This 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.
Muddy assembled a band in Westport, Connecticut, for a week’s recording, October 4 to October 10, 1976. From his own group he brought Pinetop, Margolin, and drummer Willie “Big Eyes” Smith. Pine, like Spann before him, had become an anchor to Muddy’s sound. He’d learned to play in the same school as Muddy — a cotton field, where the conjugation was done with a hoe and the school lunch was a fish sandwich and homemade whiskey. If Pine brought the root, Margolin brought the licks. He’d seen a cotton field only on television, but he’d studied it, brother, watching Mud’s fingers night after night, bugging him at Westmont, playing the old tapes. Big Eyes brought the delay, and that delay is what moved behinds. Muddy called him “the greatest Saturday-night drummer alive,” and a Saturday-night record was his intention. Harp duties went to James Cotton, a natural choice.
“Johnny Winter inspired Muddy’s band to push Muddy,” said Cameron. “The studio we used was in Dan Hartman’s house, an ideal setting, so relaxed. Johnny was, at that point, straight as an arrow and fun to work with. You’d see Muddy and him feed off each other with this excitement going from level to level to level because they’d just keep pulling each other higher.”
Hard Again affirms the advice Muddy held dear since Big Bill Broonzy spoke it in 1943: “Do your thing, stay with it, man. If you stay with it, you goin’ to make it.” Muddy was true to himself. Hard Again is the culmination of Muddy’s career, a modern and lasting interpretation of his achievement: it is an electric blues band that captures the force and emotion so much more easily achieved by a lone player baring his soul with just his voice and his instrument. The band becomes the instrument and Muddy plays them. “Every country has its own music,” Muddy said, getting to the heart of authenticity, “and I got the Delta sound. There’s so many musicians, they can sing and play the guitar so good, but they can’t get that sound to save their life. They didn’t learn that way. That’s the problem. They learned another way, and they just can’t get it.”
Muddy’s new treatment of “Mannish Boy” rivals his earliest hits for passion and power. He sings the lines over air, night air, dusty air, Mississippi in New England and champagne air. The instruments lay out, except for the slide guitar, which dares only to snake between the lines. The single string’s reverberations hang like heat, shimmering and bending. Muddy’s voice is cavernous, huge, so full of character it’s impossible to believe he’s ever recorded songs where he wasn’t a hammer, and it’s downright depressing to think how long it had been since he sounded so good. There’s a quiver in his voice, the sound of the tones amassing as they travel up his chest and through his throat and out between his lips. The spiritual distance is even farther. There is no Leonard Chess on the receiving end, no Chess brother and no Chess son. The farm was sold and the straw bosses gone with it. Muddy was plowing old ground in the old harness with neither benefit nor burden of a furnish. On these tracks, and especially on “Mannish Boy,” the lead track, Muddy sings like a man freed to sing for himself. There is pride in this voice, independence, a drive, a declaration: everything’s gonna be all right this morning, yes I know.
And that is just the first four bars. The Telecaster — it’s Margolin playing Muddy — hits a couple high notes, lingering like a question: band, are you ready? And like a freedman falling across the Mason-Dixon Line, their resounding answer is that there’s no stopping us. Muddy chuckles — not with laughter but with strength, and the story begins, an old story told anew:
Now when I was a young boy [and the band hits]
At the age of five, [and the band hits again]
My mother said I was gonna be, [it’s music as boxing]
The greatest thing alive.
His mother was right. These were the greatest living blues. And the players knew it. The song’s close includes the studio jubilation that followed, the lightness they felt at realizing that the bleakness of the past couple years — the past couple decades — suddenly had lifted. Muddy yelled and clapped in the studio, grinned broadly, walked around with a bounce in his step. He said, “This stuff is so good, it makes my pee pee hard again.” And an album title was born.
