Today marks the 50th anniversary of Muddy Waters' seminal set at the 1960 Newport Jazz festival. The festival itself has been remembered with some infamy for the riots that swept through town the night before Muddy's set. It is remembered in better light for wrapping up on a late Sunday afternoon when it was all just so right.
Released three years later,
Muddy Waters at Newport, 1960 remains as one of Muddy's--and the blues'--utterly essential albums.
And of course, it almost didn't happen. The blues program scheduled for Sunday afternoon was spared summary execution by the Newport Town Council. Allowing this program to commence was the council's sole concession, having voted 4-3 to cancel the rest of the jazz festival. Given the ugliness of the preceding 24 hours, this concession seems almost magnanimous in retrospect. It was almost certainly a move on the town council's part to redeem its suddenly and unexpectedly-tarnished image. Sunday's program was to be filmed by the United States Information Agency "for promoting American culture overseas..." While canceling this particular commitment would have cured some minor headaches, allowing the event to go forward with cameras rolling ensured that the last (and likely most enduring) images coming out of Newport would not be of the previous night's chaos.
It has been frequently cited that the Newport 1960 riot broke out when 3-400 jazz fans tried to storm the gates through "only a handful of cops" and into Freebody Park. Sometimes these accounts suggest that Ray Charles was already on stage when this occurred, but that's just junk.
Newport's streets were already swirling into the dumper long before the gate-crashing. By the Friday before, there were thousands more young people than either Freebody Park, or Newport itself, could accommodate. It should be remembered that this was 4th of July weekend and thousands of folks were looking to spend it on the beach. There is no way to estimate how many of the rioters were actually there to get into the festival and how many were swept up into the mayhem. Hundreds were unable to find lodging the night before in a town already swollen with ticket-holding festival-goers. Hundreds spent Friday night on the beach and in the rain.
Saturday the weather was gorgeous and Newport was jammed. "Midday we inched along in our patrol car and eventually had to abandon it," Cab Costello, a retired Newport patrolman recalled. "The beer stores in town were selling to buyers all day long, which obviously was a mistake."
By late in the afternoon, the expanding crowd had descended on Freebody Park. The State Police were called in to augment Newport's only 100 officers. Scattered fistfights were already breaking out in the mob. At 7:30, an hour before the Festival's scheduled start time, the crowd rushed the southeast gate. "Kids began tearing down the big wooden gate to get into the concert," Jack Taylor, another Newport PD vet remembered. He drove a refrigerator truck into the breach to "block the gap and keep them out."
The Festival's promoter, George Wein, was asked not to cancel the evening's performances no matter how bad things got outside the park. The Powers-That-Were were justifiably concerned that 16,000 pissed off jazz fans would be dumped into the riot. Ray Charles and Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross went on as scheduled as the riot raged on in the streets. Two hundred cops locked arms and tried to push the crowd back. They were met with a hail of bottles and debris. Ill-prepared for such a melee, the officers wore no helmets.
When the fire hoses didn't break up the mob, the cops got busy with the tear gas and riot batons. Almost 4 hours after the riot began, the officers finally managed to split them "into two running groups."
At midnight, the governor deployed three companies of the Rhode Island National Guard. With 170 of them arrested, the rioters were pushed back and contained on the beach. Newport began busing them out of town first thing in the morning, at roughly the time Muddy Waters and his band were arriving, having driven in a station wagon all the way from Chicago. Patrolled by soldiers and with their streets a shambles of broken bottles and windows, the Town Council had a tough choice to make. They could have easily cut their losses and canceled it all. They instead permitted the blues program to go on as planned--and be filmed--hoping that they'd give the world a high point with which to remember that chaotic weekend.
That afternoon saw Otis Spann, backed by the rest of the Muddy Waters Band, serve up a rock-solid set (eventually released in Europe) that helped establish for him a secondary career as a bandleader. What little I've seen of John Lee Hooker's set (also backed by Muddy's band) has been on youtube, such as this little nugget here...
