Can't Be Satisfied (26 page)

Dancers may not have heard the musical chaos that first night, but one listener did: Elgin Edmonds. “He showed up,” said Clay, “sat in the lobby. I felt sorry for the cat. It
was pathetic.” Clay’s week stretched to four years.

Like the man he replaced, and unlike his new band mates, Clay was born in the North (Rock Island, Illinois, November 15, 1923). He’d earned his reputation around Chicago before moving
east, and he maintained his contacts there through heavy touring. Freddie Crutchfield stopped by Muddy’s gig to see Elgin and was in for a surprise. “I saw Clay and he was playing the
blues real great with Muddy. I said, ‘Clay!’ ” Freddie raised his voice to a squeaky high
question mark. “ ‘Whachou doing playing blues?’
I always thought Clay was one of the greatest jazz drummers in Chicago.” Indeed Clay was Mr. Bebop, the jazz man.

“We quit touring in January [1958],” Muddy said. “We got tired of it. We’d been on the road for five straight years, staying at home with our families about two months
out of the year, so we decided we gonna cool it, gonna get work around Chicago and be at home with our families. The blues are so popular we can work six, seven nights just around
Chicago.”

While there’s truth in it, Muddy’s emphasis on the local gigs was a deflection from the loss of national jobs to rock and roll. But not touring meant getting local in a big way.
Smitty’s Corner was in the heart of the South Side, Thirty-fifth and Indiana, a corner property and somewhat larger than the other venues; its spaciousness made the diminishing jazz crowds
feel all the more paltry. Owner O’Brien Smith “thought he’d try blues for a couple weeks and we stayed there about four years,” said Clay. “Soon as we started, the
place was packed. There were two lines, one two blocks long on Thirty-fifth Street, and one two blocks long down Indiana.”

Smitty’s was less of a shoebox than many of Chicago’s other blues clubs. The stage — there was a stage — was elevated a couple feet. A bar ran down one whole side of the
club, and the floor was filled with tables and chairs; there was little room for dancing. Muddy still played no guitar and did little singing, but the crowds continued to come.

In 1958, Muddy’s brother Robert visited and, with Bo driving a Crown Victoria, rode with Muddy to another regular gig he maintained, midweek at the F&J Lounge in Gary, Indiana.
“Muddy played till past midnight, and then we headed back to Chicago,” said Robert. “I thought we were going home to get some sleep, but he pulled into Smitty’s Corner and
at that hour of the morning they were waiting for him to arrive. He was there till daylight. We got home, he went to breakfast and I went to bed.”

On Sundays at Smitty’s, Muddy hosted a matinee show. The band played the first couple numbers, then began calling up guests, and
players rotated on and off the
stage. “If you was good enough, you could get up and play,” said Willie Smith, a drummer who jammed there and later joined the band. “The music didn’t ever stop, it would
just steady turn over.”

Like his girlfriends. When Dorothy found out Muddy was stepping out on her, she dropped into his gig at Ruby’s Show Lounge — like a ton of bricks. She broke every window in the
band’s station wagon (she even broke the side-view mirror), which she had no trouble finding; on the side was painted “Muddy Waters and his Hoochie Coochie Boys.”

When Muddy arrived, he and Dorothy got to fighting and James Triplett stepped in to break it up. The cops thought the men were doubling up on the lady and threw them both in jail. The band used
that night’s pay to bail them out. Muddy hid the station wagon so Geneva wouldn’t see it but the
Chicago Defender
ran a photograph of the car the next morning. Muddy dispatched
Cotton to buy every copy on the corner. “Here come a little lady walking down the street,” said Cotton, “rang the doorbell. Muddy opened the door. She said, ‘Is Mrs.
Morganfield here?’ Muddy said, ‘Hey, Grandma, someone wants to see you.’ The woman had the paper folded up under her arm. When Grandma got to the door, the lady said, ‘I
just want to show you what a rotten motherfucker you got,’ and handed her the paper. And I left the house then, I got out the door.”

