The New Yorker covered Muddy when he played Mick Jagger’s twenty-ninth birthday party on July 26 at the prestigious St. Ritz Hotel in New York. “Andy Warhol had been taking Polaroid pictures. Lee Radizwill began to take Polaroid pictures. Then Muddy Waters came on with his band.” He dedicated “Hoochie Coochie Man” to the Rolling Stones and to Marshall Chess and Chess Records. “Muddy Waters, businesslike, packed up his equipment after his set was over. He and his musicians sat at a table near the bandstand. Muddy and his band were geared for rapid appearances, rapid setups, and rapid departures. They were on the road. ‘We’ve been in Chicago, we’ve been up to Iowa,’ he said, ‘We’re going out to Washington.’ ” (Trow, “Ahmet Ertegun,” pp. 66–67.) The venue was nice, Muddy later told a New Zealand writer, but said he was most impressed by a naked woman who leapt from a cake and made each breast move in opposite directions. (Nicholls, “Strangers.”)
232 “For a blues band such as Mr. Waters’s”: John S. Wilson, “Blues Band,” New York Times, December 21, 1972.
233 “the essence of the black man in Chi Town”: Bims, “Blues City.”
233 “if they’d thrown me out the fourth one”: Nicholls, “Strangers.”
A few days before departing for a European tour behind the London Sessions, Sammy Lawhorn dove into double trouble. He told Pee Wee Madison he’d had a skirmish with some furniture movers. “The guys said, ‘You got to give us more money.’ He said, ‘I ain’t got no more goddamn money.’ They grabbed him, stripped him down, went through his pockets, locked him in the bathroom. They was trying to figure out what to do with him, and when he heard the guy coming at him, Sammy say he had no choice but just dive out the second-floor window, naked. Broke him all up. He was pretty lucky, though. To live.”
Sammy told Bob Koester (and also Calvin Jones) that he’d come home and someone was robbing his house. They put him in the bathroom and scared him so bad that he jumped out a third-floor window and broke both his legs. Whatever the cause, whatever wrong Sammy had done, the negotiating was over. He was forced out of his clothes and locked in the bathroom for safekeeping. His apartment was ransacked, presumably in search of the goods in question. When nothing was found, Lawhorn heard the thugs discussing his fate. And when a decision about terminating his fate was reached, the two or three stories between him and the ground seemed a much shorter distance than the hell that loomed. And so he leapt. He’d recuperated enough to travel to New Zealand, where a reporter noted his difficulty hobbling to a press conference. “Muddy doesn’t ask much of the band off the stand, but if he does, they do as they’re told.” (Nicholls, “Strangers.”)
235 Geneva died on March 15, 1973: Mike Kappus of the Rosebud Agency, which later booked Muddy, was handling a club in Milwaukee in 1973, and he recalled Muddy playing there the week of Geneva’s death. “Muddy had done a night or two,” said Kappus, “then his wife died and he took a night or two off and he finished the week.” Scott Cameron independently corroborated Kappus’s account. “I said let me call up and cancel it,” said Cameron, “and Muddy says, ‘No, I need to do this.’ I think it probably was better for him emotionally to ride that van to Milwaukee and play that date, release some of this tension, whatever emotional pressure he was under, then ride back home with his band members instead of having to sit in that house all by himself and think about what had just happened.”
Willie Smith’s memory supports Cookie’s claim of Muddy being home. “He called me up that morning,” said Willie Smith. “He told me she was dead, so we wasn’t out. We might have just come in that night or that morning. She had done got to the point where she would go on off in a trance, wasn’t talking, didn’t know nobody.” Muddy’s friend Al Perry came to the funeral. He asked who picked out the plot and was told, “The Old Man had picked that spot out because it was right in the front by the gates so people wouldn’t have to look hard to find him.”
239 Watertoons: Muddy was not fully disentangled from the Arc and Heavy publishing companies at the time, and so he could not put his own name on the Watertoons songs. Instead, he used Cookie’s real name, Amelia Cooper. “I figured,” said Terry Abrahamson, who shared songwriting credit with her, “that a little girl wasn’t writing any of these songs.”
239 “I started to play ‘Can’t Be Satisfied’ ”: Margolin, “Can’t Be Satisfied”; author interview with Bob Margolin.
