Can't Be Satisfied (40 page)

Chess Records had devoted effort and expense to Muddy’s
London Sessions
and been rewarded with both a Grammy (Muddy’s second) and strong sales.
Unk in
Funk,
Muddy’s next studio effort, was recorded January 29 and 30, 1974 — the same month that Muddy’s additional tracks from London were coupled with Wolf’s to create
the album
London Revisited,
complete with expensive gatefold and
très
chic comic book liner notes.
Unk,
the first album since Cameron had assumed management, was
the first to credit Muddy as a producer, sharing the duty with Ralph Bass. It also marks the appearance
of Muddy’s own publishing company, Watertoons. (Prevented by his
contracts with Arc Publishing from putting his own name on his new company’s songs, he used Cookie’s name as author until the lawsuit was settled.)

Before the recording began at the end of January 1974, the band personnel changed again. While on tour in a small town in western Massachusetts, Sammy Lawhorn encountered a cop who noticed the
illegal gun on his person. When Lawhorn’s call for help came from jail, it went unanswered. “Muddy disbanded Sammy, left him in the air,” said Pinetop.

For Lawhorn, this was the end of his career in the bright lights. He hung out at Theresa’s, a basement blues bar on the South Side. “He had a drinking problem,” said Bob
Koester, “and Theresa would put up with him because he was so damn good. But the last set, he’d often be in a booth, sleeping.”
Living Blues
writer Ken Burch encountered
him in the late 1970s in Chicago, and Lawhorn was pimping his own daughter.

His replacement was Bob Margolin, a man in the right place at the right time. In the Boston area, Snake Johnson’s band was Muddy’s regular opening act, and Margolin (rhymes with
“Steady Rollin’ ”) had been a member since the early 1970s. “Bob could slide just like Muddy,” said Pinetop. “Sometimes Muddy’d take the slide and give it
to him.” Margolin recalled, “Muddy used to say that there were two kinds of players: those who are born talented, and those you can ‘build with a hammer and nails.’
I’m sure Muddy was the first kind, and though I may have a little talent and a lot of desire, I’m the second kind. I am indebted to the carpenter.”

Initially, Muddy showed little interest in tutoring — until he was baited by the sound of a guitar from the living room. “I started to play ‘Can’t Be Satisfied,’
which was my favorite song long before I knew Muddy. Immediately I heard a huge ‘Wrong!’ from the kitchen. Muddy wouldn’t pick up the guitar and show me, but he sang the
corrections at me. As well as I thought I knew the song, there were subtle nuances I was missing that were critical to him.”

Luther “Guitar Jr.” Johnson (not to be confused with Luther
“Georgia Boy” / “[Creepin’] Snake” Johnson) had come up playing the
West Side sound with Magic Sam, and had a high-pitched, soulful voice. His trebly, tightly wound sound added a distinct new texture to
Unk in Funk
. The album’s harmonica duties were
mostly given to Carey Bell, except for two tracks on which Mojo Buford plays, and the title track, for which Chess laid out money getting Paul Oscher to Chicago.

Muddy contributed several new selections, including “Katie,” about a girl from the Chicago suburbs living in Boston; she’d been another blues singer’s girlfriend till
Muddy stole her. “When Muddy had a new song, he would specify a key and just start playing it,” said Margolin. “We’d usually have it in a couple of takes. Occasionally there
was a song where everyone would talk it through first. There was minimal arranging, just cues for solos.”

“People ask if we wrote the lyrics or the melody,” said Terry Abrahamson, who shares writing credit with Muddy on two of
Unk
’s songs. He was a twenty-two-year-old
blues fan, transplanted from Chicago to Boston, who’d dug the Rolling Stones in college, which led him to Muddy in his own hometown, and a friendship developed. “Hey, it’s the
blues, all the melodies were written before I was born.”

