Review: Muddy Waters - At Newport (1960)

Tracks: 1) I Got My Brand On You; 2) I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man; 3) Baby, Please Don’t Go; 4) Soon Forgotten; 5) I Wanna Put A Tiger In Your Tank; 6) I Feel So Good; 7) Got My Mojo Working Part 1; 8) Got My Mojo Working Part 2; 9) Goodbye Newport Blues; 10*) I Got My Brand On You; 11*) Soon Forgotten; 12*) Tiger In Your Tank; 13*) Meanest Woman.

REVIEW

Muddy’s performance on July 3, 1960 at the annual Newport Jazz Festival has long since passed into legend, but, as with many legendary events, the real reasons for its passing into legend are not immediately obvious. Without doing a little digging around for information and relying instead on simple blurbs from the endless online musical resources that mostly regurgitate each other’s waste, one might even form the wrong impression that Muddy’s performance on that day was the first, or at least the most important one, to introduce the art of Chicago electric blues to white audiences. Well, it is true that electric blues had been a pretty rare guest at Newport — but even before 1960, the Festival was no enemy to musicians whose interests lay outside the jazz universe; thus, Chuck Berry played Newport as early as 1958, when you can see the rock’n’roll master confidently take his place next to Louis Armstrong and Thelonious Monk in the footage of Jazz On A Summer’s Day, one of the greatest concert movies to preserve priceless evidence for posterity.

Actually, arguably a much more legendary and influential event in the history of electric blues in general and Muddy Waters in particular was his and his band’s tour of England in 1958 — when, eight years before Dylan played a similar cruel trick on his UK admirers, Muddy shocked the general public by plugging in his guitar and going loud and wild on a crowd that was expecting an authentic acoustic Delta sound from an authentic cotton field worker, passing on that olde «Negro plight» to all those in search of a guiding light. That tour left the public baffled and divided, but would be directly responsible for the beginning of the British rhythm’n’blues boom, the formation of Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, and, eventually, the Rolling Stones. Unfortunately, very little documented evidence of that tour survives, although at least one show (at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, from October 26) was captured on tape — you can listen to this performance of ‘Rollin’ Stone’, for instance, and imagine a young and excited Brian Jones sitting in the audience, just about to make a personal decision of historical importance...

Of course, by the time we get to the summer of 1960, Muddy Waters was already as famous both in the US and in the UK as he was ever going to be — some might even say he was already past his prime, with his last single to hit the R&B charts having been ‘Close To You’ back in 1958. The idea that his Newport performance was "the point at which blues finally broke through to white America", as it is currently advertised on Amazon, can hardly be viewed as anything other than myth-making promotional hogwash — although, admittedly, the surviving footage from the show, only partially overlapping with the recorded album, may be the first instance of a few white American people captured on camera while clapping and toe-tapping to a Chicago electric blues performance. That said, it was certainly not the Newport Jazz Festival of 1960 that made, for instance, somebody like Paul Butterfield, a white native of Chicago who’d been hanging around blues clubs since the late 1950s, want to form an electric blues band. And while At Newport did make history by becoming the first live electric blues LP of any importance, upon release it did not even make a dent in the blues charts of the day, never mind the general Billboard 200, which, at the end of 1960, was far more preoccupied with buttering our souls with Frank Sinatra’s Nice ’n’ Easy, The Kingston Trio’s String Along, and Elvis’ G.I. Blues soundtrack.

If we are really craving for myth and symbolism, it might be more amusing — and/or sorrowful — to note that Muddy Waters’ performance at the Newport Jazz Festival incidentally put an end to the Newport Jazz Festival itself (at least, a temporary one, but even after it reopened, it was no longer the same Newport Jazz Festival that it used to be). From 1954 to 1960, the Festival had been an uninterrupted tradition that typically attracted a modest-size crowd of elitist-intellectual enthusiasts; however, the theatrical release of Jazz On A Summer’s Day in March 1960 did the Festival a great promotional favor and a colossal disservice at the same time — that year, the venue passed into mythological Shangri-La territory, and a huge crowd of proto-Woodstock-style teenagers descended on the town that summer, resulting in chaos, riots, and a joint decision on the part of city officials and concert promoters to cut the festival short for fear of escalation; Muddy’s show turned out to be one of the last, if not the very last performances on Sunday, July 3. Just the usual routine, one might say: all good things are bound to die the minute they become too popular.

But it is a little ironic that the last performance at the «old style» Newport Jazz Festival (which would resume in 1962, but already in a somewhat different light) was not a jazz performance, but an electric blues one — symbolic indeed, as if a new, simpler, but more modern, vital, and instantly gripping form of music was less-than-gently ushering out the older values. In that way, Muddy’s performance at the venue is indeed comparable to Dylan’s going electric at the Newport Folk Festival five years later (damn that lucky Newport for all of its historical symbolism!), even though it was nowhere near as much of a shock (everybody knew that Muddy Waters would be playing electric blues with his band, which he’d been doing for years, whereas Dylan’s «conversion» to the world of rock’n’roll was known only to those who’d bothered to buy Bringing It All Back Home several months earlier, and even those people might have secretly been hoping that that LP’s first side was just a temporary aberration on Bob’s part). Just put this together with Ray Charles’ magnetic performance from the previous day of the Festival, and the inevitable impression is that jazz is slowly starting to lose its artistic supremacy, while newer forms of African-American music like R&B and electric blues are quite shameless in encroaching on its territory — an early analogy of later developments, such as, for instance, hip-hop yappin’ at the heels of rock 40–50 years later.

