Can't Be Satisfied (18 page)

The power in the spare sound of the Aristocrat singles was reinforced by Muddy’s songwriting. His third release, “Train Fare Home,” cut to the homesickness that resided at the
new urbanite’s emotional core. Opening with plaintive slide notes, the electric guitar has a rich and intimate tone, softer on the strings than the keening sound of his first hit.
Crawford’s bass, inconspicuous, lends an appropriate heaviness to the rhythm. Muddy sings:

Muddy had been on a couple trips out of town with Leonard to visit disc jockeys, and he knew their records were reaching beyond Chicago. Now Muddy called Mr. Anderson at KFFA in
Helena, Arkansas, and arranged for a radio slot. In late September of 1949, before harvest time, he took Jimmy Rogers, Little Walter, and Baby Face Leroy for a long month in the Delta. They
arranged time off their day jobs or quit them to fulfill an old fantasy — becoming the disembodied voice they had so admired when Sonny Boy began broadcasting. On KFFA, their sponsor was a
Helena store, Katz Clothing. The hour, however, came as something of a surprise: six in the morning, every morning.

While Leonard may have been upset about temporarily losing his
new main man, he appreciated the market Muddy’s southern stint would build. “All the time that we
were on that radio station, we were touring through the South,” said Jimmy Rogers. “We played gigs till maybe one in the morning, then leave out of Mississippi and take the ferry over
to Helena and go to bed. At five, you gotta be up getting ready to go to the studio. We were on from six till seven. It was rough.

“One morning there, Little Walter and myself, we overslept. We were staying one place and Muddy Waters was staying another. When he gets to the studio, he had Leroy Foster playing the
drums, and they went in and was beating away with the guitar, his slide, and his drums. We had the radio on in the hotel we were staying in, and that’s what woke me up. After they played this
number the radio announcer said, ‘Well Jimmy Rogers and Little Walter is somewhere sleeping it off. If they hear us, come on in.’ Then I had to wake Walter up, we get dressed and go
down to the studio. They had played about three or four tunes. And I was gonna sneak me a peek and Muddy was looking right in my face, man. So he beckoned for us to come on in, so between the
commercial and the song we came in and he had set up all the equipment. We just jumped in and started working out. Yeah, it was a lot of fun.”

“We did a couple of little gigs in Helena,” said Muddy. “But as far as the radio would reach, people was callin’ me, like over in Mississippi and in some parts of
Arkansas. We were playing all them little towns — Clarksdale, Shelby, Cleveland, Boyle, all the little towns. People would call up the station and get a date on me. I got a lot of bookings
like that.”

The band played juke joints run by friends from Muddy’s old days and gigs for strangers who heard them on the radio. They were featured at the grand opening of Clarksdale’s New Roxy
movie theater. Electric instruments were spreading in the South, but Muddy’s ensemble sound was new. Even when they played acoustic in the unwired backwoods, the sensibility they brought to
the old music was something to behold. Blues
bands,
four players creating one big sound, were not yet common.

Robert Morganfield, Muddy’s half brother, saw him play at a little joint in Glen Allan, not far from Jug’s Corner. “It was an eating place during the day,
had a Piccolo [jukebox], and on the Piccolo was some of Muddy’s songs, which was a favorite of the people. His band was two guitars, a drum, and harmonica. He had an electric guitar, stores
had electricity. They had a huge crowd, bigger than the building.”

And there was a command performance at Colonel Stovall’s home. “When he came back through in 1949, he had him a van and a band. And they was having a party — Colonel Stovall
— and Muddy came up to the house where the party was in the van with the band,” said Myles Long. “And Muddy played there till late. Was about thirty people, everybody there knew
him. Muddy had cut a lot of records. It was day when he left, around five the next morning. Muddy had a woman in there with him. Every time he’d come, he’d have a different woman with
him.”

“I couldn’t leave until I got over there to play for [Colonel Stovall],” said Muddy. “I’m on my way to Helena, he said, ‘You don’t go nowhere.’ He
give us, oh, seven or eight dollars apiece and a whole good sip of whiskey. When I was there living, you couldn’t make but a dollar and a half.”

The band was back in Chicago by November 6 to participate in a promotion at the 708 Club. It had been exciting to get out of town, gratifying to return south a success, and invigorating to hear
the old sounds played the old way. But now the band — the musical unit
as
a unit, working as one to convey the emotion and feeling of a solo blues artist — was wired, fired,
and inspired, and totally fed up with being shut out of the Chess studio. In January of 1950, they fell into a warehouse for the tiny Parkway label to cut “Rollin’ and
Tumblin’,” a victory whoop, a collision between the thrill of visiting a former life and the rush of resuming a contemporary one. Jimmy Rogers arrived late and is on only two of the
eight tracks; these Parkway sessions were the first time that Muddy’s club band was in the studio together. “Boll Weevil” includes the full band and is truly an ensemble piece,
with no one person or instrument taking the lead. The lyrics are a variation
on a field holler about the boll weevil’s quick proliferation, but musically the statement
is about eradication, if not of the farmer’s pest then of the old-style Bluebird blues.

