Can't Be Satisfied (31 page)

Buddy Guy had come to Muddy’s attention shortly after his arrival from Louisiana. Muddy had Bo drive him to the 708 Club, then waited in the red station wagon while Bo fetched Guy.
“I walked out and he was sitting in a station wagon in the front seat, so I attempted to get in the back,” Guy writes in his autobiography,
Damn Right I’ve Got the Blues
.
“ ‘Don’t get in the back. Get in the front,’ he said. So I got in the front. And he’s sitting up there eating a baloney sandwich. ‘Go ahead on, get you some
baloney,’ he said. ‘Make a sandwich.’ So I started thinking, ‘This cat here is better than I thought he was.’ I thought he was going to be saying, ‘Look man,
I’m Muddy Waters.’ But he was down to earth and I thought, ‘Wow, what else can you ask for?’ ”

Chess remained anxious to capitalize on the folk craze; Muddy’s
Folk Singer
album, recorded in September of 1963, was probably named before it was recorded. But now young whites
looking for more passion in their music increasingly turned toward the blues. Rock and roll had dissipated from the force of “Great Balls of Fire” and “Hound Dog” in the
mid-1950s to “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” and “Let’s Do the Twist” in 1960; the British Invasion was still nascent.

Chess’s next concept was to record Muddy with either a peer or one of his mentors, both on acoustic guitars. For Leonard, it was a return to 1947, when he’d first recorded Muddy
— something in the Lightnin’ Hopkins or John Lee Hooker vein. The idea must have appealed to Muddy, certainly more so than another twist record. Besides, he was returning to England in
October and needed to brush
up on his acoustic guitar; he wasn’t making the same mistake of playing a screaming guitar over there again.

The resulting album is an intimate, if imperfect, portrait of Muddy. The sounds are crisp, clean, and close; the microphones have been chosen and placed with care. Sensing the possibilities,
Muddy accents his singing with hums and moans, the occasional side comment, and whispered lines. It is mostly great listening, though running underneath and surfacing occasionally (“My
Captain,” for example) is the sense that maintaining the conceit of his nearness has deflected Muddy’s attention and diminished his feeling.

The next month, October of 1963, Muddy returned to Europe with the second American Folk Blues Festival, an annual tour that ran into the early 1970s. In London, the first of the seventeen dates
— they’d also play Belgium, Germany, France, and Denmark — Muddy strode on stage and sat down. He strummed his acoustic guitar, perhaps mentioned how nice it was to be back, and
then he moaned his way into the recently cut but as yet unissued “My Captain.” Applause was not thunderous. Holding back nothing, he reached into his repertoire for a surefire winner
and delivered a deep, solo version of “Rollin’ Stone.” Response was polite. Then the band joined him for quiet versions of “Five Long Years,” “Blow Wind
Blow,” “Trouble No More,” “My Home Is in the Delta,” and “Mojo.”

“Back at his London hotel after the concert, sharing a bottle of Johnny Walker with Memphis Slim, Matt ‘Guitar’ Murphy, and me, [Muddy] sat shaking his head in
disbelief,” recounted photographer Val Wilmer. “His wide, fine-featured face with its high New World Indian cheekbones seldom betrayed his emotions; now a look of genuine puzzlement
disturbed it. Just what did they want, these [British] white folks? He’d brought along the acoustic guitar they’d demanded. He’d given them the old down-home country blues this
time — and now all they could ask him was, ‘Why’d you leave the Telecaster behind?’ ”

Show after show he tried to win them over, but found that while Americans were digging the rootsier acoustic sounds, the British were still catching up with Muddy’s
last
visit,
buying electric guitars
and cranking their amps. Muddy’s catalog had become widely available in England through an improved licensing and distribution deal Chess struck
with Pye Records in 1959. Muddy was unaware of his influence; one British band (with David Bowie) was named the Manish Boys (maintaining the typo on the original release’s label), another was
The Mojos, and a third was the Rolling Stones, who’d already achieved a hit covering Chuck Berry’s “Come On,” with Muddy’s “I Want to Be Loved” on the flip
side.

