Can't Be Satisfied

by Robert Gordon

  This new recording of old material was followed by another compilation of Muddy’s old recordings. More Real Folk Blues focuses on Muddy’s slide playing, and tracks such as “Sad Letter,” “Early Morning Blues,” and “Whiskey Blues” stirred not only the folk and rock fans, but Muddy himself. “One of the few times I saw Muddy come out of himself was just after the album More Real Folk Blues had been released,” said writer Peter Guralnick. “A friend of mine had gotten the record at the Harvard radio station and he interviewed Muddy and played excerpts from it on the air. This was the first Muddy had seen of the record, and it stimulated both his engagement and his imagination. His performance at Club 47 later that night included songs and open tunings that he probably hadn’t employed in ages.”

  Another fortuitous encounter came during a chilly October 1967 stint at a Montreal club. Local enthusiasts arranged to record Muddy and the band informally at their rooming house. With a kitchen there, and a relaxed sense of familiarity, the band was at ease, smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee while the recordists set up. In his liner notes to Goin’ Way Back, Michael Nerenberg writes, “All eyes seemingly turned together towards the silhouette in the doorway as Muddy stepped into the room, a purple velvet house robe adding a certain majesty to his already imposing presence. Even the slippers and hair net little diminished the dignity of his bearing.” Muddy strums a bit, is told it’s all working, answers sleepily: “Crazy.” He slides down a string, strumming a slow rocking rhythm, playing runs and falls, working the sleep from his voice on “Gypsy Woman” like he might have on a 1930s Sunday afternoon after a late night out. It’s an acoustic session, and Muddy’s in the mood. By the third song, “My Home Is in the Delta,” his slide is going to town and back, Sammy Lawhorn accompanying him. Muddy addresses his final song to Lucille, who is sitting quietly while her man records; it’s “Mean Disposition.”

  Later that year, Muddy recorded two studio sessions for Chess, producing an album’s worth of honest material, Mud playing Mud. The songs are good and so is the music, which is probably why they were not released for four years — until Chess finally decided that an unmediated Mud might be better than a manufactured Mud.

  In February of 1968, Muddy landed in New York City short a harmonica player. Guitarist Luther “Georgia Boy” / “(Creepin’) Snake” Johnson, who’d recently joined, reminded him about the white guy they’d met a couple tours back; he’d come to the Apollo’s backstage with a friend of the band, all jive and attitude, talking Harlem soul stew. His name was Paul Oscher and he’d managed to emulate Walter’s amplified tone without benefit of an amp. Hearing the kid’s big fat sound, Snake had whooped, “Motherfucker’s got a tone.”

  So Snake called Paul, who’d recently turned eighteen, and Paul ran to the club. He played “Baby Please Don’t Go” and “Blow Wind Blow” in a stairwell and Muddy told him, “I like the way you play, man.” Oscher recalled, “Muddy didn’t speak too much, and he often spoke with his finger to his lips, like he was reminding himself to hush even when he was speaking. I got in this old Volkswagen van with most of the band, some of their girlfriends. They all had pints of gin. Spann says, ‘Lucille, let me see my shit, baby.’ And she hands him his pistol. I’m thinking, ‘I’m into this shit here.’ ” Indeed, Paul was in.

  Perhaps not surprisingly, most white audiences thought it natural that a white player was in the band; they’d come to Muddy through the Rolling Stones and other blues-based rock groups. “I was really, really crazy about Paul,” said Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie. “I was just becoming a teenager when Paul came to the house. Other white guys came around and were a little standoffish but Paul really clicked with the family. We would laugh and look at TV and Daddy would really be on Paul’s case. ‘I’m gonna fine ya, Paul, your shirt wasn’t clean.’ ‘I’m gonna fine ya, Paul, you was late.’ I’d be like, ‘Whoa, I’m glad he’s here today, I’m out of trouble.’ Paul would walk up and down the street and I would tell everybody, ‘Don’t mess with him, that’s my cousin, he doesn’t have good sense.’ But Paul was the only white person I ever seen that had such a good rapport on the low South Side. We’d sit on the porch and he’d laugh at my friends or make jokes, start playing the harmonica. I would be so happy when Paul walked in the door.”

