“It was kind of a nostalgia trip,” said Johnny in an interview coinciding with the release. “The tunes were soul and rock ‘n’ roll. It had been quite awhile since I’d played live with Edgar. It felt really good. We sang harmony on ‘Soul Man’ by Sam and Dave—we did a lot of harmony that night. We sang harmony on ‘You Lost That Lovin’ Feeling,’ Edgar sang the higher falsetto part. We also sang harmony on ‘Mercy, Mercy’ [and] ‘Baby, Whatcha Want Me to Do.”’
“It was really fun to do the old songs we did in bands together,” said Edgar. “That was the concept—to go back and do harmony songs like ‘Lovin’ Feeling’ by the Righteous Brothers—songs that could lend themselves to a duet thing that he and I had done together. Almost every one of those songs was a song we would play in various bands when we were kids. It was very emotional for me, and lots of fun.”
An interview with Johnny and Edgar was released on an album entitled
Johnny and Edgar Winter Discuss Together: Johnny and Edgar Winter
. Although the album was distributed to radio stations across the U.S. prior to the record’s release, it didn’t help sales. “That album sold mediocre,” says Johnny.
But rockers still loved Johnny’s band, which was at the peak of its power when the tour ended in late September. Many fans and critics called
Captured Live
! one of the best live albums of the decade. “When we were touring with Johnny, the band was getting better and better,” said Radford. “The promoters were coming up to me to get to Johnny, saying we want Johnny to come back, we’ll pay you double. We were already making a lot of money, but the shows were just getting better and stronger, and the promoters were willing to pay.”
But Johnny had played rock long enough. When he got the call to produce Muddy Waters, nothing could have held him back. His musicians, like the lineup in Johnny Winter And, were completely surprised when he called a rehearsal and told them he had decided to call it quits.
“After we rehearsed, Johnny says, ‘I’m going into the studio for nine months with Muddy Waters,’” remembered Radford. “And that was it. It was over. It was very quick. I don’t understand why Johnny did it that way, but I think the decision came from Johnny’s heart. On
Captured Live!
we played a lot of blues, but it was still rock ‘n’ roll. Johnny had a fair amount of fortune and fame by expressing himself through rock ‘n’ roll. But for him to go with Muddy Waters was the greatest dream of a lifetime.”
9
A DREAM COME TRUE
W
hen Waters left the Chess label in November 1975, his manager Scott Cameron scheduled meetings with several labels. Ron Luxembourg, who headed Epic Records, came up with the concept of Waters working with Johnny. Cameron negotiated a record contract with Blue Sky, with the stipulation Johnny play on and produce the records. Paul was happy to sign Waters.
“Muddy Waters was the first recording artist I ever hired to play at the Scene,” said Paul. “I loved him then and when I had a chance to sign him as a Blue Sky recording artist, I couldn’t have been more thrilled.”
Waters had been impressed with Johnny’s talent and love of the blues when he met him in Austin and knew he was making the right move. “Muddy spotted Johnny’s ability the very first time Johnny opened for him down in Texas, before Johnny had a record deal,” said Cameron. “He knew his sincerity and [that Johnny] knew Muddy’s music—he wasn’t going to come in and try to change Muddy. He was just going to enhance it.”
Having an opportunity to play with and produce his idol meant the world to Johnny. “I always loved Muddy—it was like a dream come true to be able to work with him on a record,” he says. “I tried to do everything I could for him. The record company itself was behind him—they had a big picture of him up on one of the floors of CBS.”
Johnny loved Waters’s early Chess Records and wanted to produce records in the same vein. He felt the attempts by Chess to repackage Muddy to suit the latest musical trends didn’t do justice to the blues legend.
“I thought Chess had messed him up pretty good,” says Johnny. “They had a Muddy Waters
Folk Singer
album. The
Brass and the Blues
record wasn’t bad but it wasn’t really Muddy. I hated
Electric Mud
. It just wasn’t Muddy Waters at all. It wasn’t Muddy’s band; it was a psychedelic band playing the blues. The publicity shot-Muddy in a robe with his hair up—was pretty terrible. I don’t think he had that good a relationship with Leonard and Marshall Chess. He said Chess wasn’t doin’ a lot to promote his albums, and he didn’t make much money from his old records. He wasn’t getting the proper control and respect.”
