Can't Be Satisfied (60 page)

Butterfield’s first album, recorded directly after Newport 1965, included Muddy’s “Got My Mojo Working.”

Shortly after Newport, Butterfield played three nights (one hundred bucks each night) at a Cambridge coffeehouse, Club 47. “He told me that I should get some of the other bands from
Chicago, starting with Muddy Waters,” said Jim Rooney, who was managing the club. The afternoon of opening night, Rooney phoned Muddy at the Hotel Diplomat. “I said, ‘What kind of
coffee would you like?’ and he said, ‘TSIVAS.’ I said, ‘What?’ ‘TSIVAS.’ ‘What?’ ‘TSIVAS! Tsivas Regal!’ And I said,
‘You’ve got it.’ That night he got a bottle of Chivas Regal and everything was straight.” (Von Schmidt and Rooney,
Baby,
p. 270.)

“[At Muddy’s show] I walked into the men’s room of the Club 47,” said Peter Wolf, later vocalist with the J. Geils Band. “I had heard about Butterfield through the
grapevine. In person, it was incredible. It seemed that all the Chicago bands started coming to town. . . . and there was Cotton, Spann, and S. P. Leary all gathered around a pint. They are my
idols, so I picked up my cue real good and ran out and scored a couple of pints, and after the next show they were all over me, and my apartment was only four blocks away.” (Ibid, pp. 268 and
272.)

1966 Gigs:
In January of 1966, Muddy brought most of the band to Toronto for the taping of a CBC–TV special, “Bell Telephone Presents the Blues.” In addition
to performing, Muddy and Spann informally exchanged stories with Willie Dixon and Sunnyland Slim. The highlight of the performances is Spann solo, the whiskey on his breath nearly tangible, singing
“Tain’t Nobody’s Business (If I Do).” A motto, clearly.

In April 1966, while touring with Big Mama Thornton — also managed by Bob Messinger — the band stopped at Coast Recorders in San Francisco to back her on
Big Mama Thornton and
the Chicago Blues Band,
some of which has been compiled on her CD
Ball and Chain
(Arhoolie CD-305). A feisty woman who knew about being screwed by the music business —
she’d recorded the original “Hound Dog,” but because she hadn’t written it, she received nothing but an honorable mention when Elvis’s version became an international
hit — she drew a hard edge from Muddy’s band.

The band took three gigs over 1966 at New York’s Cafe au Go-Go: May, August, and November. At the August date, Muddy’s band did triple duty, backing Spann on the opening set and then
backing John Lee Hooker as well as Muddy. The August dates yielded two Blues Way albums, one for Spann (
The Blues Is Where It’s At
) and one for Hooker (
Live at the Cafe au
Go-Go
), though Hooker’s tracks may have been recut later. Spann’s album is some of the best-sounding Muddy from the 1960s. Hooker, best heard alone, is ably backed by Muddy’s
ensemble; they understood the boogie groove at the core of Hooker’s style and knew not to count bars and change chords until he did — if he did. In November, they were part of
“The Blues Bag,” a series running hot at the club that featured several name acts doing short sets in rapid sequence. There were matinees for younger kids, where the club sold ice cream
instead of liquor; most kids snuck in their own bottle. Despite the cold rain, the line at the door was four people deep and ran around the block. One critic noted Sammy Lawhorn’s
“speed of execution that is breathtaking.” (Kunstadt,
Record Research
.) While in New York for the November
date, the band cut an album for Victoria
Spivey’s Spivey label as The Muddy Waters Blues Band; only Muddy was signed to Chess, so they were free to step out. Muddy participates on some tracks, credited as “Main Stream.”
This record is hard to find and generally worth the search.

In the wee hours, after a night of the May gig at Cafe au Go-Go, Muddy and Spann went to a nearby FM radio station for an interview, recorded by Bob Messinger. After the disc jockey’s
rambling start, a decent interview evolved, along with some real good music.

Band Personnel:
One night, when the band happened to be in St. Louis, a gunman came into Smitty’s, fire in his eyes and a firearm in his hand. “If we’d been
sitting on that bandstand, we’d all be dead,” said Cotton. “He said that everybody was going with his wife. And then he shot up into the ceiling. We heard about that, got kind of
scared, and soon everybody had a little gun. And then it cooled off. So I’m standing up on Forty-third Street one night waiting on a bus, had a few drinks. And I look around and he is there
with a .38 in his hand and he says, ‘How come you treat me like you did?’ And he pulled the trigger on it. Five times I got it. Never did nothing to him in my life. It scared every
musician in the city. If he hadn’t gone to jail right away, he’d’a been killed.”

When Cotton left, he was replaced by George “Mojo” Buford. Buford was born in Hernando, Mississippi, in 1929 and began singing in spiritual groups before he was ten. He moved to
Memphis in 1944, where he was exposed to more urban blues artists such as B. B. King and others on WDIA. He got to Chicago around 1953 and wound up in a group that got busy on the South Side. Spann
heard them, sent Muddy by, and Buford’s group became Muddy’s “junior” band, filling his gigs when he’d travel out of town. (For more background, see Wisner,
“Buford.”)

Pat Hare was notoriously jealous. He’d often run to the phone between sets to make sure his girlfriend was home and not out being unfaithful. When she didn’t answer one night, Hare
took a Winchester rifle to her apartment and demanded to be let in. There was, of course, no answer. He fired through the front window. Ever the dutiful bandleader, Muddy helped him hide out; when
the heat didn’t let up, Muddy got him to Memphis. In May of 1963, when the scene cooled, Hare left Memphis for Minneapolis and a band with Mojo Buford. “Me and Jojo Williams went to
Arkansas to pick him up,” said Buford. “He was working on a farm, picking cotton and driving tractors.” (Darwen, “Buford,” p. 11.) He murdered his baby in Minneapolis
six months later. (For a comprehensive account of Pat Hare’s life and demise, see Hahn, “Blues Guitarist.”)

