During a lull in April, Muddy stayed home and Pinetop, Guitar Jr., and Bob hit the road with a Washington, D.C., blues band, the Nighthawks, billing themselves as Jacks and Kings. With Margolin’s former band mate and Spann protege Dave Maxwell, they would all guest on the Nighthawks’ next album, titled Jacks and Kings.
The Legendary Band: Most of the old band regrouped as The Legendary Band and promptly had a recording contract and a tour booked. They hit the road running. Willie Smith still saw Muddy on the South Side; he bought a house a few doors down from Muddy’s. “He was living in Westmont but he still used to come over,” said Willie. “He’d sit down and talk like we always did. The Legendary Band was traveling pretty heavy ourselves, we didn’t never really settle down.”
“I lived near Washington, D.C., then,” said Margolin, “and had started my own band. Around November, I heard that Muddy was coming to town, so I called the club and tried to arrange to open the show. The booker knew that I had left Muddy and said he’d have to check with Muddy’s management to make sure they didn’t mind. They didn’t, and Muddy later told me that he had been asked personally, and approved. As always, playing in front of Muddy for me was like a kid trying to make Daddy proud. I closed my set with the early Little Walter tune ‘I Just Keep Lovin’ Her,’ and when I came back into the dressing room, Muddy leaped up, put his hands on my shoulders, and said, ‘I haven’t heard that song in thirty years! You’re keeping the old school alive!’ It’s the most valuable compliment I’ve ever had.”
Jerry Portnoy visited Muddy in Westmont soon after The Legendary Band’s first album. When Muddy opened the door, he gave Portnoy a big hug. “Muddy already had the album and he was proud of us. That hug, he made it right between us.”
Muddy’s Musical Secrets: During Muddy’s comeback, educated interviewers formed lines to interview him. This resulted in detailed information about his performing style; the following quotes are culled from Tom Wheeler’s “Waters–Winter Interview” in Guitar Player. “I play in mostly standard [tuning],” said Muddy, “because it’s tough if you’re waiting in between songs to tune to G or A. And I’m too lazy to carry two or three guitars around like Johnny Winter.” Muddy favored strings made by Gibson. “I got a heavy hand,” he said. “A lot of guys want to squeeze and bend their strings up, like B. B., so they have the strings real low. My strings are heavy, like a .012 or a .013 for the first one [the skinniest one, nearest his toes] up to .056 for the last [the one nearest his face]. I don’t need to worry about bending, because I can slide so high up there.” One of his tricks was to replace the wound third string with a plain .022-gauge. Muddy used a short slide on his pinky finger because he never needed to cover more than three strings — usually just one. Winter explained, “Sometimes I play a whole chord [covering all six strings], so the size of the slide makes a difference.”
As crucial as a guitar is to defining a player’s sound, Muddy put the emphasis on the amplifier:
“I think on any guitar, if I could make a note on it, you could still know it’s Muddy,” he said. “But I really can’t do nothing with other people’s guitars. A lot of the sound is the amp. I’d rather always use my own amplifier. It’s the Fender with the four ten-inch speakers, the Super. Even if I forgot my own guitar and had to borrow one, I could make the sound come out of that amplifier. I don’t like the Twin — different sound. I like some of Johnny’s amps. They’re Music Mans and them little guys is tough.” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter”)
Margolin said, “Muddy ran his amps with all the knobs set on nine and no reverb or tremolo, controlling his volume from the guitar.” (Author interview with Bob Margolin.)
“Muddy loved that real trebly Telecaster sound,” said Johnny, “and he got a great sound out of his treble pickup. Sometimes during a verse, maybe just going into the turnaround, [he] will switch the toggle from the bass or middle position to full treble and just let ’em have it. Muddy would tune his guitar to an E chord and put his capo wherever it needed to go.
“You can’t exaggerate how distinctive Muddy’s playing is,” Johnny continued. “In my band, if I stop playing, the main feeling keeps on going, but when Muddy stops, the whole feeling can change.” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter.”)
“When I play on the stage with my band,” Muddy confirmed, “I have to get in there with my guitar and try to bring the sound down to me. But no sooner than I quit playing, it goes back to another, different sound. My blues looks so simple, so easy to do, but it’s not. They say my blues is the hardest blues in the world to play.” (Palmer, Deep Blues.)
