Can't Be Satisfied (58 page)
Read Can't Be Satisfied Online
Authors: Robert Gordon
R
&
B GOING STALE
?: The past two years have seen the American disk-buying public — in reality, the entire
disk-buying world — discovering what many in the business have always known: that the rhythm and blues field is one of the most fertile, honest, and dynamic sources of song material.
It has explored the emotions frankly and directly, and it has voiced some penetrating views of society. And always, underneath it all, there has been “The Beat.” Today,
it’s hardly a secret that R&B is the big thing in our popular music. But there are indications that the music that revitalized the business is now in danger of going stale. (Gart,
First Pressings Vol. 6
)
“I was playing in the clubs with Muddy in the late fifties,” said Billy Boy, “and Muddy didn’t do nothing but sing — he had Pat Hare playing guitar. Muddy would sit in the audience with his lady, and his bodyguards and valets and strong-arm men, and he would come up and sing three or four numbers. He had put his guitar down because things were changing and he felt nobody wanted to hear that dang stuff.”
148
“Forty Days and Forty Nights”: This is a big, bold record. Hare contributes a
Chuck
Berry–esque riff that may have inspired the Beatles’ “Revolution.” The song is similar to “Mystery Train,” which had been a hit for Junior Parker in 1954 (and to
Arthur Crudup’s “Mean Old Frisco” from 1942). Cotton and Hare made “Mystery Train” part of the band’s pre-Muddy set, and when Muddy saw the audience’s
reaction, he reworked the words and claimed the song.
148
the sound was quite different: “Don’t Go No Further” was the sound of the urban blues club, the very electric
guitar propelling patrons up and over the South Side cinder-block top. The flip side, “Diamonds at Your Feet,” is a radical reinterpretation of “Take Sick and Die” from
Muddy’s Library of Congress recordings. The dirge is here made jubilant; instead of mourning his baby’s passing, Muddy anticipates the occasion as a moment to celebrate her life. The
session is rounded out by “Just to Be with You,” one of Muddy’s personal favorites.
149
“Got My Mojo Working”: Ann Cole recorded hers on January 27, 1957, for an April release. Muddy’s was recorded a
month or so earlier. The week of April 27, 1957,
Billboard
made Muddy’s version a Buy o’ the Week: “This version of the tune is locked in competition with the Ann Cole
disk. Most areas show it practically even with the latter.” (Gart,
First Pressings Vol. 7.
) “We played with her a couple times after that,” said Cotton, “once in
Philadelphia at the Uptown Theater. We had a big hit on ‘Mojo,’ she asked Muddy not to sing it, so he didn’t. We let her do it because it was her song in the first
place.”
Around the time of “Got My Mojo Working,” Muddy went on a tour that featured Sarah Vaughan. Researching the date of the tour only resulted in conflicting accounts. Cotton told me,
“That was the big tour. Nappy Brown, Sarah Vaughan — it was her tour — the Moonglows, Ray Prysock, Arthur Prysock, Al Hibbler, Jimmy Witherspoon. We got booed the first day, in
Washington, D.C., at the Howard Theater. They were there to see Sarah Vaughan.”
149
“So I told Muddy I couldn’t play out the night”: Trynka, “Howlin’ Wolf.”
150
“McCoys”: Trynka interview with Hubert Sumlin.
151
“We quit touring in January”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
155
“I only charge thirty-five cent”: For the musician, the money from a hit was in the gig pay. “A blues
record,” said Marshall Chess, “if it sold seven or ten thousand in Chicago it was a hit. At eighty cents a record, that’s six or seven thousand dollars in a few weeks. The
artist’s royalty I think was two or three percent, let’s say it was even five percent. It was complex ‘no rules’ time. There was all this payola going on to get the record
played and that wasn’t a recoupable investment, the label took care of all that. Songwriters’ royalties were two cents per cut. The writers’ portion was one cent. Let’s say
the most you would do was forty thousand. Four hundred bucks worth? These guys liked it when Chess got the record on the radio in Chicago, all of a sudden you could get four or five hundred for a
weekend at a club.”
