When I Left Home

by Guy, Buddy

  One thing to live with the blues. Other thing to die with them.

  Jailhouse Blues

  I been in jail a bunch of times—but never for nothing I did. Went to get Junior out.

  It got so bad that one time the cop—a man I knew well—came into where I was playing and put the handcuffs on me.

  “What I do?” I asked.

  “It ain’t for what you did. It’s for who you know.”

  “You can’t arrest me for who I know.”

  “I ain’t arresting you—just making sure you don’t get away.”

  We went outside, where he put me in the squad car.

  “Who’s this about?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “Your brother.”

  “I was playing with my brother Phil up in the club when you came to get me.”

  “Not your blood brother,” said the cop, “your soul brother.”

  “If you talkin’ ’bout that crazy motherfucker Junior Wells, I ain’t responsible for what he did.”

  “He says you responsible for everything he did. Besides, ain’t no one gonna bail him out except you. And we don’t want him. We tired of him.”

  “What do I gotta do to get him out?”

  “Give me two hundred and fifty dollars and I give you the pink release papers.”

  Oh Lord, I thought to myself, here we go again.

  I forked over the cash. By the time we arrived at the station, I had the papers that would let me take Junior home. I went down to the cell where they was holding him. Man, it smelled like a whiskey sill. Junior was inside, cuddled up in a corner, snoring like he didn’t have a problem in the world.

  Man guarding him was a brother who must have weighed 350 pounds. He was playing with a chain that held a key.

  “Brother,” I said. “I came to get Junior.”

  “You got papers?”

  “I do.”

  “They pink?”

  “Pink as pussy.”

  “Now I need to see something green,” he said.

  “I already gave the man two hundred fifty dollars.”

  “So it won’t mean nothing for you to give me fifteen.”

  I reached in my pocket and found only five.

  “My last five,” I said. “Five’s got to be good enough.”

  “I’ll take your five, but you go in that cell and get me another ten. I know your man’s gotta be holding ten.”

  “What if he ain’t holding shit?”

  “Then you sleep next to him in the cell.”

  “You gonna lock me in there?”

  “One way or the other, I’m gonna get me my fifteen dollars.”

  “Hold on, good brother,” I said. “You best come in here with me. I don’t want you out there and me inside. I ain’t gonna be locked up with this man.”

  Guard chuckled, but I still wouldn’t step foot in that cell until he was by my side.

  We went in together—I was still nervous about the cell door locking behind me—and I right away started poking and shouting at Junior.

  “Junior!” I screamed. “Wake up, man, you gotta give me ten dollars so I can pay this man.”

  Coming out of some dream or nightmare, Junior mumbled, “I ain’t giving you nothing.”

  “I paid two hundred fifty dollars to get you out of here,” I said.

  “Well, go get your money so we can buy us some drinks.”

  Even the big bad guard had to laugh at that. At the same time, that didn’t stop him from making me search Junior, who, it turned out, had about two dollars in change. The guard took it all and I took Junior home.

  The thing that made the bumpy ride with Junior Wells worthwhile was the music. Even though we never made big money as a team and even though no one could never convince Junior that he wasn’t gonna replace James Brown, our chemistry was nothing they could make in a science lab. I believe it was magical.

  We argued like a married couple. He wasn’t a guitarist and I was no harmonica player, but we could both sing. I loved his singing more than I did my own, and I let him sing all he wanted. After all, he’d been in Muddy’s band and I hadn’t. He had seniority. But in my mind that didn’t mean I should shoulder more of the costs.

  For example, I bought our first band van. When I’d run it into the ground, I figured it was time for him to buy the next one. He refused. So I refused to play. So he changed his mind and bought the van, but then he started drinking more. When he passed out cold from too much whiskey or wine, I’d snap his picture and put it up in the club where he could see it. He didn’t care. When the doctor told him he couldn’t smoke due to his punctured lung, I hid his cigarettes. “Don’t matter,” he said. “Next break I’ll run out and buy another pack.” And that’s just what he did.

