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(train engine running)

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(ambient music)

[Adam] I was in graduate school at Columbia.

Kind of at the tail end of a long relationship

that wasn't quite working out.

I was feeling no subtleties to life at all.

I was feeling defeated.

If you're sitting alone in a room

and your girlfriend has just walked out

with somebody you knew.

You kind of say, fuck this, I'm too restless to sit here!

If I leave here, and I go somewhere, and rip open my chest,

and play, that's where my release is.

(harmonica music)

If you are forced into a different dimension of life

in which a pain suddenly hits you and it is soul deep,

it's an experience of being overtaken by emotion.

So I think I was in a space

to be able to really appreciate blues

and be struck by blues.

So I was in Harlem, and I passed the Apollo,

and I was on the next block.

And there was a guy playing right in front

of the phone company.

(blues music)

So I was a little anxious being on the street in Harlem.

But I fought my anxiety, walked up to a guy

who was watching, and I said, who is that?

He said, that's Satan.

Everybody in Harlem knows Satan.

And then I went up to him, I said,

I love your music.

I shook his hand, and I said,

I wonder if I could sit in with you on a couple songs.

I said I won't embarrass you.

And he thought for a minute and he said,

come on up!

Suddenly it was 30 people.

Before I've played a note.

You know, curiosity took.

Satan's gonna play with the white boy.

You could hear kind of murmurs.

And he started with that groove.

(heavy blues music)

* Well I want it *

* I want you! *

* I wanna make you my woman! *

* There's nothing you can do *

* Not a thing you can do *

* I get everything I want *

* Guess what, haha *

* I want you *

He just kind of threw me all over the place.

I mean his groove was incredibly strong, I just held on.

I held on for dear life.

(harmonica solo)

(cheers, applause)

The place exploded.

I mean it was an amazing feeling.

He just turned, he said, how about a hand for the young man,

and he didn't know my name.

And I said, Adam.

He goes, I am Satan. You know?

We played a few more and then it was like,

can I come back tomorrow?

And he said sure, yeah, come back.

Suddenly there was this place

that opened up in my imagination.

I mean I lived on the Upper West Side,

I had a relationship that went down in flames,

and without really being clear

what I was gonna do with my life.

I mean Harlem suddenly was possibility.

And it was an embrace, rather than a, white boy go home.

It's like a connection.

You don't know what's going to happen.

At the moment, New York City

has more racial tensions than any other American city.

New York is a racially segregated city,

in desperate trouble.

It is a city where you can be killed

for taking a wrong turn because of racial violence.

What are they doing here at 10:00 at night?

We're going to end up reaping the whirlwind

of the widening gap

between the haves and the have nots.

Personally I feel like...

A white guy in Harlem.

Harlem in the '80s was depressed economically,

but collective culturally.

This was before gentrification.

Gentrification was like this theme.

White people are coming to take over our space.

They are pushing us out.

We have a flammable atmosphere.

It's like gas in the kitchen.

All you gotta do is strike a match.

Many in this city

say the perception of racial crime has increased,

and so have tensions.

Mister Satan was trying to establish a foothold

in Harlem on 125th Street saying,

when I play here, it's a way of, it's a solace.

But one day, I actually saw a white guy.

(funky blues music)

This person was the only white person there.

(funky blues music)

This white man, what is he doing?

Is he helping him or is he stealing the music?

This is the type of talk that we heard.

To see two people that came from

two diametrically opposite existences

in the streets of Harlem, even if it violates

tribal code and takes a lot of self confidence,

a lot of courage.

Or a lot of ignorance to the environment you're in.

(funky blues music)

(applause)

Thank you sir, thank y'all!

(driving blues music)

[News Anchor] Finally tonight,

a walk on the sidewalks of New York.

Remy Blumenfeld discovered some real stars of the street.

Each street musician has his turf

And in Harlem, the streets belong to Satan.

[News Anchor] And this is Satan.

We both found it intensely exciting

to be making music on the street.

He had that before I came.

That was his space.

But the two of us together

got more people than he had by himself.

He recognized that.

That was huge.

So, to have a job as I did as a tutor,

and to realize that the money that I could actually make

with this new guitar man that I was starting to play with,

was more than that.

It was a very strange thing to quit the job,

and I was still at that point

trying to figure out who this guy was.

Till somebody took me aside, and said,

you know who you're playing with?

You're playing with Sterling Magee.

And said, you know, he was on Ray Charles's Tangerine label.

You know he played with Etta James, Marvin Gaye,

Little Anthony and the Imperials.

He backed up James Brown at the Apollo,

and they would point down the block at the Apollo Theater.

I remember one young guy coming up and saying,

you know he was in the studio with George Benson.

And he blew George Benson away.

So I was trying to figure out who he was,

and I'm getting these stories.

And the only thing I know for sure is that

nobody ever, to his face, called him Sterling.

I didn't know why.

This is the blues.

Ain't nothin' bout,

Hey, baby, why don't you treat me right?

If you act right, she would!

This is the blues.

(slow blues)

I met Sterling Magee in 1967.

I was hired by King Curtis as the bass player.

Sterling was a hell of a guitar player.

His rhythm was just off the hook.

[Sterling] Or if you wanna do it another way.

