KR: When I think of Muddy’s records, I do basically think of the first band. That to me is what he had to work with when everybody burnt out. As it went on in the 60s and the 70s, Muddy was no longer playing to his own audience. That’s the other weird thing when you come to be recognized as a great blues artist, and you’re not playing to the people or the atmosphere that actually created what it is that you’re playing for.
Muddy Waters and Robert Cray performing in Sacramento, California on January 1, 1970
Suddenly, you’re playing to a bunch of white college kids—not that there’s anything wrong with that—but sometimes they take on a different attitude because they can’t come to terms with it. For 20 or 30 years, they’re playing juke joints and places on the South Side and slowly, in an unstoppable way, the bigger they get, the less they’re playing to that section of society that the whole thing evolved from. It’s known as a declension. The bigger you get, the less you get to do it for the people that you originally started to do it for. For me it’s kind of weird because in an ideal situation, why can’t you do it for both?
The fact is [that] Muddy Waters in the 70s is playing a certain kind of a gig where they’re probably less black people in the audience than there are at a rock ‘n’ roll concert. Muddy, as they all did, got an early introduction when they went to Europe when they started playing all these college or academic scenes. The weird thing is that the people who got the music started around the world were those kind of guys we all hate—not musicians but schoolteacher types—spotty, buck-teethed, very earnest and academi, they knew the matrix number of every record.
And you wondered what the hell are they in there for in the first place. But they were the kind who booed Muddy off when he came on stage with an electric guitar. They were gonna tell Muddy Waters what’s blues and what ain’t. They know more. It was a strange thing Muddy Waters and the other great blues players ended up playing to white people [and] not the people the music was born in and learnt their craft, a vital ingredient to keeping it going.
There is a problem with blues players that they come to a halt when they make that crossover. But, at the same time, they want the crossover because it’s more bread. It’s not that you can’t make a good show to a bunch of white college kids, but at the same time it’s not the reason that the music existed. The reason the music exists is because you couldn’t reach those people in the first place. You played the blues and the chitlin’ circuit because that was all there was. And then suddenly it’s all changed and you’re a big deal but you’re not playing.
You’re not going to knock it. But you don’t get the same type of performance out of those guys as when they were playing when they got their shit together. Suddenly, you become a blues master. Hey, you’re not going to turn down a good paying gig. You struggled all your life playing the chitlin’ circuit. You’re not going to turn down some phenomenal amounts of money to play to 10 to 15,000 people. It doesn’t matter what color they are. But in a way it does. It’s something you have to come to terms with. But you find that you don’t get any powerful new input from them once they’ve gotten into that. They still play brilliantly, and they still do a good show, and everybody goes away happy, but in actual fact, it’s the artist that suffers.
