THE BEAT GOES ON

THE BEAT GOES ON

Champagne Breakfast With Muddy

CHICAGO—Muddy Waters holds up a massive, pleated hand, waving it through the air 'til the late morning light falls on its fleshy furrows. The hand is folded with age; mottled like a harpooned whale, with callouses and a long, razor thin scar that extends up along a meaty finger (one of the reasons Waters has gradually phased out his slide guitar theatrics). Muddy is prepared to go out on tour to promote Hard Again, his new Johnny Winter-produced Blue Sky album and his first record after severing a 30-year association with the Chicago-based Chess blues label.

As the title (or a glance at the striking Richard Avedon cover portrait) suggests, Muddy is none too old for a comeback. He is proud and self-assured, having shaken off the misery of a near-fatal auto crash and his waning years at Chess, which were marked by a string of ill-conceived exploitative album projects, reaching a nadir with The Muddy Waters Twist and Electric Mud, a humiliatingly crass attempt to cash in on the late '60s psychedelic furor.

As we sat in his comfortable West Side home, sipping Muddy's favorite breakfast beverage, pink champagne, the 61-year-old blues patriarch maps out the origin of the blues on his palm, a handy prop that approximates the contours of the Mississippi Delta.

"All the great bluesmen lived near each other," Muddy explained. "No one was more than 25 miles apart all along the Delta. It was a big Irip just to go 85 miles to Jackson where the recording was. Robert Johnson wasn't more than 10 miles from me to the east and I still never met him—just seen him at a distance. I listened to them all down the road—Skip James, Charlie Patton, Bucka White, Kokomo Arnold...anybody who could play guitar. But Son House, he was my number one man, when he played slide he was the greatest."

Muddy spent his youth cultivating cotton, working from §unup to sundown on a plantation, driving an F-20 tractpr. His stage name was a gift from his grandmother, who used to oversee her infant grandson's frolics in the mud outside the family's plantation cottage. "I'd crawl in the mud, where people cleans their feets off before they come into the house," Muddy says. "I'd play in the mud and eat it some. So my grandma called me her little muddy baby."

When the war came, Muddy's rapport with his employer suffered a steady decline. "Yeah, the boss man and me got to where we wasn't gettin' along so well, so I said—what the heck—I'll just get along and see what else there is to the world." To most Southern blacks, "what else there was" meant Chicago, where wartime jobs were plentiful. Muddy was soon laboring in a container factory by day and playing blues guitar at late night house parties.

"It was pretty ruggish, man," he said, using the first of what proved to be a multitude of self-coined words. "There wasn't much happening, except for Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Maceo, so I'd play rent parties to get my name out—the fourth floor at 3652 Calumet, I'll remember that one for good. Then I started with neighborhood bars and little taverns; five dollars and three sets a night.

By 1950, Muddy was a full-fledged recording star (Chess had signed him sev! eral years previously) and band leader, forming the first all-electric Chicago blues band.

"No other bluesman could claim to turn out more stars than me," Muddy boasted engagingly. "Td hate to leave any out—did I call Mojo Buford's name? You know, Junior Wells was way underage when he joined the band ,—just a baby—I kinda looked out for him. They'd have never let him in the club, otherwise.

"And was Junior wild— wild as a voodoo man! Always want to fight. Pee wee [Madison, whose tenure in the group was interrupted by a jail I sentence] wasn't that wild. Now, Little Walter—he was the stone wild man! Nothin' he didn't do. He came out of Louisiana with that Creple-French blood— oohh, it was hot, cause he had a mean, terrible temper. If he didn't like you, he didn't like you and I don't remember any he. did. If you disturbed him, man, he'd whip you."

Jackson Browne's Shoe Frenzy

During his recent. European tour, Jackson ('Call me, Buster') Browne found an opportunity In Amsterdam to slip away by himself and spend some time on his little publicized hobby, shoe petting. After four hourp of sitting with a pair of size 16 W Earth Shoes under his jacket, Jackson finally answered the sales clerk's repeated offers of, 'May I help you sir?' with a request for a knee high platform boot with teeth and eyes. The sales clerk ran off to phone the police but Jackson managed to escape unscathed and undetected. Well, you know what they say about men with big feet.

British Real Estate Fraud Revealedl

infamous "PunkRoeknrs," The Sex Pistols, in their over-zealous rush to sign with a record company, have fallen down that fateful path stumbled upon by so many other illiterate musicians...Burnsvlllol Unwittingly clowning for the cameras, instead of reading the f Inn print, these glue-headed English tools actually managed to sign a purchase agreement to buy Buckingham Palace, while under the impression they were getting a six-figure advance and eight percent royalty rights. The Pistols' recently retained solicitor, Lord l. Fleecem, anxiously looks on with the unconscionable contracts in hand.

In those early, formative years, the South Side of Chicago was probably the most violent, cut-throat musical environment imaginable. Club shootouts and brawls among competing groups were commonplace. Waters, whose swaggering blues epics like "Hootchie Koochie Man" and "Got My Mojo Workin" shaped the listening habits of an entire black generation, was in the eye of the hurricane. "When Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers and me [an early Waters Trio] were together," Muddy said, "they'd call us the head cutters. That was what we was out for. Lookin' for heads to cut! We'd drive from club to club just to find another group to cut 'em.

