Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  Pat Hare was notoriously jealous. He’d often run to the phone between sets to make sure his girlfriend was home and not out being unfaithful. When she didn’t answer one night, Hare took a Winchester rifle to her apartment and demanded to be let in. There was, of course, no answer. He fired through the front window. Ever the dutiful bandleader, Muddy helped him hide out; when the heat didn’t let up, Muddy got him to Memphis. In May of 1963, when the scene cooled, Hare left Memphis for Minneapolis and a band with Mojo Buford. “Me and Jojo Williams went to Arkansas to pick him up,” said Buford. “He was working on a farm, picking cotton and driving tractors.” (Darwen, “Buford,” p. 11.) He murdered his baby in Minneapolis six months later. (For a comprehensive account of Pat Hare’s life and demise, see Hahn, “Blues Guitarist.”)

  168 Spann, who stepped out as leader: The labels for which Spann recorded include Fontana, Storyville, Prestige, Arhoolie, Decca, Spivey, Testament, Vanguard, Blues Horizon, Bluestimes, and Delmark, for which he employed, in addition to Muddy’s band: Johnny Shines, Junior Wells, Johnny Young, and, later, younger white players such as Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, and Fleetwood Mac. A recently published Spann discography is marvelous. Begun by the late Bill Rowe, it features an excellent introduction by Alan Balfour and makes for informative perusal. (Available through Micrography Discographical Publications, Wkoestduinstraat 84, NL–1058 TJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands.)

  170 “A sturdy man”: Demetre and Chauvard, Land of the Blues, p. 59.

  170 Kokomo Arnold: Ibid., p. 128.

  171 “Muddy roared, leaped, jerked”: Leadbitter, Blues, p. 11.

  172 Bob Koester, whose Delmark Records: While Chess, unwittingly playing the role of Lester Melrose, was packaging Muddy in costumes that didn’t fit, new blues fans were following the lead of Aristocrat two decades earlier and forming their own labels. Before founding Delmark Records, Bob Koester sold 78s through the mail from his St. Louis dormitory room. His first jazz release was in 1953; he moved the label to Chicago in 1958 and, after meeting Big Joe Williams and Speckled Red and helping recover Sleepy John Estes and Yank Rachel from oblivion in the early 1960s, began releasing blues.

  176 his valet, C. D.: Jimmy Lee Morris knew him and said, “He got both Muddy’s ladies strung out on drugs. And he’s supposed to have been his friend. He was pushing that shit, had a pocket full of money. C. D. lived in the neighborhood.”

  177 “the reverends”: Reverend Willie Morganfield, whose father — Muddy’s uncle — had been a preacher on Stovall, was staying in Muddy’s house in the early 1960s. He’d scored a major gospel hit in 1959 with “What Is This?”

  “Muddy was a person like this,” said Reverend Morganfield. “He respected my father. My father was a minister. And he knew my father wouldn’t appreciate if I was singing rock and roll or blues. So Muddy didn’t really encourage me. But when I got a call from a company that was going to give me forty-six thousand dollars to do two rock and roll songs, he said, ‘They wouldn’t have to ask me twice, I’d go right on and do it.’ But my father had written a song for me entitled ‘I Can’t Afford to Let My Savior Down,’ and that’s what stayed with me all night, it just worried me and worried me, so the next morning I got up and told the guy I couldn’t do it, it wasn’t in me. Muddy wasn’t churchy. That was his business.”

  178 Life had not improved for Azelene: After Cookie, Azelene gave birth to four more children, dispersing them to others. “We have one brother we don’t know anything about,” Cookie said, “because she was on drugs and left him in the hospital.”

  179 “The Muddy Waters Twist”: Though Muddy’s version was something of a reach, the dance had its redeeming value: it got the girls shaking. At a 1961 Ole Miss University dance, that, however, led to a step back in time. “The twist was out, and none of them girls ain’t studying about no color,” Muddy told McKee. “We were playing that music, they were getting down doing the twist. Them girls down, their little white panties showing. I was scared to look anyway — I had my head over, looking like a pump handle. So help me Jesus Christ, they put them lights out! If I’m lying, I don’t want to say another word to you — they put them lights out!” (McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.)

