Can't Be Satisfied (16 page)

“You gotta have something that the record company wants,” said Muddy. “And sometimes they are afraid to take a chance. They got a good blues seller, don’t have to make
another blues singer. People interested in people selling. You runs a store and you carrying brand-new merchandise, you don’t know whether it’ll sell or not. And they wasn’t
takin’ a chance on mine.”

M
usic was always in the air at the Maxwell Street Market on the Near West Side. The Market, the heart of Jewtown, ran about eight blocks and at
least a block deep on either side. Behind the narrow doors and large display windows were stores of all types — dry goods, fresh produce, meats and fish, textiles and garments, jewelers and
barbers, pharmacies, pawn shops. The back rooms of many shops were devoted to card games or dice, some for the entertainment of the proprietors and others for the bamboozlement of the patrons.
Outside there were shambling carts selling secondhand goods and junk, the useless items commingled with the useful. The scene was similar at Handy Park on Memphis’s Beale Street, but, like
everything in Chicago, it was on a much larger scale.

Musicians would set up all along the stretch, some competing on corners, some seeking quiet on a midblock stoop, a hat or a carton or a lousy paper bag laid before them, banging a box and
singing ham-bone for change. “Jewtown, on Saturdays and Sundays from around eleven o’clock to about five in the evening,” said Jimmy Rogers, who lived just off Maxwell, “you
could make more money with three or four guys than you could make in a club in the whole week. Man, there’d be hundreds of people around.”

And hundreds of sounds. “I heard this harmonica one Sunday morning — woke me up!” Jimmy Rogers remembered. “I put my clothes on, went down in the crowd on Maxwell
Street.

“I was familiar with Little Walter’s sound, I had met him in Helena, Arkansas, when he was just a kid. I went on down to the street and there he was! Little squirrel-faced
boy.” Walter’s sound had an
acrobatic litheness to it, a humor to its swing. He listened to Louis Jordan’s small combo, jump and jive records. “It was
amazing,” recalled Rogers, “this youngster was blowing harp and that was my instrument. He had a bass player, a guitar, and a drum playing with him, but the only thing that was really
standing out to me was the harmonica. I sat in with them and we had a wonderful time. That’s the way we really met, communicating.”

Walter was a cat what liked a hat. Crisp suits, snappy shirts, he dressed like cash money, or the lack thereof: one day chicken, the next day feathers. A slight, attractive young man, Walter
Jacobs had a sharp face and red-complected skin, a hint of Native American blood. He kept his wavy hair short and combed off his face. His eyes were dark and penetrating. “Walter was
wild,” said Rogers. “Walter was likely to kill you or anybody that crossed him. A young buck with a lot of temper. He had more nerve than brains. He’d fuck up — and
we’d have to get him out of jail, me and Muddy.”

Under the tutelage of Muddy and Jimmy, Little Walter would develop into a harmonica player whose influence would rank alongside the two Sonny Boys. Born Marion Walter Jacobs in Alexandria,
Louisiana, May 1, 1930 (or perhaps Marksville, Louisiana, May 2, 1931), he heard the cry of a lonesome harmonica in the big open sky, and at the age of eight (or twelve), set out to answer its
calling. “What really made me choose [harmonica] was that most of the kids, my mother too, tried to dissuade me from playin’ it. Of course that made me more int’rested and the
more they tried to disgust me with it, the more I caught on. If you give up, you lose the fight.” He hopped trains, followed harvests and parties. In Monroe, Louisiana, he was a regular at
the Liberty Night Club in 1943, eventually working his way to Helena, where — when not hounding Sonny Boy Williamson II for technique — he was sleeping on pool tables. In Helena, he
also spent time with the influential guitarists Houston Stackhouse and Robert Lockwood Jr., picking up guitar basics. Then it was New Orleans, Memphis, and St. Louis — “playing,”
he said, “around a few shoeshine stands, pool rooms, you know.”