(driving blues)

When I met him, again, in Harlem, on the street...

Is this Sterling?

And I recognized his playing right away.

(driving blues)

The sense was he was ahead of his time.

The clubs were closing down.

There was no recording activity going on.

This is the late '80s.

And it was hard getting work.

He just took it to the street.

Where he can get paid

and make a living.

Blue is one of the most beautiful colors in the world.

The sky is blue, you got a clear day,

people go out to the beach, the water's blue,

it's clear without pollution.

And everybody's having fun.

How do you associate blue with such a sad

slumped down-anistic state of...

Unhappiness?

That's not the blues.

Those are the clouds.

I remember him saying he was Satan.

Which was like, whoa.

[News Anchor] You'll find him most days

on 7th Avenue in Harlem.

He calls himself Mister Satan.

What makes me the prince of darkness

is I can go into the darkness of my mind

and come out with beautiful things.

Hey, little mister.

Alright, hello, sir.

I'm Mister Satan, hello everybody viewing.

And this is my creation called Wisdom.

[Adam] Most people who hear

about a guy named Mister Satan,

first thing is, what does he do,

torture puppies, or something?

No.

It's more connected to anger at religion.

At organized religion and at ministers.

He knew the Bible inside out.

But he still...

He still like, he almost challenged God.

He said he couldn't die.

He said...

He couldn't get hurt.

And to tell you the honest to goodness,

I never seen him sick.

I feel that he is from the same planet

as Sun Ra, George Clinton, Cecil Taylor.

These people are coming from a very different place.

And I feel that's his tribe.

(relaxing music)

The reason why he changed his name to Mister Satan,

because he had a young lady, okay?

He loved the woman.

[Adam] We had a fight early on

that had to do with the money.

It was because as a street musician,

you're each gonna split the money that comes in 50/50.

We split the bills, but there's all this change,

and I sort of thought some of that should be mine

and at one point he basically got angry.

Because what I didn't realize was,

just how important it was to him, to have that money

to give to what he called the street people.

The people who ain't got nobody else.

And they loved him.

We got a group of fools leading this country, in Congress.

And anytime they talk about a damn budget

and contribute to upholding your life,

money ain't nothing without people to spend it.

If you step outside of your home any day,

you don't see people.

You don't go looking for no money, and go looting no place,

the first thing you're gonna find is somebody to talk to.

He would always say it wasn't just him.

It's what we're doing.

And I thought, wow, that's kind of great.

I mean if our music can pay him, pay me, and help them,

what's not to like?

I realized very early,

this is the best gig I'm ever gonna have.

I was his boy, in a sense.

I was the guy who was not his equal.

I was his apprentice.

So, I wanted to write something about what we were doing.

And got Harper's to assign me an article.

And I had this incredible guilt about having been paid money

to tell our story.

And I called him up.

He said, how much they pay you?

And I said, $3,000.

He goes, gimme half.

And I split it with him.

I gave him half the money.

My girlfriend at the time was like, you did?

But that's all I needed to do.

It was about us.

I'd done the writing.

We'd done the living.

When I think about Mister Satan's energy,

the analogy that comes to mind

is a story that my mother used to tell

when we would go on summer vacation.

She says, it was amazing to watch you go out there

and stand in front of the ocean.

It was like the first time you ever met something

that was more powerful than you thought you were.

I was the kid who thought I could sort of master the ocean.

And so to play with him, was to be swamped, you know?

I grew up in a small working class town

about 20 miles north of New York.

That's my mom in the '50s when she was working

as a researcher for Time magazine.

Probably around the time my father met her.

My father was an artist, and an environmentalist.

He was Jewish.

My mother was Dutch reformed.

Adam did not like to do anything badly, ever.

He was very smart.

I'm sure it drove people crazy.

He was certainly not one of those popular kids.

I skipped a grade, and I was smaller than everybody else.

And there were bigger kids picking on me.

I had my Prince Valiant haircut.

Maybe I didn't have a date because I looked like a dork.

You know, I don't know.

But when the music came along, and I learned how to play,

by God, within a month and a half I had my first girlfriend.

[Joan] I don't think that Adam's had

a really close relationship with his father.

I think that what he had with Sterling

was a kind of bonding experience

that he had a hard time having with his father.

There's a deep connection there.

His understandings about blues life helped shape my own

and maybe got me a little bit out of the

self indulgent narcissist rock dude white boy thing,

which is just, there are hardships, and there are hardships.

You know, nobody's shooting us stone dead.

The summer of 1989.

That was the summer of Do The Right Thing.

When the movie came out, it just crystallized everything.

And a lot of people said, yeah!

This is what's really happening to us.

It became where you could no longer avoid it.

It was in your face and all these emotions

came to the surface.

And people didn't want to feel like

you gonna put this back in the box.

No, you gonna deal with this.

You're not gonna pretend this is not happening.

[Adam] With Do The Right Thing in the air,

suddenly I was the problem for some people.

And I was in Harlem, and one day, a couple of guys came up

as I was just about to set up with Mister Satan,

and went to him and said,

why is this white boy playing with you?

And it got very pointed and very racial.

And he said, why are you here?

What do you love black people?

He said, you're not a harmonica player.

He said you're just one more white man

coming to rip off the black man's music.