Johnny respected the stylistic difference between his music and Waters’s blues, which like the music of John Lee Hooker, didn’t always stick to time signatures. Waters would throw in odd measures and make changes at unexpected times, which affected the meter. “Some of the old blues songs that Muddy played didn’t change at the right times,” says Johnny. “‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” and ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’ are hard songs to follow because they don’t change when you think they’re going to—they change at a different point.”
Guitarist Bob Margolin, who joined Waters’s band in 1973, agreed that his style could be challenging to follow. “Muddy’s blues in general had a behind-the-beat feel called delay time,” said Margolin. “The note would come a little later than you would expect it to. A lot of bluesmen had it. I certainly didn’t have it naturally when I got in the band—I really had to work on playing that way. Johnny was able to get with that too.”
Waters used heavy strings with high action on his 1957 or 1958 Telecaster, compared to Johnny’s thin-gauge strings, and his playing style was sparser than Johnny’s, who said it felt natural to play more notes. Rather than using a guitar with open tuning for slide and a second guitar, Waters now used a capo on a single guitar with standard tuning.
Waters had set the stage for instrumentation with two guitars, bass, piano, drums, and harp; his sound, which combined blues from the Mississippi Delta and the South Side of Chicago, was like no other. “Muddy’s sound was so distinctive that if he stopped playing, the whole feeling would change,” says Johnny. “His slide was shorter and smaller than most slides. He’d only get two or three strings at a time, where most guys could get six strings. He never told me why he did that.”
Waters’s traditional method of making a slide never worked for Johnny, who tried it once or twice in his early twenties. “Muddy said he’d make a slide by wrappin’ string around the neck of a soda bottle, soak it in kerosene, light it, let it burn until it went out, and then break it,” says Johnny. “I never got that down. The bottle would break off in the wrong places.”
Despite their stylistic differences, Johnny’s knowledge of Waters’s music and his love for the bluesman made their collaboration joyful. “Making
Hard Again
was fun,” says Johnny. “You could tell it was fun by just listenin’ to the record.”
“Muddy loved working with Johnny,” said Cameron. “He was very sincere with Muddy and he had a lot a respect for Muddy and treated him that way. What was important to me was that he brought the best out in Muddy.”
“I think Johnny knows more about my music than I do,” Waters said in an interview in the August 1983
Guitar Player
. “When we went to do
Hard Again,
he was bringing up things I had forgot all about, and he was playing them just like they’re supposed to be played.... He wanted to go back to the old sound, but I didn’t know he went so far back.”
Johnny laughs at the memory. “That’s nice,” he says. “Muddy probably meant I knew all the parts he was doin’ in the songs more than he remembered in some cases. It made the Blue Sky records easier to do—that I knew so much about Muddy—his tunings, phrasing, slide, picks, everything involved in the old sound.”
Johnny chose The Schoolhouse studio in Westport, Connecticut for the
Hard Again
sessions, which ran from October 4 to 10, 1976. Set in a one-room schoolhouse built in 1760, The Schoolhouse included fifteen additional rooms, and had a live-in maid and cook. The studio was owned by Dan Hartman, a multi-instrumentalist who had played in Edgar’s band and on six of his albums, as well as on several of Johnny’s LPs. Hartman, who was also a songwriter, producer, and engineer, released his own records on the Blue Sky label in the late 1970s and early ’80s, including the gold disco single “Instant Replay.” A $300,000, twenty-four-track studio, The Schoolhouse was the perfect setting because Johnny could record all the musicians in the same room.
“The Schoolhouse was a real relaxed studio that was close and sounded real good,” says Johnny. “Dan Hartman put the studio in himself for his own recording. He didn’t rent it out very often. The studio had a great big room—we set up everybody in that room. The control room was upstairs and the playing room was downstairs. I was playing and doing the producing too, so I’d run downstairs and play; and after we played a tune, I’d have to run up and listen to it. It made it a little crazy.”