“What I really wanted to do as a producer,” Johnny said, “was to make Muddy feel comfortable and make his music sound as good as it used to. I felt that the real, raw blues and some early nasty rock and roll hadn’t been recorded right since recording techniques had gotten too good for that kind of music. We were all in one big room, there were almost no overdubs at all, practically everything was done at the same time, and there was a lot of room noise — instruments feeding through other instruments’ mikes. Everything that the normal studio engineer tries to make sure doesn’t happen, I tried to make sure that it did.”
Perhaps most rewarding to Muddy was that the music achieved such a deep sound without his guitar. He had lived to hear his own legacy. Bob set up Muddy’s Telecaster right next to his chair, and it was there for him every day, but Muddy never picked it up. Both Bob and Johnny were surprised, but song playbacks confirmed that he was well covered.
An inspired session under his belt, Muddy waltzed across the globe — Switzerland, France, Poland, Italy — while Levon Helm and fellow members of The Band planned their farewell concert. The concert, to be known as The Last Waltz, was set for Thanksgiving weekend in San Francisco, and featured some of the biggest — and most funky — names in popular music, such as Bob Dylan, Dr. John, the Staple Singers, Van Morrison. Muddy’s performance, preserved in the Martin Scorsese movie of the show, was riveting. A single camera holds on him, head and shoulders, occasionally tighter, sometimes looser, but unable to let go. No edits. No cuts. Nothing but the blues, nothing but Mud.
“Muddy didn’t want to go and boy I remember Paul Butterfield got really, really mad at me on the phone,” said Cameron. “Begrudgingly, Muddy went. He wasn’t happy about the show, but it did wind up being the very first royalty check from a record company he ever got. It was the first one. He got a royalty on the soundtrack album.” A lifetime in the business, and finally a proper royalty check.
(Marshall Chess dissents: “When the Chess artist got their statement, there would be a page called Writer’s Royalties, so if the record sold twenty thousand, he would get one cent, two hundred bucks, the writer’s part of it.” A payment of one cent per song per sale was, then, not an uncommon payment.)
On December 23, 1976 (the thirty-fourth anniversary of Muddy’s second marriage), before the release of Hard Again or The Last Waltz, Scott Cameron filed a lawsuit on Muddy’s behalf in U.S. District Court against Muddy’s publishing company, Arc Music. Cameron simultaneously filed one for his other client, Willie Dixon (who’d signed with Cameron at Muddy’s suggestion).
The essence of the lawsuit is found in the section titled “The Conspiracy and the Acts in Furtherance Thereof,” which states,
[D]efendants Gene Goodman, Philip Chess, and Harry Goodman together with Leonard Chess entered into a plan and scheme to prey upon plaintiff’s [Muddy’s] inability to comprehend the nature and terms of agreements relating to musical compositions composed either in whole or in part by him, and to divest plaintiff of his rights therein and the benefits flowing from the commercial exploitation thereof. . . . Arc Music was formed for the purpose of divesting plaintiff of his rights in and to musical compositions composed by him. . . . [As for songs recorded by Chess artists on Chess or affiliated labels] no royalties would be payable to Arc Music with the result that Arc Music would make no payment to plaintiff. . . . any royalties which might otherwise be due plaintiff pursuant to his agreements with Arc Music would be substantially understated on or omitted from the royalty payments rended by Arc Music to plaintiff, and the amount of such underpayment would be retained by Arc Music for division among [the defendants].
The lawsuit also notes that, as for the $2,000 annual salary, “at no time since the initial payment on April 23, 1973, has plaintiff ever received any of the ‘salary payments’ by way of an advance of the sum of $2,000.”
When Arc began there had been no real model to look toward. The world of independent record labels had grown quickly and been thrust from the margins into the mainstream with little warning. When the Chess brothers first entered the business, they had no publishing agreement because they didn’t know what it meant. There had been, however, plenty of time to rectify that. But proving the rip-off was not going to be easy; trying to make sense of the Chess family’s peculiar accounting — taking from the hits to give to the legends, paying on demand rather than on schedule — was made impossible when GRT threw away the files that the company had accumulated. “Cartons and cartons and cartons of all the back shit that was up in the mezzanine of that building were trashed,” said Marshall. (In their response, Arc denied most everything and stated, “It was the intent of the plaintiff and Arc Music to formally bring plaintiff into the employ of Arc Music. . . ,” but failed to explain why they never acted on their intent.)