  Adult guidance had not been plentiful in Cookie’s life. She was thirteen, pregnant with Muddy’s first great-grandchild; he was fifty-six. Muddy wasn’t home when the doctor called with the results of her pregnancy test. According to Cookie, “Geneva went to the cabinet and poured herself a drink. She said, ‘You are lucky, Cookie, because you slipped by.’ She assumed positive meant positively not pregnant.” When Muddy came home, Cookie hid. “He started searching and calling my name. It felt like the whole house had crumbled. I left out the back door and went over to the lake — but I had a phobia about water. When I came back, Muddy looked like a monster standing on that porch. But he was very supportive. The one requirement for me was that I stay in school through the pregnancy.”

  Around Muddy, sex was everywhere. Not long after Paul arrived, he sat on Muddy’s front stoop and a woman in the building across the street waved at him. “She was eating ice cream, she said, ‘You want some ice cream?’ ” Paul recounted; he promptly moved in with Fannie Mae and her two little kids. “I told Muddy that she had a biting pussy,” Paul said, “that she could clench and unclench it, so about a week later she said, ‘Guess who was just on the phone with me? Your boss!’ He was trying to get her to meet him around the corner.” Paul laughed, then added, “I mean it was no exclusive situation. She was fucking her boyfriend on Saturdays.”

  Not everyone was so tolerant. Hanging with Muddy’s guitarist Pee Wee Madison in front of their building, Paul was flirting with a girl from another floor named Barbara when a guy named Roy stepped outside and said, “This is for you, bitch,” and shot her in the head. They thought he was shooting blanks until she slowly spiraled to the ground, began convulsing. Paul looked at Pee Wee. Pee Wee shook his head. Roy stood next to them, holding the gun. Like cartoon characters, Paul and Pee Wee zigzagged across the street. Muddy called the police, then retrieved his .38 snub-nose from the headboard of his bed, stuck it outside the waist wrap of his house robe, strolled out front where Roy was threatening witnesses, and announced, “Motherfucker don’t scare nobody.”

  “Guns were part of the scene,” said Oscher. “Muddy had a hatbox of guns, maybe six or eight, he kept in the hall closet. One was a Wyatt Earp special, it had a long long barrel, real old. And he had a Winchester .38. He used to carry the snub-nose .38 all the time until he switched that for a little five-shot .25.”

  He wasn’t alone. Bo slept with a sawed-off shotgun next to his bed, which Paul found out when he moved into the basement after Fannie Mae froze him out. “When Bo would sleep, if he was drinking, he would start shouting shit like, ‘Move, bitch, move, motherfucker, move, bitch.’ And I knew he had a shotgun next to him.”

  Pee Wee was known to the cops. They’d slow when they saw him, and he’d raise his shirt, showing no weapons in his waistband. But he was a small guy and he kept his elbows at his side, a pistol in the crook of his back. One New Year’s Eve, Muddy and Geneva were celebrating with Bo, Otis Spann and his girlfriend, and a few other close friends. “They were drinking and having a good time,” said Cookie, who throughout her childhood believed Bo was Muddy’s blood brother. “In a black neighborhood on New Year’s Eve they sometimes shoot their gun. Muddy and Bo were in the little vestibule right in the front and Muddy fired. Bo said, ‘Oh Lord, Muddy, you done shot me in the leg,’ and I remember Geneva saying they couldn’t call the police because they didn’t want that in the paper. They took Bo in the basement and Muddy tells me to go get the pail with the water and I’m thinking, ‘When people shot you’re supposed to take people to the hospital.’ Bo was a big burly man, really, really dark, and he kept saying, ‘No, no, Muddy could get in trouble.’ Muddy this, Muddy that. Otis Spann went to the store and got two-fifths, Old Gra
nddaddy, 100 proof. And they put Bo in this room and fed him liquor.” A week later, Bo climbed up the steps and returned to the world.

  An undercurrent of danger ran through even the good times. The Blackstone Rangers, a “community service” group that carried weapons openly, set its territorial line at Forty-third and Lake Park — Muddy’s block. South of Forty-third belonged to the Stones; the Devil’s Disciples — the “Ds” — had the North. “My mom’s boyfriend was a Blackstone Ranger,” said Joseph, Muddy and Lucille’s son. “A sign on the wall would tell me what kind of area I’m going into. Wherever I go, I always look at the graffiti.”

  “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 b
ank 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.”