“I sometimes thought Geneva saw Muddy less than anybody,” said Mary Austin, a teenager he’d met in Florida who, when she accepted Muddy’s invitation to move to Chicago,
was installed on a cot in his daughter Azelene’s West Side apartment. “I was nineteen,” Austin recalled, “his daughter was in her midtwenties, and she began calling me
Little Mama. She opened her arms to this little country girl and we really got along. She was jet black and pretty, looked like her daddy. Her boyfriend was J. B. Cooper, a good-looking guy, light
skinned. They both dressed real well. One of the first things ’Lene told me, and she kept telling me over and over, was not to use drugs.” While Mary’s relationship with
Muddy’s daughter blossomed, hers with Muddy did not. Muddy rarely came around, and when he did it was usually to fight with Azelene. If Mary was too green to city ways
to see what was going on, Muddy read the situation between his daughter and Cooper both for what it was and what it would become; Cooper had hooked Azelene on heroin and was pimping
her.

“Right away Azelene and Johnny B. took me to this tavern in Jewtown,” Mary continued, “and that was our spot. We went there every day. Later I realized that J. B. was working
her out of there.” Mary enrolled in a nursing school soon after her arrival. “Muddy was very jealous. When I would go out, if anyone would ask for a dance, he would come off the stage
and it was a problem.” Muddy rarely allowed her to attend his Chicago gigs, though he did take her on the road. When she needed to reach Muddy, she left a message for him at the Chess
offices. “He’d told them I could reach him there. Muddy told me he was married, but he told me his wife was very ill.”

When Muddy came by and Azelene was out, he and Mary made love on the cot. “Azelene was a lot like Muddy, very fiery. She looked just like him. One morning he came in there from a gig, I
was sleeping in that folding cot — that cot was the only thing he ever gave me, he never gave me any money or helped with the rent — and he picked it up and tossed me and that bed, and
Azelene jumped on his back. She was all over him. I carry a scar on my head from holding Muddy back from hitting her one time, she threw a plate at him and it got me. It wasn’t that I wanted
to live with him because once I got to Chicago I found out who Muddy was, and after I got pregnant, I really found out. When I told him I was pregnant, I don’t think Muddy believed that the
child was his son until after he was born. And then he couldn’t say he wasn’t ’cause he looked just like him.” Mary was in the Jewtown tavern one day, pregnant, when a man
sat next to her, looked her in the eye, and said, ‘You don’t belong here, come home with me.’ Azelene knew him and approved, and Mary escaped. She maintained contact with Leola
Spain, Azelene’s mother, leaving her infant with her while she worked. “Leola had a lot of spirit,” Mary remembered, “doing all she did and with only one hand —
she’d had an accident at her factory job. But she knew what Muddy could be like. She knew.”

At Smitty’s, Muddy hired his first electric bassist. Fender introduced the instrument in 1953 and it had been slowly gaining appeal. It was much
more portable than the huge acoustic bass, and once amplifiers could accommodate the deep resonance, its popularity spread. Muddy announced an audition for a bassist, and Andrew Stephenson —
“A. W.” to his friends — showed up. “When James Cotton and Pat Hare saw I was from Memphis, they knew I could play.” Stephenson waited his turn. “The tune was
‘Hoochie Coochie Man,’ it was the delay thing. You couldn’t play right up on it. When it came my time, I didn’t have a bass, I had to tune my guitar down. Muddy said,
‘I done went through fifteen guys so if you play this tune for me, you got the job.’ So, I played it. I had just made twenty-one. When I got with him I had to order an electric bass
from Fender, and it took me six months before I could get it.”

In August of 1958, Muddy cut his most down-home number since “Blow Wind Blow” five years earlier. “She’s Nineteen Years Old,” though credited to Muddy, was written
by St. Louis Jimmy Oden, Muddy’s friend and sometime housemate. Jimmy had lived in a rooming house operated by a mentally impaired, middle-aged woman and her mentally impaired son, who picked
up change collecting returnable soda bottles. Inspired, Jimmy wrote a song called “She’s Forty Years Old” that was about her ways, which were just like a baby child’s. Muddy
liked the song very much, but not as much as he liked nineteen-year-old women. So he changed that line, singing it like a man and a half, the kind who could keep a young girl satisfied. It’s
funny what a word can do.

