Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Read online

  —Marc levin

  “It’s no doubt that there’s a connection [between the blues and hip-hop]. Hip-hop is definitely a child of the blues. And I think you gotta know the roots to really grow. It’s [like] knowing your parents, it’s like knowing your culture, so you could be proud of that culture and take it to the world.”—Common

  MUDDY, WOLF. AND ME: ADVENTURES IN THE BLUES TRADE BY PETER WOLF

  This all happened many years ago when I was a student at the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts looking to become a painter somewhat in the German Expressionist manner. But then I was sidetracked by the blues.

  I got my induction at a very early age. At twelve, through a series of the usual preadolescent alienations and personal dislocations, I started going to the legendary Fifty-second Street jazz club Birdland. You could do that back in those days if you were accompanied by an adult, which was anyone eighteen years or older, and I heard Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, Dinah Washington doing very double-entendre songs, Cannonball Adderley, and a host of others. It was just a natural progression to start going up to the Apollo Theatre in Harlem for the Wednesday night show (which included Amateur Night in addition to the entire bill), and that was what I did all through high school.

  That was where I first heard Muddy Waters. It was on a show called the Blues Cavalcade, with Jimmy Reed, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Jimmy Witherspoon, Muddy, and B.B. King, and it was a time when young black people were reacting against the blues. “We don’t pick cotton no more,” someone yelled out in the middle of B.B.’s rap, and feelings were definitely running high when Muddy took the stage. Except he didn’t just take it, he commanded it. And when he went into that jitterbug dance that you would never see in later years but that you can catch on film from the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival, the crowd went wild. Even though his music was the most downhome thing on the bill, Muddy wasn’t talking about picking cotton—he was saying, “Don’t jive with me, I’m gonna get respect,” not in so many words, and with the suggestion that it could be taken as all in good fun, but with an undercurrent that broke the spell and brought that whole audience back to the blues. That was the power of Muddy’s music.

  By the next time I saw him I had hitchhiked around the country a bit, begun art school in Boston, and started fooling around with a bunch of like-minded fellow art students, trying to put together a little blues band that became the Hallucinations and would eventually metamorphose into the J. Geils Band. I was trying to learn how to play the harp, and we went to see Muddy at the Jazz Workshop, kind of a sharp upscale place where it was more common to see Thelonious Monk or Charles Mingus, two of my other heroes.

  Muddy was, as always, impeccably dressed, wearing an elegant gray suit with an off-color white shirt, slim, perfectly knotted tie, manicured fingernails, and beautifully shined shoes—it was impossible to take your eyes off him as he approached the stage with that slow regal walk. But even before he took the stand, his band had set the stage for him with several instrumentals and a vocal number or two that showed off their virtuosity. There was James Cotton on harp, sounding like a cross between Little Walter and Sonny Boy Williamson, and Otis Spann playing some of the most intricate, deepest piano fills you ever heard while puffing on a cigarette and sipping a glass of gin even as he was turning around to talk to some pretty young lady sitting up next to him. There were guitarists Sammy Lawhorn, Pee Wee Madison, and Luther “Georgia Boy Snake” Johnson, bass player Calvin “Fuzzy” Jones, and drummer Francis Clay, each with a distinct and individual style, musical and sartorial, of his own. But then it was Show Time, the band would segue into its introductory theme, and Cotton introduced Muddy as the Star of the Show. Which is exactly what he was from the moment he took the stage.

  He raised his hand, and as he slowly brought it down, the band stopped on a dime. It was as if he possessed some master switch with which just by the slightest gesture—a nod, a wink, the raising or lowering of his hand—he could control all that power, all the dynamics and all the musicality of that remarkable band. Muddy smiled then, raised his hand, and by the time it came down, the music had already startetd, at a very, very slow tempo at first, almost like a slow crawl that pulled you into the story he was about to tell. That story seemed to come from somewhere deep within, and when Muddy closed his eyes to sing, it was as if he were going somewhere far away and mysterious, and you were going there with him. The band’s gaze never wavered; even though it was clear that this was all as intricately arranged as an Ellington tone poem, they never took their eyes off him, as if they were all playing the song for the very first time—except, of course, for Spann, who was still talking to that pretty lady by his side.

