Can't Be Satisfied (38 page)

Muddy did what anyone working for shares would do if handed a check for ten grand: he signed the papers, signed away ownership of his songs. Again, what he was actually told is Merlin the
Magician’s guess, but it tells the power of money that they dared inform him the ten grand represented his earnings over the past six months. Muddy couldn’t read or write, but if he was
owed ten grand for that half year, he must have — MUST HAVE — been owed something for the half year before that, and each one previous. But he took the check and he didn’t
ask.

The Arc document refers to an attached schedule, which, had it had any writing on it — for it did not and was completed later — would have been a list of songs Muddy wrote and
recorded. The defendants, the lawsuit stated, “feared that, although plaintiff was barely able to comprehend the written word, he may have been able to see a schedule consisting of many of
the compositions composed by him . . . and thereby have made certain inquiries, the responses to which defendants wished to avoid.”

The lawsuit was organized by the man who had become Muddy’s new manager. In the spring of 1971, a friend of Muddy’s sought help through Scott Cameron at Willard
Alexander, Inc., a booking agency strong on ghost bands such as Glenn Miller’s, whose leader was dead.
“Asking do I want to book Muddy Waters was like asking a
chocoholic if he wants a Hershey bar,” said Cameron.

Cameron was raised in Madison, Wisconsin, where life was all Patti Page and the Mills Brothers until, fiddling with his radio dial one night, he picked up WLAC out of Nashville. That blew a new
hole in his Swiss cheese. He cut a couple rock singles as a vocalist, but wound up in the hotel business, managing a unit in Omaha, Nebraska. In the lobby one night he spied five guys with their
hair painted silver, “and I was back in the music business in a heartbeat.” In June of 1969, he took over Willard Alexander’s Chicago office.

Scott phoned Muddy and they arranged to meet at the Chess building. Cameron was approaching the East Twenty-first Street office as Muddy was getting out of his car. Cameron’s
distinguishing physical characteristic is his height: he stands barely five feet tall. “When I met him,” said Muddy, “I’m looking to meet a MAN, I didn’t look to meet
a little bitty. And I was getting out of the car, and he was going in, and he said, ‘You’re Muddy Waters?’ I said, ‘Yes, I am.’ ‘I’m Scott Cameron.’
Great big voice. I looked down, said, ‘Yeaaah?’ ” Muddy laughs. “You hear him on the telephone, he sounds like he’s a dynamo. He’s roaring like a lion,
rrroarrr!
And I see this little fella, and said, ‘Man, you wanna manage ME?’ ”

Cameron returned from Chess and phoned Willard Alexander in New York. “I was really excited. I told him I’d just signed Muddy Waters. Willard’s response was, ‘Great blues
singer but he’s a has-been.’ ” Cameron laughed. “I set out to prove him wrong.”

Muddy’s association with Cameron would last the rest of Muddy’s life (and, contractually, through the lives of their descendants). “At the time, Muddy was at his real low
ebb,” said Cameron. “His only regular performance was at the Quiet Knight next to the el tracks for the door on Monday nights. My psychology was, it’s because of this guy that we
have
Rolling Stone
magazine, that’s why we have the Rolling Stones — the common thread through all these guitar players was Muddy Waters. And much to the chagrin of the blues
freaks, instead of playing the forty-, fifty-, sixty-seat local blues club, I began putting him in the showcase room where the rock and roll bands
were playing, getting him
in front of the people that were buying records, associating with acts that spawned from Muddy Waters.” Scott became a link to the other side. If rock stars were going to stand on the
shoulders of giants, the giants were entitled — at least — to the runoff. Cameron lined up a spring tour of the East Coast. Fifteen months after his accident, Muddy was revitalized by
his relationship with Cameron, and critics began to notice that something had changed. “Muddy emotes warmly and relates to his listeners in the opposite manner of B. B. King, who has allowed
himself to become a professional, slick charade of himself,” wrote one reviewer. “He was in as fine a form as I’ve seen him since the days of his legendary Club 47 appearances in
the midsixties,” wrote Jon Landau in the
Boston Phoenix
.

After stepping up Muddy’s road gigs, Scott Cameron coordinated a three-week stint at an old-school upscale Chicago club, Mr. Kelly’s, which marked a turning point in Muddy’s
career. This was a venue on Chicago’s Gold Coast, the expensive side of town. Frank Sinatra performed there, Lena Horne, Barbra Streisand. There was a doorman who wore a uniform and stood
beneath a portico. There was valet parking, a sign that had all its lightbulbs, a marquee with letters as tall as a doorway. For twenty-one days in June of 1971, those letters spelled Muddy Waters.
Pee Wee Madison, for one, was impressed. “Mr. Kelly’s was a nice big club, expensive club. Lot of high-class people. Wasn’t like the ghetto.”

