Can't Be Satisfied (30 page)

In 1963, Muddy’s uncle Joe Grant died. Uncle Joe lived in the basement, and though he was only three years older than Muddy, he was heavy and not in good health. “I was a little girl
and Muddy had been out playing,” said Cookie, who was five years old at the time. “The biggest thing in our home was when he would come in, we would make these big breakfasts. When I
would hear that door open I’d get right up, it would be like a Sunday dinner right then. Geneva would always get up. Otis Spann would be there, his wife, and whatever band members that he
would bring home. We were making pancakes, and I wanted syrup.” She ran down the back stairs to her uncle’s room and found him playing possum — awkwardly, half off the bed. She
was several bites into her pancakes before she told Muddy. “Muddy went downstairs and he lost it.”

Joe and Muddy had been raised as brothers on Stovall. Joe had come to Chicago first, given Muddy an electric guitar. Losing him
was losing his hold on childhood, and his
final grasp of his grandmother. Muddy honored Uncle Joe with his next child, born to Lucille. “His uncle had just died, that was Muddy’s heart,” said Lucille. “Joseph was
named after him. Muddy was crazy about those babies.” Lucille made sure Geneva heard the good news. “Lucille was very brassy,” said Cookie. “She would call, talk about it,
put it in the paper if she can. She had no respect for our house.”

Life had not improved for Azelene, Muddy’s Mississippi-born daughter, Cookie’s mother. His ex-girlfriend Mary Austin remembered the last time she saw her. “She was out of it,
her mind was gone. She was standing on the corner, leaning against a wall and looked at me but didn’t even hardly know me. By that time I knew about seeing tracks on your arm. Muddy had a
disc jockey friend whose daughter overdosed from drugs. He was dead set against drugs.” On June 18, 1963, Azelene died of a heroin overdose; J. B. Cooper was in jail. “Muddy hated
him,” said Lucille. “Muddy despised that man.”

Mary had, by this time, sent the son she’d had with Muddy to her mother in Florida and was making a life of her own in Chicago; she had instructed her mother never to tell the child that
his father was Muddy Waters. “Muddy had brought me to Chicago and fed me to the sharks. He threw me out there to drown and I would have drownded. I knew nothing about Chicago, nothing about
the fast life. If it wasn’t for Azelene first, and then that man in the bar — I named my child for him — I’d have been eaten alive.”

“When my mother died,” said Cookie, “Muddy was in his bedroom on Forty-third and Lake Park and he set on the bed and cried. Muddy was as much a family man as he could be. He
felt he could do anything and get away with it. And he did. He did. But I’m grateful that he kept me and he kept my part of the family together.” Geneva phoned Willie Smith, letting
some of Muddy’s friends know about his first child’s death; she knew Muddy wouldn’t tell them. Azelene Morganfield Cooper is buried in the same cemetery as her father, her grave
unmarked.

Muddy continued his march into white America one fan at a time. Students twenty blocks south of Muddy at the University of Chicago invited him to campus
for dinner and a performance. His hair was pomped and he was dressed too slick to fool with crumbs and cafeteria sauce; he gave his dinner to Bo, who had accompanied him. Mark Naftalin, a keyboard
player who would soon form a white blues band with Paul Butterfield, sat across from his hero. “He was immaculate as always, dignified as always,” said Naftalin. “If we exchanged
more words than this, I don’t remember them. And in retrospect, of course, what I asked him was extremely naive. But I was sitting across from him and I asked if he’d ever heard of
Robert Johnson. I’ll never forget his response. ‘My main man,’ he said, and that was it. ‘My main man.’ ”

It’s hard to tell from his recordings of the time. Muddy had successfully transformed the emotional depth of Robert Johnson to the ensemble attack of Chicago blues, but his recent studio
recordings had forsaken everything for a shot at the white mainstream’s dollar. “The Muddy Waters Twist” (January 1962) percolates, but it’s completely devoid of emotion,
and emotion was what Muddy and the blues were about. He’d been made a mannequin, propped before a fad. There is no Mississippi in the song, there is no Chicago.

