Meeting Charlie Parr
Meeting Charlie Parr
Big news coming this Saturday November 23
For the last eight years or so whenever I post videos of @charlie.parr there’s usually at least one comment that is left every time:
“Charlie Parr is a National Treasure.”
It’s so familiar it sounds like a campaign slogan. But there’s no campaigning. He just cooks his meals on the engine block of his van in between his 250 shows a year. The other familiar comments left give a clue how this common theme came to be, “Let me tell you about the time I met Charlie Parr…”
This video was my time. The Ark in Ann Arbor, 2016. I had gotten an email from a fella interested in our F-holed tricones, “Like the first resonator prototype,” he told me. So I made him a guitar in the cold, 15 x 10 basement of my rented house. It was so cold I wore longjohns and fingerless gloves. I’d watch the cops drive into the parking lot to visit the neighbors driveway. I brought the guitar out of the basement and delivered it to him after his show at The Ark. He got done with the show and immediately came charging out of the green room to find me “let’s see that guitar!” He sat down on the step right there and well…
Watching him play that guitar and then look at me and hear him say what he says in the video above is a huge reason why you follow the work here at Mule. If you’ve found an artist you love, if you’ve been encouraged to undertake some challenge you were putting off it’s due in a large part to the encouragement Charlie gave me at that show. Up until then I didn’t know if the guitars were any good, if it was a dumb idea, if I should get another temp job swinging engine blocks standing in puddles of coolant. Those words of encouragement he gave me - it gave me strength I couldn’t have gotten any other way. It was a lazy “great job”. I had just met him and he said it like he wanted me to know he knew my whole story. It’s a lesson I learned and it’s this passionate encouragement I try to pass along. The recurring theme is that when people meet Charlie Parr he changes them.
When did you meet Charlie?
I met Charlie and Mule on the same day. Charlie was playing at the outdoor beer garden at Tyranena brewing in Lake Mills, Wisconsin. I didn’t know who Charlie was. Usually I sit in the back and enjoy the music while talking to friends. But halfway through his second song, I pulled my chair forward and sat alone, spellbound for the rest of the evening. His mesmerizing music and lyrics, of course. But also the mysterious amazing guitars. My bandmate and I went up to talk to him after the show and he was kind and open to our questions. And he told us about his Mule guitars.
Of course, I took a deep dive into Charlie’s music in the year that followed. What a treat!! Soon thereafter I bought my Mule steel resonator, which has been a delightful, musical adventure. And now I am on the waiting list for a Charlie Parr edition mahogany resonator. There aren’t many days that make a difference in one’s life, but I have to say I count that one among them.
I am so grateful for Charlie and Matt and all the folks at Mule. Kudos to you all…
