by Jon Scieszka
He didn’t realize it yet, but white kids were listening to his music on records, not just in clubs in Chicago. In 1960 a young Englishman, Mick Jagger, was riding the train with a copy of The Best of Muddy Waters under his arm. He ran into a schoolmate, Keith Richards, whose eyes lit up when he saw the record. They went to Jagger’s house and, for the next ten hours, played Muddy’s music over and over again. Richards was totally inspired, as if Muddy were a codebook that opened up the whole world of blues and rock and roll for him.
Jagger and Richards decided to form a band and started practicing together. They finally got a gig, and Richards called to put an ad in a magazine. They asked Richards the name of the band, but Jagger and Richards hadn’t even thought of a name yet. Muddy’s album was lying on the floor by Richards’s feet. The title of the first song jumped out at him, and he quickly said they were the “Rolling Stones.”
To Richards, it felt like Muddy had named them. He and Jagger dove headlong into the whole American blues tradition, the darkness and trouble and hard living. “Muddy is like a very comforting arm around the shoulder,” Richards said. “You need that, you know? It can be dark down there.”
The Rolling Stones felt the blues, and they delivered. “We didn’t think we were ever going to do anything much except turn other people on to Muddy Waters,” Richards said later. “We had no intention of being anything ourselves.” A lot of other young white musicians—American and English—listened to blues records, and were hungry for more. Suddenly Muddy—a real blues man—was wanted everywhere. He still played in clubs, but he was also enthusiastically welcomed at places like the Newport Folk Festival and Carnegie Hall. Before long, he was opening for rock bands in stadiums and arenas across the United States. The same blues that seemed old-fashioned to young blacks in Chicago was authentic and thrilling to white kids who’d embraced folk music and rock and roll. “I play in places now, don’t have no black faces in there but our black faces,” said Muddy. But he wasn’t complaining.
Muddy kept touring and singing until shortly before his death on April 30, 1983. He played for all people, black and white, his powerful voice carried on simple guitar chords, a bottleneck on his little finger. His music shook awake feelings about living and dying, joy and sorrow, lust and rage. It was all there, pouring out of his guitar amp: yearning and losing, wanting and not having. It was Muddy, fueled by mojo, luck, and hard work. It was the Mississippi delta, distilled down into the deep blues.
“Man,” Muddy said, “if it’s warm, let’s get together in the streets an’ let me sing. I don’t care. I’ll sing my blues anywhere.”
Bibliography
Muddy Waters did a number of interviews later in life. He talked about his childhood, his career, and his love of the blues. Many of the citations below include one or more of these interviews. For a full biography of Muddy’s life, read Can’t Be Satisfied.
Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters. Boston: Little, Brown, 2002.
McKee, Margaret, and Fred Chisenhall. Beale Black & Blue: Life and Music on Black America’s Main Street. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1993.
O’Neal, Jim, Van Singel, Amy. The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Penguin Books, 1982.
Rooney, Jim. Bossmen: Bill Monroe & Muddy Waters. New York: Da Capo Press, 1991.
Rowe, Mike. Chicago Blues: The City & the Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1981.
Standish, Tony. “Muddy Waters in London,” Jazz Journal (February 1959).
A CARTOONIST’S COURSE
BY JAMES STURM
“How do you become a cartoonist?” is a question I get regularly. It is usually asked by someone who loves comics and wants to know how to turn that love into a career. There is no short answer to this question, as every cartoonist I have ever met would respond differently. Some knew that’s what they were born to do for as long as they can remember while others came to cartooning after pursuing other occupations.
My first love wasn’t cartooning but dinosaurs. I owned at least a dozen dinosaur books and was transported by their illustrations. One double-page spread in particular is permanently etched into my brain: A rugged triceratops is fending off the fierce Tyrannosaurus rex as volcanoes erupt in the distance. The Tyrannosaurus rex was the aggressive bully, twice as tall as his opponent and clearly, as I saw it, the villain. The triceratops was the reluctant hero who would rather be left to peacefully nibble on primeval vegetation (but knew how to use his horned skull when provoked!).
So, in first grade, when my teacher asked the class what we each wanted to be when we grew up, I answered confidently, “A paleontologist.” This was my first career choice, and I was more than pleased with myself about it. Mostly because paleontologist was just about the biggest word my first-grade class had ever heard, and it made me feel pretty cool explaining what it meant to all the future astronauts, baseball players, and ballerinas.
Once the thrill of feeling superior to my classmates subsided, I began to rethink my career choice. To call yourself a paleontologist, you had to do more than love dinosaur illustrations—you had to go out and find fossils. Even at seven years old, I knew that the chances of stumbling across the skeletal remains of a pterodactyl were remote. If I wanted to continue with the dinosaur thing, it had to be in another capacity. And that’s when I returned to what drew me to dinosaurs in the first place: the illustrations in that book. I figured that publishers paid someone to draw the pictures in books about dinosaurs, and that someone might as well be me.