Anxious to crank his axe and rejuvenate his former image, he readily agreed to return to England in the spring of 1964. This tour would run a couple weeks, climax with a TV special, then hit
Paris for a night. Dubbed “The Blues and Gospel Train,” it also featured Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Reverend Gary Davis, Cousin Joe Pleasant from New
Orleans, and Otis Spann. Joe Boyd was hired as tour manager; he had just finished his studies at Harvard, where, using the space beneath his dorm bed as a warehouse, he’d become the
Boston-area distributor for Delmark Records. Boyd went on to become a pioneer of folk-rock, producing artists as diverse as Fairport Convention, Pink Floyd, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and REM; he
also founded the Hannibal label. “I’ve been associated with a lot of interesting things since this tour,” he said, “but in my view of my career in the music business, it was
hard to top that first job. I’ve never really been associated with anything that beat it.”

Like the
Folk Singer
sessions that had anticipated the sound of his 1963 tour, the two songs Muddy cut a couple weeks before leaving in 1964 indicated this year’s audience would
find Muddy in top form. “The Same Thing” and “You Can’t Lost What You Ain’t Never Had” were a return to the blues that had put Chicago on the map. “What
make men go crazy when a woman wear her dress so tight?” Muddy asks in the first line of “The Same Thing” (writing credited to Dixon). The music is a perfect accompaniment,
haunting and dark, energetically restrained and full of latent power. Pee Wee Madison makes his first studio appearance, his inexperience serving him perfectly as a rhythm player; no sparks or West
Side flash distract. There’s also no harmonica player, which forces Muddy’s slide
guitar to the fore. He shies not one bit from the challenge, establishing the
song’s mood with his opening guitar solo — exactly four notes, letting each one pierce like a knife puncture’s pain, pushing the lingering sound with his slide as if twisting the
weapon.

Less than three weeks later, on April 29, Muddy was on a stage in Bristol, two hundred miles from London, a crowd filling the large hall. For Joe Boyd, the tour’s first night was a
watershed experience. “Here were these guys who could barely fill a 150-seat coffeehouse in America and there the hall, with nearly 2,000 seats, was packed. Teenage girls were queuing outside
the dressing room for Muddy’s autograph. The kids were knowledgeable and really into it.”

After a show at the Hammersmith Odeon, some students came backstage for autographs and invited the players to a party in the suburbs. Spann, always up for a good time, accepted when told there
would be girls. Reverend Gary Davis too. Boyd joined them, and Muddy came along. “There were all these students gawking and for a split second I think Muddy got the idea that there might be
some pussy here,” said Boyd. “He started chatting with some girl but I think he realized that it probably wasn’t on, that this was a bunch of innocent kids who were just blues
fans. He always maintained this extraordinary dignity.”

Spann began doing a featured spot, and on May 4, one of two days off, cut an album for English Decca,
Half Ain’t Been Told,
backed by Muddy, Ransom Knowling, and Willie Smith
(produced by Mike Vernon). A casual and relaxed session, the kinship between Muddy and Otis is easy to hear; with only a small rhythm section, the two exchange licks and riffs like old friends
sharing a bottle, Muddy careful not to steal the spotlight. True to the Muddy band tradition, Spann cut a rocking version of the contemporary hit “Pretty Girls Everywhere,” changing the
verb from “see” to the more autobiographical “got”: “Everywhere I go / I got a pretty girl there.”

From outside, the blues world seemed small and intimate. But Joe Boyd realized from the start that the narrative he’d constructed about the artists was just that: a construct. “It
came as a great shock to me that they didn’t really know each other’s music. Brownie and Sonny
knew Gary from New York and from South Carolina but Cousin Joe was
from another planet. The Chicago guys knew each other but Ransom wasn’t that close to Muddy or Otis particularly. These were disparate universes that had no connection.