And he said, can't nobody say,

whether there might be some hot tempered young guy

who doesn't want to see you.

What he was saying was, why can a white guy

just come into a black neighborhood and not risk anything?

It was a threat.

Who was to say one of those guys might not just

roll down a window, pow pow pow, gone!

So I had to go home.

And I stayed away.

And I had to decide.

So are you gonna play the blues for real or not?

So what does it mean to be for real?

Well one thing it means is that you play

with full attention to the complexity

of the social situation that you're actually in.

So I owe them some thanks for helping,

as Sterling would say, bless me with revelation.

Which is, you wanna play the music.

Welcome to my world.

It would have been easy

to kind of let myself be chased away.

Then I thought,

nobody's going to stop me from playing with him.

We played, people were happy to see me.

But it took me a long time to get over that.

(train running)

We were just playing one day, you know, in our everyday spot

doing our same old songs.

And suddenly there was some commotion

and I saw a couple of cameras pointed at us.

I was the director on the U2 film, Rattle and Hum,

the concert documentary film.

And one day we ended up on 125th Street, in Harlem.

* I want some freedom *

* For my people *

To Bono and myself.

Hearing this, freedom for my people,

coming, you know, wafting down the street.

It drew us.

It was like a magnet.

It was totally unplanned.

They said hey, let's just go out

and check out what's going on in Harlem today.

Going up to Harlem at that time was a thing.

Some of the people working on the film

were quite anxious and nervous about it.

It wasn't just some guy kinda,

give me a buck, come on, I'm on the corner,

I'm just, you know, riffing some cover tune.

This was something interesting.

I was just really struck by the guitar player.

There was a kind of freedom to the playing.

He was jumping all over the fretboard,

and simultaneously singing,

and working this hi hat that's playing the backbeats.

So I'm really rooted to the ground,

just blown away by what I'm hearing and seeing.

They're sort of looking at us like, we're the real.

Like, this is part of why they came to America

is to see shit like this.

Right?

In that little moment, the theme,

freedom for my people, just seemed prescient.

It just captured so much of our intention,

as a band trying to explore America.

Trying to delve more deeply into the music culture.

And it was clear from early on

that that had to be in the film.

What was then kind of interesting is that

as they were doing the album,

they felt like they went together.

("Freedom for my People" by Sterling Magee)

When it finally came out, it was a big deal.

Because our lives intersected their thing.

They sampled us into their thing.

Actually there's never been another artist

singing one of their songs on a U2 album.

This is the one and only time that that's happened.

* Freedom from confusion *

It was a very powerful little moment in the film,

and it belonged on the record for that reason.

We suddenly were recognized.

And the crowds were clearly bigger for us,

partly as a result of that.

* Oh, for my people *

Well people used to ask me,

friends of the family would ask me

what Adam was doing now that he graduated,

and I said, well he was actually playing harmonica

on the streets of Harlem.

And they'd say, really?

How do you feel about that?

He went to Princeton, didn't he?

I was a Princeton grad, 1979.

So my 10th reunion came up.

And everybody goes back, and they're in banking,

and they're the vice president,

or they were in graduate school, they've got their PhD,

they're getting their first teaching job.

And at that point I was a street musician.

It's really hard to go back to a college reunion,

at a place like that, and everybody says,

so what you doing?

Oh, okay.

Mister Satan, really?

You know, like, there's one in every class.

A combination of all these things

began to really eat away at me.

And I wanted some kind of objective measure.

I was feeling the fragility of everything.

And so I wanted to make a recording.

That if we were killed, both of us the next day,

people would at least know, wow,

these guys were here and that's what they did.

And I actually went to Sterling.

If I paid, would you go into the studio with me?

And he said, yeah, I'll do it.

I think I'll take my gloves out,

it's a little chilly out here, Mr. Gussow.

[Adam] And so I found Rachel Faro.

Who we'd run across on the streets.

Basically she was somebody who said,

if you ever want to record, here's my card.

So I called her.

This makes it so much easier

when the speakers are already at the studio.

Nothing to carry but a guitar.

That's right.

This record particularly,

just had to set 'em up and let 'em go,

and see where it went.

Because there was no way to really predict

what they were gonna do at all,

especially what Sterling was gonna do.

[Sterling] Roll it all!

("Ride the Wind" by Satan and Adam)

[Adam] I just remember the feeling of power,

that we both had.

I mean we were so adrenalized.

And we drank so much vodka, I'll be honest.

We let the bats out of the belfry.

("Ride the Wind" by Satan and Adam)

It really was gratifying

to hear how good it all sounded.

And certainly Adam was very excited because

he got to hear everything he'd been playing all this time,

in another way, like for real.

("Ride the Wind" by Satan and Adam)

We sounded huge, two guys.

And I just remember thinking, wow, we are doing it.

("Ride the Wind" by Satan and Adam)

At the end of it I felt like

that is just the greatest day of your life.

You know we had our first cassette.

Called it Satan and Adam.

("Ride the Wind" by Satan and Adam)

The first day we actually had these things for sale

we were playing a street fair,

selling something like 60 cassettes during the set.

So you go from completely uncommodified,

to, we've got our first commodified version

of Satan and Adam, and everybody can't get enough.

