Can't Be Satisfied (34 page)

“I used to tease Paul about the gangs and he’d say I was just trying to scare him,” said Cookie. “Our house was a dividing point and the fighting
would start there. One day I called him outside and said just stand in the doorway and watch.” The sight remains etched in Paul’s memory: “The Blackstones parading down the street
chanting, carrying sticks and weapons, chanting, ‘Who run it? We run it!’ ” Guns, guns, everybody had guns.

Little Walter’s life was a skeleton key to death’s door, and he was always rattling the lock. “Every time I seen Little Walter, he was constantly looking over
his shoulder,” said Oscher. “He must have did so many bad things he didn’t know when the shit was going to happen.” He’d book himself into three or four clubs a night,
a different band in each, do a set at all of them, and get paid by all. But the sound of his small combo jump blues had become dated, while Muddy’s Delta sound rolled on like a freight train.
“I think he was sort of a broken man,” said Oscher. “His music didn’t have the endurance of Muddy’s stuff, and Muddy was more able to deal with the hurdles of his
life.”

“Daddy and them would talk about Walter, what he was caught up in or how he would start fights or be at a club and do something vulgar to a woman,” Cookie remembered. “But when
Little Walter came to Muddy house, he was just himself, not Little Walter. His guards were down. We’d be watching TV and he’d fall asleep, or something like that.” With his oldest
friends, Walter didn’t have to act like a star.

“The last time I saw Little Walter,” Blue Smitty, Muddy’s early guitarist, told
Living Blues
magazine, “I knew he wasn’t here for long. I hadn’t saw
him in quite a while. Oh man, he had wasted away to nothing. And he saw me, he didn’t hardly recognize me. And he said, ‘Smitty, I done been out there, man.’ I said, ‘Yeah,
you done been out there, baby, but I don’t think you’re gonna get back.’ And it wasn’t long.”

On Valentine’s Day, 1968, Junior Wells ran into Little Walter. “We were still hangin’ out together, over here on Forty-third and
Lake Park and down to
Theresa’s. Walter was over there like they do, shootin’ dice on the street, and a man throwed the dice and hit Walter in the butt with ’em and went to get the money and Walter
picked up the money. And the man asked Walter for the money and Walter wouldn’t give him the money and he took a hammer and hit Walter in the head with it. And nobody thought anything about
it. You know, it didn’t sound like it was that hard a lick. He went on home and he told his old lady to give him somethin’ ’cause he [said], ‘I got a bad headache.’ So
the next mornin’ she woke up, he was dead.”

The harmonica is a breath away from the soul of a man, and Walter’s soul was rambling, roaming, and adventurous. Only slightly more complex than blowing a blade of grass, the harmonica
cupped in his hands soared, dove, and emoted longing and pain like teenagers in congress. And now, with barely a gust, he was gone.

Despite everything, Geneva remained the backbone of Muddy’s home. A van would pull up and Earl Hooker, St. Louis Jimmy, Johnny Young, Floyd Jones, Roosevelt Sykes, and
Little Brother Montgomery would pile out, beginning a card game that might last hours or days. The band hung on Muddy’s stoop, drinking. Cookie was in and out, getting ready to have a baby.
Rarely did anything faze the woman they called Grandma. She stayed in the kitchen, queen of her domain, humming, sipping from a small bottle in the cupboard, sending Paul or another boarder out for
replenishment. There was a lot of entertaining to do. “He loved putting out a big bash,” said Cookie. “And a lot of the musicians would come by and eat. We would always have big
dinners during the holidays.”

Muddy’s son William, the child he’d had with Mary Austin from Florida, was about ten when he found out who his father was, and telephoned. “I said, ‘Daddy, I want to come
see you.’ He didn’t say, ‘I’m a married man and I got a wife and if you come here, she’s going to know what’s going on.’ He hurt me, broke my heart, he
said, ‘I don’t think it’s a good thing to do right now.’ ”

Muddy was head of enough households. “He’d come around and check on us,” said Joseph, who was being raised by his mom, Lucille, in her apartment around
the corner from Muddy’s house. “He’d bring us food and money. He had a blue Cadillac at the time and all the kids would run to his car. He had another home, we knew this, but he
would come spend time with us, maybe take us grocery shopping, whatever we needed.”

Lucille remained unabashed about her place in Muddy’s life. She came unannounced to Muddy’s house in need of cash. Finding her at the door, and with Geneva in the kitchen, Muddy
introduced her as Bo’s girlfriend. “Muddy would get in his Cadillac,” said Oscher, “you’d know he was going to see his girlfriend.”

“Hell yeah Geneva knew,” said her son Charles, then in his late twenties. “She was a good woman. She stood by her man. Long as he taken care of the home, it didn’t faze
her. They’d argue about the women once in a while, but they’d make up.”

“The day that I gave birth to my child, which I was only thirteen, I came home,” said Cookie, “and the phone rang. Muddy and Geneva were very excited about my child,
they’d bought a beautiful crib. It was Lucille calling. She told Geneva, ‘You’re happy because Cookie has a little girl. But I had a baby two days before for Muddy.’ Geneva
knew of every child that was born out of wedlock, the birth date, everything. I don’t see how she did it. I would not have tolerated Muddy’s shit.”

