger — the band stopped at Coast Recorders in San Francisco to back her on Big Mama Thornton and the Chicago Blues Band, some of which has been compiled on her CD Ball and Chain (Arhoolie CD-305). A feisty woman who knew about being screwed by the music business — she’d recorded the original “Hound Dog,” but because she hadn’t written it, she received nothing but an honorable mention when Elvis’s version became an international hit — she drew a hard edge from Muddy’s band.

  The band took three gigs over 1966 at New York’s Cafe au Go-Go: May, August, and November. At the August date, Muddy’s band did triple duty, backing Spann on the opening set and then backing John Lee Hooker as well as Muddy. The August dates yielded two Blues Way albums, one for Spann (The Blues Is Where It’s At) and one for Hooker (Live at the Cafe au Go-Go), though Hooker’s tracks may have been recut later. Spann’s album is some of the best-sounding Muddy from the 1960s. Hooker, best heard alone, is ably backed by Muddy’s ensemble; they understood the boogie groove at the core of Hooker’s style and knew not to count bars and change chords until he did — if he did. In November, they were part of “The Blues Bag,” a series running hot at the club that featured several name acts doing short sets in rapid sequence. There were matinees for younger kids, where the club sold ice cream instead of liquor; most kids snuck in their own bottle. Despite the cold rain, the line at the door was four people deep and ran around the block. One critic noted Sammy Lawhorn’s “speed of execution that is breathtaking.” (Kunstadt, Record Research.) While in New York for the November date, the band cut an album for Victoria Spivey’s Spivey label as The Muddy Waters Blues Band; only Mudd
y was signed to Chess, so they were free to step out. Muddy participates on some tracks, credited as “Main Stream.” This record is hard to find and generally worth the search.

  In the wee hours, after a night of the May gig at Cafe au Go-Go, Muddy and Spann went to a nearby FM radio station for an interview, recorded by Bob Messinger. After the disc jockey’s rambling start, a decent interview evolved, along with some real good music.

  Band Personnel: One night, when the band happened to be in St. Louis, a gunman came into Smitty’s, fire in his eyes and a firearm in his hand. “If we’d been sitting on that bandstand, we’d all be dead,” said Cotton. “He said that everybody was going with his wife. And then he shot up into the ceiling. We heard about that, got kind of scared, and soon everybody had a little gun. And then it cooled off. So I’m standing up on Forty-third Street one night waiting on a bus, had a few drinks. And I look around and he is there with a .38 in his hand and he says, ‘How come you treat me like you did?’ And he pulled the trigger on it. Five times I got it. Never did nothing to him in my life. It scared every musician in the city. If he hadn’t gone to jail right away, he’d’a been killed.”

  When Cotton left, he was replaced by George “Mojo” Buford. Buford was born in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1929 and began singing in spiritual groups before he was ten. He moved to Memphis in 1944, where he was exposed to more urban blues artists such as B. B. King and others on WDIA. He got to Chicago around 1953 and wound up in a group that got busy on the South Side. Spann heard them, sent Muddy by, and Buford’s group became Muddy’s “junior” band, filling his gigs when he’d travel out of town. (For more background, see Wisner, “Buford.”)