Muddying the Waters
There is no doubt at all that Muddy Waters is one of the greatest bluesmen of all time, and perhaps the most influential. His music is legendary, full stop. However one album in his consistently impressive canon that is always likely to stir up some heated debate is 1968's psychedelic blues-rock experiment "Electric Mud", whereby the father of Chicago Blues and the king of the amplified urban sound went all fuzzed out wah-wah pedals on our collective asses.
"Electric Mud" features heavy rocking and heavily psychedelically influenced versions of Waters classics, such as "Mannish Boy" and "Hoochie Cooche Man" as well as a couple of new compositions and a re-working of the Rolling Stone's rollicking "Let's Spend The Night Together" (itself surely a wonderful irony for the Waters-adoring Stones who themselves had taken the blues as a springboard to the mainstream in the psychedelic sixties). The album splits opinion cleanly, with purists deriding the commerciality of such a selling-out, which they say aimed to capitalise only on the new white audience who had recently begun to embrace Waters' Chess recordings after a long period in the wilderness. For this many despise it. For others it is a brave step into experimental territory, a groundbreaking concept album that was ahead of its time and offers an interesting and rewarding diversion to Waters' more traditional recording career.
Waters himself seems to have not been a fan of the recording, in some subsequent instances disowning it almost entirely. I think this is a shame and am probably more in the latter camp as, while i accept the charges of selling-out levelled against it, feel that this should not be a reason to dismiss it so vehemently. Mind you, some people still wish Dylan had never gone electric at Newport but that is their loss. For "Electric Mud" is an album that I really love, not for its straight-up blues qualities because you can easily find that elsewhere, but more as a daring testament to a time when music was branching off in all sorts of exciting directions. And to my ears the experiment works brilliantly. Not all the time, but enough to provide a thrillingly raw workout of an album, with many songs one-take wonders, and Waters' drawling delivery merging fantastically with the loose fuzzy drone of his electric band.
There is an energy to the record which is immediately entrancing and the drums drive it forward at an incessantly rocking pace, and there is no small amount of Funkadelic-style grooving. And while Waters didn't contribute guitar to the project, his voice is by no means out-powered by the effects laden production and instead fits naturally and confidently with the sonic banquet laid on for him. Some of you may reading this may have come across Chuck D's championing of the record, and indeed his filmed rediscovery of Chess' heritage and the story of this record in Scorsese's brilliant The Blues documentary series is well worth watching. Just don't bother with the rock-rap tribute he fronts as part of this film. For that truly is a musical experiment that I could have well done without.
"Electric Mud" features heavy rocking and heavily psychedelically influenced versions of Waters classics, such as "Mannish Boy" and "Hoochie Cooche Man" as well as a couple of new compositions and a re-working of the Rolling Stone's rollicking "Let's Spend The Night Together" (itself surely a wonderful irony for the Waters-adoring Stones who themselves had taken the blues as a springboard to the mainstream in the psychedelic sixties). The album splits opinion cleanly, with purists deriding the commerciality of such a selling-out, which they say aimed to capitalise only on the new white audience who had recently begun to embrace Waters' Chess recordings after a long period in the wilderness. For this many despise it. For others it is a brave step into experimental territory, a groundbreaking concept album that was ahead of its time and offers an interesting and rewarding diversion to Waters' more traditional recording career.
Waters himself seems to have not been a fan of the recording, in some subsequent instances disowning it almost entirely. I think this is a shame and am probably more in the latter camp as, while i accept the charges of selling-out levelled against it, feel that this should not be a reason to dismiss it so vehemently. Mind you, some people still wish Dylan had never gone electric at Newport but that is their loss. For "Electric Mud" is an album that I really love, not for its straight-up blues qualities because you can easily find that elsewhere, but more as a daring testament to a time when music was branching off in all sorts of exciting directions. And to my ears the experiment works brilliantly. Not all the time, but enough to provide a thrillingly raw workout of an album, with many songs one-take wonders, and Waters' drawling delivery merging fantastically with the loose fuzzy drone of his electric band.
There is an energy to the record which is immediately entrancing and the drums drive it forward at an incessantly rocking pace, and there is no small amount of Funkadelic-style grooving. And while Waters didn't contribute guitar to the project, his voice is by no means out-powered by the effects laden production and instead fits naturally and confidently with the sonic banquet laid on for him. Some of you may reading this may have come across Chuck D's championing of the record, and indeed his filmed rediscovery of Chess' heritage and the story of this record in Scorsese's brilliant The Blues documentary series is well worth watching. Just don't bother with the rock-rap tribute he fronts as part of this film. For that truly is a musical experiment that I could have well done without.
posted by Twelve Bar at 7:50 AM
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