Can't Be Satisfied (25 page)

But even a full-grown man was going to have trouble standing up to the force about to be unleashed.

I
n Chicago after a gig at the Palladium, a large room, in the spring of 1955, Muddy was greeting the after-show lingerers and late-night drinkers.
One wiry kid wormed his way to the crowd’s front. He’d come up from St. Louis, where his band played all Muddy’s tunes. And with good reason: “He was my favorite
singer,” Chuck Berry later acknowledged.

“Chuck wanted to get onto Chess,” Jimmy Rogers remembered. “Chess was the big thing for blues at that time. I told him to check with Muddy, that he could probably work out
something.” Not only did Muddy Waters establish Chess as the label that young black artists aspired to, he also helped them get there. “Yeah, see Leonard Chess. Yeah, Chess Records over
on Forty-seventh and Cottage,” Muddy told the young fan.

At Chess, Chuck Berry auditioned his homemade demo of a song called “Ida Red,” soon to be recast as “Maybellene.” “Maybellene” was a white country song
performed with black musical accents. Inverting Elvis Presley, whose regional success would explode into national prominence the following year, Chuck was a black man playing white-inflected music
with black accents. Leonard was skeptical. “Chess didn’t like no rock and roll for himself,” said Jimmy Rogers. “He was hung up on blues, because that was his meal ticket at
the time.”

“When I came down there the next morning,” said Muddy, “Leonard didn’t understand what ‘Maybellene’ was. [I said] ‘You better record that, that’s
something new here.’ ” Leonard listened to Muddy.

Chuck Berry recorded “Maybellene” at his first session for Chess
in May of 1955, three days before Muddy cut “Mannish Boy.” Muddy’s early
Aristocrat singles had been released over Leonard Chess’s objections, and they became his bread and butter. But still, after a decade immersed in the business, his ears highly tuned, Leonard
Chess listened to Chuck Berry, silver on a silver platter, and the big record man could not hear it. But by now he trusted those around him, and he took a chance.

It would prove to be a brilliant gamble. Blues fans had grown up with Muddy Waters, coalesced around his music, and now their younger siblings and children wanted a say, a voice of their own. In
1940, there had been three million farms in the South; over the next three decades, that number plummeted by nearly two-thirds. Sharecroppers, which had numbered more than half a million, vanished
— were no longer even a category in
Historical Statistics of the United States
by the end of the 1950s. The Illinois Central Railroad would soon cease its passenger service between
Mississippi and Chicago. In 1955, when the new sound was breaking out, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. Art and society reflected each other, inspired each other. A bridge had
been crossed, and it was now time to cross another. The blues — Muddy’s electric blues — had become a new music, a rebel music, until it became the established sound from which a
new one could be born. The blues had a baby, and they named it rock and roll.

The blues remained Leonard’s bread and butter, though not his gravy. He knew his average blues single would sell twenty to fifty thousand pieces, enough to assure business as usual, enough
to finance risks with new material. “Fuck the hits,” Leonard often said. “Give me thirty thousand on every record.” But with Chuck Berry, it was hard not to lose all
restraint. “The big beat, cars, and young love,” said Leonard Chess. “It was a trend and we jumped on it.” Chuck Berry was awarded
Billboard
’s Triple Crown
for “Maybellene,” “his towering hit,” number one on all three of their R&B charts: retail, jukebox, and disc jockey play. “Roll Over Beethoven” and
“Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” came out in 1956, followed by regular chart appearances over the next two years, usually in the top twenty.

Flush, in the fall of 1956, Chess again moved its offices and studios, this time to Record Row, 2120 South Michigan Avenue. This studio was built from scratch, using the
latest technology — a new studio for a new sound. But even with Berry’s profits, business was a struggle. Rock and roll was a risk and foreign to Leonard’s ears; he was not long
from his first heart attack.

“The stuff that really started him,” Jimmy Rogers said of Leonard Chess, “he pushed it aside. And that happened to be Muddy Waters, myself, and Sunnyland Slim, Wolf, Eddie
Boyd, Willie Mabon, Bobby Lester and the Moonglows, and a bunch of fellows. Chess, he got away from the blues.”

“Rock and roll kind of took over there for a while,” said James Cotton. “There was weekends that we couldn’t get jobs.” The music left them, literally, out in the
cold. “Me and Muddy would get in the station wagon and drive around and listen to rock and roll. We wouldn’t go in the clubs, just listen to what’s going on. Lloyd Price was
happening, ‘Ain’t It a Shame,’ ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ by Elvis Presley.” Sensing desperate times as the road gigs dwindled, Muddy left the local booking agencies and
in August of 1955 signed with New York–based Shaw Artists, which had been booking Walter for three years. They kept him busy as “Trouble No More” and “Sugar Sweet”
climbed the national charts, but it was definitely feeling like the party was over.

Sometimes they’re called hits for a reason: Chuck’s struck Muddy hard. Like Muddy’s blues had done to swing a decade earlier, the new sound was antiquating
him, intimidating Muddy so much that in 1956 he simply stopped playing guitar. He’d stroll onto the stage and sing — the star — and didn’t resume playing until his first
trip overseas, nearly two years later. Along with the guitar, Muddy also gave up much of his stage time. Around Chicago, instead of coming out after the first couple songs of each set, he came out
only for the last few. While the band played, Muddy entertained from a table, granting audiences to his fans, shilling drinks for the clubs.