With this new feel in the air, it does not even matter all that much that only about half of Muddy’s setlist here consists of indisputable Muddy Waters classics; the other consists of recently recorded rehashings of earlier hits (‘I Got My Brand On You’, ‘Tiger In Your Tank’, or the particularly aptly-titled ‘Soon Forgotten’) that only devoted Muddy Waters aficionados might remember with any degree of fondness these days. (The CD reissue of the album adds the studio equivalents of all of these performances as bonus tracks — and while everything Muddy recorded in those days sounds fairly nice due to the sheer musical greatness of his band, there is nothing particularly exceptional, inspired, or innovative about these songs). What matters is that we have here a tight, well-coordinated bunch of masters of the art, all set to show their allegedly «sophisticated» jazz-raised audiences that simple, «generic» 12-bar blues can be just as spiritually rewarding as an inspired run through ‘Diminuendo And Crescendo In Blue’.

The sensation that they were out there to prove something on that day is very much reinforced when you play the studio version and the stage version of the opening number, ‘I Got My Brand On You’, back-to-back. The studio original is faster, opting for a slightly martial, danceable tempo — but both James Cotton’s harmonica and Otis Spann’s piano seem to be holding a little back on that one, fully ceding the spotlight to Muddy’s vocals, while the guitars are mainly there just to keep the rhythm steady. Live, Muddy slows the tempo down to a crawl, but only so that all the talents of all his players could be showcased at the same time. Here, Cotton blows his harp virtually non-stop, weaving smoky patterns all around Muddy’s voice; Otis plays all sorts of improvisational figures on the piano; Pat Hare weaves in menacing electric guitar lines; and even Muddy himself takes to his slide guitar every now and then, bringing in a bit of that cotton field spirit to compensate for too much Chicagoan urbanism. Every now and then, there are four musicians soloing at the same time — yet the song never descends into messy cacophony, what with all the members so perfectly in tune with each other. Okay, maybe not «perfectly» perfectly, but who really needs «perfectly» perfectly? «Imperfectly» perfectly is alright with me.

If there’s one potential problem, it is that, having established that massive groove, they never really bother changing it until the very end. The basic principle here is that no egos are being stroked — or, what is really the same thing, all the egos are being stroked at the very same time. When a guitar or harmonica player takes a solo, all the other lead players rally behind him, upping their game as well for a «symphonic blues» sound; neither Muddy himself nor any of his players get to have the stage all for themselves even for one moment. This is admirable in spirit, but in practical terms, it makes things a bit too monotonous and predictable, so by the time another generic slow blues number like ‘Soon Forgotten’ comes along, I no longer find myself concentrating on the power of individual melodies. On the positive side, for every one of those rather inferior recent re-writes Muddy compensates with a classic like ‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ or ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, where the individual melodies are already ingrained in your brain anyway.

In very general terms, the most important aspect separating the band’s live playing from their studio production is that of... well, studio production. Muddy’s Chess-era records typically used a heavy echo or reverb effect, making all the songs sound a little like they were coming at you from inside a deep dreary forest, or a dark cavern, or the top of a lofty mountain — in other words, there was a sort of supernatural mysticism about them, subtly emphasizing the voodoo powers of the singer and the zonbi-like status of his musical warriors. On stage, those effects clearly could not be recreated, which is why the all-out assault on the senses from all the players at once is so much more important — to hell with the magic of subtlety, hooray to the power of brutal frontal musical attack. And, of course, this means that At Newport really works best when the band is at its most rock’n’rolliest — although it takes them quite a while to get there. The warm-up begins with ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’, when the tempo starts accelerating and drummer Francis Clay starts getting a lot of attention for himself, then continues with the lively and fully danceable performance of ‘Tiger In Your Tank’, a song that ruthlessly steals its bridge from Muddy’s own ‘I Just Want To Make Love To You’, something that is very easy to leave unnoticed given that most people are probably going to spend their time wondering how it would be physically possible to put a tiger in a tank. (The answer is actually quite simple but, nowadays, requires one to be familiar with the history of 1960s advertisement).