The Schoolhouse setup had two microphones near the ceiling, which created a room echo and captured the raw sounds of Waters’s early blues recordings. “With overhead microphones, you get the sound of a whole band instead of separate instruments,” says Johnny. “Everything fed through everybody else’s mike. Regular miking ruined the sound of real raw blues. Studios did the same thing to early, nasty rock ‘n’ roll—made it too clean. Overdubs ruin the sound of raw blues, and we had enough musicians so we could get it without overdubbing anything, except for the vocals.”
Johnny also used close miking—placing microphones close to the amplifiers for separation and a cleaner sound. “Johnny put mikes on each instrument and the drum set, and had two microphones near the ceiling, capturing the ambience in the room,” said Margolin.
To ensure that engineer Dave Still knew the sound he wanted, Johnny gave him a crash course in Muddy Waters. “I played him a bunch of Muddy’s records at my house,” says Johnny. “I played him the good records and told him why they were good, and played the bad ones and told him why they were bad. He knew what I was trying to get before we went in the studio ’cause I had gone over all that stuff with him so particularly.”
Johnny took a low-key approach to producing Waters, which mirrored the way he produced his own albums. “If the players are doin’ something I like, I tell them; if they’re doin’ something I don’t like, I tell ’em,” says Johnny. “With Muddy’s band, I didn’t have to tell them much. They’d just count it off and play. Muddy already had the idea of what he wanted to do before we started.”
“As a producer, Johnny was very concerned about capturing the essence of Muddy Waters and I think he did that,” said Cameron. “He was not overbearing, nor did he give in. He wanted the quality of excellence out of Muddy. He knew Muddy could deliver and they worked to get that. They had an ability to communicate musically extremely well and their personalities seemed to get along extremely well. Muddy had a lot of respect for Johnny’s ability at the board, in addition to as a player. Johnny’s respect for Muddy was unquestioned.”
“I’ve seen all kinds of producers,” said Margolin. “Some take everything apart and take the joy out of it; some just try to help you be the best you can in a very nonintrusive way. Johnny didn’t take things apart; it was just, ‘We know how to play this stuff. Let’s get the arrangement and cut the tune.’ He had boundless energy and a lot of enthusiasm. He loved that old blues so much and was thrilled to be working with Muddy. It was just the way it sounded on the
Hard Again
album; it was friendly and fun, just a happy, good time. They were having a good time together and Muddy felt that too.”
Waters had told Margolin he played harp as a boy, so Margolin thought it might be fun for him to play harp on that record. “I told him I’d buy him a harp, if he played it on the album,” said Margolin. “He said okay. And I said, ‘If you don’t do it, I’m going to keep the damn thing’ and I ended up keeping it.”
“Bob was always trying to get Muddy to do off-the-wall things,” says Johnny. “But Muddy was hard to talk into doing anything off-the-wall.”
Cameron credits Johnny for getting Muddy’s band to push him during those sessions, but Johnny knew he couldn’t push Muddy to do anything he didn’t want to do. “Muddy had his own ideas,” says Johnny. “He was stubborn—he knew what he wanted. He was definitely more open to have somebody else try something, than to have him try it because he was used to having things the way he wanted them.”
Johnny played all the slide parts and most of the solos; Margolin played the background parts and occasionally took a solo. Even though Waters’s Telecaster was set up right next to him, Johnny couldn’t get him to play guitar on the first Blue Sky album. “He didn’t play at all on
Hard Again
,” says Johnny. “He didn’t pick up his guitar. He did that back in the old days too—he didn’t play the guitar very much at all. I think he considered himself a singer—mostly. I was disappointed that I didn’t play with Muddy on
Hard
Again. But we did play together on some of the other Blue Sky records and we both played on the live album.”
Although Waters never played guitar on that record, several reviewers—including one in the March 24, 1977
Rolling Stone—
commented on his slide playing. “I guess the slide on ‘Deep Down in Florida’ sounded like Muddy a little bit,” says Johnny. “I’d played like Muddy for a long time. The people just figured that on a Muddy Waters album, he’d be playin’ a song.”