Once we had the recording,

I was able to give it to somebody

who was programming Summer Stage,

and then we got the chance to open for Buddy Guy.

("I Want You" by Satan and Adam)

3,000 people in Central Park, and it's like, Satan and Adam!

And I'm thinking, fuck, we're really making it.

("I Want You" by Satan and Adam)

Suddenly, we were a New York act.

Not just a Harlem act.

From the street, to the studio,

to gigs with Buddy Guy, sure.

But at the same time, for me it seemed natural,

it seemed right.

That fall, we got a gig from a woman who saw us.

And she had a bar called Kelly's in the Village.

And that was our steady gig.

I was a single guy, and I'm playing

in a lesbian bar in the Village.

And I'm sitting, going,

I'm surrounded by women, and I'm not gonna get a date.

(laughs)

And you know, and that's when Margo Lewis walks in, one day,

and says, hey, I love what you guys do!

Come down and see me sometime.

And it turns out she represents

Bo Diddley, Wilson Pickett, and the Village People.

Musically, visually, in every way,

it was just two different ends of the world.

That they could come together as they did, through music,

was a beautiful thing.

It was beautiful, you know.

Sterling was raw talent that deserved to be seen.

I wanted to find the platform for that, for him,

and put him on that platform.

As Margo began to do her thing,

Rachel went and had her conversations

with Bruce Kaplan at Flying Fish.

Flying Fish was a real label, with a real vision,

and a real owner who cared about the records on his label.

So, we got the record deal.

It was so much what I wanted.

It was a little scary for me.

I think it was very scary for Sterling.

Sterling had a lot of mistrust

about the music industry in general.

Which is not surprising for somebody

who has had that whole career and ends up

choosing to play on the street.

* You got a crazy, funny way of teasing me *

* I can't complain because it's really pleasing me *

* No matter how you're getting me near insanity *

* You'll keep on *

He talked a lot, for example, about how

he'd had a hit on Ray Charles' Tangerine label.

With Oh She Was Pretty, and man, he stifled that.

He wasn't gonna let one of his label mates supersede him.

Remember Ike and Tina Turner?

They didn't do any good

until they got out from under Ray Charles.

Ain't nobody in Ray Charles's company gonna make anything.

He prevents, I don't, you know, so...

Just like so many black artists from that era,

he saw his fair share of people not getting paid,

not getting their due.

So, you know, I sensed that he had

the same disillusionment with the music business

that I think a lot of black artists have.

The typical story,

white promoter manages,

and agencies screwed the black artists,

by instead of giving them a check,

giving them a car, or a diamond ring,

or a bottle of booze.

[Al] How artists was treated was only a reflection

of how blacks were treated in society.

The fact that you were talented.

You could entertain us.

But you can't be one of us.

The very first time we played Chelsea Commons,

and we counted out the dollars on top of the piano,

I think I counted them, and started to pay him,

and he was like, no no no!

He got ragingly angry.

I pay you, you don't pay me!

He had gone to Adam and said,

I don't want to do this any longer.

I don't want to get involved in this business thing.

A record deal will be the worst thing in the world.

He was afraid to leave the security of the street.

To leave the security of Bobby Robinson, his mentor,

and then come with these white people.

But one of the people that I approached,

once we had a record, was Quint Davis.

Who runs the New Orleans Jazz Festival.

And I get a call back from Quint and he goes,

I don't know where you got these guys,

I'm gonna give you a date,

but not only am I gonna give you a date,

I'm gonna make these guys stars.

I think he went along with this

because Satan saw that we delivered.

It was a real generous thing of him to do for my sake too.

I'm not saying he did unselfishly.

But he could see that I really wanted it.

So, I provided the jet fuel.

The jet was up.

They had taken off.

And they were happening.

(harmonica music)

[Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,

please welcome Satan and Adam!

("Seventh Avenue" by Satan and Adam)

To play a featured role on this festival,

there has to be a level of musicianship.

It can't just be cool, but not very good.

("Seventh Avenue" by Satan and Adam)

When I saw the name Satan and Adam, my first thought was,

somebody's been too clever here.

If a casting director had been hired to create a sitcom

about two opposites together in a blues band,

this'd be what they'd come up with.

* So then she kissed me *

* I'm here to tell you *

* She hit me right *

Satan himself, is you know,

like a UFO landing at your festival.

You know, he's like lightning getting out of the bottle.

And with Adam on top,

they filled the sonic space perfectly.

You know the beauty of Satan.

He got more out of the performance than the audience did.

And a true consummate artist does.

* Ah ah ah ah, she got away *

It was like being present

at the discovery of something really special.

Yeah!

Yeah!

Thank you!

When you kill at this festival,

word goes out.

I mean, word goes out.

July of '91, our album had just come out.

So Margo, she's putting the press thing out there.

[Margo] I had no problem getting the bookings.

Everybody got turned on by it.

They saw what I saw.

It's just from one end of the world to the other.

Just coming together through music, you know?

It was a great thing.

It's called co-acceleration.

You know that's when the music swings.

Great big old word, that ain't worth a damn.

[Margo] I told him I wanted to put him on a Bo Diddley tour,

and bring him to Europe, and have him open.