240 Unk in Funk: It is astonishing that, with expectations high and money spent on these sessions, Chess would release a cut as flawed as this seven-minute version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” which is actually the song played twice. About three minutes in, as the track is winding up, Ralph Bass bursts in, waving his arms and stomping. Startled, the players stop and the song falls apart. “Everybody,” Muddy shouts, “come on in,” and the players resume, running through the song again. Afterward, Bass explained he was trying to throw some excitement into the song. There is some life in the moment — the brief moment — when the song falls apart, but it’s not any musical magic. The seven minutes would have made an interesting outtake; its inclusion, as reviewers noted, just sounded sloppy.
240 Terry Abrahamson: Abrahamson explains how he met Muddy: “I met Muddy at Alice’s in Chicago, a coffeehouse, around 1970. It was a small room, and very narrow. You entered through the front, the stage was at the back, there were seats along the walls, and everybody else sat on the floor. We’d get there early to sit up front. People piled in behind us, so, to use the bathroom, we had to walk across the stage and use the band’s bathroom. I go backstage, start talking to the guys. In between nights, I talked to my dad and he said his friend Hy Marzen used to own a bar where all these guys played. It turned out to be the Zanzibar. So I told Muddy that I grew up down the street from Hy Marzen. Muddy misinterpreted this and thinks I’m Hy’s son, and introduces me like that. I said, ‘No, I’m not Hy Marzen’s son.’ Muddy said, ‘Oh you don’t have to lie to me, boy, he didn’t rip me off that bad.’ ”
Abrahamson pitched his song to Muddy before a gig. “I said, ‘What do you think of this: ‘The men call me Muddy, the women call me Electric Man / When I plug into your socket / I’ll charge you like no one else can.’ He said, ‘That’s good shit, boy, you write that down.’ I was twenty-two years old and I knew that that would be the artistic peak of my life.”
Getting to know Bo proved almost as exciting as getting to know Muddy. “Bo was so entertaining, he was like watching a TV show,” Abrahamson said. “He was black as night, his eyes were little red slits. You didn’t see any eyeball, just little pockets of red, like blood, above his nose. And when he talked, it was a deep growl, and all mumbles. If you didn’t know him, you’d be terrified of this guy. Bo loved to goof on people by getting them scared.” (Bob Margolin said of Bo: “This was when that song ‘Bad Bad Leroy Brown’ came out, and it’s like it was about Bo.”)
240 Jerry Portnoy: Portnoy got to know Muddy through Paul. “He was living in Muddy’s basement and sometimes we’d go upstairs to see Muddy and Muddy would be in his doo rag and watching the Cubs game in the afternoon, drinking champagne. ‘Well, boys, you want a little taste?’ He was drinking champagne. Piper-Heidsieck. I learned from Muddy Waters, my wine expert.”
241 “You don’t know how happy I am”: Litke, “TV Tribute,” p. 15.
241 He played Montreux: The 1974 Montreux set is available on the videotape Messin’ with the Blues.
241 “It should have been just another show”: Margolin, “Can’t Be Satisfied.”
243 “I got my favorite blues singer”: Jones, “Superstar.”
243 “I’ll have to tell the truth, you’re from down in that way”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
Muddy charmed Margaret McKee. “Just thank God I’m living. I’m fifty-eight years old, an old man. Cute, too.” On the tape, he said “cute, too,” in a practiced way; this line has worked before. And he delivers it with a pause, after which, sure enough, she giggles like a little girl.
245 had r
ecently sued Arc Music: Howlin’ Wolf’s lawsuit in Blues News, Living Blues, summer 1974.
Wolf’s suit was settled — after his death on January 10, 1976 — for an undisclosed amount. Toward the end of his career, Wolf, despite growing kidney problems — his touring schedule was built around cities with dialysis facilities — was not retiring. “It wasn’t unusual to see Wolf take one tune and play it for a half hour, maybe longer, and only remember two or three stanzas of the song,” said Bob Koester. “We didn’t mind, you know.” Reviewing a Wolf gig at the Chicago Amphitheater, Dick Shurman wrote in Living Blues, “Wolf summoned all his energy to stalk around, clown with the mike, and sing and play harp forcefully. His was the night’s most gutbucket set, and the audience returned the enthusiasm to show that down-home blues still hits hard in ’75.” (Shurman, “Howlin’ Wolf.”)