  In between sets, a friend of mine and I wanted to try to figure out how James Cotton got such a unique sound. We were both Little Walter fanatics, and this was the first time either of us had sat close enough to anyone with anything resembling the Little Walter sound to try to figure out where that sound might come from. We could see it wasn’t the microphone, which was just your standard-issue Radio Shack bullet mike, so we figured it must be some secret device in Cotton’s amplifier that helped him create all those swoops and bends and soaring special effects. We waited till the band had left the stage, and then we decided to go up and look behind that beat-up old red amp. We weren’t really aware that we were trespassing on someone’s private domain, and it never crossed our minds that we might be taken for thieves, musical or otherwise, but then all of a sudden we sensed this looming presence behind us, along with the strong smell of Scotch and a kind of heat all around.

  Muddy Waters and a young Peter Wolf, 1964

  “What the hell are you doin’ up here?” demanded a large, angry James Cotton, just staring down at us with unforgiving eyes. “We were just looking at your amp,” I replied, unable to think of anything else to say. “And what the hell are you looking at my amp for?” he said, getting even angrier. “Well just to see how you—you know— you make that sound. How you get it. What kind of machine you got back there.” “It’s got nothing to do with the damned amp,” he said, more exasperated now than really angry, but in a manner that made it very clear that my friend and I should get the hell off the stage—now, I’m not sure that we altogether believed him—we knew there still had to be some magic involved—but we didn’t raise any more questions, we just got out while the getting was good.

  Muddy Waters celebrating Father’s Day with his extended family, Chicago, 1973

  The next time I saw Cotton it was under less trying circumstances, and it was to become the basis for a lifelong friendship with Muddy and the band. Muddy had been booked into a folk club in Cambridge for the better part of a week, and the manager had alerted me that they would be arriving in the late afternoon. I had started playing around town a little with my own band by now, but that just made me even more of a fan, so I got to the club by midafternoon and sat on the steps waiting for their arrival. Finally, after several hours, this big long Cadillac pulled up, followed by a station wagon crammed with musicians and equipment. Muddy’s driver, Bo, a huge man with a hard look and a suspicion of anyone who might take advantage of his employer, got out, came around to the passenger side, and opened up the door for these two perfectly shined shoes to plant themselves on the pavement. I rushed over and said, “Hello, Mr. Waters. I saw you not too long ago at the Jazz Workshop, and I’m a huge fan.” He nodded graciously, almost as if he might have remembered, then introduced me to the rest of the band and allowed me to help them carry in their equipment, including, of course, that beat-up red amp that I still believed had to contain the secret of James Cotton’s sound. The band proceeded to set up while Muddy went to the small dressing room, and I walked into the bathroom, where I overheard a conversation between James Cotton and Otis Spann. They were counting their money, and Spann said to Cotton, “Man, you know they’re calling this place a coffeehouse.” And Cotton said, “Does that mean they only serve coffee?” “I don’t know,” Otis said, “but I just found ou
t they ain’t got no booze.” “No booze?” said Cotton. “Man, we better find some place to get a bottle.” Well, that for me was just the sound of opportunity knocking. “I’ll get a bottle,” I said, ignoring the fact that I was two years underage and looked it. So I rushed down to the liquor store to buy my heroes some whiskey, after first finding someone who would go into the store and buy it for me.

  That was how I became a kind of impromptu valet to the band. All of a sudden everyone was coming up to me like I was their best friend, and I was scurrying to and fro buying whiskey, running errands, just trying to make things right. Later that night in between sets, the band stepped outside for a drink, since Muddy occupied the one tiny dressing room and the bathroom had become too crowded. I told them J had an apartment just a couple of blocks away, so Spann, Cotton, and Sammy Lawhorn all followed me to my place, a cramped, one-room, almost furnitureless space with a mattress on the floor, a piece of foam rubber on a board that served as a couch, and several large stacks of 45s. “We should let Muddy know about this place,” Otis said, and the next night Muddy showed up, preceded by Bo, and they all sat around smoking and drinking, just kicking back, and all of a sudden my apartment felt like the Taj Mahal.