Around this time I also picked up my first comic book. It was an issue of The Fantastic Four, and on the cover was a character that was orange and rocky being punched really, really hard by a much bigger guy who was clearly the villain. I wanted to know who these people were, why they were fighting, and most important who won. I must have read that comic hundreds of times. Pictures of dinosaurs fighting, while still very cool, didn’t satisfy me anymore. I wanted to know the story behind the picture, and I wanted that story to be told in pictures too.
I quickly found out that there weren’t a limited number of superheroes and villains (like there were dinosaurs) but a seemingly endless supply—and each had their own unique powers and origin. They formed groups and fought against common foes and among themselves. By the time I entered second grade, I was truly obsessed with comics and determined to become a cartoonist. It seemed like an achievable goal too, since sitting down and drawing a comic seemed a lot easier compared to searching for fossils that have been buried for a million years.
Besides The Fantastic Four, my favorite comics included Avengers, Spider-Man, and The X-Men and I wanted the comics I made to look like them. Even then I already fancied myself a true artist—and a true artist, above all else, is original. My first order of business was to come up with my own cast of superheroes. I would spread out choice issues from my quickly growing comic book collection and open to pages that featured characters in particularly dynamic poses and copy them. But along the way I would change the costumes, turning Captain America into the Pursuer, Iron Man into the Protector, and the Black Panther into the Mighty Aeron. One character that I came up with was called Super Snotman. By shooting snot out of his nose, he could propel himself through the air. Disgusting, yes, but effective! I was sure that all these characters would soon have their own titles at Marvel.
Though drawing comics was easier than finding dinosaurs’ bones, it was still a lot harder than it looked, and my early results were mixed. The superhero characters I was copying were composed of a lot of crisscrossing lines that would make the figures look three-dimensional. On good days I could make an okay drawing by carefully copying a specific pose, but the problem was I could never convincingly draw the character in any other position—I always needed to copy. This is a big problem if you want to make comics, because comics require that you draw the same charac
ters over and over and over in a variety of positions.
What I wound up with weren’t really comics but random drawings of posed characters. Still, I was undeterred. Cartooning was an obsession, and one good thing about an obsession is that it sort of makes you delusional. I was unconcerned that I couldn’t draw cars or buildings or hidden laboratories. What did matter was that now I had at least six heroes I could draw in several positions, and that was good enough to earn my reputation as the class cartoonist. Compared to the comics I admired, my work was amateur at best, but in the opinion of my classmates, who didn’t read comics, I was a special talent.
Through junior high and high school, being the only cartoonist in my class provided enough confidence for me to convince myself that I was destined for cartooning glory. But by the time I got to college, it was getting harder to sustain my delusion. In my Drawing 101 class, I struggled mightily with still lifes. In Life-Drawing Class, no matter what the size and shape of the model, he or she always came out looking like a poorly drawn superhero. Years of only copying from comic books made me ill-equipped to draw a live model. To add insult to injury, I was no longer the most talented artist in the class; in fact, I was far from it. For the first time since second grade, I began to wonder if I was truly meant to be a cartoonist.
There’s nothing like the feeling of failure to open you up to greater possibilities. What else was out there besides comics? In my studio classes I tried my best to learn how to draw and not just copy. Outside the art department I took classes in history and literature, philosophy and social sciences.
As my interests expanded a friend introduced me to a stack of comics the likes of which I had never seen before. At first I didn’t know what to make of them, as they were radically different from the superhero fare I had long loved. For starters, instead of being produced by a team (writer, penciller, inker), most of these comics were penned by a single cartoonist and published in black-and-white by companies I had never heard of. Some comics were drawn in a simple, pared-down style; others relished in retina-rattling details.
I later learned that these were underground comics that were published in the late 1960s. It was the first time in comics history where a critical mass of cartoonists steadfastly devoted themselves to exploring the medium’s possibilities separate from any commercial concerns. Any and all subject matter was up for grabs. I read comics that espoused the virtues of feminism and Marxism and others that made fun of feminism and Marxism. I was drawn to stories that transformed the mundane aspects of life into a kind of poetry, like the wordless two-page comic of someone doing dishes by R. Crumb. I was also fascinated by the autobiographical work of cartoonists who laid bare their own personal demons, like Justin Green, who documented his Catholic upbringing. These comics felt more intimate and honest than any I had ever seen before.
As I explored this new world I noticed that the best-drawn comics weren’t always my favorites. Some comics felt so urgent that more polished artwork would have diminished the story’s impact. This began to make me question what actually constitutes “good” art. It made me realize that a comic is greater than the sum of its parts—the quality of the drawing or writing may vary, but how the comic works all together is what counts.
No longer feeling my work had to measure up to some preexisting standard, I dove back into cartooning and began an intense period of experimentation. I drew comics where word balloons would come alive. I tried using dip pens, technical pens, and brushes. I played around with lettering and tried making comics with no words at all. I used a fine-point pen to draw incredibly tiny comics and enlarged them on a copier to see how that would affect the quality of the line.