Muddy’s willingness to be experimented on was indicative of his submissive relationship with Chess. During these same years, Howlin’ Wolf was cutting classic sides:
“Spoonful,” “Down in the Bottom,” “The Red Rooster,” “I Ain’t Superstitious.” “Killing Floor” was yet to come. Even Wolf’s
novelty numbers, such as “Three Hundred Pounds of Joy,” maintained a bluesman’s integrity; he generally doesn’t sound like he’s wearing a costume and trying to pass as
Johnny Rocker or Peter Pop.

“Muddy didn’t have the drive, the initiative that Wolf had,” said Billy Boy Arnold. “Muddy let Cotton run his show. Wolf wouldn’t be sitting at no table with no
woman. Wolf would be on that stage kicking ass all night long. Muddy was a great artist, but he became less of a draw in the Chicago clubs than Wolf, until the white audiences came along and
rescued him.”

Jimmy Rogers, too, respected Wolf. “Wolf was better at managing
a bunch of people than Muddy or anybody else. Muddy would go along with the Chess company, Wolf would
speak up for himself — and when you speak up for yourself you’re automatically gonna speak up for the band. Muddy would go along with Chess because Chess was gonna give him the money to
pay his car note if he needed to cover a bill.”

The yoke of sharecropping — and the nominal protection it offered — never fit Wolf. A huge and hulking man, he moved about like he was breaking shackles: on stage, he seemed
assembled from boxcars. “Wolf would be sitting in the corner with his spectacles on in intermission,” recalled Billy Boy Arnold, “studying his book; he went to night school, he
took music lessons, he was always trying to advance.” Muddy had made a life in the plantation South. He played guitar, ran a bar, drove a car. His pockets jingle-jangled with silver and
scrip. Muddy not only sought a relationship with the boss man, but was sheltered by it. It was how he lived.

“The difference was,” continued Billy Boy Arnold, “if you played in Wolf’s band and got fired or quit, you could draw unemployment compensation. If you walked up to Muddy
and said something like unemployment compensation they’d think you were crazy — ‘What the hell’s that?’ ”

Smitty’s closed in 1961, but at Pepper’s more and more white faces appeared. Muddy’s name was painted on the front of the building and the club was easily accessible from the
Forty-third Street el stop. Charlie Musselwhite had come up the hillbilly highway from Memphis in 1962, and he saw the sign while driving an exterminator company truck. Poking around, he began to
frequent the place and got friendly with a waitress named Mary, who, one Wednesday night, told Muddy that he should check out the honky on harmonica.

“So Muddy called me up to sit in,” said Musselwhite, “and at this time, blues was out of fashion. I was eighteen and they thought it was funny I knew anything about it. So any
time I was in Pepper’s Lounge, he’d have me sit in and word got around. People started offering me money to play.”

Musselwhite got to know everyone in the band, but was closest with Spann. If it was wet, Spann drank it, and Musselwhite was into
that. “Spann liked me and would
introduce me to women, ‘Charlie, I want you to meet my wife.’ It would be a different woman every night. And he was always fixing me up with other ladies and we’d go out.
Pepper’s was open until four in the morning, but there was a whole other scene that happened after that. There were these private clubs that were open till the next afternoon. Anybody could
pay the door fare to get in, and they served alcohol. Then we’d get a hotel room and flip a coin to see who got the mattress and who got the springs. Spann and his lady would be on one and
I’d be with my lady on the other. He called me his fucking-buddy.”

