Psychfan's Trip O' Th' Week - Mindbending Mud

Sometimes [writes Psychfan - Ed.] when I heard Elvis mentioned in the late sixties or early seventies I found myself wondering why he didn't assemble an all star band of young players and make an up-to-date rock or blues rock record. After all (I reasoned), all he had to do was snap his fingers and the biggest names in the business would line up to play in such a band and the album would give him a badly needed relevance boost.

This was seriously naive for a few reasons. First, a lot of big name blues rock musicians had big money commitments taking up most of their time, along with big drug habits taking up the rest. It may not have been as easy as I thought to assemble a superstar band for this purpose.

The bigger problem, though, was my mistaken assumption that Elvis wanted to update his sound in the way I envisioned, that he wanted to follow the path that others had taken in a direction that had diverged from his own.

Whatever was leading me to think along these lines was also active in Chicago, where young Chess Records  exec Marshall Chess was being given leeway to experiment by his label-owner father. His version of the idea was to get Muddy Waters to record psychedelic blues. He left out the part about big name backing musicians, though he did use quality session players, including guitarists Phil Upchurch and future Miles Davis sideman Pete Cosey. The two albums that resulted, Electric Mud and After The Rain, were derided as attempts to cash in on current trends (which they were) and as artistically worthless (I would argue that they were not).

There's an interesting segment in the Red, White and Blues documentary that was part of Martin Scorsese's Blues series on PBS. In it, Chuck D from Public Enemy and others debate the worth of Electric Mud, with Chuck D in favor. To me, the two LPs sound like a pretty decent psychedelic blues band that happens to have Muddy Waters as lead vocalist. Of course I was the exact person Marshall Chess was targeting with this ploy so my opinion may not be reliable. Judge for yourself. Muddy returned to his own style of playing after that and later worked with Johnny Winter, which was probably a better idea.

Chess tried something similar with Howlin Wolf, but that's another story for another time. Also, they eventually got it right with the London Sessions series a few years later. Elvis ended up performing in Vegas and hiring James Burton to play rockabilly and country guitar, along with the Sweet Inspirations on gospel backing vocals. The mixture of old Elvis songs and carefully chosen covers of current country and pop material that they performed there seemed perfectly appropriate to me by then.