More of Bob Bell’s Amazing Chronicles
Encounters Along the Road
One of the wonderful pluses of my peripatetic life on the road, travelling around the USA with Roomful of Blues, was the unparalleled opportunity to hear music during most of the hours I was awake.
While we travelled to and from gigs, there was invariably a tape player present, playing anything from blues to jazz to cowboy songs. On occasion Mario Lanza and Caruso, other times Lightnin’ Hopkins and Guitar Slim, or perhaps Illinois Jacquet and Jack Teagarden. And then there were the gigs themselves. In the early days with the band we usually played two 60 minute sets, or two 75’s. Later, as we attained headliner status in most places it was one long 90 minute set, often with a 20 or 30-minute encore.
As we used to say, after getting out of whatever vehicle we were riding in after a ten-hour jump, you pay us to get here - we play for free. And listening to all this wild jumping blues every night was a treat I never tired of - I was the luckiest man in the world.
One of the great joys of gigging was the chance to hear another musician sit in with the band. Down in Texas it might be Grady Gaines, the saxophonist who led Little Richard’s crack road band The Upsetters, back in the ’50s. Or Pete Mayes, the elegantly white-suited guitar player in Houston who evoked the ghost of T-Bone Walker. Or maybe Freddie Cisneros, crazy white-haired guitar player who not only used a slide, but whatever came to hand, be it a glass, a brick, or a rubber duck. Little Junior One Hand was his stage name. In New Orleans Earl King would be there, playing jagged guitar and singing his beautifully wrought songs. In Kansas City the legendary Jay McShann, who had employed Charlie Parker back in 1941, would come see us, and stay all night, digging the band.
Out on the west coast, in San Francisco, we had Boz Scaggs, Carlos Santana and The Fabulous Thunderbirds on stage with us all at the same time.
Further up the coast in Eugene, Oregon we met for the first time a young Robert Cray with his then singer Curtis Salgado. That was probably in the very early 80’s - Curtis later joined Roomful as the band’s singer.
Albert Collins
How could I forget the night when Albert Collins, Koko Taylor and Eddie 'Cleanhead' Vinson all showed up, and got on stage with the band? What a wild and searing night that was, how strong was Koko's voice leading the entourage through 'Wang Dang Doodle' with Albert and Ronnie Earl slicing the night with shimmering reverb, their huge tones filling the room, and then Cleanhead stepping to the mike, singing 'Kidney Stew' and blowing the blues on alto, all the while Roomful's five piece horn section painting palettes of deep emotion, great sonorous cameos, billowing cushions of sound supporting the soloists.
Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson
At the end of the night Albert came up to me, his face alight with joy. 'Man, if I had that band behind me every night, I'd be a millionaire'.
Wherever we went, someone was sure to turn up, bringing with him or her a wonderful whiff of history past, a great sense of history in the making, and always a reminder of just how much musical talent this vast country is and was awash in.
Koko Taylor
These events imprinted themselves upon my musical psyche, my memory and my soul, contributing not only to a glorious storehouse in my mind but often to long and lasting friendships.
One of those friendships that have endured to this day is with Rusty Zinn. Rusty and I are always trying to figure out just where and when it was that we first met - we think it may have been at Terry Dunn’s hip New York City club Tramp’s, on a bill featuring Roomful and ex-Fabulous Thunderbird singer Kim Wilson. Rusty was playing guitar in Kim’s band. He had enviable blues chops, with a killer tone, and played with taste and great feeling. We’d run into one another from time to time. He made a few records for Black Top, down in New Orleans, which were stunning in their sound, feel, and mastery of the genre.
I ran into him again after I left Roomful, and moved to Oakland, California. I was working part-time at Down Home Records in El Cerrito, home of the fabled Arhoolie record label, and Rusty would come in from time to time, and we’d chat about music and old times. By then he was devoting most of his musical energy to reggae and rock-steady and was intrigued by my involvement with Trojan Records, back in reggae’s golden era in the late ’60s.
Rusty has since made some superb recordings in what he smilingly refers to as ‘Jamaican stylee’. Yes, that is stylee. He writes exquisite and dazzling songs and has the voice of an angel, and before the coming of the current plague, gigged fairly regularly. Sometimes reggae gigs, for which he would put together a special band, but often blues gigs. He’d play both locally and around the country - he is an in-demand session player, or as a key guest for a national act that might want to beef up its stage sound for a prestigious festival gig.
He has arrived at this point in his career not just because of his obvious talents, but it is also his knowledge of music, his depth and understanding of various styles and genres that have earned him a reputation for being a musicologist nonpareil. To give you an idea of the breadth of his knowledge, I sometimes make a point of having a record on the turntable when he turns up at my place for a listening session. He’ll walk into the room, and within a few bars, will nail the tune, the singer, the musicians on the date, and often have an entertaining, or perhaps scurrilous tale to tell about the artist.
So Rusty has the goods and the know-how.
Some years ago, just after he had finished his ‘The Reggae Soul of Rusty Zinn’ album, he had a call from a friend of his out on the east coast. ‘Hey Rusty, some record company has just put out the Complete Five Royales CD, and there is a cut on it that the liner note writer says is a rare unissued track by them, but I know it is really you. What’s going on?’
The song in question was ’Think’, a Five Royales tune that Rusty cut in 1996, was touted on the ‘Complete Five Royales’ CD as being from a long lost 1962 session cut in Memphis for The Home of the Blues label. Bringing the mistake to the attention of the label, and getting their apology was one thing. Ensuring it would never happen again was another. There is an old saw regarding people believing what they see in print, regardless of its veracity, regardless of a later correction, hidden away on page twelve. And this year it has happened again - another label has issued a Five Royales set, and again included ‘Think’. This time around the blues press, such as it is these days, has jumped on the error so perhaps it won’t happen again.
The unsaid irony here is, as Rusty remarked the other day, that so many of the ‘blues experts’, like the one that initially discovered the ‘lost’ Five Royales re-cut of ‘Think’ are the ones that endlessly deride the efforts of white musicians working in the blues field as derivative, and at the same time, they are unable to differentiate the very obvious difference in the sound between two very dissimilar artists.
That’s enough of ranting from me. This piece started as a reflection upon musicians I had the great pleasure of listening to, close up, and the joys of making friends made along the road. The music business is a tough one. Indeed, for anyone involved in creating something, be it painting, writing, music, acting, or whatever, nothing is guaranteed, everything is potentially precipitous.
These days, concert halls and clubs, art galleries and theatres are shut down, and who knows when, or if, things will ever get back to normal. And at the same time, I read every day, of artists dying, from old age, the virus or something else. Many of the folks I knew back in my road days are gone.
It would be nice, if not proper, for those who are still with us to be acknowledged for who they are, what they have done, and how they do it.
Time is not simply a metronome, setting the rhythm, and the beat. It is the measure of life, and we all need to do more than tap our feet to it. We need to clap our hands and applaud those who use it to enrich our lives.
Photos of Rusty - Britt Hallquist