The coffeehouse and folk boom had been good for Muddy; his appearance at Newport had launched him into a new audience. But the war in Vietnam again changed that audience.
Somewhere in the decade, coffee gave way to psychedelics, electrics to electronics. Muddy described the Electric Circus, a New York psychedelic club he played, as “blinking blinking jiving
jiving shit.”

By now, it wasn’t just Leonard who was making the musical decisions; Marshall Chess was coming into his own at his father’s label. An acid man, Marshall launched a subsidiary label
called Cadet Concept,
reaching out to his compadres on the mind-expansion trip. His first project, an album with Minnie Ripperton, sold a quarter million copies in the
Midwest, making him a hero at home. Muddy referred to Marshall as “my little white grandson” and gave him lines to use on girls. “He would always ask me, ‘Did you get any
yet?’ ”

From his childhood on, Marshall had worked in the Chess facilities — office, studio, publishing, even operating the pressing-plant machinery. While still a teenager, Marshall went to
Europe and arranged new and successful distribution deals for the catalog, also picking up on European fashions. “I was really into clothes and jewelry, just like blacks. My dad, too. My dad
drove a new Cadillac every year, had the big ring on his finger, and he always told me that he would not be respected by his artists if he didn’t. So I followed that. When I was thirteen I
had a suit custom made, same tailor that these blues guys went to.” In Paris, he’d been impressed by the shop of upstart fashion designer Yves St. Laurent, and modified the design for
himself. “I had the wood walls of my office painted with shiny black epoxy paint, there was a gray rug, and the windows behind the desk were this black-and-white op art. It was high design.
Chuck Berry dug it. I saw him decades later and he said, ‘Man, that office. I knew you were a motherfucker, anyone who would have that office.’ ”

With his new power, and with the noblest intentions, Marshall attempted to bring that new audience he’d tapped to the blues, or at least to the bluesmen’s bank accounts.
“
Electric Mud
was a misunderstood project,” he said of the album recorded simultaneously with France’s May Revolution in 1968. “I came up with the idea of
Electric Mud
to help Muddy make money. It wasn’t to bastardize the blues. It was like a painting, and Muddy was going to be in the painting. It wasn’t to change his sound, it
was a way to get it into that market.” He tapped players from Chess’s jazz label for the palette. “I put together the hottest, most avant-garde jazz-rock guys in Chicago for the
album,” said Marshall. “We were going to call them the Electric Niggers, but my dad wouldn’t let me.”

“I thought we were going to do a straight blues session when they said Muddy Waters,” said guitarist Pete Cosey, who played lead guitar
on the album. “I
came prepared to play the old-time blues and found some electronic equipment there. So I hooked up into it and we took off. Muddy didn’t have anything to do but be Muddy Waters and everything
was swirling around him. He was going around the studio shaking his head. All through the session he said, ‘I don’t know, boy, I don’t know.’ He didn’t get upset, or
if he did, he didn’t let it throw things off. But he was clearly confused.”

Like on the farm, don’t cross the boss. “A lot of people go in for [the effects] and I just tried to dedicate them a recording,” Muddy said not long after the record hit the
market. “Really I was shooting for the hippies with that.”
Electric Mud
is remembered more for its over-the-top electronic effects than for its high points, which is not fair.
True, the album is so full of screeching instruments and pulsating organs that it parodies the avant–Miles Davis sound it was emulating, but there are tracks, such as “I Just Want to
Make Love to You” and “Herbert Harper’s Free Press News,” that achieve a unique artistry. If the record lacks subtlety, as a historical document it has a certain charm.
Muddy’s facial expression on the album’s back cover is a Mona Lisa cipher; is he smiling or is he wincing?

(Pete Cosey was later told by Jimi Hendrix’s valet that before he’d perform, Jimi would play “Herbert Harper’s Free Press News” from
Electric Mud
for
inspiration. “The first guitarist I was aware of was Muddy Waters,” Hendrix said. “I heard one of his old records when I was a little boy and it scared me to death, because I
heard all of those sounds. ‘Wow, what is
that
all about?’ ”)

Electric Mud
became Muddy’s first album to hit the
Billboard
(and
Cash Box
) charts, where it stayed for two months.
After the Rain,
recorded half a year
later — soon after
Electric Mud
’s release — repeats the concept, though slightly toned down. “I’ll never forget,” said guitarist Cosey, “as soon
as I walked into the studio for the follow-up and Muddy saw me, he threw his arms around me, said, ‘Hey, how you doing, boy, play some of that stuff you played on that last album.’
” On
After the Rain,
Muddy is given more of a voice and has Spann and Oscher in his corner; he is allowed lead guitar on several tracks. He contributes three new songs, though there
is no recorded evidence of his ever playing them again.

Though
Electric Mud
shipped to retailers like a success and initially sold well, critics in America panned it. “It was the biggest Muddy Waters record we
ever had at Chess,” said Marshall, “and it dropped instantly. The English accepted it; they are more eccentric.” The adulteration was so dense, the reviews so disappointing, and
the warehouse returns so heavy that Muddy expressed his frustration, though he waited long enough — until 1970 — for whatever sales might occur to taper off: “They got this funny
thing going, man. Every time I go into Chess to record, they are going to put some un-blues players with me. And it ain’t that they’re not good players, those boys can play just about
anything, they some of the top-notch guitar players in Chicago, but they can’t get that blues sound. And if you change my sound, then you gonna change the whole man.”