Page 37 - Blues Festival Guide Magazine 2024 Digital Edition

Throughout Bob’s years as a musician, he maintained a
day job as an exterminator. “My boss was kind of proud of
me. He had a guy who was an exterminator and traveled
playing music – something he could tell his customers. I did
that for about 15 years while I was trying to get established.
On my first gig, I think I was making seven dollars a night. We
played the holes-in-the-wall, but back in those days, we didn’t
think we were playing for a career. We all had day jobs. We
were playing because we liked to do it. I never thought I’d
ever play music as a career. But then Otis Rush came along
and needed a bass player for a club in Chicago’s Old Town
we used to call The Peanut Barrel. When Otis first took me to
France, we were going to the venue from the hotel at eight –
in the morning – and people were lined up almost round the
block and we didn’t start until eight that night. I thought ‘this
is a big thing!’ It was the first time I ever had it in my mind
this was something I would love to do as a career.” But once
Bob got married and was juggling both jobs, his wife said it
was either one job or the other because it was too hard what
he was doing. “She said she had my back if the music didn’t
work out. So, I had to make a choice.”

"I fell in love with the bass. I never wanted to be a front person
anyway. I wasn’t the talkin’ kind, so it did me good to stay
in the background. I think my friend Calvin ‘Fuzz’ Jones had
the first portable bass I ever saw, made by Sears, and I think
Dave Meyers was the first one I saw with a Fender bass. I got
one, but it got stolen. The bass I have now is the second bass
I ever owned. I’ve had it almost as long as I’ve been playing
music – over 70 years.”
Bob’s first band was called The Red Tops. “Everybody
back in the day wore uniforms, but we couldn’t afford them,
so we bought some French tams, our girlfriends sewed a little
red circle on them and we called ourselves The Red Tops.”
To this day, Bob is one of the best dressed performers in the
blues. “These are my work clothes. Back in the day, I don’t
care how good you played, if you didn’t have a black suit and
a white shirt, you just didn’t work. Once you walked in a club,
everyone knew the musicians.”
One of Bob’s closest friends was Calvin “Fuzz” Jones.
“Before Fuzz got with Muddy, they called me and Fuzz ‘The
Gold Dust Twins.’ Every time you saw Fuzz, you saw me. He
learned a lot from me, and I learned a lot from him. We moved
around together for years and years. I learned by watching
Fuzz and Bobby Anderson, and then would go back and try
to figure out what they were doing. I was always asking them
to show me how. They were my buddies.” After The Red Tops,
Bob “went into the jazz for some sophistication” with Rufus
Forman. But after a while, he went back to the blues, playing
with Eddie King for almost 15 years until King relocated to
Peoria and the band broke up. Bob took a couple years off
but came back to his love – the blues.

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