Can't Be Satisfied (22 page)

The club’s reaction was only the first indication of the song’s potential.
Billboard
couldn’t keep quiet about it: “We’re so happy with Muddy Waters on
Chess 1560 doing ‘Hoochy Coochy [
sic
] Man’ that
we can’t help mention it again for a top spot. Action gets better every week.” Leonard went
south to bolster sales, and Phil told the magazine that the record had sold an astounding four thousand copies in a single week. It became Muddy’s top-selling single and spent three months in
the national charts, where it rose to number three.

The success of “Hoochie Coochie Man” affirmed what each previous single had hinted at and what the steady gigging was trying to make plain: Muddy’s music had become his career.
He was ready to buy a house and went to Leonard for advice. Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, remembers the meeting. “I was out in the yard and this big car pulled up. The guy walks out
and he had on this chartreuse green, bright, bright green suit. I looked down and his shoes were made of cow skin, the fur was on them, black and white and brown. And I looked up and he had one of
those five-inch hat brims. I was young enough that I didn’t know this was a blues artist, it could have been a spaceship landed. He got out, totally secure, walked over to me, looked down,
and said, ‘You must be Chess’s son. Is your daddy home?’ They sat at the kitchen table talking, drinking coffee. Muddy would come to him for advice, but we didn’t have many
artists come to the house. My father was never there. He was a workaholic. He took me on the road with him when I was ten because he wanted to be with me, but the only way was to go to
work.”

After the discussion, Leonard sent Mud to his personal lawyer. With Geneva and her two kids, Muddy moved up the social ladder from the West Side to the South Side, settling in for a twenty-year
stay at 4339 South Lake Park. Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers, and Otis Spann helped them move furniture. (“I represented Muddy when he bought his home on the South Side,” said attorney
Nate Notkin. “I said, ‘Muddy, you want this to be in joint tenancy with your wife?’ I explained what that meant, and he said, ‘You might as well put her on but you know,
she’s my common law wife.’ Well, there hasn’t been common law in Illinois since 1920.”)

The West Side, according to one Chicago aphorism, is the South Side’s basement. The West Side was managed by absentee aldermen;
those who had the power to bring
improvements were not around to even know what was needed. The South Side was controlled by its own. The South Side was the headquarters for Congressman William Dawson, the New Deal Democrat
who’d been serving in Washington since 1942, at one time the sole black face in Congress. He controlled three of Chicago’s fifty wards, accumulating two more as the city’s black
population expanded; his machine made blacks an essential cog in Chicago’s political machine. He arranged a line of credit for the
Chicago Defender,
controlled the NAACP, evicted
white organized crime from the South Side so blacks could run it, and then represented these policy kings in his legal practice. He was tight with Chicago’s leading black ministers. He walked
the South Side on a wooden leg, and what he surveyed was his.

Across town, another power was rising: six years after becoming the Cook County clerk, Richard Daley would, in 1956, become mayor of Chicago. Daley envisioned a political machine embraced by a
cross section of Chicago’s constituents, and he addressed the black population’s housing squeeze early on, establishing tens of thousands of low-income housing opportunities, each with
a majestic beginning — the Henry Horner Homes, Stateway Gardens, Cabrini-Green, the Robert Taylor Homes — but deteriorating quickly, as control was wrested from the city by local gangs.
In addition to the resulting territorial fights, black expansion south was still being fought by whites who, despite the Supreme Court’s mandating integration in February of 1954, could not
imagine an integrated neighborhood; the National Guard had recently been called to quell a riot over housing. Nonetheless, this was a move toward possibilities, toward promise and enterprise.

“On the West Side,” said Muddy’s stepson Charles, “we was living in a two-bedroom apartment. We had a commode, and we had to wash our face and hands in a little small
pan. But after ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ we accumulated enough money and paid down on this building here. Hell yeah, hell yeah, Leonard Chess would come to this house and eat!”

Muddy’s house on South Lake Park was built at the turn of the
century, when the flourish and detail of the Victorian era had passed, but the era of cookie-cutter
homes was yet to come. A large picture window filled the spacious, paneled living room with afternoon light — and heat; the blinds stayed drawn till evening, when the air cooled and a light
breeze cracked the heaviness. He had a sizable dining room, separate bedrooms for stepsons Charles and Dennis, and a big kitchen where he and Geneva could cook. Muddy, accustomed to a sideline,
quickly installed tenants upstairs and in the basement, adding three more kitchen areas. Otis Spann claimed the basement’s front room, Bo took the middle room, and Muddy put his uncle from
Stovall, Joe Grant, in the back of the basement. The band rehearsed in the basement’s common room. Band members and a valet rented the upstairs apartments.

Several people could comfortably gather on the front stoop, and with a crowd spilling down the steps, maybe a chair or two at the bottom, there was room enough for two poker tables of people to
gather, jive, and talk trash. A wino in the neighborhood went up and down the streets with a cat on a leash and a recorder in his pocket, stepping around the tamale, watermelon, and Sno-Kone
vendors. He’d have a trail of kids behind him, Muddy would see him, say, “Hit it,” and he’d blow a work song that sent the kids dancing. There was a patio in the backyard,
and Muddy put two wrought-iron flamingoes on his front door, his name inverted beneath: Waters Muddy. He was confirmed middle class.

His new home was just blocks from where the new Chess offices were about to be established, South Cottage Grove at Forty-seventh. Muddy could easily stop in to see Leonard, shake hands with him
— and shake him down for some of his own money. “My old man would go there almost every day to talk to Leonard,” said Charles, “and I used to come with him. He’d drive
here, he wasn’t the walking type, hell no.” He’d done his walking in Mississippi.

