Can’t Be Satisfied:
The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
by Robert Gordon
Published by Little, Brown, 383 Pages

Reviewed by Kurt Opprecht

for the New York Sun, July 16, 2002

Nobody wants to hear about a city boy with a middle class background trying to say he knows the blues. But I’ve got to tell you, I swear I’ve got a taste of them.

By the time you’re halfway through the any good biography, you get the feeling that you grew up in the subject’s hometown; maybe you used to hang out together, had some good times. When that subject is an artist, the feeling doubles as you reach out into the real world and experience that art. When that art happens to be a music that is so evocative of a mood as down home blues is, I’m here to say you might as well just give up on everything else.

In his forward to Robert Gordon’s "Can’t Be Satisfied, The Life and Times of Muddy Waters," Keith Richards tells of running into his friend Mick Jagger on a train in 1961. The two went to Mick’s house to listen to his "Best of Muddy Waters" record. The first time the soon-to-be rock guitar legend heard Muddy Waters he said, "Wow. Again." Ten hours later, he was still saying, "Okay, again."

I think I know how he felt. I’ve had Muddy’s acoustic riffs pulling on my brain for weeks now. They roll around like an empty beer can on the floor of a subway car. They go that way, they go this way, they stop for a while, and then they start rolling all over again. I suspect they will never leave me now and I shall die with the words, "Sho-nuff he’s a Rollin’ Stone" circling through my blood stream.

What is it about good blues tunes that sinks them like a hook into the catfish of your deepest consciousness? Keith Richards puts it this way: "There’s a demon in me. I think there’s a demon in everyone, a dark piece in us all. And the blues is a recognition of that and the ability to express it and make fun out of it, have joy out of that dark stuff."

There’s a haiku-like simplicity to a good Muddy Waters tune. The point is made without having been stated. The guitar playing is neither showy nor trite, it’s dead-on pure and the singing feels personal and honest. It’s not like hearing a rock star perform, it’s like hearing your best friend when he doesn’t know you’re listening.

The legend of the southern blues singer has been told so many times now that Muddy Waters’s actual story is a cliché. His mother died soon after he was born in 1913 and his grandmother, 32 years old when he was born, took him in. He made his first guitar out of "a box and a bit of stick." And at the time he made his first recording, part of a Library of Congress project in 1941, he was a poor sharecropper on the Mississippi Delta who sold moonshine on the side.

Muddy Waters went on to become the legend that other legends came from. He wasn’t the first blues singer, but his style became it’s own genre and flowed like the Mississippi into our culture. The iconic rock and roll band and the iconic music magazine both named themselves after Muddy’s "rolling stone" symbolism. His own tunes pop up everywhere from elevator music to Viagra commercials.

Once you start listening to roots blues, you start hearing it in every song in the radio. The songs themselves get modified, as in Led Zeppelin’s "Whole Lotta Love." They are converted cross-gender, as in Etta James’s "W.O.M.A.N." And sometimes they are completely transformed, as in the Rolling Stones’s "Satisfaction." But more significantly, the blues framework is the backbone everyone anywhere near the pop charts uses, from Billy Joel to Britney Spears.

Mr. Gordon rises above his fellow music journalists with this work. He talked with what seems to be everyone from Muddy Waters’s world who is still alive and willing to talk. There are over 100 pages of appendices and notes. It is clearly the authoritative Muddy Waters biography for some time to come.

Still, there are occasional and not necessarily unwelcome surprises from music journalism's hapless style, dispersed throughout his prose [no colon] like a handful of M&M’s tossed into your bowl of chili. Mr. Gordon writes, "Little Walter’s life was a skeleton key to death’s door, and he was always rattling the lock."

Regarding Jimmie Lee Robinson, he writes, "His city is punctuated by hot dog stands, and he discusses the past with relish."
Many of the bluesmen from Mr. Waters’s time forward followed the trail Chuck Berry blazed into rock and roll, or took other paths into funk and folk, leaving too many singers more dedicated to rehashing the blues than to letting it live and grow. The rigid and tired 12-bar format, which Muddy Waters never endorsed, still has a stranglehold on modern blues, but as long as folks stay in touch with Muddy Waters and his music, sho-nuff the roots of the tree will refuse to die.

Kurt Opprecht, a writer in New York, has recently purchased a bottleneck slide and a new set of guitar strings.

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