246 Mandingo: The internationally known film composer Maurice Jarre, who had scored Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago, requested Muddy’s contribution to the scoring of the James Mason film Mandingo, directed by Richard Fleischer. The job involved singing their words, accompanied by banjo, ukulele, and washboard, in synchronization with images on the screen. Muddy practiced his reading on his wife’s lists at the grocery store; it required all his effort and he could not simultaneously comprehend the words. As much as he tried to familiarize himself with the material, he could not get comfortable in the movie situation — keeping his eyes on the paper, on the screen, and on the other players. “They worked with him a little bit,” said Cameron. “It wasn’t cut and dry like you’d have to sync to a commercial, there was some space for timing errors or phrasings. I think they probably had a lot more material that they could have used, but it was very hard for him to do things in sync with the film.”
247 Bottom Line. Bob Dylan: Al Perry was backstage with Muddy. “Victoria was in heaven, saying, ‘It’s like old times, Bob’s living in my apartment, sleeping on the floor.’ ” She and Bob got up and played. Oscher was on the gig — playing piano — because Pine had broken his wrist. After the show, Oscher and Jerry Portnoy accompanied Dylan and his entourage to Victoria Spivey’s house. “He asked me if I wanted to go on his Rolling Thunder thing,” said Oscher, “so I gave him my number. But my phone was disconnected two days later.”
248 “tired of being sold to everybody”: Murray, Shots, p. 191.
All Platinum held a sale at the 320 E. Twenty-first Chess building, though tens of thousands of albums were left afterward. They hired day workers, gave them chainsaws, and the contents of the building and warehouse were destroyed.
14: HARD AGAIN 1976–1983
Hard Again: Johnny Winter gave his engineer a crash course in blues sounds. “I spent almost twenty-four hours playing him blues records and telling him what I liked. It was real important we got the right sound.” Bob Margolin brought a portable cassette player to the sessions and some homemade tapes of Muddy’s original recordings. “They were mostly recorded from bootleg albums because Chess did not have official releases on the market.”
“We didn’t practice,” said Muddy. “We just got in there and we’d run over a song and put it down. We caught it.” (Obrecht, “Bluesman.”) Said Willie Smith, “Wasn’t like it would take a whole year to figure out. Figure out a pattern, work on it a little, and take it. Once you’ve been playing with a band long enough to know what each other are going to do, hell, you just do it. The Chesses, they was slave-driving in the studio, cussing one another to get you pissed off enough so you could put all you had into it. With Johnny Winter, it was like day and night.”
As the sessions wound down, and the feeling had lasted for so long and translated so well to magnetic tape, both Bob and Johnny wanted to test the waters of the way-old school: acoustic guitars. Mud sat between them — three across on stools — and they knocked out his 1941 songs again: “I Feel Like Going Home” and “I Can’t Be Satisfied.” At the start of the 1970s, Muddy said in an interview, “I try to play straight as I can so the band can follow, but songs like ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied,’ I don’t think nobody never been able to half follow that but Spann. That’s why I don’t ever try to play it since I got a band.” (Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.) But he’s singing that sucker now, boy, the lead licks on an acoustic National steel guitar, Son Sims rising from his grave to shuck corn, the tractor engine revving. Johnny and Bob began discussing another take. Muddy was finished. “He didn’t want a bunch of extra songs floating around,” said Johnny. “The Chess people had put out so much of his extra stuff on albums, and he wanted to get paid for everything he did.”
The sessions jolted Johnny Winter, made him reconsider the direction of his life. “Working with Muddy made me realize that blues was what I wanted to do. Rock and roll was okay, but blues was my first love. I might not make as much money as a rock and roll player, but blues made me happier.” Johnny brought the Hard Again band to Westport to back him on his own album, Nothing but the Blues. Muddy stopped by to lay down lead vocals on a bouncing version of “Walking thru the Park.”
Last Waltz: As The Last Waltz approached, unbeknownst to Muddy, his role was jeopardized. “It was mind-blowing,” Levon Helm said. “That was just bullshit.” In his autobiography, This Wheel’s on Fire, he expounded:
Two days before the show, our studio manager tried to talk to me. He was one of the boys on the other side of the desk. I could tell from the awful look on his face that there was some problem, and he’d been delegated to deal with me. . . . This flunky said, “Um, we’ve all discussed it, and we’re thinking about, ah, maybe, you know, taking Muddy off the show.” I just looked at him. “Anyway, we were hoping maybe you could talk to Muddy for us.”