  Within a couple of nights, James Cotton had moved in and, in a pattern that would be repeated in various configurations over the next ten or twelve years whenever Muddy or his band members came to town, we quickly worked out a routine, where I would take Cotton to the market to buy food for the band’s dinner, then Bo would bring Muddy around in the late afternoon and Cotton would start preparing a huge downhome feast. I’d leave them alone then so they could have their privacy, but when I’d come back there would always be a card game going on amid gales of laughter, loud discussion about every subject under the sun, and if the drinking got out of hand, the kind of occasional disagreement that could lead to the drawing of pocketknives but which was always quelled by a look or a nod from Muddy. I could never get over the unlikely sight of Muddy in my own apartment, shoes off, shirt and suit jacket neatly hung up, wearing a T-shirt and a do-rag (to preserve his carefully straightened and sculpted hair) on his head. Sometimes I would play him some of his early singles, he would ask for certain ones that he hadn’t heard in years, and we would sit and talk about the music and the early recording sessions. I would read to him from the blues books and magazines I had around the house—he was fascinated by all the newfound interest in the blues, and there was an unspoken understanding between us that it was up to me to communicate whatever I thought might be of particular interest by reading it aloud to him. But most of all, what made me feel good was that he clearly felt at home. We could sit without talking sometimes. We could talk about nothing. Muddy might bring up the baseball standings. Or he might describe a woman he knew. It just felt right.

  I got to know James Cotton really well, too, but in a different kind of way. He had come up under Sonny Boy Williamson II in West Memphis and recorded as a teenager for Sun Records, but he had never played in the more urban, big-band-oriented Little Walter style until he replaced Junior Wells in Muddy’s band, after Walter had gone out on his own. He told me how nervous he was about filling such big shoes, but most of all about trying to recreate the pioneering sound that Little Walter had established with the band. One time he had even approached Walter at a club to try to get some advice, but Walter just took the harmonica from him, turned his back, played some of his typically swinging Lester Young-styled riffs, and then turned back around and said to James, “See? It’s that easy.” Which, of course, just made his young replacement all the more insecure.

  Then one night, after James had been working with Muddy for only a few months, Little Walter came into the club where they were playing, took the mike and harmonica from him, and just blew the place away. James retreated to the back of the room practically in tears. He thought he might just as well quit the band right then and there, but just at that moment Sonny Boy Williamson happened to walk in and, seeing how upset his young protege was, asked him what was wrong. “They all so crazy about Walter,” James said. “I just can’t get that sound.”

  Sonny Boy, a proud, irascible, somewhat inscrutable older man with the look of a grand vizier, drew himself up to his full height and said, “I taught you my style, and if you was doing what I taught you, you wouldn’t be having no problem.” Then, after telling Cotton, “I’m going to teach you something I want you always to remember,” he got up onstage and, without even using the microphone, started playing in what he called his “country style.” By the time he was done, as James recalled, he had three harmonicas going at once, two out of the side of his mouth and one that he was blowing through his nose. The club went stone crazy, and Walter stomped out in a huff. Then Sonny Boy came back to Cotton and said, “Don’t you ever doubt yourself again.” It was a story, I realized, that James was telling me as much because he knew I was having a hard time trying to find a harp style of my own as to tell me about his own youthful difficulties. And I thought to myself, Well, you know, at one time James was searching for that secret machine, too, same as me!

  Howlin’ Wolf came in right behind Muddy, and Muddy tried to warn me off him. “That Wolf, he’s crazy,” he told me. “You stay away from him.” But, of course, I knew there was a long-standing rivalry between them, and there was no way anyone could have warned me off someone whose music was so powerful and had exerted so huge an influence on me anyway. Mudddy was right in one way, though: Wolf was different. And as much as I tried to assume the same role with him as I had with Muddy, and as often as he came by my apartment with various band members, it was never quite the same.

  You just didn’t get that close to Wolf. He maintained at all times an air of intentional inscrutability that was almost impenetrable. I remember one time at the club, this kid said, “Isn’t it great we’ve got two Wolfs in the same city?” And even though it wasn’t me saying it, Wolf just gave me that icy stare that could go right through you and said, “As far as I know there’s just one Wolf,” glaring at me with a look that I didn’t even want to try to comprehend.