The lawsuit asked for a total of 7.5 million dollars and the absolution of the agreements between Arc and Muddy. Within five months it was settled out of court, the terms confidential. One result was apparent: when the copyright renewal came up, ownership of Muddy’s songs went from Arc to Muddy and Scott’s Watertoons Music. The victory, like everything else in Muddy’s life, came on shares: Muddy received partial payment, the manager got the rest.
In the early spring of 1977, Hard Again was released to wide critical acclaim. The package befitted the man. The cover photo was an exquisite black and white, a near full-body shot against a white background, Muddy in a camel hair winter coat and a three-piece suit — his buttons glimmering, his hat atop his head. It’s from a large-format negative (taken by fashion photographer and portraitist Richard Avedon), so the detail on his face is intimate: the bristles of his graying mustache, the shaving bumps on his cheeks. His thumbs are hooked into his vest pocket and he’s got slightly more than half a smile, as if he knows something, knows we know it, but knows we know only something less than half. The photograph is a kind of a capsule summary of his aura; it bespeaks elegance, and also hard work.
“I saw a whole new life breathe into Muddy,” said Cameron. “He was finally getting crowds, he was finally making money. In the early seventies, you’d see fifty people in a club and the club owner’s up there saying, ‘You gotta give me a break, I’m losing so much money.’ And later the same club owner was screaming about why he can’t get him back because his club doesn’t hold enough people.”
In March, Muddy embarked on a Hard Again tour with the recording band. They were crackling, and Epic recorded many dates. (When Marva would join Muddy for several days on the road, Leola would come to the house to stay with the kids.) Portnoy and Fuzz were left at home, on retainer. “I got a band and they’re on vacation now, with pay — and hell, I ain’t never had a vacation with pay!” Johnny Winter, thrilled to be performing with his hero, remembered picking up Muddy’s guitar. “You couldn’t play his guitar to save your life,” Winter said. “It was impossible. He had his strings so high off the neck, and he used such heavy-gauge strings too, you just couldn’t play it. Muddy said to me, ‘When you pick up somebody else’s guitar it’s like somebody else’s woman that doesn’t want you. The guitar is telling you, “Leave me alone, I don’t want you.” ’ ” They sold out the Palladium in New York, a large hall known for rock acts. In Boston, Peter Guralnick went backstage to say hello and found Muddy talking to a woman whom he introduced as Robert Johnson’s sister. “ ‘Here, show him. Show him the picture,’ ” Guralnick remembered Mud saying. “From her wallet Anne Anderson drew a picture of a man with a guitar: it was indeed Robert Johnson. ‘You see, man? You see?’ said Muddy with a proud, almost proprietary expression on his face. ‘Didn’t I tell you? Isn’t that really something?’ ”
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.
There was hardly a break between the sessions and the resumption of the endless tour. They started on the East Coast, went up into Canada, then down into middle America. They went to Europe in July, back to Canada, and over to Alaska, where Cotton’s band opened their shows. One bleary night on the road, when somewhere felt like nowhere, Muddy got “belligerent” in the dressing room, according to Bob Margolin. “The uncomfortable business situation was the developing split. I stood up and elaborated on a problem, and he just quietly answered, ‘Oh, I can understand that.’ He drank a little more than usual that night after the show, and the band got in his two vans for the ride back to the hotel. Muddy and I were in one of the vans with Luther driving, and Muddy’s depression overtook him. With Luther and me, caring friends, he ran down a long list of things with health, personal life, and business that were going wrong and really weighing on him. It was heartbreaking to see Muddy so down, and to know that all of his success and greatness and the world’s love couldn’t comfort him. He was coping fine by the next day, but his problems were real, and eventually they did get the better of him. Soon he did lose the band, and his health, and that is nothing less than tragic.”