  Willie Smith also remembered the incident: “Just like it always was, they didn’t want us to see those white girls shaking their booties so they had us to play in the dark. The one that put the lights out wasn’t nothing but kitchen help. She was an old white woman, sixties or seventies, nothing you could do to change her ways. She did everything she could to disturb what was going on, but everyone was drinking moonshine and having a good time. It was raining cats and dogs when we were through and she put us out. We knew she wasn’t nothing but help in the kitchen but she was white and we didn’t want to start no trouble, so we obeyed. We was used to rain anyway. Sat in the car till the man got the check. He apologized. If you was black, you stayed back — at that time.”

  179 “Muddy let Cotton run his show”: Trynka interview with Billy Boy Arnold.

  179 “Wolf was better at managing”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.

  180 “unemployment compensation”: Trynka interview with Billy Boy Arnold.

  180 Charlie Musselwhite: He was raised in Memphis, on a road that dead-ended into a creek and a field. Said Musselwhite, “I’d hear people singing blues in those fields. I’d be a little kid playing in the creek, and I’d hear that music — that singing — and man, it just wrapped itself around me.” (Bill Ellis, “Charlie Musselwhite: The Blues Overtook Me,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 9, 1997, Sec. C.) Musselwhite moved to Chicago and drove an exterminator’s truck; he told me, “I got to know the whole city right away. I remember around the Maxwell Street area, seeing a sign for Elmore James. And I’d go back at night and it was such a thrill. I didn’t connect Chicago with blues at all. To me, it was a big city up North where it was easy to get a good-paying job. I’d see these friends of mine going up the hillbilly highway in these old jalopies and then come back a year or two later in a brand-new car. So that looked good to me. Especially after I had been digging ditches over in Arkansas for a buck an hour.” After appearing with Big Walter Horton on a Vanguard Records anthology, Musselwhite released his first solo record, Stand Back!, on Vanguard at age twenty-two. He left Chicago in August of 1967.

  180 Pepper’s Lounge: When the music quit around four, Willie Smith usually hit the basement for some gambling. “That’s where the dice game was,” he said. “The cops used to get in on the game. We knew all the cops on the beat. Some of them later moved off the street into headquarters, and sometimes we’d recognize each other there from Pepper’s basement.”

  182 “You Shook Me”: The track was released as an instrumental for Earl Hooker, “Blue Guitar,” on the Age label.

  183 Blues from Big Bill’s Copa Cabana: Buddy Guy said, “Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, every time I see them they’ll bring that album up and say, ‘This is what turnt me around with the blues.’ They’ll show me those little licks I was doing.” In the 1990s, Clapton had Guy re-create his track “Don’t Know Which Way to Go” on the soundtrack to Rush. “I came up with the song,” Guy said, “and come to hear they gave Willie Dixon credit for writing it.” Around the time of the Big Bill recording, Muddy appeared on two Chicago TV programs, one entitled “For Blacks Only,” and the other, “Jazz Supports the Symphony.”

  Buddy Guy, a sharecropper’s son born in 1936 in the country about sixty miles from Baton Rouge, was raised on acoustic blues. “The first electric guitar I seen in my life was Lightnin’ Slim. I didn’t know what the hell that was. He came out in the country, plugged into a storefront, and started playing John Lee Hooker’s ‘Boogie Chillen.’ I had my allowance, thirty cents, and I put it in his hat. I got to know him.” In 1956, Guy climbed atop his high school roof to watch Muddy’s “Mojo Working” tour.

  183 Folk Singer: A return to the earlier style probably appealed to Leonard too. His interest in the record label and
recording was fading as it became more complex, and he began to branch out. In 1963, he purchased WVON radio, selecting the call letters because they stood for “The Voice of the Negro.”

  184 “Back at his London hotel”: Wilmer, “First Time,” p. 87.

  187 Upon returning to the states: Writer Peter Guralnick drove from Boston to Hunter College in New York for his first opportunity to see Muddy perform, even though it meant staying up all night to drive back.