  Where Muddy was cool and elegant, with all the glamour of a Hollywood movie star, Wolf sent out a signal that said to all onlookers, “Look out! Proceed with caution.” Muddy’s music was always insinuating that there was something going on behind closed doors, but Wolf’s performance was about something else—it was almost like, “Hey, baby, break down the doors, bust open the windows, you’re going deep into the heart of darkness with me tonight.” I remember one time there was a young college girl sitting at the front table with two of her friends, and Wolf just stalked toward her, put his face right up next to hers, dangled the microphone between his legs, and waggled it around not suggestively—altogether explicitly. Then he strutted back and forth across the stage, his eyes rolling back in his head, until suddenly he stopped dead, gave his band members a strange hypnotic stare, waved his hands once in the air, and then from his great height fell with a thud to his knees. I think everyone in the room was tilting as far back in their chairs as they could possibly go—I don’t know if I can ever recall a moment quite like it, when an audience was as enchanted as it was petrified. But that was Wolf, on and off the stage.

  With the J. Geils Band I got to play and travel with Muddy. But whenever he came to town I was still his Boston valet. He had a bad automobile accident in 1969, and after that he couldn’t make the long drives with the band anymore, so he would fly in, and after the gig I would take him to get something to eat and then we’d go out to the airport and wait for whenever his plane was scheduled to depart in the morning. We would talk, and sometimes he would nap under the cold fluorescent light, and I would find myself looking at him in some wonderment not just that I was sitting in a lonesome air terminal next to the great Muddy Waters but that it was all so ordinary somehow, that all of the grandeur of his music, the nobility of his character, could be contained within such sad, humdrum surroundings.

  Sometimes I thought about
the journey he had traveled, how he had known the young Robert Johnson and Son House, seen Louis Jordan and all the great jump bands, absorbed a tradition that went back more than a century. He had come out of another world but found his own voice, a voice that transcended time and space and was just as up to date and contemporary, just as vital at the end as it had been when he made his first recordings on the Stovall Plantation. The last time I saw him, we sat together all night at Logan Airport, and in the morning I walked him to the gate. He was limping badly by that time, and it was almost as if he knew we might never see each other again. “Little Wolf,” he said, in that familiar form of address that the Howlin’ Wolf would have instantly rejected, “Peter the Wolf,” he said, “thank you, thank you, thank you, my friend.” He repeated it once or twice more, and then, with that regal bearing that never let you forget you were in the presence of a king, he walked down the jetway to the plane, turning just once to wave before he disappeared from sight.

  Otis Spann, Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton, Muddy Waters, James Cotton, Luther “Georgia Boy Snake” Johnson Jr., Francis Clay, and Samuel Lawhorn (counterclockwise from bottom left), San Francisco, 1965

  CHICAGO PEP By Robert Palmer [From Deep Blues, 1982]

  One humid night in May 1978, I drove to Morgen’s Liquors, at Sixty-first and Calumet on the South Side, to hear Sunnyland [Slim] play. Morgen’s was in the shadow of an El stop, and when one walked in, it seemed to be a perfectly ordinary ghetto liquor store. But behind a curtain in the back, where you’d expect to find a stockroom, there was a long, crowded, dimly lit bar, and in back of that, behind a heavy door, was a plain, square music room, with cheap plywood wall paneling, bare bulbs, and a few paper streamers. Sunnyland Slim, long, lanky, and weathered, was sitting on the tiny bandstand behind a battered red Wurlitzer electric piano, flanked by guitarist Louis Myers, from Byhalia, Mississippi, and a much younger rhythm section. He flexed his arms, grimaced, and downed a shot of booze—he was stabbed in both arms in a 1968 South Side robbery and says he has trouble limbering up—and then Myers counted off a crisp shuffle rhythm and stepped to the microphone. “Woke up this mornin’, lookin’ ‘round for my shoes/You know I had them mean old walkin’ blues.” It was “the theme,” as Muddy calls it, the Delta anthem, and the crowd, all black except for my friend and me, was a middle-aged Mississippi crowd. The beat was different—a trace of funk from the bassist, snappy fills from the drummer—but Louis and Sunnyland were playing “Walkin’ Blues” pretty much the way they played it in the thirties.