249 “This is a big time for me tonight”: Random Notes, Rolling Stone, May 20, 1976.
250 “Johnny Winter”: Johnny Winter had made a lasting impression with Muddy when they’d met in 1968. “I told him the truth then. ‘Man, you got to go places, because ain’t many white kids sounding like you at playing music.’ He’s albino white, he’s not jiving white, he all white!” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter.”)
250 Muddy assembled a band: Muddy’s regular bassist, Calvin Jones, was indifferent about being excluded. “It didn’t make me no difference. It didn’t make me a bit of difference.” It also wouldn’t have made a drastic difference to his pocketbook, and recognition didn’t buy cans of food.
251 “the greatest Saturday-night drummer alive”: Author interview with Scott Cameron.
251 “Every country has its own music”: Palmer, Deep Blues, p. 104.
252 “What I really wanted to do as a producer”: von Lehmden, “Muddy Waters’ Winter of Content,” p. 28.
253 Muddy waltzed across the globe: He opened a string of dates for Bonnie Raitt in the Pacific Northwest. “By the mid–nineteen seventies, Bonnie wanted opening acts of people whose music she really loved,” said Dick Waterman, her longtime manager. “She wanted to come to the gig and sit and listen to Fred McDowell or Sippie Wallace. She was initially uncomfortable with having Muddy Waters open for her. She said, ‘This should not be.’ We won her over by explaining he was being paid all the money that he was asking, and we were giving him visibility and a bigger crowd. Instead of a club, he’s playing for three thousand five hundred and getting better sound and lights. And Bonnie would say on her set, ‘I can’t tell you how honored I am to have this artist on this show with me.’ ” The arrangement worked and was repeated several times in different locales.
255 the manager got the rest: Even as Muddy leaned on Scott, he was concerned about the support’s strength. On a trip to Mexico City, Muddy had asked Willie Dixon — also signed with Cameron — and Dixon’s wife, Marie, to his room. “He said, ‘I have some suspicions about Scott,’ ” Marie Dixon recalled. The discussion was vague. Later, Dixon developed his own suspicions, which led to severing his relationship with the Cameron Organization. “When my husband decided to fight Arc Music,” said Marie Dixon, “his intention was to become owner of his songs. He looked at his contract with Scott, and it gave Scott one-third ownership of the songs for the life of the songs. I was standing in my living room when he told Scott Cameron, ‘I wrote these songs for myself and my family and not for anyone else and their families.’ He didn’t mind paying a manager to manage his business, but when it came to giving a third of what was his, it infuriated him.”
256 “I got a band and they’re on vacation”: von Lehmden, “Muddy Waters’ Winter of Content,” p. 28.
258 “They wanted me and my band”: Sweet Home Chicago, produced by Nina Rosenstein, directed by Alan Raymond.
258 “Muddy Waters is one of the great performers”: Obrecht, “Life and Times.”
259 “Eric Clapton”: In Minneapolis, on the Clapton tour, arrangements were made for Muddy’s former guitarist, Pat Hare, to surprise his old boss with a visit. Hare had kept up his chops in prison. Accompanied by an armed guard, Hare enjoyed Muddy’s set from the side of the stage. At the encore, “Got My Mojo Working,” Margolin loaned Hare his axe and the pair reunited for a last time. Pat Hare died in St. Paul’s Ramsey Hospital on
September 26, 1980, a day after learning he was to receive a medical pardon. (Hahn, “Pat Hare.”)
260 Muddy married Marva Jean Brooks: Muddy had a favorite produce store on the South Side, Seventy-first and State Streets. “He always thought they had the freshest greens and the nicest cuts of meat,” Cameron said. “Then Willie Dixon turned us on to a place at the state line between Illinois and Indiana where a woman grew corn-fed beef and you’d buy a quarter or a half a cow, they’d cut it up the way you wanted and then freeze it, you’d take it home to your freezer.”
Johnny stayed around Chicago until Clapton’s tour with Muddy played Chicago on the twelfth. Muddy surprised the audience by bringing out Johnny Winter, and then Clapton surprised the audience by bringing out both. The stage was, briefly, a living family tree of blues, Muddy and two of his proteges, each having synthesized their diverse backgrounds — Texas and England — with Muddy’s Delta licks and taken the music in different and popular directions.
