Can't Be Satisfied (37 page)

Within a couple months, Muddy began appearing in area clubs and was filmed for the documentary
Chicago Blues
. He hobbled in on crutches, requested a stool for the
stage, and though his hands were not yet right, he played short sets. “I’m up and around, and I ain’t runnin’ yet,” Muddy told
Rolling Stone
. “I only
play about thirty minutes. My hands are all swollen, and the doctor said it’ll take a while before they can be fixed.”

Muddy’s release from the hospital coincided with news about Otis Spann: the thirty-nine-year-old blues pianist was diagnosed with liver cancer. Peter Guralnick flew to Chicago on
assignment for
Rolling Stone:
“When I arrived at Spann’s home, a dilapidated apartment whose walls were covered with pictures of dogs, I sat in the living room talking to a
woman and a male neighbor,” Guralnick wrote.

A few days later, on April 24, 1970, Spann died in Chicago’s Cook County Hospital. He’d played behind — or beside — Chuck Berry, Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Sonny
Boy Williamson, Buddy Guy, Junior Wells, Johnny Shines, and many others in addition to Muddy. He’d shared his technique with sideman after sideman, stranger after stranger, giving away all he
knew. He had a wife, he had three kids, and he had no money; he’d let his musician’s union dues lapse so there was no headstone. “I remember walking by Muddy’s car at
Spann’s funeral,” said Charlie Musselwhite. Muddy’s hip kept him car-bound. “He had the window down, looked really, really sad. I said, ‘It’s a sad day.’
He said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ We shook hands through the window. And that’s all we said. Everybody loved Spann. He was just drenched in blues. He was the blues walking and
talking.” Friends held a benefit to help defray funeral expenses; Muddy performed.

Gone was Little Walter. Gone was “Elgin” Edmonds, Big Crawford, Baby Face Leroy Foster, Johnny Jones. Of Muddy’s early Chicago playing partners, only
Jimmy Rogers and Sunnyland Slim were alive. “Muddy never showed his emotions,” said Paul Oscher. “When Spann died, he must have felt that. He was with the guy seventeen years, but
Muddy just said, ‘There’ll never be another Otis Spann.’ Muddy didn’t let you know.”

“Muddy took it real hard,” said Lucille. “He’d be sad, want to be by hisself. He mostly hold things tight.”

So much feeling had gone from Muddy’s bones into his early records, feelings that were hard to express unaccompanied by music. “He knew my music better than any man alive,”
Muddy said of Spann. “There is no one left like him who plays real, solid bottom blues like he does. We’d better raise another before it’s too late.”

Muddy didn’t need Spann’s death to tell him it was a changing world. For that, he had his cane, a bunch of unmod suits in his closet, and bookings in small clubs,
while younger white people played their versions of his music in massive arenas for big pay. The question repeatedly asked of Muddy was, “Do you think a white boy can play the blues?”
The question was poorly phrased; what’s meant is, “Why is it different when a white person plays the blues?”

“There are some beautiful white bands,” Muddy explained, but he distinguished them as unauthentic. “[T]hey didn’t go to the Baptist church like I went. They didn’t
get that soul down deep in the heart like I have. And they can’t deliver the message. They’re playing the white folks’ blues. I’m playing the real blues. I’m singing
the same thing the old master liked to hear when you’re working for him.”

Johnny Winter had recently made headlines signing his first major recording contract — for $300,000 (though reports were quickly exaggerated to a cool million). “Just one thing makes
me a little mad,” said Muddy. “These young white kids get up and sing my stuff, and other people’s stuff that I know, and next thing is they’re one of the biggest groups
around and making that real big money.
Sometimes that makes me mad because we’ve been struggling so long, fighting for a little recognition.”

As blues had seeped into other genres of music, losing its community, the bluesman or -woman no longer needed impoverishment or geography for substantiation. Lack of plumbing or a childhood in
the cotton fields was no longer required to sing the blues; the style was enough. Muddy’s popularity was curtailed by the same thing that made him king: the Delta soil that clung to him now
threatened to inter him. He had become an institution. Institutions were honored, and forgotten.

There were black musicians younger than Muddy and Wolf who knew the blues and the commerce of music. Buddy Guy, for one, was raised under circumstances very similar to those of his influences
and could play their style very well. But when it came time for Buddy Guy to make his own mark on the music world, the Muddy Waters style was claimed — by Muddy Waters. Guy could back Muddy
and demonstrate his down-home chops, but to make his own statement, he had to respond to the new world. And that was a world of Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix, of James Brown and Creedence
Clearwater, of blues licks on overdrive and blues licks on acid. That’s where the spotlight — and the money — was.

In the spring of 1970, Muddy flew to Lehigh, Pennsylvania (the band drove).
Rolling Stone
covered his arena appearance at the Philadelphia Spectrum: “He strolled on stage with a
crutch under his arm, put down the crutch and picked up his Fender, hobbled to a stool and opened with ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ He played a restrained, careful set, nothing fancy, and
later told us that his hands were still partly numb from nerve damage. Doctors have told him that the deadening will go away at the rate of half an inch a month.” Muddy Waters had big
hands.