There was silence for an awful thirty seconds. I was trying to get a grip before I answered, before I lost control. We were all under tremendous pressure because of this movie. The whole damn thing had been hijacked to the nth degree. I had to clear my throat before I could speak. “Not only will I talk to Muddy,” I managed, as I began to get worked up, “but I will also take Muddy back to New York, and we will do the goddamn Last Waltz in New York. Him and me. That’s right.” Now I was getting going. “Yes, I’ll talk to Muddy, you no-good, low-grade sumbitch! Now get the hell out of my sight, before I have some of these here Arkansas boys stomp you to death!” (Helm with Davis, This Wheel’s on Fire, p. 261)
The Band rented the Miyako Hotel, near the Winterland venue, for its guests and held a rehearsal there the day before the show. Dr. John noted: “I really wish they had filmed during Muddy Waters’s rehearsal, and I just wish somebody had filmed the guitar players in the room watching Muddy, with their jaws hanging open while this guy is playing ‘Nine Below Zero.’ . . . There were so many great guitar players there — Robbie Robertson, Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Stephen Stills — and the looks on the faces of those guys was worth the price of admission for me!” (Skelly, “Muddy Waters.”)
The Last Waltz had, as showbiz events are wont to do, become something larger than itself, including a feature film to be directed by Martin Scorsese. “Joni Mitchell introduced herself to Muddy and he definitely hit on her without knowing she was famous, which made her laugh,” said Margolin. “She was heartbreakingly beautiful and attractive. In the dressing room, Pinetop told me, ‘I hear one of the Beatles is here,’ but didn’t realize that he was sitting next to Ringo. Kinky Friedman assured Muddy that ‘Jews love the blues.’ He was wearing a white satin smoking jacket with blue Jewish stars on it and embroidered scenes of the Crucifixion. Muddy just smiled at another weirdo talking nonsense.”
Though it seems intentional, the intensity with which Muddy was filmed was a matter of circumstance. “I noticed that they didn’t seem to be shooting Muddy,” Helm wrote. “Later we realized that because of some fuck-up, all but one camera had been turned off. We almost missed his entire segment. As he was walking offstage, I stood up to applaud, and Muddy grabbed my head in his big hands and kissed my forehead! What a feeling!” (Helm with Davis,
This Wheel’s on Fire, p. 264.)
The next year, between gigs in Los Angeles, Muddy, Marva, and Scott Cameron left the Hyatt Hotel in a cab to attend a matinee showing of The Last Waltz at a theater on Sunset Boulevard. “That was incredible,” said Scott. “I was watching Muddy. They flashed him on that big screen up there and his chin just hit his chest. His mouth dropped. I don’t think he could have believed how big he looked.”
I’m Ready: “You could tell they were old friends,” said Johnny Winter about Muddy and Jimmy Rogers, “but they didn’t talk too much about the old days. They didn’t have time to do much talking in the studio. We worked from one song to the next. Again, nobody ever did any arranging. I asked, ‘Do one of y’all want to play the top part and another play the bottom part?’ and they laughed and said, ‘No, we just play what we feel like.’ They thought it was funny to even care.”
I’m Ready brought a welcome boost to Jimmy Rogers’s career. Since the start of the 1970s, he had resumed gigging, putting out an album on Shelter Records with Leon Russell and Denny Cordell. He was not at all interested in another stint with Mr. Chess, alive or dead. Initially, things had gone well. “Get a gig now, you ask the guy for five thousand dollars and he just smiles. ‘Okay, if that’s all.’ But during that time, if you ask them for five hundred, they’d holler.” (O’Neal and Greensmith, “Jimmy Rogers.”)
By the latter part of the decade, however, he was gigging less. Following the recording of I’m Ready, he and Big Walter stayed together for a while. They played spots from Boston to Austin and around Chicago, including the better-paying gigs on the North Side; streaking was the rage, and dancers often shed their clothes. And when I’m Ready was released in early 1978, Jimmy hit the road with the recording band. The higher profile led to a new recording contract, this time with Chicago’s Delmark Records.
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