The next song, “Close to You,” became the single’s A-side. It lacks the subtlety and feel of “Nineteen Years Old” — Muddy overworks a forced laugh, using it
at the end of most every line — but it spent more than three months on the charts, Muddy’s sixteenth and final appearance in the top twenty.

However solid Muddy made his tunes, rock and roll still seemed unstoppable. Needing another local gig, Muddy went to Johnny
Pepper. Pepper’s Lounge, a slight place,
had opened less than two years earlier. At the start, they’d used proceeds from the early night’s bar to replenish the late-night liquor. By the time Muddy came, Pepper’s was
hopping with a “twenty-five-cent night”; a quarter at the door would get you in to see Otis Rush and all your drinks were twenty-five cents. It wasn’t the glory days, but it
became Muddy’s home through the early 1960s. “Muddy came to me and said, ‘What about a job?’ ” recalled Pepper. “I said, ‘You a big man, I don’t
think I can handle it.’ I said, ‘I only charge thirty-five cent on Thursday nights, and I couldn’t make enough to pay you.’ He said, ‘Try me anyway. We’ll get
together on it.’ ”

Meanwhile, there was a young and beautiful waitress at Pepper’s named Lois Anderson, and Muddy got together with her. “She was a flirty type woman,” said Jimmy Lee Morris, who
later played bass with Muddy. “She went from man to man, wasn’t a one-man woman.” She stayed with Muddy long enough to have his third child, a girl named Mercy.

At Chess, record sales were down for all blues. Leonard understood how this would affect his longtime artists, but, approaching his company more like a family than a business, he refused to let
them feel the full impact. “My father and Phil would look through the royalty statements,” Marshall said, “and I remember them once taking money from some artist and giving it to
Wolf because Wolf’s statement had zero.”

But while Muddy was making the best of his thirty-five-cent nights, suffering with the diminishing loss of his American blues audience, his salvation was being orchestrated far far away. Across
the ocean, some young men and women in England had heard Muddy. Like a coat from the cold, these British blues fans were about to extend a hand across the water.

I
t would be like going to a grocery store in Japan and trying to buy grits.” That’s how British jazz man Chris Barber described the
difficulty he faced trying to find Muddy Waters in America. “You don’t know what to ask for or who to ask.” Barber played trombone, and his band was among the most popular for
what the British termed “traditional jazz,” a sound heavily influenced by American Dixieland. Barber’s group was distinguished by their fondness for Delta blues; his trombone
replicated the slide guitar parts. In a Mississippi juke joint that might have gone over like sushi, but it was all the rage in postwar English concert halls.

The Chris Barber Band was successful without importing American artists, but they savored improving their styles alongside authentic performers, and they enjoyed their company when traveling.
They’d played with Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, and imported Chicago’s Modern Jazz Quartet. “The reason we had Muddy Waters in this country,”
Barber said, “is because the MJQ’s keyboardist John Lewis told me, ‘If you don’t get Muddy Waters, then you’re doing it all wrong.’ And he offered to find him
for us.”

Muddy was skeptical about carrying his music so far away. He didn’t know he had two four-song EPs available there, a mixture of his early Aristocrat material and more recent sides. In
1951, Big Bill Broonzy had toured England. He’d suggested Muddy make a similar trip, but the idea seemed so preposterous at the time that Muddy didn’t even consider it; plenty of gigs
were available nearer home. But in the post–Chuck Berry days — hey, a gig’s a gig.

Cotton drove Muddy and Spann to the airport; Geneva came too.
“When Muddy got on the airplane, Dorothy and Mildred were standing there in the hall to see him off.
Geneva didn’t know them to recognize them. And when Muddy came back, I seen them then too.”

“I was going overseas,” said Muddy, “and I didn’t know what to think. And that was a big surprise for me.” The surprises seemed continuous and ever larger. They
drove on the wrong side of the road, they called themselves talking English but you could hardly make out their words, and their money was funny. Muddy brought Spann to make sure someone on stage
could speak his language.