A couple months after
Unk
was recorded, Mojo Buford left the band to tend to his children. (Six years later he’d be back; bad pennies and good harp players — you can’t
shake ’em.) His replacement was a young player who’d befriended Paul: Jerry Portnoy. Portnoy had picked up technique from Big Walter Horton and made a name around Chicago accompanying
Walter’s former partner, old-school guitarist Johnny Young. Portnoy’s father sold rugs at the Maxwell Street Market until the expressway ran him out in the early 1950s.
“They’d send me down to Lyon’s Delicatessen to get corned beef sandwiches for the store. Little Walter used to play right across the street.”

Portnoy sat in with Muddy and three days later was hired. “I felt like a light was shining on me. You want to be a brain surgeon, there’s a course of study. You get good grades, you
take the right courses, it’s not impossible given an ordinary set of circumstances. But Muddy’s
band, the harmonica has always been the centerpiece, and all the
great players that went through there, and all of these millions of harmonicas they are selling to all these people all over the world — Muddy’s band put you in the royal line of
succession.” Portnoy was the final component in the band that would carry Muddy into his comeback; this grouping lasted six years, the longest of the lineups.

On July 18, 1974, Muddy anchored the debut of a new public television performance series, SoundStage. Augmenting his own band was a host of guest stars: Junior Wells, Willie
Dixon, Koko Taylor, Johnny Winter, Dr. John, Phillip Guy (Buddy’s brother), and a minireunion of the soulful Electric Flag, with Buddy Miles, Nick Gravenites, and Michael Bloomfield. Muddy
was warming up as the guests began arriving, and the greetings were discreetly recorded and incorporated into the show. Caught sneaking a little Crown Royal backstage, Muddy told a
Rolling
Stone
reporter, “You don’t know how happy I am. It’s the thrill of my life, man. Just to think that the kids didn’t forget me.”

Far from it. His fans came out in great numbers to hear him create the sounds he’d played in broken juke joints decades ago. The sound was bigger now — the band had grown in size and
vastly amplified their volume, letting large arenas feel what used to reverberate off clapboards and echo from the space between the floor and the ground, where the wind howled.

The summer of 1974, Muddy returned to Europe. He played Montreux with an all-star band that featured Buddy Guy and Junior Wells, and members of the Rolling Stones and of Crosby, Stills, Nash,
and Young’s band. Stones bassist Bill Wyman called a rehearsal, but before they could even get through a whole song, Muddy said it sounded great and called an end to the ordeal.

The spirit hit one night in Reims, France, coincidentally the home of Muddy’s beloved Piper-Heidsieck. “It should have been just another show on a European tour in the
midseventies,” remembered Margolin. “But somehow on this night, for no apparent external reason,
the years fell away. A powerful, passionate young man in his
prime sang from his big heart about his hard life. He pulled off his picks, slipped into his slide, and tuned his guitar to open-A, taking the Chicago blues he pioneered a deep step back toward
Mississippi. Using the full dynamic range of his cranked amplifier, from a breath to a roar, he held his own voice up with full-bodied, percussive runs that were rock solid yet suggested swinging
syncopation. His slide fills and solos were intricate, but raw and over the top both in volume and emotion. Then he put his guitar down and began to sing ‘Still a Fool,’ a rare and very
deep song choice. Luther ‘Guitar Jr.’ Johnson and I came in with Muddy’s ‘Rollin’ Stone’ guitar licks. With the audience, the band followed the story in each
verse and we were sucked into the depth of Muddy’s singing. At the end of the verse where he sang, ‘Well they say she’s no good, but she’s all right,’ Muddy suddenly
broke double time and began to chant: ‘She’s all right, she’s all right / She’s all right, she’s all right’ over the band’s jumping, one-chord pattern. But
every time Muddy sang the line, he sang it more intensely. He put progressively more power and meaning into the same phrase, over and over. For ten minutes, he built steadily until it seemed like
we would all explode. When he cut his arm down and ended the song, we were all dropped back onto the ground, to pick up the shattered pieces of our little lives and go on as best we
could.”