  Muddy, when he declared that he had a black cat bone and a mojo too, and when he tilted his head to one side, assumed that quizzically stolid look, and roared out, “I just want to make love to you”— Muddy might just as well have been eight feet tall, he was so majestic. On the last number of the set (it was his signature tune, “Got My Mojo Working,”) he corkscrewed out one leg, hitched up his pants, and abandoned himself to a jitterbug, dancing with a concentration all the more remarkable in so stoic and ungainly a man. The crowd went wild. (Peter Guralnick, “Muddy Waters, 1915–1983,” Boston Phoenix, May 10, 1983, Sec. 3)

  Guralnick wrote of Otis Spann:

  . . . a mournful, diminutive, and slightly bewildered-looking man. From his familiar position, half-hidden and pushed into a corner by the oversized grand piano, he would hold court, carrying on a running conversation with the tables around him and offering well-meant, gratuitous advice to an audience that could barely pick up his words. He played with his head flung back, swinging his legs loosely off the floor and facing that piano at an angle with a fine disregard for the microphone. (Guralnick, Highway, p. 289)

  187 “a white is going to get it”: Bloomfield, “An Interview with Muddy Waters,” p. 7.

  188 “From two blocks away”: Ward, Michael Bloomfield, p. 21.

  Marshall Chess said of Mike Bloomfield: “When my dad started making money around the time of Chuck Berry’s ‘Maybelline,’ we moved from the South Side of Chicago to the northern suburbs. Bloomfield went to the same high school, I was a couple of years older. Mike Bloomfield must have been fourteen, and I went over to his house and he had a cherry red Gibson and he was playing Chuck Berry riffs and asking me about Chuck Berry and about music. I brought him a slide from the studio. He had never had a slide.”

  188 “When we started the Rolling Stones”: Obrecht, “Muddy, Wolf, and Me.”

  188 “When I got to hear Muddy Waters”: Bockris, Keith Richards, p. 38.

  The Stones left Chess with an album’s worth of material, initially released as the EP Five X Five. “The Stones had one album out,” Marshall Chess remembered. “I always was a Stones fan, they had something of Chess Records in their sexuality. I felt very comfortable with their music. At that time no one recorded at Chess but Chess artists. Andrew Oldham called me and said, ‘We are coming to America, can we record?’ And I talked to my dad and we let them record. They came to Chicago and I was shocked. They were drinking straight whiskey out of bottles, and Brian Jones had the longest hair. Muddy came by, I remember Willie Dixon, because we were trying to hustle songs to them, by then we understood we could sell hundreds of thousands getting our song in. I took Brian Jones back to his hotel in my 1964 red Porsche convertible. No one in Chicago had ever seen a man with long hair. People started screaming, ‘You homos.’ ” Marshall does not remember Muddy ever painting a ceiling at Chess. He also discounts stories of the family hiring Muddy to bartend at private parties during his lean years.

  188 “We pulled up with the equipment”: Guy and Wilcock, Damn Right, p. 57.

  189 “get your ass down”: Cohodas interview with Billy Davis.

  189 “The Rolling Stones created a whole wide-open space”: Murray, Shots, p. 188.

  190 “Muddy had the best band”: McCulley, “Father and Sons.”

  190 “Talent Deserving of Wider Recognition”: Recognition wasn’t going to feed families, and there were more personnel changes. Willie Smith initially quit in the mid-1960s to make more money hustling a cab. Clay came back, locked horns with Muddy, and left for the final time around 1967, which was when Willie Smith returned. In May of 1963, James Cotton returned to the band, replacing Mojo Buford, who, in his first of several stints, had seen more of the inside of a station wagon than he’d imagined possible. Cotton’s year off proved a learning experience. “I found out during that time I wasn’t a bandleader and people didn’t know who I was, so I went back to Muddy to learn a few things.” When he left again in 1966, George “Harmonica” Smith returned to replace him.

  191 Muddy squeezed in an Apollo gig: “I met Lou Rawls at the Apollo and Gladys Knight and the Pimps (sic),” said Lucille. “Gladys Knight’s brother thought I was Muddy’s daughter, asked Muddy if he could take me out. Muddy told him, ‘This is my wife!’ Sammy Lawhorn got drunk, started cussing and act like he was fixing to jump on Muddy and Bo jumped on him. Bloodied his nose. Muddy cussed him out. Muddy was good for cussing.”

  191 “We were boogying”: Von Schmidt and Rooney, Baby, p. 253.

  192 basis for rock and roll: Buddy Guy toured Europe with 1965’s American Folk Blues Festival, and after playing a song as close to James Brown’s funk as to Muddy’s blues, Buddy explained: “That’s a little touch of the blues,” but then he corrected himself and added, “or should I say Chicago blues,” and then he considered that that definition wasn’t accurate either and added, “with the beat to it.” He used the same words Muddy had used when differentiating his style from his antecedents.

