Muddy Waters-Electric Mud (1968)

 

Artist:  Muddy Waters

Title:  Electric Mud

Label: Chess

Format: CD

Cat #: CHD-9364 

Year of Release: 1968

Country and Year of Edition Issue: US 1996 The Original Chess Masters series

Listed Condition: VG+/VG+

Sell Date: 2/8/21

Sell Price: $5.99

Discogs Last Sold: 12/28/20 $7.50 NM/NM

Low: $2.79

Median: $5.50

High:  $14.99

Current low price: $4.49 VG+/VG+

Current Number on Sale at Discogs: 15

Have/Want: 299/106

Where Sold: Jonesboro, AR  

Time it took to sell:  10 years

Where and When Bought: internet early aughts

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: B+

Sad To See It Go:  No

"What Is This Shit?-Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone

"That Electric Mud record was dogshit. But when it came out, it started selling like wild, but then they started sending them back. They said, 'This can't be Muddy Waters with all this shit going on, all this wha-wha and fuzztone.'"-Muddy Waters

Square, the rating for unlistenable-Rolling Stone Record Guide 1979

Universally hated by American critics and the artist himself in it’s day, Electric Mud is actually a damn good psychedelic rock album that got more acclaim in recent decades.  In it’s day,  Hendrix used "Herbert Harper's Free Press News" to psych himself up before gigs.  The record sold at least 150,000.  The players weren't some popular kids brought in to capitalize on the commercial psychedelic rock market like Hooker 'n Heat seemed to be.

It was a real deal Black Psychedelic incursion with top line players: guitarist Phil Upchuch played with Curtis Mayfield, Otis Rush and Jimmy Reed, and still lives--Dylan got him on 2009's Christmas In The Heart.  Guitarist Pete Cosey was a Chess session man who also played with Miles Davis.  Keyboardist Charles Stepney went on to work with peak era Earth Wind and Fire before passing of a heart attack in 1976.  Bass player Louis Satterfield also played trombone, and was also in peak era Earth Wind and Fire, playing live on Gratitude.  He passed in 2004.  Drummer Morris Jennings played all over the place from Curtis Mayfield on "Superfly" to Roy Buchanan before passing in 2016.  

As for me, I also prefer the 50's Chess recordings of Waters.  I had a copy of Hard Again produced by Johnny Winter for the rock world, which is a solid late 70's Blues Rock record, better than what Winter was doing at the time.  I liked that one quite a bit when I got it in a $5 box of records in the early 80's.   I got a remastered CD copy of Electric Mud from collecting the 1996 "Saloman 100" after realizing I never really gave the album a concentrated listen.  Nick had Otis Spann's The Biggest Thing Since Colossus a few ticks higher, and the two albums really do make a nice pair of late 60's psychedelic informed Blues.  The real pairing with Electric Mud however, is The Howlin' Wolf Sessions from 1969,  which had the same session band back Howlin' Wolf to the same dislike from the bandleader.

People got a little wigged on the revised Willie Dixon standards or his own standard "Mannish Boy", but he also dips into the Jagger/Richards songbook doing a cool "Let's Spend The Night Together" totally different from the Stones approach. 

This one aged well.