The lion in winter. He’s the king of the jungle, and he’s won the title fair and square. He suns himself on the hill and watches his young descendants vying for the spot he’ll soon vacate. But what they don’t know is it won’t be the same spot. It couldn’t be.
Muddy Waters made these, his last three records, in 1977-81. Produced by Johnny Winter for Blue Sky, a boutique label of Epic, they mostly feature old songs of his in stretched-out versions played by a larger band than his classic works had used, a band comprised mostly of younger musicians such as Winter, Bob Margolin, and James Cotton. Only Pinetop Perkins is on deck from Muddy’s generation.
And because of these records and some others like them, for a long time I thought I didn’t like blues. Then, about eight years ago, I talked my way on to a jazz radio station and asked to do one night a week of blues, which forced me to unearth my old Chess compilations and other classic blues recordings, and I made a discovery: They didn’t sound anything like I remembered.
As I listened into these records, something became clear. When Muddy Waters had been coming up in the fiercely competitive world of Chicago blues, his was a popular music. Because of this, it had to fit on 45-rpm singles, and be no longer than three minutes long, a constraint that begged for ingenious solutions.
And those solutions came in varied and appealing ways: It was all about the arrangement. You could stretch out some on the bandstand when you were playing for dancers, but when the red light went on, you had to hit it, git it, and split it. The Muddy Waters band was known as the baddest band in Chicago; each musician was adroit enough to be able to say something strong in a short, concentrated space. Nobody was better at it than the boss, either.
But Chicago blues was a small piece of a minority market called rhythm & blues, and it appealed to a specific audience, one that had long since disappeared by the time Winter convinced Blue Sky to let him make these records. In the meanwhile, something quite remarkable had happened: A whole new generation of musicians, in a foreign country, no less, had discovered the Chicago blues and had made their version of it popular. Not only that, they’d made it so fashionable that American musicians, albeit white ones like the foreigners, started playing it, too. This led to, among many other things, Columbia Records paying a then-unprecedented signing fee to Johnny Winter, simply because he was a hot-shit blues guitarist.
Which he was, but in a different way than Muddy and those guys were. For the purist white blues guys, the fact that their medium was the long-playing album meant their work was based not on arrangements but on jamming. And jamming, for most musicians in the past, had been a form of practice, not performance. But the audience for this new generation of players appreciated virtuosity and, thanks to their choice of intoxicants, found being carried away on wave after wave of soloing fun.
That’s what’s on these records. Muddy Waters singing, and doing a little jamming with guys who revered him, and getting paid well for it. He’d waged a battle to get his publishing rights back, he had decent management, he was still alive, and he had money. That these three albums don’t add anything to the Muddy Waters story is irrelevant. This was what he wanted to do, and he did it.
On top of the hill, the lion yawns. From this far away, you could be forgiven for thinking he was roaring.
