Can't Be Satisfied (41 page)

In Florida Muddy met a young lady who would also become part of his family. “We were playing in Gainesville,” said Bob Margolin, “and Muddy asked me to run to the store for
him. When I came back to his hotel room, the door was open and I stepped in. It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the dark, and there was Muddy sitting on the bed, surrounded by four hotel
employees. He pointed to one, who turned out to be Marva, and said, ‘Don’t look at that one, I’m gonna marry her.’ ”

“My girlfriend had taken me to see his show the night before,” the former Marva Jean Brooks recalled. She was nineteen years old and biding her time after high school working
housekeeping. “At the hotel the next day, I was wearing an orange-and-white-striped miniskirt and we were all talking to Muddy. I went to his performance
that night and
it led from there. He started calling me Sunshine and we used to talk on the phone at night, and he told me point-blank, ‘You was born for me.’ I was a young kid and never thought a
famous man like Muddy Waters would be interested in a young girl like me. I was a child, but he made me feel as a woman, as a woman should feel.”

Muddy was strengthening other family ties, bringing his kids on some summer tours. At the show’s end, he’d invite Renee, Joseph, Roslind, and Dennis and Charles (if they were around)
to join him for “Got My Mojo Working.” “It didn’t sink in until I became an adult just how famous he really was,” said Joseph. “To me, I was just with my father,
having fun.”

“Can you imagine growing up with this man and then seeing all these kids surface?” asked Cookie. “Mercy, Renee, Joseph, another boy — and me not knowing? It was hard
learning the private side of Muddy. Joseph and Renee’s mother got strung out on drugs. Mercy’s mom was strung out on drugs. It made me see the man part of Muddy. Someone can be all
dressed up and all cleaned up when you see the outside, but they made me see what Muddy was really about.

“I always think about Muddy’s song, ‘I’m a Man.’ When he’d sing that song, he really meant it. He’d put his whole heart in it, you could see he really
meant it. When I was younger, he was a god to me. As I have gotten older, and dealt with things, I will always be grateful for the things he did in my life, but as a person, he was not a very nice
person.”

Touring emphasized to Cameron that the part of Muddy’s career that did not involve Chess Records was doing very well, and the part that did involve Chess was not.
Howlin’ Wolf, not far from his death by kidney disease, had recently sued Arc Music, Chess’s publishing arm, for $2,500,000, charging they had fraudulently induced him to sign over
“sole and exclusive” ownership of all his compositions to the company and owed him for unpaid composer’s royalties and profits. While Cameron was investigating the possibilities
of leaving the company, calls were coming in that further confirmed Muddy’s
stature. Muddy cut a few songs for the Hollywood film
Mandingo
and recorded a Dr.
Pepper radio jingle.

Levon Helm was the drummer in The Band, the popular roots music group that had backed Bob Dylan and enjoyed many hits of their own; Henry Glover was a legendary black record producer, involved
in the early days of Syd Nathan’s King and Federal labels: he produced hits with James Brown, Hank Ballard, and Little Willie John. Helm and Glover had recently formed RCO, “Our
Company,” and were hiring themselves out to labels to produce artists at a studio in Woodstock, New York. They wanted Muddy to be their first production and were excited about working with
Chess Records. Levon’s audience was exactly the one Scott wanted Muddy to reach. “Muddy had two or three options left with Chess,” said Cameron. “I went to New York and met
with the people running Chess Records. I told them we’d do the
Woodstock
album, but if it didn’t sell, Chess would release Muddy from his contract. ‘Oh, no problem, no
problem.’ ”

In early February of 1975, Muddy and Scott flew to New York. Pinetop and Bob Margolin were coming the next day; they’d be joined in the studio by several people Muddy didn’t know
(including Levon’s band mate Garth Hudson) and by Paul Butterfield, a familiar face. Glover and Helm wanted to cut a couple Louis Jordan tunes with Muddy, “Let the Good Times
Roll” and “Caldonia.” Glover had collected some new material that seemed like it might fit. “For ‘Why Are People Like That,’ ” said Helm, “we just
started going over it — head arrangements, a tempo that Muddy liked, and follow Muddy. It was like the music played us. And we knew Muddy had ‘Fox Squirrel’ and some more original
songs.”

