Can't Be Satisfied (20 page)

Psychology has as much to do with record producing as does musical knowledge. If artists are trying too hard and have lost their natural feel, the producer deflects their attention, unleashing
their innate artistry. A producer will set an artist on edge — if that discomfort will create great art. “Blues is nothing but the truth, truth that at one time or another in his
lifetime the singer has felt,” said Phil Chess. “Our job was to try to bring out points in his mind that he might have forgotten, to give him ideas, to get him to think about some
things
that were happening down in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, or wherever. It’s actually like psychiatry, you try to talk to him for him to bring out the things
himself.”

Leonard was known as a particularly aggressive shrink. “Leonard calling people a motherfucker,” said Jimmy Rogers, “that was just his way of saying good morning to blues
musicians. At Chess if you didn’t curse you wasn’t recognized!” (Muddy was immediately comfortable with that; Colonel Stovall had been the same way.)

On “She Moves Me,” Leonard pounded the bass drum to make the dead jump up and run. It reverberates through the years right to the listener’s gut, like a heart that pounds when
your crush enters the room. In response, Walter shapes his notes like a sculptor — elongating, eliding, quivering, and shaking. You can almost hear him figuring out how to play by listening
to the sounds he’s just made emanate from the amp. His notes float like crimson leaves that skip in the wind. “Oh man, I wished you could have seen Little Walter,” Muddy said.
“While you’re recording, he be dashing all around you everywhere, changing harps, running all around the studio, but he never get in your way. He had ideas, put a lot of trick things in
there, getting all different sounds. Aww, he was the greatest. He always had ideas.” “She Moves Me” again put Muddy on
Billboard
’s top ten.

But they weren’t done yet. Next, Walter put down his harp and plugged in Jimmy’s guitar. The creative juices were spilling off him and Jimmy didn’t want to slip in the puddle.
Walter couldn’t play a lot of guitar, but the bit he learned he mastered, and he throws his whole physical self into this song. “Still a Fool” is played with all the heaviness of
Muddy’s full band in the clubs, but with the band stripped away. No concessions are made, no accommodations for the pared-down instrumentation. Two guitars and a drum in 1951 can’t get
more electric than this; in Glen Allan, Mississippi, or broadcast live on the Delta’s KFFA, this sound would have caused riots.

“Still a Fool,” a paean to the outside woman, is a song as important for what it suggests as what it says. The guitar’s burning distortion evokes an over-the-top madness, an
uncontrollable desire beyond
all reason, of fucking a woman between rows of cotton, then stepping one row over and having her sister. “They say she’s no
good,” he sings, “but she’s all right by me.” Women were a matter of quantity over quality to Muddy, and “Still a Fool” is his best attempt to explain himself.
Musically, the song revisits the “Rollin’ Stone” riff. Leonard is still on the studio floor, banging the bass drum; the sweat has got to be soaking his shirt, pouring from his
brow. Walter’s bass notes are like a pulse: you can feel the beat as it approaches, as it rides through you, as it passes. Muddy picks the six strings, raw and visceral, a deep world of hard
blues, ominous, horrific, his guitar in unison with his vocal, Walter attuned to Muddy’s spatial and aural insights, dirty dancing around him. Moaning and humming reach for what words fail to
say. There are four verses with no guitar break, nothing to diminish the onslaught; and slaughter is ultimately this music’s subject. “Still a Fool” hit the national top-ten
charts in late November of 1951, and advertisements announced “King of Blues Muddy Waters And His Blues Boys.” Playing a Chicago jazz club during an off night, they were drawing bigger
crowds than the main attraction. “They even named it the Muddy Waters Blues,” said Freddie Crutchfield. “When they were going to play the blues, most of the guys said,
‘We’re going to play the Muddy Waters Blues.’ ” He was becoming his own genre.

Down in Memphis, meanwhile, just before “She Moves Me” was recorded, a middle-aged man named Chester Burnett walked through the doors of the Memphis Recording
Service and recorded his first single for producer Sam Phillips, who had yet to start his Sun Records label and was instead selling and leasing his tracks. Leonard Chess bought Burnett’s
first recording and would later acquire the man’s contract; Burnett recorded under a pseudonym, and his “Moaning at Midnight” was about to make Howlin’ Wolf a star.

Like Muddy, Wolf embraced the Delta feel. His parents lived in Drew, Mississippi, which was near Charlie Patton’s home, and Wolf learned directly from the seminal Delta artist. He roamed
the Delta
juke joints, picking up gigs and earning a reputation. He later got a radio show in West Memphis, where his trademark howl, a variation on the falsetto favored by
Robert Johnson, Tommy Johnson, Muddy, and others, was broadcast far and wide. The burst in popularity of Muddy’s electric blues band sound — “Long Distance Call” was on the
charts just before Wolf made his first recordings and “Honey Bee” was rising — informed Wolf’s music, whetted Sam Phillips’s appetite, and answered Leonard’s
supplications for another star artist.

“When I heard him,” said producer Sam Phillips, “I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man never dies.’ Then the Wolf came to the studio and he was
about six foot six, with the biggest feet I’ve ever seen on a human being. Big Foot Chester is one name they used to call him. He would sit there with those feet planted wide apart, playing
nothing but the French harp, and I tell you, the greatest sight you could see today would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in my studio. God, what it would be worth to see the veins
on his neck and, buddy, there was
nothing
on his mind but that song. He sang with his damn soul.”

Also in May of 1951, at the same studio, B. B. King made his second recordings (his first had been three years earlier at a radio station). He’d left the Delta and become a prominent disc
jockey in Memphis, where, seeking pointers, he met Muddy. “One of the things he told me then that I tell all the young musicians today: practice. He told me to be yourself, not to play for
these people one way and these people another way, be they black or white. As great as I thought he was, he was very modest. I call him the godfather of the blues. He did more for the blues than
most of us.”

