Muddy Waters - Electric Mud (1968)

Muddy Waters - Electric Mud (1968)
FULL CD AUDIO | WAV+CUE | COVERS | 276Mb

In an attempt to make Muddy more sellable to his newly-found White audience, Chess lumbered him with Hendrix-influenced psychedelic blues arrangements for Electric Mud. Commercially, actually, the results weren't bad; Marshall Chess claims it sold between 150,000 and 200,000 copies. Musically, it was as ill-advised as putting Dustin Hoffman into a Star Wars epic. Guitarists Pete Cosey and Phil Upchurch are very talented players, but Muddy's brand of downhome electric blues suffered greatly at the hands of extended fuzzy solos. Muddy and band overhaul classics like "I Just Want to Make Love to You" and "Hoochie Coochie Man," and do a ludicrous cover of "Let's Spend the Night Together"; wah-wah guitars and occasional wailing soprano sax bounce around like loose basketballs. It's a classically wrongheaded, crass update of the blues for a modern audience. The 1996 CD reissue adds interesting historical liner notes. ~ Richie Unterberger, All Music Guide

Electric Mud is a 1968 album by Muddy Waters which mixed blues with psychedelic rock arrangements on several of Waters' classic songs. The album was a major commercial success, but wasn't well received by critics. It has at once been considered a groundbreaking experiment and a commercial sell-out.

Riding the wave of the folk-rock boom of the 1960s as well as a revived interest in the original form spurred by the success of blues-based rockers such as The Rolling Stones, Waters had found a mainstream white audience after more than two decades of jukebox race music hits on Chess Records and playing the Chicago blues club circuit. In an attempt to capitalize on this new popularity, producer Marshall Chess (son of label founder and owner Leonard Chess) convinced Waters to move away from the blues style he had become famous for and "modernize" his sound.

Chess brought in a host of studio musicians and worked up Jimi Hendrix-inspired psychedelic rock arrangements of several Waters classics, some new material, and a cover of the Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together".

The resulting disc, titled Electric Mud and featuring a back-cover photo of a dressed-down Waters holding a customized guitar of the sort favored by psychedelic rockers, was an immediate and severe critical debacle. Blues purists decried the move, rock critics derided the playing as derivative and pretentious, and psychedelic devotees were not generally impressed. Even Waters himself would eventually dismiss the album as "not real blues" (Waters also revealed that he played little, if any, guitar on the album).[1]

John Paul Jones, the Led Zeppelin bassist, has cited this album as the inspiration behind the song "Black Dog".

The album was a commercial success by blues standards, however, selling over 100,000 copies and reaching #127 on the Billboard Pop Albums chart; adventurous progressive FM stations picked up the album. Despite its success, the album was out of print by the end of the 1970s.

The album took on a second life in the 1990s, as hip-hop artists, notably Chuck D of Public Enemy, discovered the album as a source of fresh samples and funky arrangements. The album was released on a deluxe CD edition in 1996; in 2003 many of the original players reunited with Chuck D to record a rap tribute to Electric Mud (these sessions were filmed as part of the PBS television series "The Blues". In June 2003 the reunited band, fronted by Chuck D, headlined the Chicago Blues Festival playing new versions of several tracks from the Electric Mud sessions.

Tracklist:
01. I Just Want to Make Love to You
02. (I'm Your) Hoochie Coochie Man
03. Let's Spend the Night Together
04. She's Alright
05. Mannish Boy
06. Herbert Harper's Free Press News
07. Tom Cat
08. The Same Thing

http://rapidshare.com/files/121991974/MW-EMud.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/121991882/MW-EMud.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/121999723/MW-EMud.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/122006081/MW-EMud.part4.rar
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