This album marks what could probably be considered the nadir of
Muddy Waters' career, although at the time it did sell somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 copies, a lot for
Waters in those days. By 1968,
Waters was no longer reaching black audiences, who were mostly listening to soul music by that time, and he also wasn't selling records to more than a relatively small cult of white blues enthusiasts. Meanwhile,
the Rolling Stones,
Jimi Hendrix, and
Cream were selling millions of records each using licks and sometimes songs learned from
Waters. Previously, in 1966,
Chess Records had recorded
Waters'
Brass and the Blues, trying to make him sound like
B.B. King, and this time
Leonard Chess' son
Marshall conceived
Electric Mud as a way for
Waters to reach out to the
Rolling Stones/
Hendrix/
Cream audience. Recorded in May of 1968,
Electric Mud features
Waters in excellent vocal form, running through new versions of old songs such as
"I Just Want to Make Love to You," "She's Alright," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy," and
"The Same Thing." But he isn't playing, and the band that is --
Phil Upchurch,
Roland Faulkner, and
Pete Cosey on guitars,
Gene Barge on sax,
Charles Stepney on organ,
Louis Satterfield on bass, and
Morris Jennings on the drums -- is trying awfully hard to sound like the
Jimi Hendrix Experience-meets-
Cream, playing really loud with lots of fuzztone and wah-wah pedal. The covers of the old songs are OK, if a little loud --
"She's Alright" starts to resemble
"Voodoo Chile" more than its original,
"Catfish Blues," and that's fine if you're looking for
Waters to sound like
Hendrix (no one has ever explained the
"My Girl" fragment with which the song closes, however). The most interesting of the "new" songs is his cover of
"Let's Spend the Night Together" (barely recognizable as the
Stones song), which opens with the band sounding like they're in the middle section of
"Sunshine of Your Love." Waters pulls this and the rest off vocally, and the album did got him some gigs playing to college audiences that otherwise might not have heard him. Ironically, he was never able to play these songs on-stage, his own band being unable to replicate their sound, and he was never comfortable with the album. It would be a few years before producers realized that the solution was to simply let
Muddy be
Muddy, not
Jimi. ~ Bruce Eder
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