A conversation with Outer Park members Patrick Noonan & Charles Tobermann

Patrick: I’m glad we opened with this one.

Charles: We were Youngbloods fans, yes. And they were definitely of the era that we were reaching back to, in conceiving of this album.

Patrick: I don’t think I’d say I was a “fan” at that time, to be honest. I came to love them more later. At this time I found most of their stuff to be pleasant but a little simplistic. On the hippy-dippy end of things, but OK because of their San Francisco cred. “Darkness, Darkness” blew me away, though. The opening cut of their “Elephant Mountain” LP. That violin riff, the whole thing really. I found it much richer and deeper. I’ve always wanted to record it, and here we are.

Charles: I don’t recall playing this particular song back in the ‘60s, but we must have played the Youngbloods’ big hit, “Get Together,” at some point.

Patrick: I think so. We didn’t know at that time that the composer of “Get Together,” Chet Powers, also went by the stage name of Dino Valenti, the guy I detested for having ruined my favorite San Francisco band, Quicksilver Messenger Service. That’s a story for another day (as is a “small world” story about a friend of mine who once live with Powers/Valenti in the Quicksilver house in the Haight.) 

Charles: Back to “Darkness, Darkness,” which was written by the Youngbloods’ singer, Jesse Colin Young. This version almost didn’t happen.

Patrick: That’s true. Chelsea and I had played this together before – I had introduced it to the Atlanta-based group “The Peoples,” where she and I first met – so it was one of the first songs I put on our Outer Park list. But jeez, it sure wasn’t happening in the studio. The feel wasn’t right.

Charles: Well, we were trying a bit of a Bo Diddley beat, but with acoustic guitar and bass and that nice Youngbloods sounding electric piano. But yeah, it wasn’t coming to life as we’d hoped. So James stepped up – as he did a few carefully selected times during these sessions – and put on his producer hat: “Look, you’ve come all the way down here. And ya got me. And ya got him (pointing over to Jason). So how ‘bout we do it in a New Orleans style?” We nodded in agreement.

Patrick: I think the two of us had been avoiding the pretense of steering things in a NOLA way just because we were temporary musical residents.

Charles: Exactly. But James was steering now. So he called out to Jason, “Put some ham fat on it,” and boom. Jason kicks off with that great groove, and it all fell into place.

Patrick: New Orleans musicians have their own musical dialect. They all know the traditions and the songs and the styles, and they do session work all the time. The language is as rich and informative as it is efficient.

Charles: Afterward, we had a good laugh, trying to think of how to say that in German, how it might appear, say, in the score of a Mahler symphony. In any case, it was the right thing to say and to do because the resulting groove is infectious.

Patrick: I finished up the song with some guitar overdubs back in my studio in Atlanta. Chelsea and I had been listening to some alt-country artists we love, like Neko Case, so I added some background guitar with a twang and some spacey reverberations. But my solo was old-school, drawn from one of my lifelong guitar inspirations, Jerry Garcia.

Charles: Came together well.

Patrick: Thanks. And we tried to avoid doing an exact repeat of the signature fiddle line in the introduction. (That was a challenge we had on a couple of songs, as I’m sure we’ll explain.) That was David Lindley on violin on that recording, did you know?

Charles: I did not.

Patrick: Yep. I love how Chelsea interpreted the vocals, and gave power to the emotion in the lyrics. It’s a Vietnam song, by the way. Most people don’t know that. Jesse Colin Young was thinking about friends who were over there – and I think he’d lost a good friend to combat – and the terror of going to sleep each night. Vietnam comes up again in our music, a bit obliquely in this album, but in a really up-front way on the second album, which we’re working on now.

Charles: Oh yeah. The war, in your face. Stay tuned for what we’ve got coming out in 2020.