""Later on, you know," Muddy continues, adopting a slight aggrieved tone. "Even my own sidemen could get jealous of their boss. I'd walk out on stage and get this standing ovation and they'd be back in the shadows, wonderin' 'why him and not me?' This is a jealous business, that much I know."

And when it came to jealousy, no one envied Muddy's position as top dog more than the late Howlin' Wolf, Muddy's oldest, most persistent and malevolent rival. Wolf, who once went so far as to stall and extend his set at the 1969 Ann Arbor Blues Festival to prevent Muddy's band from taking the stage, constantly offered challenges lo fight Waters— both on and off the bandstand.

Having outlasted the Wolf, Muddy can now afford to be gracious: "He was one of the greatest blues players to ever live," he admits, rubbing his chin with a meaty paw. "But he was also the most jealous-hearted bluesman. He wanted to be the best at everything. This caused the problem. You see, we used to play together at the same club, Sirio's Lounge, over on Lake Street. Now, this guy Sirio, sometimes he'd have Elmore James, me and the Wolf all workin' sets and if the Wolf didn't get the biggest house every night, he'd get awful mad. lie died wantin' to be the greatest—and I ain't sayin' he wasn't close. So deep down we didn't hate each other, least ways, if he hated me, I didn't hate him definitely."

Muddy's generosity has its bounds. Asked if the Wolf had formed an electric band simultaneously with Waters, Muddy snarled, "Nooooo! The Wolf was a johnnyconie-lately. He didn't get started till later on in the '50s. No one beat my band!"

Muddy's early hits, dark, brooding compositions like "I Can't Be Satisfied," "Rolling Stone," and "She Moves Me," dominated the race record market for over a decade, giving voice to the barely surpressed rage and frustration of millions of urban ghetto dwellers. Even the Chess Bros., Leonard and Phil, who spent most of the '40s1 .traveling through the South recording itinerant singers and selling records from the trunks of their car, were mystified by Muddy's dense, drone-like blues shouts.

"They'd never heard anything like it before," Muddy says proudly, eyeing another glass of champagne. "My first hit, T Can't Be Satisfied,' was what made Chess. 1 was responsible for their success —it / picked them off the ground. The song came out on Friday and by Saturday afternoon you couldn't buy one, they sold so much. It was limited to one a customer. I even couldn't have more than one. I had to send my wife to get another. That record sold like catnip. I was responsible for the Chess business—old man Chess said it himself before he died."

Many aging blues legends have complained bitterly of how white rockers plundered their music. Characteristically, Muddy js more generous. "I been hopin' they'd do it," he says proudly. "It took me a long time to cross over that race barrier. Till the Rollin' Stones came along, your daddy and mommy didn't want no race records in their house. It was against their religion. Now Chuck Berry, he could come into the home 'cause thfey didn't know if he was black or white. Hell, if the mothers knew he was as black as me, they'd say—'no man, don't bring in that nigger music. Not in mydiome—not that nigger shit'."

Although the blues first gained a mass audience in Europe, Water's initial tour in 1958 met with a frigid reception. "They hated me," Muddy laughed. "I made headlines. I was the biggest man in Leeds, England, the next mornin'. Mostly because of my screamin' guitar. They was used to the folk bluesmen like Brownie McGhee and Josh White.

"I brought over my new amplifier artd they couldn't stand it! But dig this: 1 came back a few years later, just with my guitar and what did they say? 'Man, where's your amp, Muddy?' I go into the clubs to see this band, the Yardbirds, and they're playin' louder than I did in the States. So when someone asks you who's responsible for rock 'n'.roll, you tell 'em Muddy Waters; cause I hipped them to the amplifier: You send 'em a letter and tell 'em so.. I'm the daddy of rock 'n' roll and you don't forget it." * Patrick Goldstein

Tubettes Make Mucus

SAN • FRANCISCO—The Tubes asked us "What Do You Want From Life?" and now have bequeathed a spinoff group to solve that musical question. Answer: a mucus overdose at McDonald's where the smell of burning french fries hovers around the Golden Arches. The group: Leila and the Snakes, aka the Raucus Dykes, a trio of Tubes plus rhythm section, San Francisco seemingly has no end o^ shock-rock, campvamp outfits, this time a five-

some of femmes. (Re Styles had made it a sextet before returning to the Tubes, but the ambisextrous Leila, Pearly Gates, and Natasha the Tongue remain on loan.)

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Leila has been known to don x-ray specs and become Marge Battaglia. She slips a slice of Wonder Bread in Pearly's armpit and tells her to spurn those avocado sands on nine-grain bread because "What you need is this nongrain stuff." That ain't the half of it, Bub. Leila whips out her "bull dyke gun"—a pistol with a bull dog's head for a muzzle—and signs off with^ the thinking person's lyrics: "A pyramid may keep your razor sharp, but a love triangle will keep you on your toes."

Lbila is better known as Jane Dorknocker and cowriter of the Tubes' "Don't Touch Me There." "We're feminist farmworkers," she chants to intro another song. "Oh those gosh darn men.

They fucked us up again.

They are strong; we are weak.

. So they sent us up Shit Creek."

The Kafkaesque metamorphosis is complete when Leila sheds her work shirt and paint-splotched jeans to reveal fleshy flanks, baubled belt and sequined bra, as her serpentine cohorts slither around in berets, Hawaiian blouses, and '50s length skirts. Leila! You got me on my knees, I beg you darlin' please, let's go chow down on a Big Macus.

Clark Peterson