When the audience for Chicago blues shifted in the 1960’s from working class black to college age white, a good bit of strange and sometimes wonderful music resulted. Electric Mud certainly makes the first category. The second? Well…
Leonard and Phil Chess had already tried to market Muddy Waters to suit the folk craze and even the brass craze (remember Herb Alpert?) but it was left to Leonard’s son Marshall to meld Muddy with psychedelic rock. Electric Mud, released in that terrible watershed year of 1968, is the result.
Muddy, backed by the rock band Rotary Connection, does his best, but the result is about as happy an event as that of the Titanic meeting its iceberg. Marshall Chess would later claim that Electric Mud was a commercial success, which, if true, doesn’t say anything about the music. Still, with the passage of forty-five years, the music, while remaining exactly what it was, can be experienced not so much as a catastrophe, but as a curio.
