This song does extra duty for the entertainment-conscious citizen you can either fry out on the inherent meta-ridiculousness of the whole thing, or you can appreciate some true hybridized blues-rock. Trackwise, the big drooler/raver is for sure when Muddy rips into his cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend The Night Together", belting out a hearty, lustful, "DON'T you worry 'bout what's on my mind - I don't wantcha to think about it…" over a wall of overdriven fuzz wailin' guitars that would make Cheech and Chong shit their pants, working in a burgeoning, crunching Lo-Led Zeppelin or Cream-In-A-Can motif just behind the awe-inspiring power-noodling of the twin leads. But since they were also ignoring “Skip” Spence and The Velvet Underground at the same time, what the fuck did they know? Too fucked up for the trad folk blues crowd, too trad folk blues for the fucked up crowd, the record suffered near-abortive sales and was deemed a "failed experiment" by the few that did stop laughing enough to listen to it. Take Muddy out to a field of flowers and photograph him glaring dubiously out from over a flowing white kaftan, love beads gratuitously strung about the famous leathery neck, his unicorn-like conk of processed hair keeping part of it back in 1954 somehow… if Muddy was down with the peace, the love vibration, could your own ultra-square parents be very far behind? It was close but no cheroot… Get the pre-eminent elder statesman of the blues, trip him out, wind him up, and put him in the studio with the finest acid-rock hacks money could buy. Jimi, Blue Cheer, The Ron Wray Light Show, circa squalls of sloppily sculptured noise forced by sheer blown-out will into mind-bending, orgasmic hardrock bliss. Naturally I was immediately thereafter compelled to seek out this hard round black object of potential transcendence: namely, the 1968 "Electric Mud" epic where greedy music moguls tried to shoe-horn our hero into the then burgeoning genre of acid rock. I just taken Chicago completely over!"Įlectric Blues 1939-2005.The way I first heard of this album was reading some old interview of Muddy Waters, where he was complaining that this was his worst album, he felt completely degraded making it, selling out, or tryin to sell out, yadda yadda yadda etc., you can imagine the general scene. "I came up at the right time and the right season, and I should say, I just taken it over. "Maybe somebody else would have come up and went another way," Waters mused. It’s a sure bet no one will ever take his place. The King of Chicago Blues died of cancer Apat age 70. Producer Johnny Winter strove to restore Muddy’s original sound on his acclaimed 1977 LP ‘Hard Again.’ "He was one of the young white kids who was really deep into it," said Muddy. "I hope they never play it." During the mid-‘70s, Waters underwent a studio renaissance on a new label, Blue Sky. "I really went with the company with that part," he said. The nadir was his pseudo-psychedelic 1968 travesty ‘Electric Mud.’ Muddy freely ripped the album later on. "I go back a couple of years later and didn’t bring it, and then they’re cryin’, ‘Where’s your electric guitar?’"Īlways loyal to Chess, the ‘60s weren’t overly kind to Muddy from a recording standpoint. ‘Where’s he comin’ from with all this noise?’" said Muddy, who tried to comply on his next visit. "I went over there, and they went stone nuts. British fans accustomed to Big Bill Broonzy’s acoustic blues weren’t quite ready for the aural assault. In between the two Mojos, Waters made his maiden voyage to England in 1958, bringing along his electric guitar. "I put the arrangement on there," says Cotton. But this rendition wouldn’t be the one everyone so widely copied that version was done live at the 1960 Newport Jazz Festival with James on harp (Chess issued Waters’ set on LP). As Cotton noted, Little Walter was still his main harp man in the studio other participants were his essential 88s ace Otis Spann, guitarist Jimmy Rogers, bassist Willie Dixon, and new drummer Francis Clay. When Muddy got back to Chicago, he made the song his own on either Decemor January 16, 1957. I taught him the words when I knew everything. I need to learn that song so I can do it.' He said, 'Learn the words to it for me.' So I learned the words, and I learned to play it. "Muddy said, 'That's my kind of stuff there, talkin' about the mojo and all that kind of thing. She's the one that originally did 'Mojo,’" says his then-road harpist, James Cotton. "We went on tour with a lady named Ann Cole.