Change was in the air. Jackie Brenston had released “Rocket 88” in May of 1951, its beat presaging rock and roll. Alan Freed went on the radio in July of the same year, calling
himself Moondog and featuring artists such as Muddy, Wolf, and Brenston; he popularized the term “rock and roll,” and developed a white audience that liked the name. In Memphis, Dewey
Phillips had, for three years, been playing these black artists back-to-back with whites, mixing bluegrass and blues, divining the feel beneath the rhythm and ignoring the
industry’s categorizations. One of his most dedicated fans was a young listener by the name of Elvis Presley.

When “Still a Fool” left the national charts, “She Moves Me” ascended in its place. The other big sellers were Howlin’ Wolf’s “How Many More
Years,” B. B. King’s “Three O’Clock Blues,” John Lee Hooker’s “I’m in the Mood,” and Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Give Me Central
209.” “At one time there was a wide gulf between the sophisticated big-city blues and rocking novelties waxed for the northern market, and the country or Delta blues that were popular
in the southern regions,”
Billboard
wrote in March of 1952. “Gradually the two forms intermingled and the country blues tune [is] now dressed up in arrangements palatable to
both northern and southern tastes.” Mainstream acceptance was first confirmed when major labels began jockeying for position. But it was the independents who better understood the business,
and Chess Records, which had forged this new sound, was the leading independent. Establishing itself on Muddy’s back and using the demand for his records to shoehorn more of its releases into
the marketplace, Chess had the industry in check.

The idea at the May 1952 session was to create an all-star band. Muddy had a marquee name, Jimmy had developed one, and if Little Walter could get a hit, they’d have a
three-man front line. There’d been one session between “Still a Fool” and this one, at which Walter had failed to arrange for his own amp and had to play acoustically. This time,
amps abounded, everyone was juiced. “We were sitting down [in the studio],” said Jimmy Rogers. “They would put a mike on the amp and a mike to the vocal. Sitting in a chair, we
could see each other, and we’d play off each other in the studio, like we were on the stage. We would build it and then we would give a listen to the tape. Then we’d keep it running
till we get the right sound we like.” Warming up with their theme song, they caught Leonard’s ear.

“At the time we called it the jam,” said Jimmy. “We’d do it coming on stage and during intermission we’d do a couple of verses and take a break.” Muddy or the
others could address the audience,
introduce band members or guests, make announcements, or generally clown around over a beat that would pique interest in the coming set, or
make anyone think twice before hitting the door. (“If you couldn’t play that song, you couldn’t play harmonica,” said Jimmy Rogers. “They’d sit there all night
to hear it, and we’d have harps singing up there on the street all the next day trying to do it.”) The jam that would become Little Walter’s classic “Juke” had no
name. The give and take of the groove let everyone stretch out, and they’d pass the solo around like a pint bottle among friends. Jimmy and Walter could push their progressive ideas, while
Muddy rooted the song with his slide. It brought out the best in all of them, especially Walter, curling his notes through the amplifier — and gradually the band let him take command of the
tune.

Feeding his trademark quiver through the amplifier took Walter to another realm. “All my best records, I made them with the amplifier,” said Walter. “You can fill that harp
with air. If you don’t, it’ll kill you. I can keep a whole lot of wind in that harp, I don’t have to do nothing but navigate with it then.”

Leonard leapt to the song. “He said, ‘What’s that?’ ” recalled Rogers. “He said, ‘Play that again.’ ” It struck Leonard the way it struck
Muddy’s fans. “I could’ve had the song or Muddy, either one of us could have taken it,” Rogers recalled. “But we wanted Walter on record as well. We were trying to
make an all-star unit out of the deal. And Leonard went for it.”

The harmonica kicks off the song with a short running riff, punctuated by a jazzy guitar strum; Jimmy’s influence is strong. In the middle section, Walter blows the riff big and fat,
skronking
like a horn, then retracts, changing the harp’s tone to the simpler country feel; he’s making taffy of the instrument. “Juke” shuffles and glides, it
rolls and cajoles, brings a smile to listeners’ cake holes.

Among those who would end up smiling were the Three Deuces, a trio of kids still in their teens. Louis and Dave Myers had come to Chicago in the early 1930s, still kids and musically inclined.
Playing a house party, they were introduced by some girls to a harmonica player their own age. “This kid was so small,” said Dave Myers. “He sit in with us, he could play all that
Muddy Waters kind of stuff, and
we clicked real good.” The kid’s name was Junior Wells, and he and Little Walter would soon switch places.

While readying Muddy’s next release, Leonard played an acetate of the instrumental in the Chess offices. The day was warm and he opened the door for a breeze. At the bus stop, a woman
danced to the song. He played it again and she stayed, stamping her feet and doing the shimmy. There’s no higher test market than the street, and the song was rushed to release on August 6,
1952. On tour in the South, the band was between sets in a Shreveport, Louisiana, club when the song came on. Walter, recognizing his own harp — no one else played like that — rushed to
the jukebox, saw the call number being played, traced it on the menu, and found his song, now titled “Juke,” by the band Little Walter and His Night Cats. The patrons played it several
times in the course of the night, always dancing. Walter watched, listened, and set to ruminating. He phoned Chicago and spoke to his girlfriend, who told him the song was getting a big push on the
radio from the major disc jockeys.
Billboard
also took immediate notice: “Little Walter flashes some nice harmonica work in fronting a fast instrumental. The Night Cats back him
solidly.”