A conversation with Outer Park’s Charles Tobermann and Patrick Noonan
Patrick: I’m still impressed, every time I listen to this one, about Charles’ courage for tackling the slide playing. I’ve been playing all sorts of guitars for over 50 years, and I don’t have the nerve to do that.
Charles: Oh yeah, if somebody had told me a few years ago that I would dare to record a Muddy Waters song, playing slide guitar and singing, I would have said they were crazy. But our reunion cried out for some kind of tribute to this great man who showed us the real blues.
And of course, James and Jason laid down an incredible groove that held us aloft effortlessly. I’d like to believe that Muddy would think we learned his lessons well.
Patrick: We should share our story of bringing Muddy Waters to Springfield.
Charles: Sure, but let me back up a second. It’s kind of an interesting story about this song, how the British Invasion brought the blues from Chicago to Springfield via London.
Patrick: Run with it.
Charles: I can’t remember exactly how we found out about Chicago blues. I think part of it was reading interviews with people like Eric Clapton and Keith Richards in Rolling Stone magazine. Hey, there are these people named Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf and they are right upstate in Chicago! We knew some Stones covers and Cream’s highly electric version of Robert Johnson’s Crossroads. We probably knew about B.B. King after the Cook County Jail album came out in 1971. The Fathers and Sons album with Muddy and Otis Spann and Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield came out in 1969, the same month as Woodstock and the Singleton brothers had a copy and it was often on the turntable.
Patrick: I remember Fathers and Sons being the first time I made the connection. A naive youth, it took that collaboration for me to open my mind to the possibility that those old blues masters might be cool guys.
Charles: Some of us were in a group called Springfield Youth, Inc., and we managed, against all odds, to convince the others to bring Muddy and his band down from Chicago for a show at the St. Nicholas Hotel ballroom. It was one of those life-changing moments: when you see the truth and the future takes a new turn. It was the first time that we saw the real thing up close and personal.
Patrick: I wish I could recall how we sold the idea.
Charles: I remember the crowd being divided between black people of our parents’ generation and white teenagers. The description of Muddy’s hotel room/dressing room before the show demands treatment by Scorsese: cards, dice, whiskey, piles of money, a funny smell in the air, and Muddy in a burgundy velour dressing gown with a lady who was almost certainly not Mrs. Waters (Little Geneva) sitting on his lap. Musically what I remember was the incredible authenticity and emotion of Muddy’s voice, and the fact that his band was very large (including Pinetop Perkins on piano, and Bob Margolin on guitar), but nobody played very many notes, and the net effect was like a freight train rolling over you. Sheer blues power!
Patrick: You went to the dressing room? Man, I was way too intimidated by the whole scene to do anything but sit down and shut up and listen to the music at showtime.
Charles: Remember, the band played three tunes to warm up the crowd, and then the harmonica player said, “Start marking time, ladies and gentlemen! And when I say start marking time, that means it’s time to welcome to the stage Muddy ‘Mississippi’ Waters!” And then we were launched into deep blues outer space.
Patrick: The concert was electrifying. Mesmerizing.
Charles: Music industry note: At that time, you paid in cash, $1200 for the show, and Muddy counted it out himself in his room before taking the stage.
A couple of years later some of us went to a blues festival at a union hall in Central Illinois, and we saw Bukka White (the only one of the “first generation” of Delta bluesmen I ever saw), Willie Dixon, Muddy, and B. B. King on the same bill. B.B. was the headliner that day, and after his first song he said, of Muddy: “You know ladies and gentlemen, they call me the King of the Blues. But ladies and gentlemen, you just saw the King of the Blues!”