The result was Muddy’s best studio album to date, the players bringing a vitality that had been missing at least since Leonard Chess died. It wasn’t Muddy’s deepest blues, but
it was relaxed and fun. Cameron was pleased, though he knew Muddy could do better. “Muddy was at the ultimate point of not wanting to make another record for Chess,” he said. “He
finds himself in a place that he wasn’t familiar with, and he’s with these musicians who think so much of him but have never played with him. We had a genuinely good time, but the
musicians were a little bit in awe of Muddy and they folded in
behind him instead of pushing him. Muddy’s thing was get in there, get this done, and go home.”
Recording away from Chicago, however, distanced Muddy from his troubles. “Any problems between Muddy and Chess were far away from us, nonexistent in the studio,” said Helm. “Not
only was there none of that kind of tension, there was no tension.”

The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album
was on the streets three months after it was recorded, and Muddy hit the road. In New York City, he played a week at the Bottom Line. Bob Dylan, who was
emerging from retreat, showed up several nights in a row, bringing a drunken Phil Ochs (a folksinger not long from suicide) and 1920s blues singer Victoria Spivey — who made everyone address
her as Queen Victoria. She wore a flowing white gown decorated with snakes, and Muddy kept asking her to take it off; the snakes gave him the heebie-jeebies.

“Dylan came into our tiny dressing room with a group of musicians who were soon to become his Rolling Thunder Revue,” said Margolin. “Muddy could tell he was someone important
because of the intense excitement. It was arranged for Bob to sit in.” Muddy, more acquainted with the gangster than the pop star, the gun than the poet, got the name mixed up. “Muddy
announced to the audience, ‘We have a special guest on harmonica, please give a nice round of ‘acclause’ (that’s how Muddy pronounced
applause,
and no one ever
corrected him) for . . . JOHN DYLAN.’ A couple of people clapped politely, and most turned to their friends and asked, ‘Who?’ I leaned over and stage-whispered to Muddy,
‘His name is Bob, like my name —
Bob
Dylan,’ and Muddy repeated, ‘Bob Dylan,’ as though that’s what he had said the first time. The audience went
apeshit.”

Rock stars didn’t much impress Muddy because he didn’t know who they were. When Rod Stewart had recently come backstage at a gig in Detroit, Muddy heard his English accent and
couldn’t understand why the musician would come to America to find an audience. He was more comfortable with the Allman Brothers, with whom he toured in the fall of 1975. One of their gigs
was in New York’s Central Park, and they stayed at the fancy Plaza Hotel. Songwriter Terry Abrahamson showed up and Muddy shared his room with him. “He
didn’t like air-conditioning, and we couldn’t figure out how to turn off the air conditioner, so Muddy and I stuffed towels in the air-conditioning vents. I was always
coming to his hotel rooms, bringing food and we’d drink champagne. Once I knew I had his ear, I’d usually bring him some lyrics. I never saw him pick up his guitar in his hotel room.
We’d just hang out, usually have the TV on, he’d be wearing his black undershirt and black silk boxer shorts.”

In the meantime, Cameron received the first accounting of Muddy’s
Woodstock
album, claiming tens of thousands of copies sold. “I was a little suspicious because I
hadn’t seen anything really happen with the record. The end of twelve months comes along and now the number has gone even higher — with an extraordinary number of copies being held in
reserve. It didn’t make a lot of sense, so I flew back and said, ‘You’re going to take those out of reserve or we’re off.’ ”

“Chess was by then a disaster, really,” said Esmond Edwards. “The main problem was that the Chess mystique, without Leonard, was not there. Len and Phil had a relationship with
the artists, even if it was calling everyone ‘motherfucker.’ GRT was a white-bread operation, with business grad people running it, they didn’t have a feeling for the
music.”