Paul Oscher knew something was unusual when Muddy called a band meeting before the first night. “Muddy took all of the guys into the kitchen and said, ‘Now I ain’t taking no
alcoholic band into this gig so you guys better think about that.’ So we were cool. The first set, Muddy was very laid-back, like he was afraid to sing. By the end of the night, he was doing
his shit and people were going wild. Bill Cosby came down, Nancy Wilson was there.” So was Bobby Stovall, who remembered the Chinese lanterns being hung at his father’s house for
Muddy’s performance there in 1943. He sent a note up to the bandstand. “I had gotten divorced about that time,” said Bobby, “so I would go see him and take a date. His way
of finding me was to go through this drill from the stage where he’d say, ‘Everybody has some luck in their life. Mine was living on a good man’s plantation, he really took care
of me, I remember him always, and his family is here, y’all stand up and take a bow.’ The light would find us so he’d know where we were sitting. I told Muddy he did more for my
sex life than he could ever know.”

Mr. Kelly’s was a beginning and an end. The Quiet Knight, the White Rose, Pepper’s, the Urbanite, Silvio’s — these were places that were about to become part of
Muddy’s past, his pre–Mr. Kelly’s days. “I think I saw the last real regularly booked black Chicago club that
he played,” said Jim O’Neal,
one of the founders of
Living Blues
. “It was New Year’s night, 1971. I kept up with the club scene because we printed the listings in
Living Blues,
and the only time
that I can remember that Muddy played at a black club in Chicago after that was if a film crew set it up.”

Live (at Mr. Kelly’s)
was his first album of new recordings since
Fathers and Sons
two years earlier. It had been five years since Muddy recorded with his own band for
Chess, and they’d been nearly obscured by brass.
Live (at Mr. Kelly’s)
both countered the dire outlook of the
AKA Muddy Waters
liner notes and declared that Muddy had
recovered from his accident. He is full voiced, plays stirring slide, and leads a solid band. Muddy was back.

Not only was Muddy’s career changing, so was the city. Chicago’s white population, by the new decade, diminished by half a million, while the black population rose
by 300,000. The city became nearly one-third black. The most momentous change on the expanding South Side came in 1970, when Congressman William Dawson died. This twenty-eight-year politician had
maintained his control of the whole area’s vices, including the policy game, and secured power that Daley’s machine could not ignore. Upon Dawson’s death, Daley restructured the
district, thereby dividing the power and preventing a single African American from having such wide control. Gangs, especially since Martin Luther King’s assassination, took a stronger hold
and made the streets more dangerous; band members walked with their guns drawn at night. Shops, in the wake of so-called Urban Renewal, boarded up, and many neighborhoods were plowed under or
irreparably split by the construction of highways on their spines.

In early December of 1971, Muddy went overseas for
The London Muddy Waters Sessions
. Accompanying him were guitarist Sammy Lawhorn, harmonica player Carey Bell, and producer Esmond
Edwards from Chess’s New York office. The band awaiting him was Georgie Fame on piano, Rory Gallagher and Rosetta Green on guitars,
Rick Grech on bass, and drummers
Mitch Mitchell and Herbie Lovelle; not everyone played both nights.

Sending Muddy to England was an expression of Chess’s confidence in their original hitmaker (and would get them a good catalog item with steady sales). “It was basically a love
session,” said Edwards, who would return to London to produce similar records with Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. “Muddy was so revered by those guys. Many may have had bigger names than
him but they were in awe of being on his session. Their attitude was, ‘Let’s do what we can to make a great album for and with Muddy.’

“Muddy was a very quiet man. He would sit in his seat in front of his microphone and things would swirl around him. When I worked with Chuck and Bo, they were more imperious in their
manner, much more outspoken than Muddy. Muddy might say, ‘Maybe it’s a little too sad or too slow,’ something like that. But Muddy was easygoing and mellow, almost ignorant of the
awe that the other guys held him in.”

The
London Sessions
is a good meeting of the minds. Muddy’s guitar parts are easily distinguishable from those of his guests; the generational disparity, the cultural difference
is a significant part of the record’s subject. But when the tapes were brought back to New York, what might have been a great album was degraded by overdubbed horns. In the mixes of the songs
before they were made hip, the excitement between the artists is tangible, their blending of blues and rock, black and white, England and America. The sassy horns cover that like water on fire.
(Several hornless mixes have been released posthumously by MCA / Chess.)

Muddy’s return to the United States was more auspicious than that of his tapes: he won
Billboard
magazine’s Trendsetter Award, which called him “a father figure of
electric blues.” There were other signs of his influence too, notably Etta James’s answer song to Muddy’s “Mannish Boy,” “W.O.M.A.N.” Three months later,
after an album of previously shelved tracks,
They Call Me Muddy Waters,
won Muddy his first Grammy Award (Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording) and even before
London Sessions
was
released, Chess put him
back in the studio for
Can’t Get No Grinding
. Again he was allowed to use his road band (with Cotton in the harmonica chair).

The album, which got a top rating from
Rolling Stone
(despite a grating electric piano) and was nominated for a Grammy, is decent midperiod Muddy, though it pales next to his classic
sides. It establishes the standard for blues in the last third of the twentieth century: the performances are strong, but the emotion is pallid; you can’t hear the artist falling to his
knees, drawing power from the earth as he sends his plight heavenward.