Another night, with his band gathered in his hotel room to get paid, the mood was celebratory. The gig had been hot, the cash was all there, and drinks were flowing. Nobody remembers exactly how
or why, but the effusive conversation turned to the old days and, specifically, a lecture from Muddy on how to make love in a Model T Ford. The positioning was the issue, and Muddy’s
experience taught that her butt needed to be out the door while he employed the running board for support. Seeing the puzzled faces on the youngsters in the band, Muddy launched himself on the bed,
sent his fanny into wild gyrations, teaching by demonstration.

In addition to card games, drinking, and women familiar and unfamiliar, Muddy kept his sense of home by keeping Robert Johnson at his side. He might go from one strange European country to the
next
several days in a row, but he could lean toward anyone in the band and say, “Give me my shit,” and instead of being handed a pistol, these days he’d
get a cassette that had Robert Johnson on one side and Jimmy Rogers on the other. He amazed one European interviewer by casually pointing to the tape recorder and saying, “I got my favorite
blues singer right on hand. I got Robert Johnson sitting on there now. And I play it about three or four hours a day, and sit back and listen to it. I like ‘Crossroads,’ ‘Kind
Hearted Woman,’ ‘Walkin’ Blues,’ ‘Terraplane.’ He got a few things that I’m not crazy about, but really I don’t care what he plays.” (Muddy was
less fond of what he called Johnson’s “ragtime” songs such as “Hot Tamales” and “From Four Until Late.”)

Cameron was working his end too. Journalists continued to come, all given the same basic restrictions: not to ask Muddy how he got his name nor what he thought about the Rolling Stones.
(Cameron: “If you didn’t know the answer to those two questions, you don’t know enough to interview Muddy Waters.”) One interview, conducted by white journalists Margaret
McKee and Fred Chisenhall, who were working on their book
Beale Black and Blue,
stood out. McKee had been raised on the McKee Plantation, near Stovall. “I’ll have to tell the
truth, you’re from down in that way,” Muddy said when they began talking.

“It’s the black man and the white woman the ones they jealous of,” Muddy told them, referring to the white men who rule society, especially in the South, especially in the old
days. “But a black woman could work for a white man all day long, that’s fine, nice. That’s the way it was.” Muddy had almost never spoken about racism in a public setting.
Perhaps he didn’t have to say anything. Perhaps it would have been like talking about gravity or the wetness of water. “I think they’ll probably learn. About forty thousand years
from now, maybe they’ll learn better. They know more now, that’s true. It’s so much different. You could stay in most any hotel you wants. You’d be surprised how some people
treat me now. I was in Tennessee — Murfreesboro — last week. Man, seem like it not no Tennessee — seem like Chicago.”

Scott tried to keep surprises from Muddy, but Muddy managed to surprise him. “I learned about [Muddy’s daughter] Mercy, she was probably fourteen,
fifteen,” he said. “I think we were in New Orleans and coming home. We stopped and saw her in Mississippi. Then I used to send her a check once a month.” She soon visited him in
Chicago. “He had a house full of people I didn’t know, and I didn’t know him really,” Mercy said. “I had grown up so ridiculously horribly poor, to me his home looked
like opulence. I was resentful. As the years went on, he saw I was resilient, that I would work and do something.”

In Florida Muddy collected another of his progeny. “My mother said I was about two or three when I left Chicago,” said Big Bill Morganfield. “I was raised by her mother. First
time I remember seeing my daddy, I was around a teenager. He had came down to play the War Memorial Auditorium in Fort Lauderdale. My mother went, and I knew she was going to see him. They woke me
up that night, came to the house. He was walking with a cane. I had a little plastic guitar, one of the strings was missing. He said, ‘That’s the E string.’ We talked, and that
night he got rid of the cane. I still got that cane. That was the first time I can remember laying eyes on him outside of a picture. I was hurt for a while, I was deprived of the chance to spend a
lot of those years with him. Like any son would do with his father.”