  After Hoodoo Man Blues, I’d say the next best record I did with Junior was Buddy and the Juniors. That came through Michael Cuscuna, a music producer.

  We were talking one day in Philadelphia when I happened to say, “You know, Michael, when I go on stage with those rock cats and their Marshall amps piled up high as a mountain, they got a volume you can hear from here to Alabama.”

  “Do you like that, Buddy?” he asked.

  “I like it. I’ve always liked loud, but sometimes it gets to where you can’t feel nothing but the loud. You ain’t feeling your soul.”

  “Would you be willing to make a record that went the other way?”

  “What you mean?”

  “I mean,” said Michael, “an acoustic record. No bass player, no drummer—say, just you and Junior and maybe a piano player.”

  “Who you got in mind?”

  “How about a jazz piano player like Junior Mance? That way we could call it Buddy and the Juniors.”

  I had to laugh. And I had to say that I thought it was a good idea.

  “If you can pull it off,” I told Michael, “I’m there.”

  Michael pulled it off. Me and the Juniors met in New York City.

  We started off playing some of the more famous blues like “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Five Long Years.” Junior Wells was in fine form, and Junior Mance was right on time. With no electricity anywhere, it felt great to hear all those empty spaces around me. I could breathe real good and easy.

  Things got so good and easy that when Junior Mance was sitting up in the control booth, me and Junior Wells began making up shit on the spot. Those songs—“Talkin’ ’bout Women Obviously,” “A Motif Is Just a Riff,” and “Buddy’s Blues”—were caught on tape and became part of the final album put out by Blue Thumb Records.

  By 1971, at age thirty-five, in addition to my girls with Phyllis, I was the father of three other girls—Charlotte, Carlise, Colleen—and three boys—George, Gregory, and Geoffrey—all with Joan. We was living in the two-flat on the South Side. Because I was on the road so much, the marriage was hurting bad. I provided but not nearly in the style that Joan wanted. She wanted more—and I could understand it. The kids wanted more time with me—and I could understand that too. When I got off the road, I was tired. When I played in the city, I didn’t get home till the wee hours of the morning. Joan and the kids was living in one world and I was in another.

  One incident still burns into my brain. Happened after I had bought a cherry-red El Dorado with a white canvas top. I looked at the Caddie like a beautiful woman—curvy and sexy as hell. Couldn’t wait to get in it and drive. Everyone who knew me saw me riding in my El Dorado, proud as I could be.

  Well, one night, a month or so after I’d bought the car, I was up in the bed asleep when something told me to open my eyes. I woke up just in time to keep my wife from stabbing me with a letter opener. I got it away from her, so no harm was done, but of course I had to know why she was crazy mad.

  “I don’t need to tell you,” she said. “You can tell me.”

  “I would if I could,” I said. “But I can’t. I honestly don’t know.”

  “Bullshit. You got guilt written all over your face.”

  She stormed out
, and I still didn’t know. For a week she gave me the cold shoulder. Wouldn’t say a word. Finally, we got into it.

  “Last Tuesday,” she said, “two different girlfriends of mine saw you in Hyde Park riding ’round with some white woman.”

  “Not me they didn’t.”

  “You got a cherry-red El Dorado with a white canvas top?”

  “You know I do.”

  “Well, a black man in a car that exact model and color was all over this white woman in Hyde Park.”

  “Wasn’t me.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “How can you prove it wasn’t you?” she asked.

  “How can you prove it was?”

  “You playing with me.”

  About then our daughter Charlotte, who was eleven, spoke up. “Last Tuesday Daddy came home early and went to sleep. I remember’cause I was doing my homework.”

  “When I drove by the house I didn’t see his car,” said Joan.

  “That’s ’cause he parked it out back in the garage,” said Charlotte. “He said he didn’t want no one knowing he was home so he wouldn’t be disturbed.”