[Adam] You can imagine, like,

one day you're on the streets,

the next day, you're in the bus with Bo.

[Margo] Bo started on the street too.

So he could relate greatly to what Satan was about.

[Adam] So we began to have an international public.

Well we flew everywhere.

England, Scotland, Switzerland, Italy, Finland twice.

But now, finally, he felt it was Satan and Adam.

And he's not lost inside the King Curtis band.

Or Etta James, or Marvin Gaye,

or Little Anthony and the Imperials.

He's not just the guitar man.

He's the act whose name is on the marquee.

So he really felt like, you're getting what's due you,

and I'm getting what's overdue me.

And by the way, the one time we showed up at a gig

on the marquee, it said Adam and Satan.

He got pissed off.

(laughs)

He did not have an ego, but, that's wrong!

And he was really upset, I go, somebody just messed up, ugh!

Time to check in with Kimberly. Kim's got the blues tonight.

Satan and Adam.

You are gonna be at the Classic Blues Festival

this weekend, and joined by a lot of great musicians.

Just as sure as you are beautiful.

God, you can stay here forever.

(laughs)

It's a classic bromance.

It's two guys, just having a great time.

We're an odd-looking couple, so what?

Now, we have a name, we have a manager,

we have official gigs.

And then your record starts to chart.

There's no experience like this.

As you're sitting listening to the radio,

and suddenly, your music comes on the radio.

The feeling is indescribable.

It's like...

[Noah] Out on the streets of New York City,

and now on CD and tape,

the music of Satan and Adam.

How serious are you about the name, Mister Satan?

And I've read that you have the number 666,

[Satan] I do.

[Noah] From the book of revelations.

[Satan] I am very serious.

[Noah] Around your instruments there.

[Satan] I also have it around my neck and everything,

but it's not in the numbers that you would read it.

It's in a beautiful piece I made called asoxyses.

It's a square of circled squared, and square circles.

So it's nothing projecting something.

[Adam] Sterling's amazing

with being able to do this numerological stuff.

It's quite remarkable. I never really understood it.

But he's very convincing.

[Noah] I'm trying to figure out how you feel about the devil.

-Taking that name. -[Sterling] I didn't say

anything about no devil.

I am Mister Satan.

S-A-T-A-N.

I felt, here is a imbalanced man.

Extremely talented.

And how the hell did this white kid

get him up on that stage?

Correct?

The only constant thing was his performance.

He was not constant in thought.

If his mind was wandering into another place,

and he woke up one morning,

and he looked out the window and said,

the world was gonna end, the world was gonna end.

Jazz and opera and all this can't ignore blues.

It covers the entirety.

Creation digs the blues.

It was difficult for Adam to keep a continuity.

And although Adam could,

because he was like a split personality.

He was an intellect, he was a student.

And then he was a musician.

He wanted this to come off.

Jazz says hey,

It's a sunny day, and you can go out

and go in any direction you want.

This is your interpretation.

I'm just saying blues goes in a straight line

and jazz for me goes out.

I just got through crowning the whole globe

that we live under

blue.

Ain't nobody ever look up and say, oh, what a jazzy sky!

They look up and say,

oh, look at that beautiful blue sky up there.

I had a fear, that if I allowed myself

to get closer and start to get into

the philosophical aspects,

that it would definitely be a negative to the business.

And I didn't want to have a philosophical argument with him

and not show up for a gig or something, you know?

I definitely think Adam was willing to do

what a lot of people do in these kind of

co-dependent relationships, which is just,

whatever comes up, deal with it,

even if it's really complicated,

and stuff that you wouldn't consider normal, is normal,

when you're in that kind of thing.

What does that have to do with blues versus jazz?

But I missed the transition.

Stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

From the very first meeting, I did know

that I had a problem with Satan, and Miss Macie.

Miss Macie!

Reach in my jacket pocket there and get my pick.

It's tempting to think that he and I on the road

were kind of a buddy movie.

And it's Butch and Sundance, right?

But every single gig that we played on the road,

his wife, Miss Macie was in the back seat.

She never drove.

She never sat in the front seat.

She was sometimes smelling smells that weren't there.

She heard my car speakers say things to her

that they weren't saying to her.

She was counting the money that he gave to her.

That's one way he kept her happy.

She occasionally got pissed off at me or at him,

and would come right up front.

And occasionally I would play my harmonica, and,

go right back at her.

And she'd shake her head

like she knew I was saying something to her with that music.

And I was.

[Sterling] Well...

Got cold.

(laughing)

Hey, Miss Macie.

[Macie] Thank you Mister Satan.

That's why you act the way you act, 'cause you're cheap.

Oh whatever.

(Macie laughing)

[Adam] But he loved her. That's my baby.

For Adam, not only was he the road manager,

but he was a shrink.

In the sense that, he had to deal with Miss Macie

in their personal arguments and/or not.

Why don't you sit around there, and...

I don't feel like you should go there.

She wants to be in the back.

[Miss Macie] Now Mr. Gussow, you can take it to your room.

Take it to your room, Gussow.

No, you gonna tell me I shoulda went around there.

[Adam] No, I won't! No, no, no, he said

maybe you might want to be in the film.

No, I hate these movies, they're too cheap for me.