168
Spann, who stepped out as leader: The labels for which Spann recorded include Fontana, Storyville, Prestige, Arhoolie, Decca, Spivey,
Testament, Vanguard, Blues Horizon, Bluestimes, and Delmark, for which he employed, in addition to Muddy’s band: Johnny Shines, Junior Wells, Johnny Young, and, later, younger white players
such as Eric Clapton, Paul Butterfield, Michael Bloomfield, and Fleetwood Mac. A recently published Spann discography is marvelous. Begun by the late Bill Rowe, it features an excellent
introduction by Alan Balfour and makes for informative perusal. (Available through Micrography Discographical Publications, Wkoestduinstraat 84, NL–1058 TJ Amsterdam, The Netherlands.)

170
“A sturdy man”: Demetre and Chauvard,
Land of the Blues,
p. 59.

170
Kokomo Arnold: Ibid., p. 128.

171
“Muddy roared, leaped, jerked”: Leadbitter,
Blues,
p. 11.

172
Bob Koester, whose Delmark Records: While Chess, unwittingly playing the role of Lester Melrose, was packaging Muddy in costumes that
didn’t fit, new blues fans were following the lead of Aristocrat two decades earlier and forming their own labels. Before founding Delmark Records, Bob Koester sold 78s through the mail from
his St. Louis dormitory room. His first jazz release was in 1953; he moved the label to Chicago in 1958 and, after meeting Big Joe Williams and Speckled Red and helping recover Sleepy John Estes
and Yank Rachel from oblivion in the early 1960s, began releasing blues.

176
his valet, C. D.: Jimmy Lee Morris knew him and said, “He got both Muddy’s ladies strung out on drugs. And he’s
supposed to have been his friend. He was pushing that shit, had a pocket full of money. C. D. lived in the neighborhood.”

177
“the reverends”: Reverend Willie Morganfield, whose father — Muddy’s uncle — had been a preacher on
Stovall, was staying in Muddy’s house in the early 1960s. He’d scored a major gospel hit in 1959 with “What Is This?”

178
Life had not improved for Azelene: After Cookie, Azelene gave birth to four more children, dispersing them to others. “We have
one brother we don’t know anything about,” Cookie said, “because she was on drugs and left him in the hospital.”

179
“The Muddy Waters Twist”: Though Muddy’s version was something of a reach, the dance had its redeeming value: it
got the girls shaking. At a 1961 Ole Miss University dance, that, however, led to a step back in time. “The twist was out, and none of them girls ain’t studying about no color,”
Muddy told McKee. “We were playing that music, they were getting down doing the twist. Them girls down, their little white panties showing. I was scared to look anyway — I had my head
over, looking like a pump handle. So help me Jesus Christ, they put them lights out! If I’m lying, I don’t want to say another word to you — they put them lights out!”
(McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.)

179
“Muddy let Cotton run his show”: Trynka interview with Billy Boy Arnold.

179
“Wolf was better at managing”: Trynka interview with Jimmy Rogers.

180
“unemployment compensation”: Trynka interview with Billy Boy Arnold.

180
Charlie Musselwhite: He was raised in Memphis, on a road that dead-ended into a creek and a field. Said Musselwhite, “I’d
hear people singing blues in those fields. I’d be a little kid playing in the creek, and I’d hear that music — that singing — and man, it just wrapped itself around
me.” (Bill Ellis, “Charlie Musselwhite: The Blues Overtook Me,”
Memphis Commercial Appeal,
June 9, 1997, Sec. C.) Musselwhite moved to Chicago and drove an
exterminator’s truck; he told me, “I got to know the whole city right away. I remember around the Maxwell Street area, seeing a sign for Elmore James. And I’d go back at night and
it was such a thrill. I didn’t connect Chicago with blues at all. To me, it was a big city up North where it was easy to get a good-paying job. I’d see these friends of mine going up
the hillbilly highway in these old jalopies and then come back a year or two later in a brand-new car. So that looked good to me. Especially after I had been digging ditches over in Arkansas for a
buck an hour.” After appearing with Big Walter Horton on a Vanguard Records anthology, Musselwhite released his first solo record,
Stand Back!,
on Vanguard at age twenty-two. He left
Chicago in August of 1967.

180
Pepper’s Lounge: When the music quit around four, Willie Smith usually hit the basement for some gambling. “That’s
where the dice game was,” he said. “The cops used to get in on the game. We knew all the cops on the beat. Some of them later moved off the street into headquarters, and sometimes
we’d recognize each other there from Pepper’s basement.”

182
“You Shook Me”: The track was released as an instrumental for Earl Hooker, “Blue Guitar,” on the Age
label.

183
Blues from Big Bill’s Copa Cabana:
Buddy Guy said, “Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, every time I see them
they’ll bring that album up and say, ‘This is what turnt me around with the blues.’ They’ll show me those little licks I was doing.” In the 1990s, Clapton had Guy
re-create his track “Don’t Know Which Way to Go” on the soundtrack to
Rush.
“I came up with the song,” Guy said, “and come to hear they gave Willie
Dixon credit for writing it.” Around the time of the Big Bill recording, Muddy appeared on two Chicago TV programs, one entitled “For Blacks Only,” and the other, “Jazz
Supports the Symphony.”

183
Folk Singer:
A return to the earlier style probably appealed to Leonard too. His interest in the record label and recording
was fading as it became more complex, and he began to branch out. In 1963, he purchased WVON radio, selecting the call letters because they stood for “The Voice of the Negro.”