  Joan wanted to double-check, so she went looking for that car. She discovered that Caddie—the one just like mine—in Hyde Park. She realized I was telling the truth. I waited for the apology.

  I’m still waiting.

  I don’t want to sound like I’m saying I was perfect in our marriage—not nearly. On the road I fell to female temptation. But whatever I did, I tried to be discreet—I would never embarrass or humiliate the mother of my children.

  When it became clear, though, that our relationship was in the dumpster, I found my pleasures elsewhere. I went through a period when I enjoyed many women. I played around. Turned out, though, running around wasn’t my style. Might be fun for a while, but I wanted to settle back down. After Joan and I divorced I was on the lookout for a wife. I guess I always remembered the happiness of Mama and Daddy. That’s the kind of trust and love I wanted with a woman.

  I also wanted something else—a blues club of my own.

  Checkerboard

  Not long ago a friend said to me, “Buddy, I know why you had to have your own blues club.”

  “Why’s that?” I asked. I knew, but I wanted to see if he knew.

  “Because that’s your church, man. That’s where you first got religion when you came to Chicago. You got baptized in these funky blues clubs, you got born again, and you can’t forget it. When you got worried to see all these churches disappearing, you had to get one for yourself.”

  That wasn’t the answer I expected, but damn if it didn’t make sense. I guess I did see the Chicago blues club as something sacred to my heart. Sure, there was drinking and shooting, but it gave me a beautiful feeling like nothing else. It brought a spirit that got all over my soul—and that’s something I never wanted to lose.

  In 1972 I was thinking that if I had my own club, I might get off the road more. I’d be able to be closer to my kids and, if I played my cards right, might make some money.

  I bought the Checkerboard, at 423 East 43rd Street, at a time when prices were low. That’s because the hood was going down. Far as I was concerned, though, the hood was always going down. I figured good blues would draw drinkers. Besides that, Pepper’s, one of the most famous clubs, had closed down. I hated that the South Side wouldn’t have no blues. On the bright side I figured that, what with my work at the F&J in Gary and the club I managed in Joliet, I had good experience. But man, did I have a lot to learn!

  Before I opened up a cat said to me, “Buddy, I got only one piece of advice: get a rollaway bed, a gun, and sleep by the register.”

  I got the gun, but—at least at first—I didn’t get the rollaway bed.

  First year I got robbed so much that I put up security gates. But the motherfuckers just screwed ’em off and got in anyway. Cost me a hundred to put the gates back up. Then the thieves came back and removed ’em like they was nothing. It was costing me more to put up the gates than what the robbers took.

  That’s what got me to put up a sign that said, “Don’t break the front gate. Go around back. The door’s open there. Take what you want.”

  Of course, I was in the back, waiting for them with a gun. But wouldn’t you know that’s when they stopped breaking in.

  I was selling beer for 35 cents and serving open whiskey only. That meant I’d buy the booze by the half-gallon and pour shots. Thieves couldn’t resell open bottles. They were looking to steal whiskey by the case. I learned to keep the stockroom empty.

  Folks thought my famous friends would play the Checkerboard and make me a mint. Didn’t work that way. For example, the most famous thing that happened at the club, with our capacity of sixty-five, was when the Stones came to film and play with Muddy. They blocked the whole street, keeping out the regular customers, while the Stones’s huge entourage of cameramen, engineers, security guards, and friends filled up the place. It was beautiful to see Muddy and the Stones jamming together—turned out to be one of the last things Muddy did—but I didn’t hear my cash register ring once.

  The Checkerboard was a spiritual blessing but a financial burden. I never broke even and had to use the money I made on the road to keep the doors open. No matter what, I kept the doors open because, as the seventies got disco crazy, the life of the blues was on the line.

  Mud in the Burbs

  Had to be around 1973 when I went to visit Muddy in Westmont, way out there in the white suburbs, some twenty miles outside the city. He had bought himself a house—nothing fancy, but clean and neat with a little swimming pool in back.