I remember one time, Sterling and Miss Macie

were fighting as we went up the Connecticut turnpike.

She hit him on the back of the head while he's driving.

That was the last straw for me.

I said, Mister Satan, that's it.

Pull to the side of the road.

It's a very, very difficult job, to move an act.

And I couldn't hang any longer, if you know what I'm saying.

With love I had to walk away, because,

I had to maintain, for myself,

I had to evaluate what that project meant to me.

And it was becoming a negative.

Today happens to be, almost exactly, to the day,

10 years from the day that we met on the streets in Harlem.

[Sterling] Our 10 year anniversary!

That's right, 10 years.

I developed an acid stomach at that point,

from just knowing that I could not control anything.

I just had a kind of surrender and submit.

It's me and Miss Macie and Mister Satan.

From start to finish.

[Adam] And a lot of acting out.

We'd moved from Margo, to a brief thing

with another agent that didn't work out at all,

to a guy named Hooter.

But it wasn't building.

The act was on a slight descending thing.

They have a little bit of lead in there.

[Adam] But that couple years, '96 to '98,

he was no longer living in New York.

They had a slumlord.

And the apartment got in bad shape,

and the landlord was doing nothing.

And I think the landlord almost wanted them out,

at a certain point.

That was the beginning of the gentrification of Harlem.

And people were pissed off about them being moved out.

So Miss Macie's mother lived in Virginia.

And so when they decided they're gonna leave their apartment

instead of just moving around the corner,

or moving down the block,

they moved a nine hour drive away.

We continued to tour.

He would drive up, sleep in his car with Miss Macie

kind of on the same block where he used to live in Harlem.

And then we would go off on the road, in my car.

And go and play a gig or two on a weekend,

and then he'd drive back down to Virginia.

So there was a lot of stress on him.

I never understood how he could do it.

How could you come home from a 300-mile drive

from Portland, Maine, and then sleep in your car that night

when I get to go home?

That's rough.

Not being a pampered artist,

or an artist with a travel budget,

and at least a roadie helping move things,

and tour managers.

When you're doing that all yourself,

after a while that has to grind on you.

And this is what I hate.

The playin' ain't no problem,

it's the work that's the problem.

It's not good food.

It's coffee.

And it's the long drives.

Too much to drink and not nearly enough sleep.

In early April of '98, I noticed,

for a couple months before that,

he just seemed kind of dispirited.

I didn't know what was going on.

He actually started, he was dying his beard black.

At it had always been gray.

And I thought, why is he dying his beard?

This is a guy, he's totally about just being who he is.

Miss Macie.

The last gig we played,

we just started off and he missed some lyrics

for the first song.

And I said, this is strange.

I mean he's never, he doesn't lose lyrics.

He's my hero, so I mean,

he's my hero 'cause his energy's

always been impossibly strong.

And when it wasn't I naturally got worried.

We had a gig on a Friday.

And that Thursday Miss Macie called me up, and said,

that they had gotten up to New York,

and had just turned around and drove all the way back home.

470 miles up, he got to his throne.

Something happened, and he drove all the way back.

[Adam] I wasn't on e-mail contact with him,

the phone number didn't work.

Sterling had really just kind of fallen off the grid.

And it was basically, he was gone.

Boom.

He was gone.

I mean apart from the sadness and concern,

I mean, huge concern.

What are you going to do when somebody just disappears?

(melancholy music)

Come on.

(melancholy music)

(melancholy music)

He's a blues musician, his instrument, the harmonica.

He was educated at Princeton and Columbia,

but he learned about music on the street.

Adam Gussow describes his odyssey and growth

in his new book, Mister Satan's Apprentice.

[Adam] So I went off on the road, on a book tour.

Mister Satan's Apprentice.

The natural question is, so how's the act doing now?

Where are you guys?

It's hard to answer that question.

I had to basically, the kind word is finesse it.

The truth is sort of lie.

'Cause I didn't know what was going on.

And I was losing a lot.

My father had died in May of 1997.

Sterling disappears a year later.

So I'm having my own struggle.

It's missing him, it's being aware of things in my life

that are not right, it's all that stuff together.

So in the spring of 2000,

my plan was to go and visit Sterling.

And I had a heart attack.

(melancholy music)

I was in intermediate intensive care

for three and a half days.

And it was an incredible life shock.

So I never got to see him that time.

I never got to see him.

Losing a father, losing Sterling.

Talk about things falling apart.

(melancholy music)

First time that I met Sterling was when I was

the brand new activity director at the nursing home.

Of course I had to get to know everybody

there in the facility and try and find out

some of their likes and dislikes in the past,

to give them a nice time while they're there.

And why I started asking Sterling some of his past,

and he wasn't really that forthcoming,

he was kind of quiet.

Kept to himself a lot.

You would see him with his head down just a little bit.

And he was always stomping his feet.

And of course in health care, sometimes you think

it's just some kind of a medical condition.

When I was asking around and a couple of folks said,

well, yeah, he was some type of a music man

or something, at one time.

There was just something about Sterling

that I knew needed a second look.

I was curious enough to go on the internet.

And I was blown away.

I got the call from Kevin.

Sterling was at this Medicare facility in Florida.

As I walked into this facility,

I did not know what I was about to see.