  193 Batt’s Restaurant: “We didn’t have a coffee machine at 2120,” Marshall Chess remembered. “I walked across that fucking street fifty times a day, for my father and Phil, bringing the coffee. We’d go to Batt’s all the time. It was a Jewish restaurant. Chuck would order strawberry shortcake and then bacon and eggs, all backwards. If Muddy came in at lunchtime, ‘Let’s go get a sandwich.’ And we’d walk across the street. We were regulars, every waitress knew us, we had our own tab.”

  193 “I had a lot of people listen at me:” O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”

  194 Muddy, Brass, & the Blues: Most of the songs get in an unadulterated verse or so before the parade comes through. Several of the tracks have, over the years, been issued as “hornless remixes,” and nothing makes plainer how unnecessary the overdubbed instruments are. Spann plays chunky piano parts, knowing the horns will be all over the songs’ turnarounds and spaces; the guitars mostly lay back. “Black Night” breathes like a moonless sky, Cotton’s harp sounding like a distant cicada hopping trees until it’s in Muddy’s backyard.

  194 “My Dog Can’t Bark”: The song was recorded on May 18, 1965, and “Highway 61 Revisited” was recorded on August 2, 1965. Bloomfield was living in Chicago and went to New York for the Dylan sessions.

  194 “you’re going to get a whuppin’ ”: Jones, Melody Maker, p. 29.

  12: ROLLIN’ STONE 1967–1969

  Electric Mud, After the Rain, Marshall Chess, and the Players: “Look,” the Chess Records advertising manager said in 1967, pointing to the inside front cover of a successful teen record magazine. “There’s my first Muddy Waters ad for the teeny boppers.” (Brack, “No Credibility Gap,” p. 62.) Teeny boppers never really happened for Muddy, but the hippies did, a youth market that Marshall Chess reached out to. Marshall was raised in the business. His earliest memory is being tossed by his father to his Uncle Phil when shooting broke out at the Macomba. Wolf urged Marshall early to get laid. “Wolf once told me — and I remember this because I was so little and it was so shocking — ‘The best pussy is wino pussy. You want to take them in the alley and fuck them and then you leave. They don’t be bothering you.’ ”

  Before producing Electric Mud, Marshall had previously packaged straight blues albums in psychedelic covers “to get them into the blues.” The goal was similar for Electric Mud and After the Rain, though the methodology was inverted. The low-key, black-and-white covers don’t hint at the non-Muddy content within, except perhaps for the hideousness of the frog and slime showered on Muddy for After the Rain. (The inner
spread of Electric Mud, however, is very nearly worth the price of admission: a black-and-white photo essay of Muddy having his hair processed at a parlor that boasts, “World’s largest in beauty.” He is regal even with rollers in his hair.)

  When the finished Electric Mud was presented to Muddy, he couldn’t get past the idea that, if it became popular, he would be unable to replicate the sounds from the stage; how, in 1968, could he re-create the backward tape on “Mannish Boy”? Then again, “Chess thought they could make some money off of those,” said Muddy, “and hell I could use some money too.” (Murray, Shots, p. 190.)

  Between the two Muddy sessions, Wolf was brought in for his psychedelic album, an experience he hated. Guitarist Pete Cosey recalled, “When we did the Howlin’ Wolf session, the Wolf was outraged at all those electronics. He was angry. He didn’t consider that the blues. During the sessions he would scowl. Phil Chess came in and tried to console him. Wolf dropped a real good lug on me. I had a real long beard, my shades, a big natural. The Wolf looked at me and he said, ‘Why don’t you take them wah-wahs and all that other shit and go throw it off in the lake — on your way to the barber shop.’ He just wiped all the shit out in one stroke.” Cosey continued, “Charles Stepney’s arrangements were beautifully tight, yet open enough to let the guys do what they do. He had the patterns written; the groove on ‘Herbert Harper’ was locked. The other things were relatively simple by comparison. I did a lot of overdubbing on After the Rain, where on Electric Mud I only overdubbed once or twice. I got to use the bowed guitar on After the Rain, as I did with the Howlin’ Wolf album. I did a little solo bowed guitar on ‘Bottom of the Sea’ and ‘I Am the Blues.’ ‘Rambling Mind,’ when Muddy did that before, he played traditional blues. But Charles utilized a line from a classical piece as a turnaround. The song was in twelve-bar blues, but when we came to the turnaround, instead of using the fifth and the fourth, we played the classical line. That was a really funky groove.”