Can't Be Satisfied (43 page)

Peter had his young son with him, who’d been allowed to bring a friend. They were thrilled to meet a celebrity and, reacting like many children do — and before Peter could stop him
— the friend asked Muddy for his autograph. Graciously, Muddy asked if he had a piece of paper. The boy produced a bar napkin. Writing was not a simple task for Mud. He looked at the cocktail
napkin, then at the kid, and pronounced, “That’s a mighty shitty piece of paper you got there.”

The band stayed on the road, playing Hawaii, Africa, and Europe. They played a tribute to the pop band Foghat, who’d rocked up Muddy’s version of Dixon’s
“I Just Want to Make Love to You” and sold it to another generation. In October of 1977, they sold out 6,000 seats at Radio City Music Hall, sharing the bill with B. B. King, Albert
King, and Bobby “Blue” Bland.

From Radio City, the band continued north, returning to Dan Hartman’s studio in Westport to make another album with Johnny Winter, this one titled
I’m Ready
. Not long
before, Bob Margolin had gone from Boston to Rhode Island to hear Jimmy Rogers, who was also enjoying a second career. “I had to call Muddy the next day, so at the end of the night I asked
Jimmy, ‘Is there anything you want me to tell him?’ He said, ‘You tell him anytime he wants to get together and play those old blues like we did, I’d like to do that
again.’ I got goose bumps — the combination of Muddy and Jimmy playing together is a large thing in my life. If you have a house or a car, this was bigger in my life than your house or
your car are in yours. So when I told Muddy the next day, he said, ‘Boy that would be great, I’d love to do that, maybe we could do a record with him sometime.’ So I called up
Johnny Winter, and he arranged for that to happen. While we were at it, I said, ‘Little Walter’s gone but Big Walter’s still around,’ and we got him too.”

At the studio, Margolin set up Muddy and Jimmy’s guitars. “I tuned them and set them for big fat heavy sounds. Johnny Winter was up in the control booth and he said to them,
‘Guys, those are really distorted, is that the way you want them?’ They both go, ‘Yeah! Yeah, that’s it, that’s the shit.’ They always used really big fat sounds
— the sound of an amp turned all the way up.”

“Copper Brown” was cowritten with Marva. “Any time a song would come in his head, he’d get me up,” she remembered. “ ‘Wake up, Marva, wake up, you gotta
write.’ I always kept a pen and a pencil by. He’d tell me what to write and I would write it. I’d be half ’sleep and nodding, but I’d be writing. ‘Deep Down in
Florida,’ he did that with me, ‘Who Do You Trust,’ ‘Copper Brown.’ ”

The mood at the sessions was similar to the previous year and achieved solid, though different, results. There’s a restraint that
makes this album a bit more mature,
and a bit less powerful. With Muddy playing, there’s another guitar sound woven in, and Jerry Portnoy sometimes joins Big Walter. (“I used to drink with Big Walter in Chicago,”
Portnoy said, “so recording together was a gas.”) The sound, however, is less dense, more intricate.
I’m Ready
was released in February of 1978 — on the heels of
Hard Again
winning a Grammy Award, Muddy’s fourth, and also winning street credibility with the
Rolling Stone
Critic’s Award.
I’m Ready
would earn Muddy
his fifth Grammy Award.

On July 9, during a stint at the Quiet Knight, Terry Abrahamson was backstage talking to Muddy. “Willie Dixon was there,” said Abrahamson, “and the backstage
door opens, in comes Keith Richards and Ronnie Wood. I love the Stones — if I’d never heard the Stones, I’d have never gotten into Muddy. Keith Richards walked over to Muddy,
kneeled down, and kissed his hand.” Said Margolin, “Muddy knew Mick and Keith very well, but hanging out after the show, he kept addressing Charlie Watts as ‘Eddie.’ Charlie
didn’t correct him, and seemed really tickled to be around someone who didn’t kiss his ass.”

