Electric Mud

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This article concerns the album Electric Mud by the artist Muddy Waters. For the band Electric Mud see Gus Lambros and Electric Mud.

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Electric Mud

Studio album by Muddy Waters

Released

October 5, 1968

Recorded

May 1968

Genre

Blues

Length

36:54

Professional reviews

All Music Guide link

Muddy Waters chronology

Brass and the Blues
(1967)

Electric Mud
(1968)

After the Rain
(1969)

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.

1 Background
2 Recording
3 Reception
4 Track listing
- 4.1 Album personnel
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Background

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.

[edit] Recording

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".

[edit] Reception

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.