CHEERS to Bill and Michael in PWM, our Laramie, Wyoming-based friend Irish Patti and ...... well, each of you at Cheers and Jeers. Have a fabulous weekend .... and week ahead.
ART NOTES— an exhibition on Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham entitled Cover Story— w/photographs and objects from her career (publishing the Pentagon Papers in 1971 and supporting the paper’s investigation of the Watergate scandal) — will be at the New-York Historical Society to October 3rd.
YOUR WEEKEND READ#1 is this essay in The Guardian, on how Britain’s privatizing its rails in the 1990's is being somewhat amended— as a single public body (Great British Railways) will henceforth manage infrastructure, timetables and fares for the network.
HAIL and FAREWELL to (quite possibly) the last surviving member of Spain’s International Brigades who fought against the Fascist armies of Francisco Franco, Josep Almudéver— who has died at the age of one hundred and one.
THURSDAY's CHILD is named Gadget the Cat— a South Dakota kitteh who lives at a nursery (protecting plants from mice and gophers) with two other such firms in the Sioux Falls region utilizing felines for the same purpose.
YOUR WEEKEND READ#2 is this essay on how the GOP voted on a straight party line against the Comprehensive Debt Collection Improvement Act— that had a provision protecting military service members from predatory debt collection.
CHEERS to the news that there will be an in-person Netroots Nation (in our nation’s capital) …. if you are able to attend, I hope that we have a chance to meet.
FRIDAY's CHILD is named Kevin the Cat— an English kitteh who had fallen into a garage wall hole, with firefighters having to extract him by removing bricks.
BRAIN TEASER— try this Quiz of the Week's News from the BBC ...… and the usually easier, less UK-centered New York Times quiz (no common questions).
YOUR WEEKEND READ#3 is this essay in the American Prospect about coal country in West Virginia recognizing it must embrace renewables— especially as neighboring Virginia and North Carolina can offer renewables to corporate clients.
SEPARATED at BIRTH— a Brazilian woman on Tik Tok (Priscilla Beatrice) and the Barbadian singer/film star Rihanna— who, when she saw the Tik Tok side-by-side photos tweeted, “Where’s the (R-9) album, sis?” — which floored Priscilla.
...... and finally, for a song of the week ...........................… if there could be one on-stage performer that defined the Chicago blues: it would have to be the Mississippi-born McKinley Morganfield, known to the public as Muddy Waters. Writing some of his own tunes (and often recording songs by the Chess Records dynamo Willie Dixon) he became a legend … with his song entitled Rolling Stone inspiring a Bob Dylan song and wholesale adopted both by an English rock band and also a magazine … all of which you may have heard of.
Yet even as his songs (and sometimes guitar licks) were inspiring rock musicians on both sides of the Atlantic: by 1968 he was losing his traditional black audience (now favoring Motown, soul and other musical forms) and not quite yet gaining a solid foothold among white record buyers (who were still listening to their rock band covers) other than the slowly-budding circle of blues aficciando purists.
The solution, as seen by Marshall Chess— son of Leonard Chess, founder of the legendary Chicago blues label Chess Records — was to release an album of Muddy in an uncommon format. Two years earlier, the label had Muddy recording Brass and the Blues (an effort to try to win-over B.B. King record buyers)
Now, Marshall Chess wanted Muddy to cross-over into the burgeoning rock/psychedelia market. Muddy would only have to sing; Marshall Chess recruited a studio band not made-up of the normal band members (i.e., Willie Dixon, Hubert Sumlin, Junior Wells) but instead a more avant-garde jazz-rock ensemble. Some of those he recruited included guitarists Phil Upchurch and Pete Cosey (who later performed in Miles Davis’ increasingly jazz-rock line-ups).
The title would be Electric Mud— not because Muddy Waters had been an acoustic performer in the 60’s, but as a nod to psychedelia. And it did indeed have that as part of its sound, along with a more rock music edge to the album.
Part of it consisted of re-makes of Muddy Waters classic tunes (Mannish Boy, and She’s All Right, which samples “My Girl”) and those written by Willie Dixon (Hoochie Coochie Man and my favorite on this album, The Same Thing) and some soul-jazz tunes (Herbert Harper’s Free Press News and Tom Cat) arranged as if they were played by a rock band. Most critics panned these songs as neither blues nor rock. I am a bit schizophrenic about it … glad that Muddy was willing to experiment and that he gained wider recognition, yet preferring his later works.
There were some benefits to Muddy Waters, as the album did reach #127 in the Billboard charts. This led Chess to encourage others to try this method, with both Howlin’ Wolf (which had a minor hit with a psyched-out remake of his tune “Evil”) and even Chubby Checker in 1971 recording partly psychedelic albums. Muddy Waters was booked into several college dates he would not otherwise have found, although his traditional blues band could not replicate that sound live.
He did record a follow-up album: After the Rain was partly psychedelia yet more of his traditional sound (such as on Rollin’ & Tumblin’, a song many rock bands covered) yet he grew tired of the genre, returning to more normal Chicago blues the rest of his career, with one writer saying, “Let Muddy be Muddy”.
He did have a more durable recording career in the 1970’s, with many white rock stars performing with him, and had a notable appearance on The Band’s 1976 final concert The Last Waltz. Muddy Waters died in 1983 at the age of seventy.
Interestingly, the album is more respected after his death than before.
Guitarist Pete Cosey was later told by Jimi Hendrix's valet that before he would perform live, he'd listen to "Herbert Harper" for inspiration. In the '70's, when Marshall Chess went to visit the Rolling Stones rehearsal space, he saw a poster on the wall for the Electric Mud album. Led Zeppelin's bassist John Paul Jones cites Electric Mud as the inspiration for the basic riff behind "Black Dog."
And perhaps the most surprising fan of Electric Mud is the hip-hop singer Chuck D. (of Public Enemy fame) who heretofore had never cared for traditional blues, yet saw it as connecting the blues to hip-hop. When Martin Scorsese oversaw his PBS film series The Blues in 2003 (thirty-five years after Electric Mud), Chuck D. led a band appearing on the film with several of the surviving session musicians, members of The Roots, plus a turntablist and another rapper to form … The Electric Mudcats…. showing how the disdained album went full circle to hip-hop.
While The Same Thing is my favorite from the album … a good reason why Marshall Chess saw the Electric Mud poster in the Rolling Stones rehearsal space … is that Muddy Waters covered their song Let’s Spend the Night Together— which as many writers correctly observe, the back-up band sounds like they have the (then-current) Cream song Sunshine of Your Love in mind, playing it.