During an extended gig at the Cellar Door in Washington, D.C., Muddy’s presence in town came to the attention of a fellow southerner who was also on an extended stay, President Jimmy
Carter. He invited them to play the White House. “They wanted me and my band,” a somewhat incredulous, and very proud, Muddy told a documentary film crew. “From where I’m
from, a black man couldn’t even get inside a white man’s front room.” So on a hot August afternoon, 1978, the vans drove through White House security, set up their equipment, and
watched bomb-sniffing dogs smell their gear before they played. “Muddy Waters is one of the great performers of all time,” said the president. “He’s won more awards than I
could name. His music is well known around the world, comes from a good part of the country, and represents accurately the background and history of the American people.” The president and
first lady were
treated to, among others, “Hoochie Coochie Man,” “The Blues Had a Baby,” and “I Got My Mojo Working.”

“We didn’t know about the show until about a day before,” said Calvin Jones. “We didn’t get paid nothing. Shit no. I got pictures with Jimmy Carter and all of us.
Somebody got paid but I don’t know who it was. Playing for the White House, don’t make no money — that’s tough, ain’t it? They didn’t even give us good dinners,
give us some hot dogs.”

In the fall of 1978, Muddy announced a European tour had come together for the next month “with some rock guy,” Margolin said. “When I got over the shock of
realizing I’d have to change a lot of immediate plans, I asked Muddy who we’d be playing with. He said, ‘I can’t call his name — it’s one of those guys who was
on that
Last Waltz
.’ I named off a bunch of them and when I got to Eric Clapton, he said, ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’ ”

The first few nights, Muddy returned to the hotel after his own set. “One day, over breakfast in Germany, he asked me about Eric’s music,” Margolin continued. “That
night, Muddy stayed. Two things Eric played really nailed Muddy: he did a very soulful version of Big Maceo’s Chicago blues classic, ‘Worried Life Blues,’ which the late Otis
Spann used to play when he was with Muddy. And Eric did a killer open-G slide guitar ‘Come See Me Early in the Morning,’ in which he used a trademark Muddy Waters turnaround lick. Muddy
got a big smile and said, ‘That’s
my
shit!’ From then on, they were close, and Muddy used to call Eric ‘my son,’ his highest compliment to a younger
musician.”

The partnership worked well for both parties and was reconvened in North America on March 28, 1979, for a forty-seven-city tour. Muddy’s label had issued
Muddy
“Mississippi” Waters Live,
featuring live renditions of songs from the previous two albums — and the requisite chestnuts. The live material featured his touring band, along
with three songs drawn from the tour with Johnny Winter and James Cotton. The crowd’s reaction to Muddy’s slide work — you
can hear their eyes lighting up
like Christmas trees — confirms the eternal power of his playing. Half a century before, he’d drawn the same reaction from a juke house full of field hands, the same way Son House had
drawn it from him. Going up the country, don’t you want to go? The live album won Muddy his sixth Grammy. The wide exposure brought by the Clapton dates promoted sales of his recent releases,
which were readily available, and of the older material, which was slowly being repackaged and rereleased by All Platinum.

When Muddy played Atlanta, his son Big Bill heard about the gig on the radio. “My daddy had moved from Chicago to Westmont and the number I had was no longer any good. I thought my daddy
changed his number and didn’t want me to bother him. So for years I didn’t try to bother him. I went to see him in Atlanta and he hugged me. His words were, ‘You’re
Mary’s boy?’ I said yeah. He hugged me, said, ‘Well you’re my boy too.’ I got goose bumps. I still get goose bumps. I sat there in the dressing room with Bob Margolin,
Jr. Johnson, Pinetop Perkins, Jerry Portnoy, and they kept saying, ‘Man, you look just like Joe.’ My daddy sat there in his chair, he had a little lady on each side of him, he just sat
there staring. Staring.” Big Bill’s words, which began fast and furious at the clear memory, slowed as the memory crept from the shadows, as its edges and wholeness came to light. Big
Bill took a breath, but breath wouldn’t come. Tears did, in a steady stream, and he buried his head in his hands. “Man, you know, it hurts. It’s a hurting thing.”

