Hail Muddy

Blues greats keep Waters music flowing

by Don Fluckinger

Seeing the Muddy Waters Tribute band play is like going to baseball's All-Star game. The group include the late Waters' entire 1970s-era band and six players who have become popular on their own: Jerry Portnoy (harmonica), Willie "Big Eyes" Smith (drums), Calvin "Fuzz" Jones (bass), Luther "Guitar Jr." Johnson, "Steady Rollin'" Bob Margolin, and Pinetop Perkins, an 85-year-old blues institution who was born before B.B. King, Robert "Jr." Lockwood, and even Muddy Waters himself were.

It's quite a line-up card, but of all the players, it's Perkins who has made the most history. The Mississippi-born piano player has done it all, playing in the '40s on the seminal radio show The King Biscuit show with Sonny Boy Williamson, joining Earl Hooker in the '50s, and eventually filling the legendary Otis Spann's shoes in the Waters band in the late '60s. The funny thing is, he started out playing guitar and picked up the piano later, switching to piano full-time after an altercation with a mad-as-hell chorus girl 50 years ago in Helena, Arkansas, that resulted in a stabbing.

"My arm, they wanted to cut it off up to the elbow," Perkins says, joking that the amputation didn't come to pass because the man who was running the club that night said, "I don't want no one-armed piano player, I want one with two."

"I played piano with one hand a long, long time before the other hand got back in order," adds Perkins, who took the nickname "Pinetop" after adopting the little-known Clarence "Pinetop" Smith's "Pinetop's Boogie Woogie" as a signature song.

Though Perkins dropped out of the blues world through most of the 1960s, old friend and guitarist Earl Hooker convinced him to get back onto the recording scene in 1968, and when Spann left Waters, Perkins took his place. During the next few years Waters assembled the ensemble that today makes up the MWTB, with Margolin joining in 1973.

"We picked up Bob in Boston, Massachusetts, a long time ago, when he was real young [he was 23]," Perkins says. "One of the boys got messed up in jail. And we got Bob."

Says Margolin: "I had seen [Waters] and Pinetop play a number of times way before I met them. . . . I went down to see them in Boston one night, and it turned out to be right after Muddy had fired a guitar player the night before -- I was the next one he saw. The harmonica player in the band at the time, when I walked in, mentioned something to me, mentioned something to Muddy, and Muddy said, `Come down to the hotel tomorrow and bring your guitar,' which I did. I had him scoped out pretty good, I just knew to play the old . . . stuff, and that impressed him, and he gave me a chance."

Later, in 1980, in a dispute with Waters' manager, the entire band walked, reforming as the Legendary Blues Band. Although Perkins left that ensemble several years later, Smith kept it together for a time. Then in 1993, on the 10th anniversary of Waters' death, a Boston booking agent got the idea to reunite the group to do a five-day run of tribute gigs at the House of Blues in Cambridge. Since then, the group have toured with B.B. King and recorded a Grammy-nominated CD; and they get together several times a year to play all Waters tunes, all night.

The CD, You're Gonna Miss Me (When I'm Dead & Gone) (Telarc), features an amazing roster of guests (including Chicago blues stalwarts Buddy Guy, the late Junior Wells, and Koko Taylor); fellow Waters band alumni James Cotton; rockers Gregg Allman and Peter Wolf; and bluesmen Billy Branch and Sonny Landreth.

Also adding lead vocals to a track ("Going to Main Street") is Levon Helm, a member of the Band, which as rock fans recall invited Muddy Waters and his band to the Last Waltz, the biggest rock event of the 1970s. Although the assembly of talent for the MWTB recording paralleled that of the Last Waltz, Margolin -- who did both -- calls the MWTB more of a '90s-style "virtual" Last Waltz than a live event.

"The Last Waltz happened with everybody there in the same place together, and Muddy Waters sitting there in a dressing room," Margolin says. "A couple of seats away would be Joni Mitchell, and a couple of seats away would be Ringo Starr, and Bob Dylan would be off in another corner. But this stuff was done separately. We recorded basic tracks for it, and, say, if Buddy Guy was singing a song, he'd record his part over it at another time in another place."

Could the group record another effort together under the MWTB name? Sources at Telarc say they'd like to do it again, and Margolin adds that because the musicians still get together to record as sidemen -- they recently served as the back-up band on a CD by Waters' son Big Bill Morganfield -- "it's certainly an easy thing for us to do."

The Muddy Waters Tribute Band play at 7 and 9:30 p.m. March 14 at the Iron Horse in Northampton. Tickets are $17.50. Call (413) 584-0610.