By year’s end, Muddy was booked for three weeks in Europe. He’d begun picking up the pace and if he had to go out for a long haul, Europe was a better prospect: the drives between
gigs were not so far apart, clubs treated the musicians better, and the audiences did too. The band parked the cars at Bob Messinger’s New Jersey home,
instructing him
to send weekly payments home from the deposit he’d received. Muddy had checks sent to Geneva and smaller checks to Lucille.

The tour, which included Paris, Stockholm, and London, was well received. Muddy, still using crutches, was often asked about his accident. (He told his friend Max Jones, a British journalist
he’d met in 1958, that his accident happened “a year and a month and five days ago.”) The excitement of the tour distracted him from the pain in his hands and before the trip was
over he’d taken to performing a solo version of “Walkin’ Blues.”

The English writer Charles Shaar Murray saw Muddy on a rainy night at a small club with a leaky roof, “in this filthy room with pools of water all over the floor.” Thinking of how
those who’d copped his licks no longer needed such gigs, Murray asked him “how he felt about being ripped off. I was thinking culturally, but he interpreted it as financially and said,
‘If you don’t rip me, he gonna rip me, and if he don’t rip me, someone else will, so if you can’t deal with that, don’t get into the music business.” Don’t
matter where you farm, the ’cropper’s deal was never square.

“As we go to press,”
Living Blues
magazine, the new bulletin board and blues family newsletter, wrote in its fourth issue, winter 1970–1971, “Muddy Waters has
not yet been paid for his tour of England in November and December. Muddy is unable to contact his booking agent [
sic
], Bob Messinger, who was supposed to have met him in New York with the
money. As a result, Muddy used personal funds to partially pay the members of his band.”

It was bad timing to be screwed out of the tour money — it didn’t make for a happy Christmas — but it gave Muddy a place to vent. So much had changed: the big house that had
been Chess Records had turned cold. Machinations and whispers sprouted like bad plumbing leaks. Leonard and all the Chesses were gone and the cooks in the kitchen didn’t feed the hands like
they used to. Muddy was pissed off, confused, frustrated, and he had nowhere in-house to express it. When he wrote Bob Messinger on January 11, 1971, Muddy was fed up with being taken, was
frightened of losing his furnish, felt he was
owed the farm, and knew he was entitled to a piece of it. The handwritten letter — feminine script, Geneva’s
probably, or Cookie’s — on notebook paper burns with rage, explodes like a letter bomb. So that he wouldn’t be misunderstood, so that his intention and desire would be clear at
that moment and clear decades later, he drove home his main point by printing in all capital letters: “I WANT MY MONEY!”

Breakups are not pretty. Exactly what happened is difficult to discern. Someone screwed Muddy out of some cash, and Muddy fired his manager. Those are facts. Messinger put the blame on the
British road manager, then on the American promoter: “Apparently the road manager disappeared on the last day or next to last day of the tour. They came back with enough money to get home to
Chicago and that was it.” The missing money was a drag, and so was the resulting lack of management. “Muddy started booking dates himself,” said Paul Oscher, who would soon quit
the band. “We started going to the state of Washington, then Texas, then Montreal, to Virginia. We would go zigzagging all over the place.”

In Muddy’s personal life, Lucille had followed Lois, his previous girlfriend, down the poppy path, and the kids he’d had with her were taken by the state and put into foster homes.
“Lucille got in the wrong crowd,” said Willie Smith. “She was leaning pretty much in that direction. When you’re dealing with that kind of people, you got to pay back one
way or the other.”

Muddy could find no comfort in the situation at Chess. The label had been moved to New York, the Chicago office was empty, the studio a rental facility for other labels. “They’re all
new people,” Muddy said. “I don’t know nobody and nobody knows too much about me.”

The new Chess repackaged the old repackagings —
The Best of, Real Folk Blues,
and
More Real Folk Blues
— as
McKinley Morganfield AKA Muddy Waters
. Its
liner notes, by Mike Leadbitter, the founder and co-editor of the British blues magazine
Blues Unlimited,
were scathing and captured the dire feeling of Muddy’s traditionalist
fans:

A few days after writing Messinger, Muddy was given a document to sign by GRT, the new Chess owners. It was nothing he could comprehend, who knows what he was told — except that a check
would follow soon after his signature. The bean counters at GRT had discovered that many of Muddy’s compositions had never been published, and with the Rolling Stones and other
million-selling bands covering Muddy’s songs, they smelled money. The document put Muddy’s publishing with their organization, Heavy Music, Inc.

The sharks at Arc, who still owned Muddy’s publishing, went for blood. On March 3, 1971, while touring the East Coast, Muddy was told to appear at the New York offices of Arc Music, the
longtime Chess Records publisher. What transpired there is described in the lawsuit filed on Muddy’s behalf against Arc half a decade later. “Upon his arrival in the offices of Arc
Music,” the lawsuit stated,

According to the papers that Muddy couldn’t read, signing made the songs the property of Arc Music. (Gene Goodman dealt with GRT’s claim and soon had them convinced to
“relinquish its claim in and to the musical compositions.”) Muddy’s status with Arc would be “employee for hire,” implying that Arc Music had paid him a regular salary
to compose songs. Lastly, the document was retroactive, dating back almost twenty-five years to grab the hits.