bro mud

one of my favorite memories of my brief, truncated career as a college student is the time when i had all of our band's equipment in my dorm room and i hooked up my record player to the p.a. so i could blast muddy waters out to the street below through the giant voice of the theater speakers. there was some indefinable quality -- maybe the ambience of those early chess recordings, maybe the wobbliness of muddy's pitch when he sang "long distance call" -- that made that music sound otherworldly to me. it still does.

i saw muddy play three times: once at my father's place in roslyn, lawn guyland (same place and around the same time i saw captain beefheart and john lee hooker), once at the palladium on northwest highway in dallas, and a coupla nights later at the dallas convention center, opening for eric clapton. (i was standing near the stage at the dcc when i saw muddy's gtrist "steady rollin'" bob margolin peer out from behind the barricade at the throng of ppl in the audience. "a few more than the other night, hunh?" i asked him. he agreed. i watched the muddy band do their 45 minutes and then walked out on clapton.) a few years after that, i wrote the following, which i entitled "blues singer," for b.d. (ben) trail when i was taking a freshman comp course with him at tcjc. sometimes it amazes me how much better i usedta write in my 20s than i do now.

He took the stage haltingly, tentatively, on wobbling, calcified legs. He rested his bulky frame on the stool at stage center, a colussus in an incongruous salesman's polyester suit, and surveyed the scene before him like a monarch from his throne. His hands, which gingerly held the toy guitar, were huge, gnarled, calloused things, weathered by years of hard labor. His eyes, sunk deep in his ursine head, framed by deep furrows, regarded the world with a profound weariness. Behind him, the musicians were clock-punchers, automatons, rooted to the boards where they stood, eyes shifting uneasily, oblivious to the drama about to play out before them. Before him [i know...lotsa "befores"], the audience drank and joked uproariously, a worldly congregation awaiting a secular exorcism. The music started and he was suddenly transformed, his limbs suffused with new strength, propelling him across the stage like some demented wind-up toy. The music lurched and rumbled out of the sound system like a primordial beast, the metallic jangle and whine of the guitars its cry, the monotonous thump and clatter of the drums its pulse. He bent and strained as if under a great burden, the collective suffering of all the world's people resting on his broad shoulders. He ignored the rivulets of sweat that creased his brow and cascaded down his face, soaking his white cotton shirt. He clenched his fists and struck out at the air, railing at invisible demons. He sang, and another presence slowly overtook him, battling its way out of its prison inside the old man's body, using his voice to bellow its masculinity.

when i wanna hear mud, i usually reach for his all-acoustic folk singer alb, but when i read in robert gordon's muddy bio can't be satisfied that folk singer don't _move_ mr. gordon, i was curious to hear what did, so i copped a coupla recs he liked that i found for cheap: otis spann's live the life on testament, and a live disc called hoochie coochie man on laserlight (a cheesy label, but one for which junior wells cut good stuff his last coupla yrs on the planet). the spann has a buncha tracks with the mid-'60s muddy band, including a version of "i wanna go home" that has spann singing with mud in a way that reminds me of ray reed and quincy brown from the b.t.a. band singing "rock me baby" with lady pearl or miss kim. the laserlight alb, recorded in '64, rocks in spite of the fact that the bassplayer on the first four tracks is having what can only charitably be described as "serious intonation problems." by the time i saw him in the late '70s, mud would always play the exact same gtr solo, but the laserlight at least has some interesting variations on the theme. what makes it and the spann work is the intimacy 'n' depth of their performances, even in a concert situation -- there's nothing showbizzy about this music (well, okay -- 'cept for justaminute at the end of "long distance call"), and i suppose that's why it satisfies better than more "uptown" blues and most of the rock that attempts to directly cop its essence.