Muddy asked Geneva to quit her factory job. As Charles told it, “My old man said, ‘I don’t want you to work no more.’ She was a damn good cook. He used to tell people
that if it wasn’t for her, he wouldn’t have been the same man, because he was real young and
wild. That old saying, it takes a good woman behind a successful
man.” Even Muddy’s stepson reaped the benefits. “A lot of kids knew who my father was, singing blues,” said Charles, “and they kind of put me on a pedestal.” Not
coincidentally, Muddy’s move brought Leola Spain south; her child with Muddy, Azelene, was almost twenty. “He really, really respected my grandmother,” Cookie said. “He
often would ask her her opinion, and as he got financially stable, he would buy her groceries or send money, do extra things for the grandkids.”

One of Muddy’s first guests in the home was Howlin’ Wolf, who had continued to have hits with Chess and finally left the Memphis area for Chicago in early 1954. Proud, he drove his
own car north. He’d intended to stay in a hotel until he found his way around, but Muddy, happy to help a friend of Leonard’s, insisted he stay with him. Staying with Muddy would have
impressed Wolf, even if Muddy weren’t in his new home. Wolf hadn’t begun to record until he was forty, in 1951, well after Muddy was established in the blues world. One of the early
tracks he’d cut was a version of Muddy’s “Streamline Woman.” Muddy brought Wolf to the Zanzibar, to Silvio’s, the 708 Club; Leonard was family, so introducing Wolf was
a family favor. Soon, wherever Muddy had a night (which was almost every night), Wolf had another one. He was quickly as popular in Chicago as established local stars such as Willie Mabon and
Elmore James.

“I had Chicago sewed up in my hand, it didn’t bother me,” said Muddy. But Wolf was the jealous type, not sharing his spotlight with his sidemen, not letting his sidemen
associate with Muddy’s band. Though Muddy and Wolf sometimes downplayed it — Muddy more often than Wolf — genuine dissension existed between them. Wolf soon made his home on the
West Side, and their conflict somewhat mirrored the undercurrent of jealousy between the two neighborhoods. The jealousy fueled a rivalry; one time, each proving his fame, Muddy and Wolf began
burning money, seeing who would stop lighting bills first. “I know the peoples thought we hated one another,” Muddy recalled, “but we didn’t. But Wolf wanted to be the best
and I wasn’t gonna let him come up here and take over the best.”

Evidence of their conflict, perhaps even its source, was found in
the minutes of a meeting from Chicago’s African American branch of the American Federation of
Musicians. Howlin’ Wolf filed a grievance against Muddy in early 1955, claiming Muddy, who was booked regularly at Silvio’s, had subcontracted Wolf to cover for him while he went on the
road in April. Having accepted, Wolf turned down two offers for gigs. When he found that Silvio’s had someone else booked for April, Wolf went to the union claiming Muddy should pay him for
the gigs he was going to miss. Muddy told the union board that his contract with Silvio had expired so he’d have had no reason to subcontract. Mr. Silvio Corroza was called to testify, and he
supported Muddy’s account; the board found in Muddy’s favor.

Tension between the stars stayed high, and Willie Dixon found himself caught between the two of them, each suspecting that Dixon was giving his better material to the other. To entice them, he
would sometimes introduce a song to one by saying he’d written it for the other. “I’d say this is a song for Muddy if I wanted Wolf to do it. He would be glad to get in on it by
him thinking it was somebody else’s, especially Muddy’s.”

In March, both “Hoochie Coochie Man” and Little Walter’s “You’re So Fine” were national top sellers. While the success was on them, Muddy and
the crew stepped up the pace of recording. On a Tuesday in April, Muddy and the recording band — Jimmy, Walter, Spann, Below, and Dixon — cut “Just Make Love to Me” (also
known by its refrain, “I Just Want to Make Love to You”), which entered the top five on the national charts. It was his third record on the charts in half a year, the ninth of his
career.

Muddy was at the height of his powers. His music harnessed the potency, the virility, in the blues. His lyrics did not flinch in their openness about sex. His braggadocio was salacious and
uninhibited. This was not the image of America that Eisenhower’s White House nor television’s
I
Love Lucy
suggested. The boldness of his delivery and the lyrics to his
songs disquieted the establishment, frightened them. The blues were considered obscene, making Muddy the boogieman incarnate.

Rolling with success, Leonard moved the Chess offices a block and a half north, into a former automobile garage behind a stationery store at 4750 South Cottage Grove.
There was space enough for administrative offices, warehousing and shipping, and a recording studio that doubled as rehearsal space. The sonic fidelity at the new place, however, was not as high as
at Universal; the early sides recorded there are thinner, with less bottom. Sales, however, were unaffected. As a gesture of his appreciation to Muddy, Leonard presented him with a new car, a 1954
Oldsmobile 98. It was yellow and green, to match his outfits.

Like his furnish on the plantation, Muddy’s labor actually paid for this car and for all the future “gifts” and cars. At the time, he was probably unaware he’d bought the
car himself, but in later years he’d know. And even then he didn’t stop taking them. “Chess would get him a car every two years,” said Jimmy. “Chess would take it off
his royalties. Wolf wouldn’t do that. Wolf would get his own car.” Wolf wanted to see the money, but Muddy embraced the sense of mutual dependence engendered by the gift, even if it was
false; it felt like he had some kind of power or protection at the company.

Muddy promptly had opportunity to test his new ride. He was booked that month in Newark, New Jersey, for Alan Freed’s first big East Coast Moondog Coronation Ball. Muddy shared the bill
with, among others, the Clovers, a vocal group, and Sam Butera’s jumping swing combo.
Billboard
stated, “Most of the attendees at the Newark clambake were youngsters from
fifteen to twenty, and about twenty percent of the crowd was made up of white youngsters.” The mixed audience was Muddy’s first hint that he could reach a whole new record-buying
public.