When the tour came through Memphis, Muddy arranged to have the day free. He and Bo took the white Cadillac down Highway Sixty-one, the road of Golden Promise, past their old stomping grounds and
all the way to Issaquena County. A field hand named Robert from the Esparanda Farm remembered seeing the big white Cadillac pull up. “The farmer sent me in a pickup truck to find out who was
looking around,” he said. “It was Muddy Waters, and he was with Carrie Brown, his cousin who lived near Glen Allan. I was trying to like Carrie at the time. We all went up to Glen Allan
after sun — we were working sun to sun — drank some beers, then he left for a gig.” At home, horsepower had replaced the horse, but little else had changed.

On June 5, 1979, in Chicago, Muddy married Marva Jean Brooks. He’d sat up in bed a few mornings earlier and announced his intentions to her. “It was
spontaneous,” Marva remembered. “Me and Cookie were running around trying to get everything ready. It was a simple house wedding. I didn’t want anything fancy and Mud wasn’t
that type.” It was her twenty-fifth birthday, he was sixty-six. The small ceremony was held at Muddy’s home. In addition to his band mates, his manager, and other friends and families,
the party included Clapton and his entourage; Johnny Winter flew out for the occasion. Muddy ordered steaks from a butcher that Willie Dixon recommended, and there was lots of champagne on ice.
“It was a big party. At the time, ‘I Shot the Sheriff’ was a hit, and that was one of my favorite songs,” said Joseph Morganfield. “All my friends were riding bikes
by, trying to peek through the fence. What stands out in my mind is Clapton went swimming in our pool in his underwear.” What stands out in Eric Clapton’s mind is Muddy “riding
around on his tricycle and it was like, ‘This blues singer is behaving like a clown.’ He was just a regular guy at home.”

During the Clapton tour, Muddy had joined the Rosebud Agency for booking, run by Mike Kappus. Kappus put champagne on Muddy’s contract, a clause reading, “One (1) fifth of either
Piper-Heidsieck Gold Label Brut (1971, 1973, or 1975); Krug (1971, 1973, or 1975); or Dom Perignon champagne, iced and with at least six (6) champagne glasses.” Said Kappus, “The
champagne on the contract rider was an extra stretch for promoters when Muddy’s demand was not at its peak, but Muddy always wanted his champagne. Turned out, if they didn’t have it,
Muddy had several bottles that he would sell to them to give to him.”

Though things were getting better for Muddy, the band was not sharing in the reward. “Muddy wouldn’t say nothing about it,” said Pinetop. “He was making plenty of money.
He got a whole lot of money off Chess Records since Scott got in there.”

“Conditions for us stayed about the same,” said Fuzz. “Hotels were going up and up. The Holiday Inn in 1971 was something like twenty-two dollars a night, it got to be sixty or
seventy dollars. We would get a double, wasn’t able to be in no single.” Muddy made no
attempt to rectify the situation; he’d turned all his business
decisions over to Cameron.

Muddy took a break from the road for about three months at the end of 1979, and the band put together a tour of their own, billing themselves as Muddy introduced them: The Legendary Band. They
asked Muddy if they could use one of his suburbans; he refused. Squeezing into Fuzz’s Cadillac, they hit the road for holiday money.

When they recorded in Westport in May of 1980, the tensions were high and the spirits were not. It was the road band (and Johnny) only, no substitutes, no guests. As if trying to get
comfortable, Muddy, in addition to the full-on band, worked with smaller units. “Mean Old Frisco Blues” is inflected with rockabilly innocence, hearkening to Elvis’s
interpretation of another Arthur Crudup tune. “I Feel Like Going Home,” pulled from the
Hard Again
sessions because there wasn’t enough from this session to make a whole
record, is all acoustic. The textural differences on
King Bee
were, to some degree, a result of the simmering feelings. Margolin remembers suggesting that less might be more on some songs
and Muddy fired right back at him: fine, you sit out.