“We were playing a place called Harry Hope’s out in Cary, Illinois,” recalled Scott Cameron, “an old ski lodge. I think it was a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday and we were scheduled to leave on either the following Monday or Tuesday for Japan. The tour manager came up to the dressing room and said that the guys in the band would like to talk so I went downstairs and out to the van. I didn’t have any idea why they were calling me downstairs. No idea at all. And they all demanded double the money or they weren’t going to go.”
“Conditions wasn’t what it was supposed to be,” said Willie Smith. “The real issue was, on our days off we had to pay our hotel. Muddy done got big so he was kind of picking gigs, getting the good ones, and you might be off two or three days. All we was asking for was half of the hotel fare, we’d all share rooms. But they didn’t compromise. Scotty said it ain’t a man here that can’t be replaced. Everybody started getting in an uproar. He was right in a way of saying it, but a band has been with you so long through thick and thin and then all of a sudden there’s no man that can’t be replaced, there is a principle that goes along with that, too. Muddy didn’t deal with it. And Scotty said, ‘You take it or leave it.’ ”
New visas could not be arranged on such short notice, so the band got their double pay. But when they got home, Cameron, at Muddy’s request, informed Jerry Portnoy, pegged as the ringleader, that his services were no longer required. “And within the next twenty-four hours,” Cameron remembered, “I had a call from another member of the band saying if this member was gone he was gone. And then I had a call from another member of the band that if any of the members were gone they’re all gone.” And they were. As a bandleader, Muddy was like Duke Ellington: he turned out other bandleaders. The bands that backed B. B. King, Howlin’ Wolf, and a host of major blues stars remained faceless musicians. From his first band to his last, Muddy produced stars. The Legendary Band followed suit, quickly recording an album and hitting the road.
Nonetheless, losing his longest running unit must have left Muddy with a sense of isolation. Marva was there to brighten his dark moments, and old and new friends rallied ’round him. But there was hardly time for such thoughts. He called Mojo Buford, and within days a new band was assembled. Bassist Earnest Johnson brought the old feel of Smitty’s Corner with him because he’d absorbed it there. Lovie Lee slipped onto the piano bench, occasionally replaced by Lafayette Leake, who’d recorded with Muddy in 1955. Buford played harp and Ray Allison quickly found his way to the drums. Guitars were handled by Jimmy Rogers, who forsook an East Coast tour to help out his old friend, and by the young John Primer, who mentored in Chicago with Sammy Lawhorn. (Guitarist Rick “Junior” Kreher assumed Jimmy’s guitar spot after the tour.) Muddy Waters kept on rolling.
Back home, Bo’s breathing had become increasingly strangulated, and finally he consented to visit the doctor. “Bo was a veteran and I went with Muddy to take him to the VA Hospital,” said Cookie. “They ran the tests and when they told him it was lung cancer, black people during that period, the word cancer was death to them. And Bo deteriorated really fast after that. I remember a sister of his came and they were going back and forth about who was going to pay this, and Muddy standing in the middle of the floor told the sister, ‘How dare could you ask that? Everything will be taken care of,’ and we buried Bo.
“Muddy took it very hard. It was the third time I’d ever seen Muddy cry. The first time was when my mother died, the second time when he took me to the hospital to say good-bye to Geneva, and then when Bo died in his Westmont bedroom. Those were the only times.”
He had work to distract him. In April of 1981, King Bee was released, and Muddy set out again to promote the record on the road. His Beacon Theater show was reviewed in the New York Times. “It was hard to believe that the great blues master will be sixty-six [sic] years old on Saturday. Both vocally and instrumentally, he completely dominated his six-piece band and outshone his special guest, the Texas guitar virtuoso Johnny Winter.” (At his birthday party that year at home, the centerpiece on the dining room table was a champagne fountain.)