When he got to Chicago, the teenaged Walter took a room at
Newberry and Fourteenth, about two blocks from Jimmy Rogers. “I told Muddy I met a boy down in Jewtown that
could really blow,” said Rogers. He walked Walter the mile west to Muddy’s house. “We had our guitars and started banging away and we could see he’d fit in. Muddy and I
could hear a different type harmony on guitar, but we couldn’t find anyone else who could play that way. So I just give Walter the privilege to play harmonica and I turned completely to
guitar.”

“When I met him he wasn’t drinking nothing but Pepsi-Cola,” said Muddy. “Just a kid. And I’ll tell you, I had the best harmonica player in the business, man. He
didn’t have very good time, but me and Jimmy teached him that. Plus we taught him how to settle down. He was wild, he had to play fast! He was always a jump boy, had that up ’n go
power. His mind was so fast he could think twice to your once, that’s how he learned to harp so good.”

Rogers added about Walter, “Really the big problem was getting him to settle down enough to play. He’d get executing and go on. He was worse than the Bird, Charlie Parker. I would
say, ‘Look, I don’t care how far you range on the wall, just meet me at the corner.’ ” So, the past met the future and enjoyed the company. Muddy: stolid, composed,
authoritative — rooted in the dust of Mississippi. Walter: half his age and galloping on Louisiana swamp funk and Kansas City swing. There to mediate the distance: Jimmy Rogers.

The three were further propelled by Baby Face Leroy’s Saturday-night frolic drumming. “There were four of us,” Muddy said, “and that’s when we began hitting
heavy.” Jimmy Rogers stated flatly, “Me and Muddy and Walter with a drum, we could sell just about anything.”

The group continued to meet at Muddy’s house for rehearsal. “There wouldn’t be nobody there to give you no problem,” said Rogers. “So we would suck on these little
half-pints, and Muddy would cook some rice and chicken gizzards. We’d have a pot on in the kitchen and we’d get us a bowl, get us some water and get a little drink, then we’d sit
back down and do it some more.”

Muddy would bring in a song idea, lyrics that suggested a rhythm. Many songs were variations on established ones that each
player would have learned differently — in
different counties in the Delta. “We’d find a pattern that fit what he’s saying,” said Jimmy, “and then I’d build and Walter would fall in, find him a pocket.
Then we’d run them patterns. It’s like pushing a car — once you get it started rolling, you can’t stop.”

The car found a garage when the Zanzibar club opened in 1946 at the corner of Ashland and Thirteenth, half a block from Muddy’s apartment. Muddy began stopping there for half-pints, and he
befriended the proprietor, Hy Marzen. “Muddy lived in the neighborhood where our store was at,” Marzen said. “He was almost like a bum off the street, just getting started.”
The Zanzibar was nicer than a hole-in-the-wall, but not much larger. The bandstand was in the back, a semicircular bar was in the middle, and at the front was a counter for delicatessen and liquor.
“We sold corned-beef sandwiches by the ton, hard-boiled eggs, hot dogs, pigs feet, cole slaw. And I had two jeeps running up and down the street making deliveries,” Marzen continued.
The club became a home base for Muddy’s band until it closed, eight years later, in 1954. “I used to make out the checks to McKinley Morganfield. I paid him a hundred dollars weekly,
plus drinks, and he paid the others.”

At the Zanzibar, the band gelled, and it was as exciting for them as for the audience. Marzen had to post an off-duty cop near the bandstand “to make sure people behaved themselves.”
The band played sitting down, and the audience, especially as the night progressed, liked to stand up. “The clubs were very violent,” said Rogers. “After we got into bigger clubs
they’d fight, or some guy would get mad with his old lady and they’d fight. Somebody would get cut or get shot. Clubs had two o’clock regular license, and if you wanted to stay
open till three, you would pay extra, a patrol buy. That was a little gimmick the gangsters had going.”