The standout track was recorded with just Muddy, Walter, and Baby Face Leroy. This “Rollin’ and Tumblin’ ” (issued variously under Little Walter’s and Baby Face
Leroy’s names) could easily have disintegrated into an overenthused party record. The song is little more than a harmonica, a bass drum in overdrive, an occasionally ferocious slide guitar,
and the orgiastic humming of several grown men. The sounds are pugilistic and sexual. Someone yelps. Someone else responds. The randomness of the interjections is frightening, the rapid-fire
drumming disorienting. Muddy’s slide rings like loose spokes on an iron wheel, haywire. The harp is hypnotic. Chant and hum, chant and hum. Violence hangs everywhere, the sex heated and
raw.

The lyric’s tale of excitement and aftermath — “I roll and I tumble / I cry the whole night long / I woke up this morning baby / all I had was gone” — induces the
musicians to lose themselves in the performance. The humming that was interspersed at the song’s start dominates the latter half; words are too confining. People are sweating to make this
music, submerged in their being, transcendent in their passion, gone. The sonic quality is awful, the song more powerful as a result, as if this wouldn’t be allowed in a proper studio,
needing a dark and surreptitious place to germinate.

Muddy’s prominent presence, even if his name was not on the release, got Leonard Chess’s attention — and ire. Not pleased at having his star artist help a rival, he promptly
marched Muddy to Universal Studios and, with only Big Crawford, made him record another version of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” The Aristocrat version is exciting —
Muddy’s guitar playing is prominent and clear — but it does not approach the transcendence of Parkway’s. Yet Aristocrat’s dominance in the marketplace assured that theirs
would kill the shelf life of Parkway’s, and it did.

Two more songs were cut at Muddy’s Aristocrat session, but not released for several months. These would be in the first batch of
issues on a new label, formed when
Leonard and Phil Chess bought out their partner. The B-side of Chess 1426 — the label took the owners’ names — looked backward to Muddy’s Mississippi roots, a version of the
song Robert Johnson cut as “Walkin’ Blues.”

The A-side also had one eye back, but the other was looking at the future. Like farmers who experimented to improve their crops, Muddy dug up his roots, cupping the treasured dirt that clung,
and set them in a new field. He hadn’t hurried them. They acclimated. Over seven years he had become a Chicagoan. And now this would be the song to capture the young men overseas a decade
later and, in the emerging days of rock and roll, it would name a magazine. They’d been singing “Catfish Blues” for years in the Delta, but it never sounded like
“Rollin’ Stone.”

M
uddy Waters was nearly thirty-eight years old and entering the best years of his recording career. There in Chicago — which had become the
Delta’s second home, which had given new breath to the spirit of Harlem’s Renaissance, which had factories burning ’round the clock — Muddy was about to help shape modern
music.

Words were becoming a major Chicago export: the
Chicago Defender
had become the most influential black publication in the country. Elijah Muhammad, whose Muslim theology was changing
the way many African Americans thought about their place in the world, moved his headquarters there. Novelist Richard Wright, after living there for a decade, wrote the classic
Black Boy.
But Muddy, in less than three minutes, struck in the gut, no eyeglasses or education required.

Lyrically, most of Muddy’s songs were about sex — sex with someone else’s wife, sex with someone else’s girlfriend, sex and trouble. But it was always a trouble he
survived, a scrape he escaped. Sex was sex, but sex also became an analogy for a kind of freedom, a freedom to serve himself, to damn the torpedoes, the shift supervisor, and the overseer’s
big gun. The sound of the songs reflected the newfound ebullience: Muddy, near the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder, corralled the sense of postwar possibility and excitement. The have-nots were
finally having — not having much, but even a little was a lot. The muscle of his electric guitar and the force of his ensemble sound and the fierce assertiveness of his voice unleashed the
exuberance of a people. There was cause for celebration, and Muddy was the vehicle.

Billboard,
July 1950: “Leonard Chess busts right into the disk
field with his first two records on his very own ‘Chess’ label. Real clickeroos.
‘My Foolish Heart’ by Gene Ammons in the number-one spot among the jazz and blues locations here [Chicago], and ‘Rollin’ Stone’ by Muddy Waters getting gobs of orders
from the Southland.”

“Rollin’ Stone” is a song about power, about rootless — and ruthless — independence. Muddy plays the electric guitar with all the force he’s been brandishing
in the noisy clubs, though completely unaccompanied, laying bare every flick of his thumb and pull of his forefinger. A quick couple bass notes establish the rhythm, then a loping third note. A few
more to catch your balance, then the whole angular riff again. Its jaggedness draws all attention to his right hand, his long fingers, the creases on the skin, the shadows from his cotton picking,
guitar picking calluses. The distortion is bone rattling: the sound of teeth chattering, or being smashed. It’s the sound of industrialized, amplified, sex drive, overdrive power. He begins
to sing: “I weesh,” enunciating to rhyme with the next line, “I was a catfish.” The sound is animalistic — predatory, after whatever comes his way:

Then the guitar says it one time, leaving us a moment to contemplate this bottom-feeder.

The guitar says it a couple times this verse, symmetry giving way to feeling. The riff saunters and scoots, a dog caught eating from another’s bowl, caught sleeping in his
master’s bed, under his covers and all up in his sheets, sure enough where he’s not supposed to be.

The guitar break is lightly picked, his bass notes punctuating this little dance on the high notes. It’s not gleeful, but it’s impudent, buying the husband a shot at
the bar while still tasting his wife’s lips.