  Muddy had been through a lot of changes, the worst being the recent death of his wife Geneva to the cancer. Her passing shook him and, in a strange way, freed him. The Mud had a lot of children from different women, and with Geneva’s passing, he got to move them all into his house. He got to be the daddy and granddaddy that he always wanted to be. Wasn’t that he didn’t love Geneva—he loved the woman with all his heart—but his love life had kept him running this way and that.

  When I first came to his house, it was winter. Because it wasn’t baseball season, the TV wasn’t on. On doctor’s orders, the Mud had switched from hard liquor to champagne, and on that day we shared a bottle.

  He was happy to see me and asked how things were going at the Checkerboard.

  “Going slow, Muddy,” I said. “But I ain’t quitting.”

  “Hey, man,” he said, “I thought of quitting after Electric Mud, but I didn’t.”

  Muddy was talking about the album he’d done with Marshall Chess that brought him a good piece of the hippie market.

  “I thought Electric Mud sold a ton of records,” I said.

  “It did. But that psychedelic shit drove me up a wall. Worst part was when I got to the show, they wanted me to play it live—and I couldn’t. What’s the point of making a record when you can’t even play it with your own band?”

  “But you liked that thing you did with Mike Bloomfield and Paul Butterfield, didn’t you?” I asked, talking about Fathers and Sons, a record I loved.

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That was a more natural thing. Those really are my sons. I raised them boys. After that, though, the shit storm hit hard. Leonard sold Chess.”

  “They say he got ten million dollars.”

  “Whatever he got, I didn’t get a nickel.”

  “And then Leonard up and died,” I said.

  “Heart attack—went just like that.”

  “How old was Leonard, Muddy?”

  “Young man, early fifties.”

  “Is Phil treating you any better?” I asked. Phil was Leonard’s brother. “I get little checks now and then. Enough to pay the bills and move me out here.”

  Couldn’t have been much more than a week after that Leonard died that Muddy and his band were in a terrible car accident in Illinois. Three people were killed, including Muddy’s driver. Muddy escaped
with his life, but his ribs and pelvis got broken, and his hips and back got smashed up. He had surgery that took hours, and he couldn’t leave the hospital for months. When he did, he came out walking with a cane. Muddy being Muddy, he picked up his guitar and went back to work. After the London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions started to sell—that’s the record Wolf cut with Clapton, Steve Winwood, Bill Wyman, and Charlie Watts—Chess had Muddy fly to London to do the same kind of thing. I remember Muddy saying, “Those English rock-and-roll cats can play, but they look at me like I done created the world in seven days. They sitting around waiting to see what I wanna play. ‘You tell me what you motherfuckers wanna play,’ I said. ‘Let’s just play and get paid.’”

  That was a couple of years ago. Now Muddy, grieving for the loss of Geneva, was still looking to get paid. We all were.

  “Think you’ll like it out here?” I asked. “Think you’re ever gonna miss the old neighborhood?”

  “I can ride down there whenever I want. Besides, you’re taking care of it, ain’t you?”

  “Who’s taking care of your old house on South Lake Park?”

  “I rented it to Big Eyes.”

  Big Eyes was Willie Smith, one of Muddy’s drummers.

  “So you holding on to it, Muddy,” I said.

  “I figure I best. If I can’t pay the note on this motherfucker out here, I can always move back.”

  Not too long after seeing Muddy I got to catch up with the Wolf. That happened because of the Rolling Stones. They was coming to Chicago for one of their big concerts and sent a limo for me and the Wolf. The plan was to come to their hotel room and then to the show. I was always glad to see Keith and them, but I was especially happy to see the Wolf. Been some time since I’d run into him. At this point he was in his mid-sixties and feeling his age. He’d taken a couple of bad heart attacks. Like Muddy, he’d been in a bad car wreck. His kidneys were fucked up until he was on dialysis. He was walking with a cane, but don’t you know he was talking shit just like he always did. And just like I always did, I listened to him like a little child listening to his daddy.