His first replacement was Cotton’s guitarist, Auburn “Pat” Hare, who, for almost a decade (until his temper led him to a life sentence in jail), remained
a steady component in the band. Hare had the manic volatility of a street prophet, and favored a dirty, grungy sound. Playing with Wolf as a teen, he took potshots at him with live bullets, sending
the huge man scurrying over a log pile. Wolf advised Hare’s parents to beat the lad, but he didn’t consider letting go of the kid’s guitar sound. Hare was in Houston with Junior
Parker and Bobby “Blue” Bland when Muddy found him. Leonard welcomed him into the studio. At his first session, Hare shared guitar parts with Jimmy Rogers, and in addition to the
classic “All Aboard,” they cut “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” which broke the top ten during its six weeks on the charts. Hare’s crunching power chords rippled with
distortion that was well suited for blues in the rock and roll explosion.

But still rock ruled. The blues gigs weren’t paying anything like they had, and in 1956 Jimmy Rogers finally quit Muddy, no hard feelings, it just wasn’t happening for him anymore.
He’d stick it out a couple more years with Leonard, then join Wolf for sessions and some gigs, but by 1961 the new sounds got the better of him and he retired from music for a civilian
career. The way that fashions change, that’s the way music changes. Jimmy Rogers, despite so many hits so recently, was unable to make the transition.

Looking to replace Rogers, Muddy’s ears stopped at Wolf’s band. Wolf could be a volcano and word was out that his guitarist, Hubert Sumlin, was recently lava burned. Muddy bedecked
Bo in diamonds and jewelry, loaded his pockets with cash, and sent him to the Zanzibar, enticing Hubert by tripling his pay. It was diamonds over coals any day, and Hubert went. “Man,”
said Hubert without the slightest sarcasm, “I cried a-a-a-all the way over there.” Taking Hubert Sumlin was like taking Wolf’s gizzards.

Hubert played on his first session shortly after joining, cutting “Don’t Go No Further,” Muddy’s last top-ten hit for two years. With Hare and Sumlin replacing Muddy and
Jimmy, the sound was quite different: no slide guitar, not much Mississippi Delta, and a huge bed of distortion. Replacing the Mississippi night, which had lingered in the shadows of even
Muddy’s most urban work, was the blue glow of
television’s cathode rays, the teen beats emanating from variety shows such as Ed Sullivan’s and Milton
Berle’s.

Sumlin stayed with Muddy about seven months. “What got to me was being on the road,” he said. In November of 1956, when harvest money was flowing in the South, Muddy set out for an
extended tour. Hubert showed up with his guitar, amp, and a little hanging bag. “Mud asked me, ‘Is that all you got, just that one suit? You know we gonna be away about forty
days?’ I’m going, ‘What the . . . This man ain’t told me nothing about forty days.’ . . . We did so much driving, I got the hemorrhoids so bad I couldn’t sit
down. They brought me feather pillows that I had to sit on!”

For half of this southern tour, they were billed with a singer named Ann Cole, who also had a following throughout the South. Muddy’s band backed her, learning her songs as the tour
progressed. There was one that particularly impressed Muddy, and upon returning to Chicago, on the first of December, he promptly hit the studio. Cole’s version of “Got My Mojo
Working” comes out of doo-wop, but Muddy turns around the rhythm to give it more driving force. And though he changed only a few of the words, Muddy’s version credits himself as
songwriter. Cole also recorded her version after the tour; it is credited to Preston Foster, the original author. A lawsuit between Foster and Chess was settled out of court, with the stipulation
that Foster receive future credit; he sometimes does.

From the “Mojo” session, the band went to play the 708 Club. Muddy mingled with the audience, sipped from a fifth of Old Grand Dad, sat with a young girl. He didn’t get on the
stage until the last two numbers before intermission. Sumlin was tired, dejected, and angry. He steadied himself on the bandstand’s electric fan and, either because he was full of fire or
because of a faulty circuit, he got jolted by a mighty shock. “So I told Muddy I couldn’t play out the night. He got mad at me, called me all kinds of things, and raised his foot to
kick me. I grabbed him. Here come Spann with a chain, gonna whip me about Muddy. I had a hold of Muddy, and every time Spann tried to get me with that chain, he hit Muddy. I said, ‘Man, when
you get right, I’ll turn him loose.’ ”

Sumlin phoned Wolf from the club. “I said, ‘Hey man, that’s it.
Whoever you got in there, they got to go. I’m coming back.’ He said,
‘No problem.’ After the gig, Wolf met us at Muddy’s house. He told Muddy, ‘Next time you do that, man, I’ll kill you over him.’ Muddy didn’t speak to me
for a year, but we finally come back to being friends. Things were never right between him and Wolf, though. Those two were just like the McCoys, man!”

To keep up with rock and roll’s rhythms, the drums had to change. Elgin Edmonds had managed moving from jazz to blues, but when Chuck Berry changed blues, Elgin
couldn’t keep up. Muddy fired him many times, but he never found a replacement and always hired Elgin back.

In 1957, drummer Francis Clay was living in New York and touring with Gene Ammons. Ammons got busted for heroin in Chicago that winter and Clay was stranded. Muddy was booked for a week in
Cleveland, nearly halfway home, and Clay caught a ride. They arrived without time to rehearse. “I found out playing down-home blues was not as simple as I thought,” said Clay. He had
performed in church and at circuses, behind vaudeville and with country and western groups, could do bird and animal imitations, but he couldn’t get a handle when it came to Muddy’s
stuff. “You need four separate minds to play the drums anyway, but this was so simple, I couldn’t get it.” Muddy took Clay’s sticks and demonstrated the beat.