“I’d go up there with him to the Zanzibar,” said bluesman R. L. Burnside, Muddy’s girlfriend’s cousin. “The sound was great. Electric. Big sound, good sound.
It was unusual to see someone on electric then. I learned a lot of stuff just watching him.”

Others were studying the band too, and even before they established
their reknown at the Zanzibar, people began to know Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter by name, by sound, and by
reputation. “We used to go around calling ourselves the Headhunters,” said Muddy. “We’d go from club to club looking for bands that are playing and cut their heads [engage
in a musical duel]. ‘Here come them boys,’ they’d say.”

“We used to just do it for kicks,” said Jimmy Rogers, “to keep from sitting around at home. As soon as we would get in a place, somebody would want us to play. We would go to
the car and maybe get an amp and quick bring it in there and set up and jam a few numbers. We could take the gig if we wanted it, but it wasn’t paying nothing, so we just drink and have some
fun. That would mean a bigger crowd for us on the places that we were playing on weekends, because we’d announce where we were. Free publicity. By the time the taverns closed at two, we maybe
done hit four or five, maybe six different taverns, and we had a pocket of money, maybe fifteen, twenty dollars apiece. And other bands, they would be glad for us to come around, because they were
trying to get into the beat that we had.” Muddy, Jimmy, and Walter plugged in, and musicians threw down their instruments, not to flee but as an invitation, anxious to witness the sound of
the future up close, to feel the jolt of their industrial power. Muddy Waters was creating the blues anew.

The Chess Brothers, Leonard and Phil, were not African American and were not from the South. But they were, like Muddy, like Jimmy Rogers, and like many of the artists they
would make stars on their record label, immigrants to Chicago, angling for a foothold in this urban new world.

Jewish and from Poland, the brothers arrived with their mother in New York on Columbus Day, 1928. They quickly boarded a train to join their father, Joseph, who had settled in Chicago several
years earlier and was beginning to realize the better life for which he’d crossed an ocean. At first, booze was their business. They bought increasingly larger liquor stores, graduating to a
nightclub.

Chicago, liquor, and nightclubs have a long history together, and
if the Chess brothers were no Al Capones, they shared his instinct for creating a large organization from
a small business. “Their club, the Macomba, was small,” said drummer Freddie Crutchfield, who occasionally performed there with Tom Archia’s house band. “It had the booths
on one side and the bar on the other. It was narrow and long, but it was a beautiful joint.” It was in a musical neighborhood, near places such as the Green Gable Hotel, where Lionel Hampton
might visit.

The brothers soon deduced that the Macomba’s patrons might want to take the nightclub music home with them. Through a friend who owned Universal Recording Studios, the Chesses learned of a
fledgling label that was seeking investors. They bought in. “Aristocrat [Records] was doing all white stuff then,” recalled Phil Chess, the younger brother, “ ‘Get On the
Ball, Paul’ kind of stuff, by a bunch of groups I never heard of. But they were selling a little bit around Chicago. And we had the black bands playing at our club, and we thought we’d
take a shot and record one of those groups. That’s how we got into the business.” The business was nascent at the time, and Leonard’s intimate familiarity with the South Side was
essential to his success. He was entering the business, he later recalled, when “every porter, Pullman conductor, beauty and barbershop was selling records.”

One afternoon at the musician’s union hall, Aristocrat’s recently hired African American talent scout, Sammy Goldberg, ran into Muddy and asked to hear him play. “[Leonard] had
Goldstein [
sic
], a black guy, scouting for him,” said Muddy, “and he wanted to hear me play a piece. I didn’t have no guitar with me, and Lonnie Johnson was there with
his. Lonnie said, ‘No, man, I don’t loan my guitar to nobody.’ The man said, ‘Let the man play one piece on the guitar. What he gonna do to it? He can’t eat it.’
” What Goldberg heard confirmed the rumors of Muddy’s talent.