You know, I never associated Sterling

with medical facilities.

You know the strange thing is Sterling hated doctors.

And I remember being led out onto the patio.

Hey, Mr. Gussow.

[Adam] It had been a couple years, I think.

Yeah, let me get this.

(guitar strumming)

[Adam] He couldn't really play guitar at all.

My thought was, god, he can't play a note.

This is a man who could play circles around

any guitarist in the world.

I was shocked.

Took a while for that to sink in.

It's a struggle when you think of somebody as so powerful.

And you're forced to recognize the fact

that they're not what they were.

And I had to recognize that.

'Cause I thought of him as all-powerful.

That's Mister Satan on the band, right here.

We played y'all all that, you know that!

How you feeling?

You are beautiful!

You are handsome!

You're kind!

And most of all,

y'all is applauding.

(dramatic music)

I'm about to move,

after basically a lifetime in New York City.

I've been hired as a tenure track

assistant professor of English and Southern studies,

at the University of Mississippi, in Oxford.

And I'll be teaching courses in American Literature,

and African-American Literature.

I may do a course

on the Civil Rights Movement in the Spring.

I'm about to move to Mister Satan's own native state.

And it's a very interesting, unexpected

kind of New York-Mississippi connection.

(blowing harmonica)

The digital delay that I used on the street all those years.

I thought about all the things that, you know,

had taken place in this room.

I mean, Mister Satan and Miss Macie

were here at one point.

In fact we had a little vodka toast shortly after

our first recording session.

Well, it feels like I've done a lot of living here.

And it's time for the next chapter.

So anyway I did my mourning last night.

I've been letting go for a while.

And trying to get ready.

(dramatic music)

[Kevin] Music has always been a very big part of my life.

As I stepped into healthcare, and seen the responses

that you can get from people with music.

So my development with Sterling,

it went way beyond me

having him as just another resident.

[Sterling] Hey there!

[Kevin] Sterling Magee!

[Sterling] Good morning.

[Kevin] How are you doing?

[Sterling] A-okay, sir.

Alright.

There was just something

that emanated from him in some way.

You know and it was like some type of magnetism or whatever,

but there was just something about him that made me

take that extra step,

in getting him back on the right track again.

(uplifting music)

And here we are at the dentist's office.

And here's Sterling getting his new choppers.

Am I coming home, Mr. Kevin?

[Kevin] Yes, you're coming home.

(laughing)

What do you think, Sterling?

I like it.

[Kevin] You like your smile?

Hell yes, I like it.

Okay. Behave yourself.

I shall.

[Man] Fantastic.

(laughing)

[Man] Congratulations.

Thank you, sir.

You remember going to this, playing here?

Folk festival.

The Winnipeg Folk Festival.

Yes sir.

There's your little bio.

Read it for me.

It says, this is a wild and very original new blues duo.

Satan, Harlem's legend Sterling Magee,

kicks, stomps and roars on an electric, and percussion.

While Adam Gussow blows up soul jazz harp,

earning them a W.C. Handy nomination for their debut,

and creating a sound that is not for the faint of heart.

(laughing)

That sound like you guys?

Ain't got him no more.

You know when you get into a nursing home,

you don't have too much left of your past.

He did have a guitar that was on his chair, in his room,

but he was using it more for a clothes rack

than anything else.

It hit me that even what I was doing at the time,

wasn't enough for him.

A lady who had her mom there at the same time,

she knew a blues guy

who was really super here in the area.

By the name of TC Carr.

She said, there's this man, this music man here,

he's full of music.

And he's a real nice black man,

you got to meet him sometime.

I said okay.

And the next time I came,

I brought a harmonica with me,

and I ran into Mr. Sterling.

And I just said, well I play harmonica, he says, you do?

Can you play it?

(playing blues harmonica)

Yes, yes, yes!

And he just lit up.

His eyes just went...

And Kevin brought out a guitar, and he strummed,

and I played, and man, it was cool, because,

I could see it pouring out of him.

And I knew this was something that I was supposed to do.

(bright blues music)

TC recently had some heart surgery himself,

so he was recovering too.

He'd come over every once in a while,

and play with Sterling on the back porch.

Sterling wasn't doing any singing or anything like that,

but he was playing along with TC.

(bright blues music)

[Sterling] We sat back in the patio back there

once or twice a week.

And it's become a good thing.

It's like medicine for me.

Wow!

(uplifting music)

This is my wife Sherrie.

That's our wedding photo.

I mean it's a photo that we got,

that was at the wedding.

And everybody who came to the wedding signed it.

That's Shaun, at about a year and a half maybe.

That is Mila, so that's Sherrie's daughter.

That's the wall.

I thought I was gonna play more music down here.

The truth is, I've had a lot of other things on my mind.

I'm in a very different position in my own life, I think,

kind of been my own spiritual development.

Would I have ended up here if I hadn't met him?

To the extent that I'm an English professor, it was because

African-American literature was what I do.

And my interest in that was partly fueled

by my experience with him.

I wouldn't have had the qualifications to get this job

if I hadn't met him.

And had that whole life in Harlem.

When you've had a powerful experience like

playing with him for 12 years,

what do you do with it for the rest of your life?

I got kind of spoiled, it's like,

why would you want to go on and find another group?

