Can't Be Satisfied (27 page)

They arrived Tuesday morning, October 14, 1958. This was their first international flight and likely their first airplane flight ever. They were surely tired, but excited British fans promptly
knocked on their door. Among them were the writer Tony Standish and the guitarist Alexis Korner. “Right from the beginning,” writes Standish in his 1959
Jazz Journal
account,
“I received the impression that Muddy was not interested in discussing old, half-forgotten recording dates and who played what on what session.” Muddy did, however, obligingly unpack
his white Fender electric guitar and pose for photographs. Learning that Korner played, Muddy handed him the instrument and said, “Play some for us, man.”

“The experts were obviously pleasantly surprised,” writes Standish. “ ‘Aha, [Big] Bill learned you that,’ chuckled Muddy.”

Their first full day, Muddy and Spann filmed a Granada TV show,
People and Places,
then were taken to Leeds, where their first gig set the tour on an inauspicious start. The Leeds
Triennial Music Festival was a stodgy bill sponsored by a cousin of the queen; it featured string quartets and the odd acceptable jazz group. Muddy played Thursday and Friday; the dates preceded
the Barber tour. “Very few musicians in England would have had any idea how to play with Muddy, or any idea what this music meant,” said Barber. “At Leeds, he played with Jazz
Today, seven or eight good players. Kenny Baker was the leader — he later played trumpet for the Muppets. But the band didn’t know what to do.”

“They thought I was a Big Bill Broonzy,” Muddy said. “I wasn’t. I had my amplifier and Spann and I was going to do a Chicago thing.
We opened up in
Leeds, England. I was definitely too loud for them. The next morning we were in the headlines of the paper, ‘Screaming Guitar and Howling Piano.’ ”

Muddy joined Barber on Saturday at Newcastle-upon-Tyne for the first of ten dates. The show began at 7:30 and introductions weren’t made until an hour before, leaving no time to rehearse.
“We’re white guys, late twenties, carrying trumpets, clarinets, a banjo,” said Barber. “Muddy was nice, but he didn’t say much. I asked Otis if Muddy began his shows
with ‘Hoochie Coochie Man.’ He said yes, in the key of A.” Each show began with a full set by the Chris Barber Band, then an intermission, and then the Barber Band returned for a
few numbers before bringing on their guests. Muddy spent the first half of the evening subjected to Dixieland and wondered if anyone in the entire country of funny-speaking people knew anything
about the blues or his music.

After an intermission and a brief warm-up by the Barber Band, the stop-time chords of “Hoochie Coochie Man” sounded. Muddy came out in a dark suit, the spotlight reflecting off the
conk in his hair, and Otis wore a white tuxedo jacket with a spangled orangey-red bow tie and black trousers, a stripe down the side. The brass players departed, leaving the bassist and drummer.
Unlike at Smitty’s Corner, Muddy had no band to hide behind, no club to table-hop. He was on stage and he worked hard. Their sets varied each night, but this review of a later show at St.
Pancras Town Hall, written by Tony Standish, reflects the attitude of those who embraced the music.

Not everyone was glowing. Photographer Val Wilmer, who was an enthralled teenager when she saw Muddy in 1958, explained, “They wanted Muddy to be a folk musician, and electric guitar had
not really been heard, not loud. The chords yes, but not that kind of wild playing.” Harold Pendleton, Chris Barber’s business partner, remembered that when Muddy Waters struck the
first note on his electric guitar at St. Pancras Town Hall, one well-known critic and
several of his cronies got up and walked out. “[Muddy] fiddled with the knobs [of
his guitar],” the review stated. “The next time he struck a fierce chord, it was louder, and I realized that this was the established order of things. As he reached for the volume knobs
again, I fled from the hall.”

“The artists this audience had seen were countryish, singing songs about plowing behind mules and telling a few anecdotes,” British blues scholar Paul Oliver said. “For the
time, it was screaming electric. It was what Muddy would be playing in Chicago clubs.”

“I drove ’em crazy in fifty-eight,” said Muddy. “I went over there and they went stone nuts! ‘Where’s he comin’ from with all this noise?’ ”
As the tour progressed, Muddy toned down his playing.

After each show, Muddy’s dressing room was crowded with fans. “All the London blues mafia was there,” said writer Frank Weston, “and Muddy was getting bombarded with
questions from collectors — ‘Was that really B. B. King who was on the Otis Spann 78 “Five Spot”?’ and the like. Muddy was always a gentleman, lots of patience, always
had time for the fans and collectors.”

“When I wormed my way backstage, an eager sixteen-year-old, it was ‘Good
morning
little schoolgirl!’ all around,” Val Wilmer recounted. “Doubtless glad of
some female company after all those earnest record collectors with their talk of forgotten sessions and obscure locations, Muddy offered me a drink.

“There weren’t many black people in this country then. Backstage, their bodies felt powerful because they had just come off stage. Sweat was coming through their clothes. They had
Vaseline in their hair and their faces were all shiny from sweat. All the grown-ups seemed to me terribly matter-of-fact with them: ‘How about another drink, Muddy, old chap?’ The
bottle of whiskey was there and Chris of course was there with his stutter and smiling face.