When Muddy played the Chicagofest, John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd were in town shooting the Blues Brothers movie. They sought out Muddy to pay their respects. A few years later, when Mike Kappus visited Muddy in Westmont, they watched Aykroyd and Belushi in Neighbors.
261 “contract rider”: In addition to money, some of the other stipulations of Muddy’s contract were a deli tray for twelve people, beer, soft drinks, Perrier, ice, cups, and sugar-free soft drinks.
262 “The uncomfortable business situation”: Author interview with Bob Margolin.
264 new band: Jesse Clay was the first drummer, briefly. Rogers’s role was never intended to be more than temporary. “But Scott wanted it to be a permanent thing and he put it in the Jet that we were back together again,” Rogers said, “and that was wrong. I was just doing Muddy a favor. Muddy meant a lot to me.”
Guitarist John Primer had been tutored by Sammy Lawhorn. “Sammy helped me to set the tone on the amp,” he explained, “and he was the one that got me into playing slide. Sammy was playing slide in standard tuning and I learned how to play like that from him. I got to the point where I could play in his place when he’d get drunk.” (Peabody, “Primer.”)
265 “It was hard to believe”: Stephen Holden, New York Times, April 1, 1981. (Actually sixty-eight years old.)
265 When the Rolling Stones next returned to Chicago: “I was living down the street from [Muddy],” said Cookie, “and he called me to say he was cooking wine chicken. We all thought he could cook it really good, and he said one of the Rolling Stones [Keith Richards] was over and for me to come.” Here’s his wine chicken recipe, with thanks to the official Muddy Web page, www.muddywaters.com:
• 1 medium chicken, cut up and washed
• tsp salt
• tsp garlic salt
• tsp black pepper
• tsp seasoning (i.e., Accent)
• cup diced onions
• cup white wine
Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Place chicken in baking dish, skin side up. Add the remaining ingredients and bake for one hour, until golden brown. Baste occasionally. The wine should reduce down to a savory sauce.
15: THIS DIRT HAS MEANING 1983 and After
Funeral, Friends, Tributes: “I hate that Muddy wasn’t a storyteller no more than bits and pieces,” Cookie said. “If you said to Muddy, ‘Where’s your mom?’ He’d say, ‘She died.’ And that was it. Muddy never opened up. I know he loved his grandmother, he told me that several times. When I got older, I tried that psychology bit, saying to him one time, ‘You must really didn’t do well with the death of your mother and then your grandmother,’ I said, ‘and I know how you felt because my mother died when I was young.’ And he’s giving me that look like, ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ And I said, ‘You know I always regretted that you never had pictures, you never had anything to say this is who that is,’ and he said, ‘Well it was just something we couldn’t afford, pictures, and it was just something we did.’ And we left it like that because I could see it was touchy.”
Before the funeral service on Wednesday evening, May 4, Muddy’s family and close friends were gathered in the small room where Muddy was laid out. Margolin passed by an old gentleman who was seated in the corner. “He asked me, ‘Did you even know Muddy?’ I ignored his attitude and replied that I had played in his band. He trumped me. ‘Well, I knew him in Mississippi,’ but then he noticed George Thorogood standing nearby and he got very excited and asked, ‘Isn’t that Mick Jagger?’ ”
Seven of Muddy’s children were mentioned in his funeral program: Joseph, Mercy, Renee, Roslind, Charles (Geneva’s son), Deltwaine (Marva’s son), and Larry. No one I spoke with, including Muddy’s estate, could identify “Larry” (Laurence, Muddy’s grandson, was mentioned elsewhere in the program) nor could anyone identify “Poppa.” How many children did Muddy have? Here’s one answer: he and Geneva raised three — Charles, Dennis, and Amelia. I count six blood children — Azelene, Bill, Mercy, Joseph, Renee, and Roslind.