In July, the new band played festivals and clubs across Europe, from Finland to the Hague, Austria to Italy; James Cotton opened a string of shows. In August, their blues festival gig was broadcast on National Public Radio. In September, they hit the West Coast, including a relaxed date on a mountaintop near Saratoga, California, at the Paul Masson Winery. “There was a winding road up there, and the stage was beneath a backdrop of a church brought over stone by stone from Europe, then partially rebuilt after the 1906 earthquake,” said Mike Kappus, who booked the gig. Sharing the bill were Willie Dixon, John Hammond Jr., Sippie Wallace, Clifton Chenier, Albert King, and James Cotton. Johnny Winter flew in at his own expense. “I just wanted to be with him some more,” said Johnny. “I liked Muddy, he was a good guy.” The winery hosted the musicians at their chateau, complete with a pool and a chef. Muddy, particular about his champagne, snuck his own bottles in; when he sat by the pool, he’d hide the label because he didn’t want to offend the hosts. “At the end,” Kappus continued, “they broke out some estate-bottled champagne, shared it with all of us. When Muddy tasted it he said to me, ‘Oh, if I’d known they had this I wouldn’t have been sneaking in my own bottles.’ ”
That same month, Muddy was booked for a Mississippi homecoming, headlining the fourth annual Delta Blues Festival held at Freedom Village near Greenville. He’d taken the gig at the behest of his daughter Mercy, who was in college nearby and was about to graduate magna cum laude. The day before, he traveled to Jackson for a reception in his honor at the governor’s mansion. Muddy wore a white suit with a Hawaiian shirt. The next month, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame at the Blues Foundation’s first ceremony.
When the Rolling Stones next returned to Chicago, arrangements were made in advance to film an unrehearsed jam with Muddy at Buddy Guy’s Checkerboard Lounge on Sunday, November 22. The club, at 423 East Forty-third, was housed in a former automobile repair shop and was next to a car wash. Muddy’s band was playing, and the Stones joined them for what would be the last time Muddy was ever recorded. The meeting of generations was more than a passing of the torch, it was a real fun time. Muddy holds the microphone for Mick Jagger while the two hoochie coochie men share vocals on “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Keith Richards studies Muddy’s fingers while they share guitar duties on “Baby Please Don’t Go.” The music is loose and fun, transforming the Checkerboard Lounge in Chicago into a Mississippi Delta Saturday-night fish fry.
A couple of weeks later, Muddy was with Marva, Cookie, and Leola, shopping at his favorite South Side produce store. Without warning, he passed out in an aisle. “He came to within seconds,” said Cookie, “said he was okay, that I would have to drive home. He had high blood pressure and said he’d been eating too much pork.” He went to the doctor for a physical and some tests, and just days before Christmas the doctor asked him to come see an oncologist. “They told him they saw cancer on his lungs. Cancer, that’s the only thing I ever saw Muddy afraid of, because Geneva died of cancer and she went completely out of her mind towards the end, and then it killed Bo too.”
“When Mud first found out that he had cancer in the lungs, it was a shock for all of us,” Marva recalled, “but he never felt defeat. He was a strong man. He stayed in good spirits.” Doctors removed part of Muddy’s cancerous lung, and he began radiation treatment. They recommended chemotherapy too, but “he got up one morning and said he wasn’t going for chemo,” Marva continued. “He had made peace with the Lord and all he wanted was to be home with his family.”
Mike Kappus went to visit him during a hospital stay. Muddy was lying in the bed, his back raised, and his spirits were high. “We were talking about John Lee Hooker, and he was imitating John’s voice and joking about how each of them would try to one-up the other, which was the first one to get a Cadillac, the first to get a Mercedes, the first to get a phone in the car. The visit was really positive.”
“I’d stop by the hospital,” Rick Kreher, Muddy’s last guitarist, remembered, “and bring him Living Blues magazines. He liked to look at the pictures, talk about the people, pick his spirits up. He always thought he was going to get better. He had that will to live, that kind of guy. He didn’t want to give it up.”
“I had no idea my daddy had cancer,” Big Bill Morganfield said. “I talked to him after he got out of the hospital and I said, ‘Daddy, what’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I just had an operation, they cut me.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘It’s all right.’ He wouldn’t tell me. I knew he was sick because he had a bad cough from deep inside him.” Muddy had been unable to tell his son about his illness, and he asked his manager to keep the news from the public. “For some reason, Scott did not want the nature of Muddy’s illness known,” Kappus said. “We were not to say that he was ill and by all means not reveal the nature of the illness.”