“The first morning in the hotel, Sister Rosetta and her manager/husband — she had a fur coat and he had a camel hair — she found herself sitting across the table from Reverend
Gary. I thought, ‘Well these two will get along because they’re from this deep South gospel tradition.’ Gary, he orders two fried eggs and he kind of feels the plate —
he’s blind — picks up one of the fried eggs and has yolk spilling down his front and drops it in his mouth. Sister Rosetta went, ‘Puhlease!’ She said, ‘I don’t
ever want to sit at the same table as that man again.’ ”

Nevertheless, the disparate musicians began to draw together. On May 7, in an abandoned railway station, Granada TV staged a concert; it was Muddy’s second appearance on English television
within a year. “By the end,” said Boyd, “Rosetta had done a 180-degree turn on Gary and decided he was the deepest man she had ever met. The last night she told me, ‘When he
does “Precious Lord,” get me a microphone off stage.’ He starts into this incredible version and Rosetta is on her knees backstage moaning right straight out of Arkansas, like
she’d sang with her mother. Gary heard the voice and said, ‘Sing it, Rosetta.’ It was just incredible. And Muddy was in the wings watching all of this. I vividly remember him
doing ‘Long Distance Call’ and he drew out that line ‘another mule kicking in my stall’ for ages, shaking his head from side to side. It was the height of the blues
boom.”

Upon returning to the states, Muddy played some East Coast dates, dancing his jitterbug. “I have a feeling a white is going to get it and really put over the blues,”
Muddy told guitarist Michael Bloomfield in a 1964 interview. “I know they feel it, but I don’t know if they can deliver the message.”

Muddy had seen Bloomfield around South Side clubs since the
late 1950s, when the teenager used to take a bus and two trains to see — or hear — his hero.
“From two blocks away, you’d hear that harmonica,” said Bloomfield, “and then you’d hear Muddy’s slide, and I’d be like a dog in heat.” When the
doorman refused entrance to the kids, they sat outside and listened. One time Muddy came out and shook their hands.

In England, there was a generation of kids who’d have relished being turned away from the door of a South Side club. All they had was the vinyl experience, none of the flesh, none of the
smoke or the spilled drinks or the ladies hiking up their dresses and dancing dirty, cinder-block buildings made intimate by beer signs and precious little light.

“When we started the Rolling Stones, we were just little kids, right?” said Stones guitarist Keith Richards. “We felt we had some of the licks down, but our aim was to turn
other people on to Muddy Waters.”

Indeed, the band had formed after Richards bumped into Mick Jagger, who was carrying two albums: Chuck Berry’s
Rockin’ at the Hops
and
The Best of Muddy Waters
.
“When I got to hear Muddy Waters,” said Richards, “it all fell into place for me. He was the thing I was looking for, the thing that pulled it all in for me. When I heard him I
realized the connection between all the music I’d heard. He made it all explainable. He was like a codebook. I was incredibly inspired by him as a musician.”

The Rolling Stones named themselves after Muddy’s song and began performing in 1962. Their first album included the lead track from Muddy’s
The Best of,
“I Just Want
to Make Love to You.” (The success of the Stones’ album meant a significant payment to Arc Music.) They toured the United States in 1964, stopping by the Chess studios to record in the
same place as their heroes. At the time, Muddy was making his worst records; the horns on “Short Dress Woman” are heinous.

“We pulled up with the equipment,” said Stones bassist Bill Wyman, “and we were out there putting the guitars in and the mike stands and amps. Muddy came walking down the
street, and he
helped us in with it. We were like [in awe]. And he was like, ‘Come on boys. Gimme that. I’ll help you.’ A while earlier, we had been
thinking, ‘God, suppose we met Muddy Waters and those guys at the studio when we’re there?’ ”

Richards’s memory is slightly different. “We walked down the corridor and there’s the assistant manager, here’s the studio manager, over there some guy’s painting
the ceiling on a stepladder and as we’re walking by our guide says, ‘Oh, by the way, you might like to meet this guy — that’s Muddy Waters.’ And there’s Muddy in
overalls and he’s whitewashing and I’ll never forget the image, Muddy’s great big beaming black face all splattered with whitewash and I’m looking at my man, right? This is
America, right? This is the music business, right? We were going in to cut some of his songs in his own studio, but he ain’t selling records at that time. He came down off the ladder, chatted
for a bit — there was no animosity, no bitterness. He was such a gentleman.” Muddy’s matter-of-fact demeanor was the outgrowth of his sharecropping years; most anything, good or
bad, that was happening to him in Chicago couldn’t be as tough as the boss man’s tub of silver dollars.