Leonard Chess recalled for the
Chicago Tribune
how Chess responded to the payola charge. “We were the only company that refused to sign a cease and desist order. I was advised not
to. Payola was standard practice in the industry and I told them I wouldn’t stop unless everyone else did. At least I was doing it honestly — make a deal and send ’em a check and
at the end of the year report
it on a 1099 form.” Leonard bought his first radio station in 1959. (Golkin, “Blacks, Whites, and Blues” part 2.)
155
he refused to let them feel the full impact: Chess’s Robin Hood accounting method was consistent with Guralnick’s
interview with Marshall thirty years earlier: “Oh sure, we done a little padding. Sometimes when royalty time came around, let’s say that he had one group that was very big, my father
might cut their royalty by five hundred bucks and add it to Wolf’s statement. But he didn’t ever put it in his own pocket.” (Guralnick,
Home,
p. 233.) Also, Nadine
Cohodas recounts a story from the early 1960s: “[Producer Jack] Tracy was speechless during one meeting when Leonard was preparing the royalty checks. He looked at the statement with
Jamal’s royalties, which were considerable, and at [Ramsey] Lewis’s, which were much smaller. He went over Jamal’s earnings again and then told the accountant, ‘That’s
too much money for him — give some to Ramsey.” (Cohodas,
Gold,
p. 170.)
10: S
CREAMING
G
UITAR AND
H
OWLING
P
IANO
1958–1959
Muddy, the English, and the Electric Guitar:
“Lomax had lived over here for about six or seven years and he played a lot of the Library of Congress recordings on the BBC
radio,” Paul Oliver said. “Anyone who had heard Muddy Waters would have heard him playing acoustic. When he played electric, it was a surprise. I felt rather thrilled by it, because he
seemed right up to date. A lot of people still thought of blues as part of jazz, so it didn’t quite match their anticipations.”
“Muddy’s guitar wasn’t loud,” Chris Barber stated with affirmation. “No one complained to me, and if they had, I’d have told them to get out. We were paying
Muddy and Otis ourselves. We’d got them there for our pleasure. We had toured with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and she played quite loud. We’d toured with Sonny and Brownie, and Brownie
played amplified acoustic guitar. I didn’t think Muddy played very loud.” There’s a CD of one date, midtour in Manchester (
Collaboration,
Tomato Records); Muddy’s
not shocking the ears.
He did, however, rock and roll at his unofficial gig at the Roundhouse, a small London pub with a blues night run by Alexis Korner and Cyril Davis, two musicians who’d begun exploring
blues before Muddy’s arrival. When Muddy and Otis strolled into the packed, smoky upstairs room around nine in the evening, they smelled spilled beer and felt the sting of thick cigarette
smoke — aah, home. They were immediately offered the stage. Korner remained to accompany the two on his steel guitar. “At the concert [halls], [Spann] had suffered from poor
amplification, but at the Roundhouse there was no trouble,” wrote Tony Standish. He continued:
The left hand rolled them, huge and blue, and the right hand hovered, making it sing, and then swooped and soared, showering us with piano blues such as we had never heard
in the flesh. . . . Muddy mopped his perspiring brow and laid aside his guitar. And suddenly there was another Muddy, a Muddy who sang as he must for his own people, in another world than ours.
. . . He sang with his whole body — gyrating, twisting, shouting — preaching the blues chorus upon hypnotic chorus, weaving a pattern of quivering tension around and over an
enthralled audience. (Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 1)
“At the Roundhouse,” said Paul Oliver, “Muddy was closer to the audience and I think he was just rather more comfortable with it. He coped with the big
concerts quite adequately, they were closer to the way he played on the first recordings he made for Aristocrat. It wasn’t tremendously heavy. But I think he liked the club atmosphere. That
prepared me a little bit for my visit to Chicago the next year. But I couldn’t reckon with the kind of power and ferocity of his playing and performance on the South Side.”
Session Notes:
“She’s into Something” is one of Muddy’s most uncharacteristic songs. In his basement, Muddy had mentioned that he was interested in
trying something different. At the Broonzy session, the band played him “She’s into Something” with Spann singing, but Muddy cut them off before they could even get going, said,
“Hold it, hold it, I don’t do no cha cha cha.”
“Clay could play a beat,” said James Cotton. “He said, ‘Let’s put a little cha cha on it.’ Pat Hare had his part. We picked it up like that.” Muddy was
won over.
