Intercourse with You: His songs are full of lust and cocksuredness.Fanservice: One of Muddy's stage acts had him put a coke bottle in his pants, then take it out, shake it up and spill the contents over the excited audience.Does This Remind You of Anything?: His comeback album was named Hard Again.Muddy performed "Mannish Boy" alongside The Band in The Band's farewell concert film, The Last Waltz. Muddy was also Covered Up by artists as diverse as The Rolling Stones, The Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Bob Dylan, Frank Zappa, Captain Beefheart, Steppenwolf, The Band, Canned Heat, Humble Pie, The Allman Brothers Band, Motörhead, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Spacemen3, and others. Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone" from Highway 61 Revisited also took its inspiration from "Rollin' Stone". The Rolling Stones were named after his song "Rollin' Stone" and their hit "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction" was inspired by "I Can't Be Satisfied". Countless Blues Rock bands wouldn't exist without his influence. In fact, Muddy's electric guitar sounds, catchy beats, virile voice and sexual lyrics provided the entire backbone of Rock & Roll. It has been said that Elvis Presley based his hip shaking on Muddy doing the same thing during his stage shows. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s he had several hits: "I Can't Be Satisfied", "I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man", "Mannish Boy", "Rollin' Stone Blues", "Got My Mojo Workin'", "She's Nineteen Years Old", "I Just Want To Make Love To You".
He was the first blues musician to replace the acoustic music the genre was known for and adopt electric guitars and more prominent percussion in his songs. He became famous in the 1940s for recording blues music that wasn't sad and melancholic, but sexy, boastful, raw and full of energy. It would be a few years before producers realized that the solution was to simply let Muddy be Muddy, not Jimi.McKinley Morganfield (Ap April 30, 1983), better known as Muddy Waters, is one of the icons of Blues music. Ironically, he was never able to play these songs on-stage, his own band being unable to replicate their sound, and he was never comfortable with the album. The most interesting of the "new" songs is his cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together" (barely recognizable as the Stones song), which opens with the band sounding like they're in the middle section of "Sunshine of Your Love." Waters pulls this and the rest off vocally, and the album did got him some gigs playing to college audiences that otherwise might not have heard him. The covers of the old songs are OK, if a little loud - "She's Alright" starts to resemble "Voodoo Chile" more than its original, "Catfish Blues," and that's fine if you're looking for Waters to sound like Hendrix (no one has ever explained the "My Girl" fragment with which the song closes, however). Recorded in May of 1968, Electric Mud features Waters in excellent vocal form, running through new versions of old songs such as "I Just Want to Make Love to You," "She's Alright," "Hoochie Coochie Man," "Mannish Boy," and "The Same Thing." But he isn't playing, and the band that is - Phil Upchurch, Roland Faulkner, and Pete Cosey on guitars, Gene Barge on sax, Charles Stepney on organ, Louis Satterfield on bass, and Morris Jennings on the drums - is trying awfully hard to sound like the Jimi Hendrix Experience-meets- Cream, playing really loud with lots of fuzztone and wah-wah pedal. King, and this time Leonard Chess' son Marshall conceived Electric Mud as a way for Waters to reach out to the Rolling Stones/ Hendrix/ Cream audience. Previously, in 1966, Chess Records had recorded Waters' Brass and the Blues, trying to make him sound like B.B. Meanwhile, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, and Cream were selling millions of records each using licks and sometimes songs learned from Waters. By 1968, Waters was no longer reaching black audiences, who were mostly listening to soul music by that time, and he also wasn't selling records to more than a relatively small cult of white blues enthusiasts.
This album marks what could probably be considered the nadir of Muddy Waters' career, although at the time it did sell somewhere between 200,000 and 250,000 copies, a lot for Waters in those days.