John Lee Hooker @ Newport, '60Muddy's set will always be the jewel in that afternoon's crown. He knew he had a lot riding on this one. Playing big meant risking losing big and when he took that stage, he was stepping into places he'd never been. It wasn't just about playing to white audiences--Muddy had already played for white folks on both sides of the Atlantic, though nothing resembling at this scale. And it wasn't just about marketing, turning white jazz and folk fans onto Muddy. That afternoon was about arriving. With that driving, grinding, pile-driver of a South Side sound on Newport's prestigious stage, it was as much about legitimacy as anything else. Electric Chicago blues was demanding it be recognized as American, rather than regional, music. On that stage, they looked 16,000 white folks in the face and demanded to be regarded as the equals and peers of all the musicians who had come before.
I believe Muddy was mindful of this during his set--for the most tenuous of reasons. As he thunders into
Hoochie Coochie Man's close, he changes the lyrics, switching out "the whole round world" for "the whole United States knows I'm here..." It was a rare occurrence. I've got a stack of Muddy's live performances here (and, yup, most will show up on this blog...) and he rarely deviated from the original lyrics in that part. He was making it personal.
Hello, America, we're here! Shove it up your ass if you don't like it!Do I think Muddy was feeling the uncertainty of it all when he took that stage? Yes, and again for the same tenuous reasoning. While admittedly still a new song, (they'd recorded it only weeks before), Muddy sounds tentative starting things off with
I Got My Brand on You. It is an undeniably fine version, but Muddy sounds detectably cautious. When compared to the Chess single (conveniently included for our comparison on the 2001 MCA re-release), Newport's opening track sounds less-assured. Four songs later, he blows the lyrics for
Tiger In Your Tank.
This is of course purely conjecture on my part. Muddy was a consistently-unflappable performer and this
Tiger remains a strong version--Muddy never missed a beat and the fans never knew the difference. A case could just as easily be made that, being new to their repertoire, Muddy could hardly be faulted. I'd as quickly argue that that is precisely where nerves will present themselves.
Using that same yardstick, what is even more apparent throughout this performance is that Muddy
knew he owned the joint.
In the end, Muddy isn't remembered for Newport because of history. What he and his band served up that Sunday afternoon was one of the blues' perfect sets. There are many more legendary than this one, but these original 9 songs added up to an album that remains as essential now, 47 years later, as it did when it was released.
Live at Newport, 1960 is a disc that starts off soft and wraps up with guns blazing, delivering definitive versions of
Baby, Please Don't Go, Soon Forgotten, and
Feel So Good along the way. But it's Muddy's
Mojo that gets remembered the most from Newport '60, more than any other song, more than the riot itself. It ended up being a two-part
Mojo because the fans, dancing in the aisles, were digging it so much they had to keep it going.
And what a band. Otis Spann on piano. The incomparable James Cotton on harp. Pat Hare on lead guitar. Andrew Stevenson on bass and the swinging Chicago vet Francis Clay on the kit. Pat Hare would soon be off to prison, and Stevenson to obscurity, but they left behind them an undeniable moment in the sun.
Muddy's set was followed (or climaxed) by an all-star jam that has never been released on any versions of this album.
As far as anyone knew--in fact, as most believed--it was over. The Newport Jazz festival would be no more. So moved was he by its closing moments, legendary poet Langston Hughes, himself a member of the Planning Board, scratched
Good-Bye Newport Blues on the back on a Western Union blank. He handed the poem to Spann, who returned to the stage and served up an impromptu rendering that cuts straight to the heart of the blues.
"What's going to happen to my music?" Spann croons. "What's going to happen to my song?"
The Newport Jazz Festival would return after a two-year hiatus and Muddy would continue on with his storied career for better than two more decades. Running alongside him as it has for a half century now, his set at Newport '60 still barks loudly as one of the Chicago blues' many definitive moments.
Peace, Mudcatz.
Muddy Waters
Live at Newport 1960
MCA 20011. I Got My Brand On You
2. Hoochie Coochie Man
3. Baby Please Don't Go
4. Soon Forgotten
5. Tiger In Your Tank
6. I Feel So Good
7. Got My Mojo Working, p.1
8. Got My Mojo Working, p.2
9. Good-bye Newport Blues
10. I Got My Brand On You*
11. Soon Forgotten*
12. Tiger In Your Tank*
13. Meanest Woman*
*CD Bonus tracks
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