I was discussing Little Walter’s majestic harmonica sound from the January 1959 “Blues Before Sunrise” session with Chicago harmonica player and music interlocutor Dave
Waldman, and he sent me this harmonica lesson, which he has allowed me to share:
The harp-player on the “Blues Before Sunrise” session was playing an octave harp. This would be a harp where, by blowing or drawing into one hole, you get a note
and also the same note an octave higher. It’s not the same thing as a chromatic. As far as I can tell, the harp player on the session uses such an octave harp for the entirety of
“Crawling Kingsnake,” except for the closing lick. This last lick is played on a normal ten-hole diatonic (probably a Marine Band) tuned in the key of A. (Note: the song is in the
key of A, as are the other two songs from the session.) The octave harp also makes a brief appearance on “Mean Mistreater.” There, the harp-player plays the first two verses of the
song using a Marine Band (or something like it) tuned in the key of D. (Playing a harp in this way — a fifth above the key that the harp is tuned in — is by far the most common
approach to blues harp.) After the last line of the second verse (“because you got that on your mind”), the harp-player picks up a Marine Band in A and plays that for most of the
next verse. (Playing a harp that is tuned in the same key as the key of the song is sometimes called “straight harp.”) However, in the middle of the last line of this verse
(“Well you know you had the nerve to tell me”), the harp-player comes in with the octave harp. You’ll notice that when he first comes in, the harp-player does not seem to have
completely found his bearings on the octave-harp and plays a few notes that don’t seem to fit with the key in which he’s playing. And indeed very soon afterward in the song, the
harp-player abandons the octave-harp for something more conventional. In the middle of the second line of the next verse (between “ain’t it lonesome” and “sleeping by
yourself”), the harp player comes back in with a D Marine Band and plays that for the remainder of the song. The octave harp on this session is the only use of such a harp that I’m
familiar with in blues music.
157
without importing American artists: The British and the American musicians’
unions each forbade the
other to play in their country for fear that local musicians would lose work. “There wasn’t a demand for British musicians in America,” Chris Barber told me, “but there was
a big demand in Europe and Britain for American music. People leapt on boats to Dublin. My band chartered a plane to see Louis Armstrong in Paris in 1956. We tried to arrange a British Louis
Armstrong tour backed by us. The British union was communist run and the union guy actually said to me, ‘Americans, bah! Why don’t you get a Russian trumpeter?’ ” The
stonewalling broke when the British union wanted to import Paul Robeson.
157
two four-song EPs: The first English EP was on Vogue, entitled
Muddy Waters with Little Walter,
subtitled
Mississippi
Blues,
and it contained “I Can’t Be Satisfied,” “Feel Like Going Home,” “Evans Shuffle,” and “Louisiana Blues.” The other was on the
London label, named
Mississippi Blues: Muddy Waters and His Guitar,
and it featured “Young-Fashioned Ways,” “Mannish Boy,” “All Aboard,” and
“Forty Days and Forty Nights.”
158
“I was going overseas”: Guralnick interview with Muddy Waters.
158
“They thought I was a Big Bill Broonzy”: Rooney,
Bossmen.
159
“They began slowly, feeling their way”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 1.
161
“I fled from the hall”: Fancourt, Liner notes to
The Complete Muddy Waters.
161
“I drove ’em crazy”: Bill Dahl, “Muddy Waters Reigns As King.”
Illinois Entertainer,
May
1981.
161
“When I wormed my way backstage”: Wilmer, “First Time,” p. 87.
161
“There weren’t many black people in this country”: Author interview with Val Wilmer.
In England, through great difficulty, Paul Oliver had acquired a photograph of Muddy, which he presented for an autograph. Muddy whipped out his rubber stamp and inkpad to hammer his signature.
The ink was dry so he stamped it again, and several times more, until he’d covered the photograph in stamped signatures.
162
“I didn’t play my guitar”: Standish, “Muddy Waters in London” part 2.
163
red Telecaster: “A guy in Chicago made me a neck for it,” Muddy told Tom Wheeler, “a big stout neck with the high
nut to raise up the strings for slide. I needed to strengthen it up because of the big strings.” (Wheeler, “Waters–Winter.”)