Muddy got a morale boost when Columbia Records, more than thirty-five years after the fact, released his sessions with Mayo Williams. When Jim O’Neal was given a tape of an old 78 that sounded like Muddy, even though his name was nowhere on it, he sent it to Westmont. It was the James “Sweet Lucy” Carter “Mean Red Spider” session, Muddy’s first ever in Chicago. “He hadn’t heard it,” said O’Neal. “He said he didn’t realize it had ever come out. He had forgotten all about it.”
And there was more good news: doctors told him his cancer was in remission. By late spring of 1982, Muddy was feeling stronger and a new tour was booked. Eric Clapton was playing in Miami on June 30, and Clapton’s manager arranged a surprise visit. Marva, Scott, and Muddy hopped a plane. Clapton had incorporated Muddy’s “Blow Wind Blow” into his set, and when he began it, Muddy stepped onstage. “Eric was clearly in shock,” said Kappus. “At the end of the song, Muddy left the stage and Eric said to himself as much as to the audience, ‘That was Muddy Waters!’ It was a tremendous surprise for him. We were thinking that Muddy was bouncing back, but he was not there yet.”
Upon his return home, Muddy coughed up blood. The cancer had returned, but Muddy’s body was not yet strong enough for surgery. “If he had been able to build up his strength, maybe they could have operated again,” said Kappus, “but his spirits were down. There had been an optimism that everything was going to be okay. After the Clapton show, there was a realization that that wasn’t going to be the case.”
“When they told him it came back, I think Muddy felt he couldn’t fight it anymore,” said Cookie. “He did the radiation, and took the medication, but he wasn’t the same after it came back the second time. His clothes were hanging off him. I got him a suit that would fit, but he would just lay on the couch. My twins were nine months old, and I was raising Muddy’s grandchild, the same age, and I brought them over there and I felt so bad. Here was their great-grandfather and he was so ecstatic, but I could see that he was unable to enjoy it.”
“Even at the end we still had fun,” said Jimmy Rogers, who phoned up his partner just weeks before his death. “I was getting ready to leave for Canada, a tour, and he told me he was getting better, that they were trying to build him up for an operation. He told me he’d be back as soon as the weather breaks. Around the first part of June he said he’d see me somewhere on the road. My wife was playing some of the records that we made down through the years, and he could hear it through the phone. He said, ‘I’m getting ready to come back through.’ I said, ‘That’s good,’ but he never did make it out of there.”
Muddy had his son Joseph living with him at Westmont. The gap between their lives was immense, and ironic. Joseph had gone from having nothing, like Muddy, to living the American dream: suburban house, swimming pool, basketball camps, spending money, educational opportunities. Materially, he was satisfied. Muddy provided him a furnish. To give him an understanding of the grit that had produced these pearls, Muddy arranged for Joseph to visit Willie Smith’s mother in Mississippi. “His mom lived on a farm in Mississippi, and my dad let me go out there for a couple weeks. It was fun but it was weird. She had an outhouse with a bathroom. We had to get water from a well. She had a wood stove, you had to actually chop the wood. There was no electricity and the next house was maybe a mile away. It was pitch black and lots of mosquitos. I wondered what I’d got myself into. By the third night it was cool. Every day before I got up, I woke up to the smell of breakfast. That was great. I could buy firecrackers up in town, that was exciting. I never had drunk water from a well before or used an outhouse. I guess that’s how he grew up and he wanted me to get a taste of it.”
On his last birthday, his seventieth (though celebrated as his sixty-eighth), there was a party at his house. His band was there, lots of family and friends. Phone calls came in from around the country. Muddy mustered his strength and enjoyed himself, though it exhausted him. Over the next month, he slipped in and out of consciousness, but he stayed at home, his last days spent among his family and loved ones.