I think most of the music I had it in me to make,

I've already made.

I think you're allowed to let go.

When you've given the blues a good run,

you're allowed to let go.

(harmonica music)

[Kevin] With Sterling, TC would bring him out

to a little local place in town called the Peninsula Inn.

This old gentleman I knew from way back

was playing piano down here.

Introduced him to Sterling and we jammed out a little bit,

and he was real raw.

And then he just started to sing,

and then all them songs started to come out.

Every day!

[TC] Every day!

Every day I have the blues.

(harmonica solo)

You know I had a lot of heart problems,

and I wasn't playing harmonic hard

because I was afraid it would kill me.

(slow blues music)

Sterling helped me in letting it loose,

and it's sort of an attitude, like,

I don't care if I die doing this.

I'm gonna die happy.

(slow blues music)

TC called me up, he says,

you've gotta come down here and see this.

And when I went down there, I didn't see the same guy

that I saw in the nursing home.

(cheering, applause)

Between myself and the town of Gulfport,

came together and we found the exact same

golden superstud guitar that he had played.

But we needed a drummer.

[Kevin] There's Dave.

Yes sir!

[Kevin] Say hey Dave, good morning.

Good morning!

[Kevin] Of course he was the heartbeat of the band.

I am Sterling's roadie.

Satan's roadie as they would say.

Then we sat him on that stool, picked up that guitar,

and put it around his neck.

He put them feet in them pedals,

and he was Mister Satan.

(laughing)

Thank y'all!

From then on, there was no stopping him.

And there was no stopping this flow of what was happening.

People coming out of the woodwork to come and see him,

and to have heard his name before.

The players of the band that played with Sterling

three to four hours a night, every single week,

they'd come down, bring all of their own equipment

and everything, not one single time

did anybody ever ask for a dime.

And they did it for the privilege

of just playing with Sterling.

Playing with Mister Satan.

(uplifting music)

With Adam, the last time that he visited,

he resigned himself to the fact that

Satan and Adam is no more.

And I said,

far from it.

When I started to come down,

it was incredible, to see the rebirth of Sterling Magee.

One, two, one, five, something like that.

(blues music)

We often want people

to play the role that we've assigned them,

in our own little ongoing drama.

You want him to be all powerful Mister Satan.

That's not where he is or who he is right now.

It was hard for me to let go of my memories.

(blues music)

And then I could look to Dave,

and Kevin, and how lovingly they

made Sterling just kind of part of the family.

Gave him human community.

Joked with him.

That was one more lesson that I had to learn.

And it was a lesson he taught along the way,

which is the lesson of surrender or acceptance.

And it was letting it be exactly what it was,

as opposed to dwelling in the space

between what you wanted it to be and what it is.

So I think for me,

learning how to let go,

and then you know, it was, what can we do with what we have?

(driving blues music)

Suddenly, our sound blossomed out of nowhere.

And it was just amazing to have that,

after really not imagining that we'd see it again.

And so we decided we'd keep going.

We'd go on these little tours.

Play a festival or two or three.

There was this kind of excitement that blues fans

who would say, Satan and Adam again, really?

People thought we disappeared.

Hey!

[Adam] We made this decision that we were gonna do

a Satan and Adam return album,

with me and Sterling, and Rachel.

(driving blues music)

It was great to be back with them.

These two guys are like a couple.

They belong together.

No matter what form it takes,

or how many years go by.

There's always that feeling that they are together.

Satan and Adam.

(cheering, applause)

Yeah!

Alright put your hands together.

(laughs)

Thank you!

Of course then, Sterling really had something to live for.

New York hat.

It's nice.

Shortly after, an agent called me up and he said,

I've got a really big one for you.

I've got a big get.

When Adam gave me the call, and said,

we had the opportunity to play

at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival.

And I said, really?

Alright.

[Adam] You know, America's a tortured place, racially,

and we all feel right now these particular evil days.

We can't know kind of where that's gonna lead.

Sterling and I, we were very conscious, both of us,

of the racial politics that were swirling around us.

[Announcer] Welcome back to the blues tent, y'all.

Are you having fun yet?

[Adam] So one of the lessons

I've learned from all of this,

is how important it was to have seen Sterling

that very first day in Harlem and have taken the risk

to be able to sort of push past my own fear.

And if I'd let racial fear keep me out of Harlem,

keep me from asking him if I could sit in,

you know, the story wouldn't have happened.

So that's, you know, the blues ethos.

You gotta keep walking forward.

[Announcer] Ladies and gentlemen,

please welcome Satan and Adam!

(cheering)

(uplifting music)

(cheering)

You're beautiful and you're kind.

[Adam] There's nothing that could happen to him

that could negate the explosiveness of his gift,

and the way in which he completely gave it.

[Announcer] Satan and Adam, y'all.

(cheering)

[Adam] I mean, I really love the man.

(cheering)

(calming music)

Miss Macie!

(chuckles)

(calming music)

[Adam] Happy birthday!

[Crowd] Happy birthday!

We gotta do that, right?

[Adam] Make a wish and blow.

(cheering)

I wish to be 155.

The mother mojo!

("Mother Mojo" by Satan and Adam)

("Angel of Harlem" by U2)