I aspired to create complete comic books, but at the time that was still beyond my ability. I could do a few pages, but if I tried anything more than that, I would get stuck, get discouraged, and abandon the story. Four to six panels were just about all I could manage, and so I started making comic strips. I worked up the courage to submit them to my college newspaper, and when they were immediately—miraculously—accepted for publication, it was a life-changing moment.
My comic strip ran five days a week. This, more than anything else, was how I learned to cartoon. Being in print and knowing the work would be seen by others (an audience!) made me consider even more carefully how my work “read.” Was it obvious which word balloon should be read first? Was the lettering big enough and clear enough? When the comic was reduced for publication, did the line work disappear? Why did people think my poodle was a rat?
Each little thing I figured out felt like a revelation. If I designed my characters more simply, it was easier to draw them in different positions; and if I lettered my comic first and then drew the word balloons around the words, I’d always have the required white space around the text and not have to cram letters together when I ran out of room.
Have you ever heard of the ten-thousand-hour rule? It is the idea that ten thousand hours of work is the minimum amount needed to become an expert in something. What this means to me is that practice is just as important as talent. As I cranked out my five strips a week I could certainly feel myself improving every day, week, month. Eventually I created the character that carried my strip: an egomaniacal, psychopathic pooch, Down and Out Dawg. I got a feel for pacing and dialogue. I figured out when background images were essential—and when they could be taken out.
After a few years of cutting my teeth on a daily strip, I wanted to tell longer, more nuanced stories, and I started working on two-to-three-page comics. Though a new format, my approach was the same: dive in, log the hours, and get better as you go. One new challenge that presented itself—because I didn’t have a place to publish this work—was that I had no deadline. Without a pressing date by which my work needed to be ready, it was easy to get distracted. We all know there’s no shortage of cable channels and video games. As I write this I’ve missed my deadline for this essay, and I’m sure I’d be surfing the internet or napping if this wasn’t due yesterday.
So what do you do for deadlines if no one wants to publish your work? I had noticed that many of the underground cartoonists who I most admired self-published. I always assumed that to become a “real cartoonist,” some publishing company had to be involved. It was a radical idea to think I could publish myself—and that that might count. So when I had drawn enough pages of comics, I headed to my local copy shop and put together my own mini-comic.
It’s important to note that this was during the pre-internet age; today it’s even easier to publish online, since publish literally means “to make public.” Scan your comic or take a snapshot using your phone, post it on Facebook or your school blog, and you are a published cartoonist. But back in the day, self-publishing meant a trip to the copy shop (cheap) or contracting with a commercial printer (expensive).
When I finished stapling a stack of twelve-page mini-comics, I felt like I had accomplished something of the utmost cultural importance. If even two people asked me, “When’s your next comic coming out?” that was enough for me to keep going. Looking back, it seems crazy that I continued working so hard with so little encouragement. Nevertheless, I was convinced that my early, amateurish efforts would someday be recognized as lost classics.
So that’s how I became a cartoonist. What I’ve come to realize is that my career in comics isn’t the result of any innate ability or even training—not at its heart, because unless there is something driving you from the inside, you’ll never get through those endless hours of practice. The reason that I am still making comics, forty years after I first declared myself a cartoonist, is because I never stopped working—because I am obsessed.
When you are obsessed with something, the answers to practical questions like “Is my work any good?” and “Couldn’t I make more money doing just about anything else?” become irrelevant. These are questions asked by concerned family members and people who don’t know what it’s like to be engaged with something so fully that it’s all you think a
bout, all the time. When you are in the grip of an obsession, your only goal is to feed it. Quitting is not an option.
THE RIVER’S RUN
BY T. EDWARD NICKENS
“Lean upstream!”
My shout to my buddy Colby Lysne, sitting in the bow of the canoe, was already too late. We’d been swept into toppled trees that lined the riverbank like angry teeth, and the instant the side of the canoe dipped underwater, the roiling current flipped the boat. That’s how it happened. That’s how I was thrown overboard into a wild Alaskan river with ten days’ worth of gear, guns, and grub. The last thing I saw before I hit the water was my pal Scott Wood sprinting toward me across an upstream gravel bar. He knew this was our biggest fear. Scott leaped into thick brush on the edge of the river, headed my way, running for my life. Then the river sucked me under, and I did not see anything else for what seemed like a very long time.
Now the world turned black and cold as the Kipchuk River covered me, my head underwater—two feet or six feet, I could not tell you—my arm clamped around a submerged tree, my body pulled horizontal in the hurtling current like a flag in a storm. Lose my grip and the river would sweep me away, into a deadly web of more downed trees and roiling current. I tightened my hold on the tree trunk as the frigid river water began to feel like a living thing, like some monster attempting to swallow me, inch by inch, and all I could do was hold my breath and hang on.