In June of 1975, GRT closed the Chess’s longtime studio in Chicago. They sold Chess Records in August to All Platinum Records, a label whose president, Sylvia Robinson, had had a hit with
“Love Is Strange,” which owed a debt to Chess’s Bo Diddley. The sale, less than a million dollars, was said to be a tax write-off for GRT. All Platinum hired a young rock bassist
to oversee the marketing of the new acquisition. Despite this kid’s brave talk — “GRT was sitting on a gold mine and they were treating it like a pile of shit”—
Cameron and Muddy wanted off. By November, All Platinum agreed to let them go. “That be the second time they sold me,” Muddy said, “and I got tired of being sold to
everybody.”

Unceremoniously, and without any fanfare, Muddy concluded his twenty-eight-year association with Chess Records on November 20, 1975.

T
his is a big time for me tonight,” chuckled the birthday boy over the din of big Texas blues fans who packed Antone’s blues club to
help their main man celebrate in 1976. “I’m gonna be forty years old tonight, and I guess that makes me about the oldest young person I know of.”

Midnight approached in Austin, Muddy would be sixty-three, but those awake were not concerned with counting, certainly not higher than twelve, as in twelve-bar blues, and if bars were the
subject, the correct answer was one: Antone’s. “You see a guy that’s a king, an immortal from Mt. Olympus,” said Clifford Antone, proprietor of the establishment,
“first time I heard him play slide, it almost scared me. It touched something in me I didn’t know I had. ‘Please don’t stop, keep playing.’ ” When Antone’s
opened in 1975, blues was not the healthiest of wild beasts. After the boom of the 1960s, the new sincerity gave way to the pyrotechnics of acid rock, theatricality, and —
hissssss
— fusion jazz. Disco’s mechanized throb, sweeping the nation, was antithetical to the natural beat and sway of the rhythm of the blues. Few bluesmen wore high-heeled glitter boots
(though many took to leisure suits). But hope was not lost. A new generation was arriving. “I did all my shows for five nights,” continued Antone, “Tuesday through Saturday.
Jimmie Vaughan was twenty-three, Stevie was twenty. We put Jimmie Vaughan on stage with Muddy, he played slide and Muddy’s head snapped. He told me that Kim Wilson was the best harmonica
he’d heard since Little Walter. The blues players had never seen no kids like this.”

After a week in Austin, a bluesman felt like a player again. Several
nights in one place meant when they woke, instead of packing, the band could go downtown and shop for
plaid jackets and polyester clothes. It meant Pinetop could unpack his tool and grease up some bird. “Muddy would have a big room,” said Antone, “and Pinetop would have an
electric deep fryer. They’d be drinking champagne and eating fried chicken. I was twenty-five and in heaven. And the chicken was good.”

The minute hand approached midnight. As Margolin led the crowd in “Happy Birthday,” Austin gifted Mud with some of his own: Buddy Guy and Junior Wells strode onstage. Muddy’s
jaw dropped; you could have wiped him off the floor. “I raised these two blues musicians since they was only thirteen!” he shouted, and they ripped through “Got My Mojo
Working.”

How was the old bluesman surviving in the modern 1970s? Quite well. He owned a suburban home and was landlord over another, owned a couple suburban road vehicles, several cars. He had friends in
high places and won his third Grammy a month earlier for the
Woodstock
album. He had dates booked across America and across the oceans. He was free, free, free at last from his withering
record company and on a roll with a manager who had a vision and who exercised might. In his lifetime he’d gone from plantation scrip to an American Express card (and Visa, Amoco, and
Dominick’s Finer Foods cards). He’d inspired a top magazine and a top rock and roll band. And he was about to rise to a new height of stardom.

“I wanted Muddy on Epic and Associated Records,” said Scott Cameron. “They had a real machine going and they seemed supportive with their artists on the road. Their marketing
was second to none. Johnny Winter and the whole Blue Sky Records thing was really hot.” It helped that the head of the label, Ron Alexenburg, was a fan; he’d entered the biz working for
a record distributor in Chicago. It was a homecoming too; Epic was a division of Columbia, which was the label he’d done his second Chicago sessions for in 1946.