“Muddy was giving me the eye but he was giving everybody the eye. He was a great womanizer. There wasn’t anything nasty about it. I felt like his attitude was, ‘Oh well, you
don’t know what you’re missing.’ Over the years I realized that, because he came from a segregated society, to make an approach to a white woman in front of
white men, even though it’s not unsafe here, is still a taboo. He was reserved, which was quite nice. And Otis was very friendly. He squeezed my hand and gave me one of those
looks and said, ‘I hope to see you again sometime.’

“Then I asked them for their autographs. Otis wrote his and then he pulled out a stamp for Muddy’s signature. Not realizing, I said, ‘Oh, I want you to sign it,’ and
Muddy did but it was a great struggle because he could hardly write.”

“We found that the American Negro artists could never believe their luck here,” said Pendleton. “Chatting up the English girls was easy because there was none of the prejudice
that there was in America. The jazz fans here had something like racial prejudice in reverse — if he was black, he could do no wrong.”

In an interview near the end of his trip, speaking with Max Jones, a writer for
Melody Maker,
Muddy made his point that the blues — his blues — was an evolving music, though
he expressed it without musical instruments or terminology. He used a wad of cash. In miles, the trip to Chicago from Mississippi was not as great as Chicago to London, but the money in
Muddy’s pocket symbolized a distance from his past greater than any that could be quantitatively measured. “There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used
to,” Muddy told Jones. “When I play in Chicago I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues — the blues we used to have when we
had no money. I’m talking about when you couldn’t even buy moonshine, a hot dog even. When you were making thirty-five cents a day.” He dug into his pocket and waved the wad over
his head. “How can I have that kind of blues with this in my pocket?” How did he explain it? The question came often, and the answer was always the same: he’d tap the side of his
head with his forefinger and refer to his “long memory.”

Muddy’s tour of England was more than a significant landmark in his career. It revitalized him. The packed halls, the teeming dressing rooms, the questions and comments and praise from
people so disconnected from the Mississippi Delta and from Chicago’s South Side all bolstered his confidence. “I didn’t play my guitar until about
two
months ago,” he told Tony Standish, “but I’m gonna keep on playing now. I won’t rest no more. Sometimes, when it comes up to a high tempo, I’m kind of slow —
that’s why I got the lead guitar player, let him take care of that business. I’m slow, but when it comes to the blues, why, I got pretty good fingers.” He would soon buy a new
guitar, a red Telecaster with a custom neck made of rosewood, strong enough to handle his heavy strings, and a raised nut to accommodate his slide. Before leaving, he told
Melody Maker,
“Now I know that the people in England like soft guitar and the old blues. Next time I come I’ll learn some old songs first.”

But the impact of Muddy’s tour was more than a validation of his career: it became an investment in his musical future. Like the imitators who sprang up behind Chuck Berry, like those who
followed in the path of Muddy’s Aristocrat recordings a decade earlier, a number of the new fans at Muddy’s British shows formed bands of their own. A young Eric Burdon stood up at the
Newcastle College of Art and said he had tickets to the Chris Barber concert with Muddy Waters and wondered if anyone else was going. John Steel stood up and said he was. They formed a band, the
Animals. “I realized I could play guitar,” said Eric Clapton, “when I mastered this bit of Muddy Waters’s ‘Honey Bee.’ ” Davies and Korner heard
confirmation in Muddy’s music to crank up their own, and their group, Blues Incorporated, would evolve into another one called the Rolling Stones.

Chuck Berry had made Chess Records a major player with the rock audience, and soon they found themselves selling not only a new style of music, but a new, more expensive format
too: the LP, the long-playing, twelve-inch, thirty-three-and-a-third-RPM album.

Folk music was one of the first nonclassical styles to exploit the LP, being a genre that wasn’t oriented around hits; an artist’s repertoire was more important than how he or she
played one particular song. The folk audience was predominantly white, and by the late 1950s, they were in their post-Levittown affluence. In 1958, a forward-thinking individual at Chess Records,
sensing the new
trend and realizing an opportunity, packaged twelve of Muddy’s songs from his decade with Chess and released it as
The Best of Muddy Waters.
It
was an ideal introduction for the new market of consumers, giving the uninitiated listener a taste of Muddy’s breadth, ranging from his amplified Delta blues such as “I Can’t Be
Satisfied” to his early urban blues band sound — “Honey Bee” — to the recent piano-and harmonica-led songs such as “I’m Ready” and “Hoochie
Coochie Man.” The songs were immediately attractive to the budding Love Generation: song one, side one was “I Just Want to Make Love to You.”

Alan Lomax, who’d spent the better part of the 1950s in England (after being tagged a communist at home), was aware of Muddy’s acceptance there and put Muddy on the bill of a
Carnegie Hall show he was producing. Lomax’s “Folksong: ’59” was intended to tell the story of American music in song. Muddy joined Memphis Slim, country singer Jimmy
Driftwood, gospel artists the Selah Jubilee Singers, as well as bluegrass artists and New York folk interpreters. Bobby Darin was billed to represent the rebellious rock and roll, and he did so
perfectly — by not showing up. After Muddy played Carnegie Hall, Chess went even more aggressively for the folk consumer’s dollar. Big Bill Broonzy had recently died (Muddy was a
pallbearer), and while Broonzy’s fans mourned the loss, Chess offered them a replacement, an album titled
Muddy Waters Sings Big Bill Broonzy.
It pitched Muddy as a folksinger, as if
“Hoochie Coochie Man” had never happened, as if he’d been raised in the coffeehouses that began dotting the northeastern cityscape.