Of course, the culmination of the show is reached during Muddy’s seven-minute long extended performance of ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Working’ — although the original studio version was released as early as 1957 (with Muddy rather faithfully copying the basics of the earlier arrangement of Ann Cole, but replacing the sax-enlivened party atmosphere with his own voodoo magic), it is this particular performance that blew the minds of thousands of British teenagers, making pretty much every 1960s rhythm’n’blues outfit in the UK include the song in their repertoire... and yet there has never been a single British rendition that would even remotely approach the raw power of this performance. There have been good versions, for sure, but there’s just too many ingredients here that would need to be replicated. For starters, nobody in the world can do the bilabial trill ("mbbbbrrrrr.... woykin’!") as smoothly as Muddy did in his prime. More seriously, you need to have a great harp blower and piano player doing their lines in perfect unison at a fast tempo. And even more seriously, this is drummer Francis Clay’s chief moment of glory — he’s going all-out here on his instruments, as if channelling the spirits of all the crazyass Gene Krupa-like drummers at the same time. This is the kind of bombastic, aggressive, non-stop onslaught on all the elements of your drum kit at once that the UK only saw with Keith Moon several years later.

It is also a performance that necessarily has to be seen rather than just heard: for this song, Muddy loses the guitar in order to fully concentrate on the «ritualistic» aspect of the performance, as he eventually all but goes in a trance, shamanizing at the crowd like he’s really trying to get his mojo working on those wimpy white-ass bourgeois intellectuals. (I like some of the actual crowd shots — most of the people captured on camera sit there either in complete bewilderment or mildly trying to clap and toe-tap like a bunch of shy pupils learning their first social skills). Some of the stage behavior is completely random, like Muddy all of a sudden going into a waltzing position with James Cotton, making him temporarily drop his harmonica (and nearly get entangled in his own microphone cord!) It’s just such a wonderful gradual descent into tightly controlled madness, by the end of which the crowd finally comes awake...

...only to find themselves saying ‘Goodbye To Newport Blues’, an odd, once-in-a-lifetime epilogue which does not even feature Muddy himself: it is a largely improvised slow blues arrangement of a poem, quickly put together on the spot by the former Harlem Renaissance leader Langston Hughes after he’d learned of the canceling of the remaining two days of the festival. Allegedly, Muddy was supposed to sing it himself, but ceded the right to Otis Spann due to complete exhaustion after the ‘Mojo’ workout. Obviously, it is not much of a song, just a little bit of slow jamming to wind things down, but coming right on the heels of ‘Mojo’, this ‘Goodbye’ feels like a serious cold shower — the atmosphere suddenly changes to almost depressive, more in the style of Otis Rush’s suicidal blues than Muddy’s hoodoo blues (I think that they even go into the solo of ‘Double Trouble’ for a moment there). Curiously, the first line sung by Otis goes something like "oh, what a groomy day in Newport" (this is how some of the lyrics sites have it) rather than "oh, what a gloomy day in Newport" (as reported by other lyrics sites) — and I actually hear groomy myself, with no idea of whether it is just a speech defect on Otis’ part or if Hughes really invented the word groomy on the spot himself, as a portmanteau of gloomy and groovy. I’d much rather like it to be the second option, of course, given that the day was indeed groovy and gloomy at the same time.

With Spann’s final wail of "goodbye Newport, whoah goodbye goodbye", the music comes to a close, and the album itself is eerily closed with the MC’s final, somewhat sorrowful announcement of "goodbye, Newport", as if the entire recording’s big message to us was to announce the end of an epoch. Like I already said, we shouldn’t be reading too much symbolic value on this chain of events. After all, the Newport Jazz Festival would eventually reopen, and jazz music still had a few more years to itself as the indisputable leader of artistic progress in music (at least until 1964–65 or so, before serious critical attention got finally usurped by the likes of the Beatles or Hendrix). Moreover, the music played out there by Muddy and his band was by no means «cutting edge» for 1960 — even if we’re strictly talking about electric blues, people like Freddie or Albert King were much more «hot shit» at the time than Muddy, with all of his aesthetics and stylistics carried over from at least the mid-1950s. But even if we cut out all the temptation to aggrandize and mythologize, there is still no denying the objective huge influence of this Newport groove on the entire burgeoning electric blues, rhythm’n’blues, and, ultimately, hard and heavy rock movement overseas.

I mean, look at something like Blues Incorporated’s seminal R&B From The Marquee debut live album from 1962 — Alexis Korner and his friends cover a whole four numbers from At Newport in their live set, meaning they must have worn out their vinyl copies to near-exhaustion by then. With full emphasis on collective groove rather than individual soloing, this might not have been an album to particularly inspire the likes of, say, Eric Clapton, or Jeff Beck, or any other aspiring young guitarist at the time with the dream of becoming a virtuoso soloist; but it was just the right thing for all sorts of circles of musically-minded friends striving to join their voices in a free flow of musical nirvana, no matter how feeble or untrained any of them might feel on the individual level. And even then, it took the UK bands years and years to reach that level of musical freedom and wildness — the difference between what might be called a natural transmission of the tradition and an artificial / learned transmission of it. The wonder of At Newport is in that these guys have this blues sound almost literally in their blood, whereas Alexis Korner and the rest had to inject it through carefully sterilized needles; it was not until bands like the Stones and the Animals understood that they had to perform this music on their own terms, based on their own breeding and experience, that they managed to turn «UK rhythm’n’blues» into something truly unique and worth our while.

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