Muddy was still consigned to black clubs, where the young audience considered him old-fashioned but where he was sought out by white kids who were exploring the roots of their music. White
guitarist Elvin Bishop was led to Pepper’s by the black cafeteria employees he befriended at the University of Chicago. “Muddy Waters was playing at Pepper’s and man what a
scene,” said Bishop. “Completely packed, all the chicks up front, he had on a fine suit, a nice process, a little narrow mike, little narrow tie, sharp shoes, and he was sweating away
singing ‘Rock Me’ and ‘Mojo Working.’ The place just rocked. He didn’t do a whole lot of jumping around, but he was intense. He’d have a grip on that microphone,
standing back the length of his arm — he had a powerful voice — and he was standing straight up, dignified, sweating from every pore. Every once in a while he’d jerk his body,
ja-pow,
he was one hundred percent into it.”

The circle drew tighter and yet more diverse, whites and blacks, old and young. Charlie Musselwhite became friendly with Big Joe Williams, the rambling Delta blues guitarist who would record for
Testament and Delmark Records. “I’d go in Pepper’s with Joe,” said Musselwhite, “and as soon as Muddy would see Joe he’d make a big fuss, get him a place to sit,
buy him a bottle and have them bring over a setup, which was a bowl with ice and tongs and a couple little red cherries to make it classy. He’d announce from the stage that Big Joe Williams
was in the audience and he wrote ‘Baby, Please Don’t Go.’ Muddy would act like a little kid around Joe, and Joe loved to be treated like that.”

Pepper’s served home cooking, allowing patrons to fill up before
tanking up. If the kitchen closed and you were still hungry, a man with a cart would appear out
front selling pig-ear sandwiches. “That opened about midnight,” said Elvin Bishop, “because the idea of eating a pig-ear sandwich doesn’t get appealing unless you’ve
been drinking till then.”

After “The Muddy Waters Twist,” the next manipulation Muddy subjected himself to was overdubbing vocals on instrumental tracks by Earl Hooker, creating “You
Shook Me” and “You Need Love.” These, however, worked surprisingly well, due in large part to the musicians’ shared background. Hooker was a Clarksdale native, younger than
Muddy, who successfully adapted his slide work to the electric guitar. He stood out even among his peers, who included Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, Matt Murphy, and Freddie King; he recorded mostly
instrumentals and thus his name recognition was as limited as his vocal range. These tracks move at tempos comfortable for Muddy, leaving room for him to build words from moans, to stretch his
vocals like he would his guitar strings, and to add emphases and emphatic pauses. (“You Need Love” was later interpreted by Led Zeppelin as “Whole Lotta Love” and resulted
in a lawsuit and payments to Willie Dixon, the songwriter.)

Muddy recorded one of his deepest blues in the spring of 1963, “Five Long Years.” Maybe because it was written by Muddy’s cousin Eddie Boyd, Muddy felt a kinship to the song.
Spann’s dark piano roll sets the mood. The pace is slow and unhurried. Cotton, back in the band, stays simple, playing accompaniment rather than lead. (“Phil wouldn’t put reverb
on my harmonica,” Cotton remembered. “Said people wouldn’t be able to tell me from Walter. That let me know I was doing pretty good.”) The session continued well, and after
a couple more tracks, everyone in good humor, Muddy dipped back to his youth and, like a band entertaining the boss man on Stovall, they cut “She’ll Be Coming Around the
Mountain.”

A concert recorded by Chess a couple months later reveals the stylistic spectrum of blues at the time. The label’s biggest traditional
stars — Muddy, Wolf, and
Willie Dixon (Walter was scheduled but didn’t show, and Sonny Boy Williamson was actually recorded separately) — were backed by its upcoming bright light, Buddy Guy. Guy’s band
segues the performances with instrumental riffs — taut, slashing, and very electric — an emerging blues-rock style tagged the “West Side sound.” Chess ultimately packaged
the same album with two different titles and different artwork. First a more conservative one
(Folk Festival of the Blues)
on Argo, the jazz and folk subsidiary, and later a flashier one
on Chess
(Blues from Big Bill’s Copa Cabana)
.