“The worst thing to happen to my family was when my father died,” Joseph said. “We didn’t have that backbone no more to put some weight on. Before he died, I signed my basketball scholarship on April 13. Coming back after my first year of college, [Muddy’s last wife] Marva decided to move back to Florida, and she’s taking Roslind with her, and Renee got married to some guy, she was moving. I didn’t see Mercy much. Those first five years, I kind of clung to Cookie, because it was a base. But I’ve seen everything change. Gangs was in my house and in my neighborhood. If my father wouldn’t have moved me out of that house, I would have been a Blackstone Ranger for real. Definitely a Stone. I probably would be dead or in prison. So in a sense he saved my life actually.” Being Muddy’s heir has not been easy for him. “Some people try to become your friends, but they’re not being honest. Even dating girls, I was proud to let everybody know who my father is. Now I don’t tell no one, because it’s for the wrong reasons. I learned that the hard way.”
Junior Wells credited Muddy with his success. “Muddy showed me how to carry myself around people and to remember that didn’t nobody owe me nothin’ and knowin’ not to get the big head or anything like that,” Wells told Living Blues. (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters,” pp. 16–17.) “He told me it could take sometime years to get a thing to go for yourself and then sometime you could get it quicker than that and then lose the same thing overnight. He’d say, ‘Always remember, whatever you do, do not disrespect the public.’ ” My own experience with Junior was a bit different. When I saw him on a small stage in the 1980s, he was touring with a sizable band and playing James Brown–styled funk. He was doing two shows that evening. At the first, he fired his trombone player on stage, hitting him in the jaw; then he called the sound man a “fat fuck.” I didn’t stick around to hear how the second set sounded.
“I have a guitar that Muddy gave me, an old Stella,” Jimmy Rogers told me. “It was down in his basement and the neck was broken so I had it fixed. And after the funeral I looked at that guitar and the neck was broken where I had it fixed.” When Jimmy died, he was working on an album for Atlantic Records, released after his death with the title Blues Blues Blues. On it, Rogers juggles the baton with some old friends — Clapton, members of the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin — and passes it to Jeff Healey and other relative newcomers. Perhaps most importantly, before he died, Rogers saw the blues pay off and he was able to enjoy his life. “When I’m goin’ after a fish, I don’t care how big he is, I’ll keep at it. I go to different places around in Illinois, places where I usually have a chance to run out there for three or four hours. I fish for cats, crappies, bass, and stuff like that. . . . And Dorothy [his wife] hangs right there with me.”
After Muddy’s death, Bob Margolin gave back some of what he’d learned, befriending Muddy’s son Big Bill Morganfield and coproducing Bill’s first album. They often tour together. “It seems like interest in Muddy is very much alive these days,” Margolin said. “Bill and I did lots of inter
views and there were as many questions about Muddy as about us. It’s a tribute to Muddy’s power that people are still trying to get in touch with Muddy through us.”
The tributes to Muddy keep on coming. The Blues Foundation, in addition to including Muddy in its inaugural Hall of Fame lineup, has honored many of his recordings. In the Hall of Fame Classics of Blues Recordings Singles, Muddy has five songs: “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “Got My Mojo Working,” “I’m Ready,” “Mannish Boy,” and “Long Distance Call.” In the Albums category, they have included The Best of Muddy Waters, McKinley Morganfield AKA Muddy Waters, and Muddy Waters — The Chess Box. In addition, they have honored several reissues of his recordings.
While Muddy would certainly have been honored by these various accolades, the lasting tribute that may have been nearest his heart is found in a book entitled 365 Ways to Improve Your Sex Life: From the Files of the Playboy Advisor (James Petersen, ed.). They quote a correspondent, “W. G.” from Kansas City, Missouri, who writes about a technique called the “Venus Butterfly.”
Take your penis, hard or soft, in hand and, starting at the south end of the vagina, gently rub the head into the groove of the vagina, lightly sliding it up towards the clitoris. Now reverse the process and slide slowly back down. Repeat. After a few gentle repetitions, the labia should begin to unfold, with the cleft moistening. If it wasn’t hard when you began, the penis should now begin to harden. Now you have prepared yourself and your partner for the Venus Butterfly. Gently work the shaft lengthwise into the fold of the vagina. This is when you achieve the likeness of the butterfly, with the shaft of the penis as its head and abdomen and the labia as its wings. What’s more, even the smallest penis will adequately stimulate the largest vagina and the smallest vagina will accommodate the largest of penises.
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