Bob Bell: Roomful of Blues Hot Little Mama Tour - this time Fort Worth, Texas
And so here we are, almost two thousand miles from California, in Fort Worth, Texas. Another city, another hotel, another tortured attempt to fall asleep at ten-thirty am, another vain attempt to exchange an over-caffeinated red and burning-eyed jittery state of consciousness to one of soft and welcome slumber, as if such a thing could be obtained just like flipping a switch; such exhaustion cannot be simply bartered away, it has to be subjected to a process, a process that demands fruitless tossing and turning, a process that has to ignore the heightened auditory senses that come with such tiredness; that very small sound, whether from the corridor on the other side of the room door, or the parking lot outside, is magnified.
Voices carry. Doors slam. Starter motors engage, engines catch and rev, trucks back up, beeping, beeping, a cop car sails by, its siren wailing and moaning, all the activities of a city going about its business, and so sleep comes in small snatches, a seesaw of sleep and wakefulness, and the mind races, what time is load-in, do we need to gas up the truck before leaving for the club, and my room-mate goes to the bathroom and the faucets run and the toilet flushes and the shower hisses and another cop car goes by with squalling siren and another, and there is some kind of chase going on, and if only sleep could be pursued and arrested so easily, and of course it ain’t gonna happen and so I give in to the inevitable and open those burning eyes and stare at the ceiling and wonder how long Pic is gonna be in the bathroom, cause now I gotta pee, and sleep is lost, and it’s gone noon and I may as well get some lunch and make some calls cause there is promo to be done, journalists to call, probably some press kits to mail out which means having to find a Post Office.
Life is reduced to day after day of drive, drive - and drive some more and then check-in, get on the telephone chasing down the promise of an interview and the guy isn’t there, and I leave a message that I’ll call back in two hours and hope the guy gets the message, because this means I got to be back in the room in two hours, by the phone, or in the lobby, cause cell phones ain’t been invented yet, it’s all landlines, with clunky ways of charging the calls to my home phone, which most of the time I can do, but some hotels are different, and then I can’t do it from the luxury of my room, lying there on my bed with the phone cradled in my ear, but gotta stand, uncomfortably in the lobby, trying to balance my promo folder on the silly little ledge beside the phone and it keeps falling off papers flying all over the floor and when I do get through, the guy has been called away and won’t be back until tomorrow and can you leave a number, and I can’t because I have no idea just what my number is going to be the next day - all I can do is ask if perhaps he could kindly leave a message on my answering machine which is two thousand miles away and hopefully some sanity will prevail, some kind of phone appointment can be made in an increasingly narrowing window of time tomorrow or the next day, and after that everything will have been in vain, because the show the interview is for is in four days time, and this guy’s column only runs on Thursday’s which means it just has to done by Wednesday evening, and now is Monday afternoon, and oh, God, I’m so damned tired.
By six o’clock the fog of the day has been yawningly navigated, the band gathers in the lobby and walks towards the truck, to go load in and then find a place to eat. The club is Blossom’s Downstairs, a joint I haven’t been to before, but where Roomful has played on one or two other occasions. We lug the equipment downstairs, drums, bass and guitar rigs, the PA speakers, mic stands, the board, snake and the one monitor that works.
Al Copley makes for the piano, checks to see if indeed it has been tuned as per our deal, and I set up the PA. It’s a cramped club, carpet on the floor and the walls, tables everywhere with a small wooden dance floor in front of the stage. Given the fact that everywhere is so cramped, I decide to put the board against the wall opposite the stage, at the back of the room, figuring that will prevent folks from falling over it which will probably happen if I put it in the middle of the room, and run the snake from the stage to the board under pieces of carpet. Place the mic stands, put the mics in the clips, wire the mics into the receptacles in the box at the end of the snake and check that each line is working, the old ‘one-two-three-testing-testing’ line that is heard all over the world. John Rossi has set up his drums, and tunes them, adjusting the skins here and there, tightening the cymbal stands, fussing with the bass drum pedal, and making sure the foot-long piece of wood screwed to the rug he carries from gig to gig, and upon which he places his drums, is secure. And why is this piece of wood attached to this piece of carpet? And why does he carry it to set up his drums on? Simple … the rug makes it less likely his stands and floor tom won’t slide about the drum riser. His stool sits at the back end of the rug, and John sitting upon it anchors the arrangement, the piece of wood sitting in front of the bass drum, known in the biz as the kick drum, prevents his foot from kicking the bass drum away from him. Rossi is a powerhouse drummer, he pushes and drives the band on the up-tempo numbers, physically thrashing the snare and toms, sweat pouring down his face and arms, and his two feet, one on the hi-hat pedal and the other on the kick pedal, are moving, moving and moving - if the kick drum isn’t anchored it will be on the dance floor in no time.
Ronnie fiddles with his Fender Super Reverb amp, the reverb unit making great swishing over-amplified trebly reverberating byooonnnggggswooooshes as the amp get re-positioned to his liking, and Jimmy checks the signal from his upright and electric basses. The horns position the one working monitor cabinet and get their levels, and then we all get back in the truck to go find a restaurant, no food at the club tonight.
Showtime arrives, the guys step up onto the little stage and Pic counts off the opening tune. The club is mobbed, and I'm glad I put the board at the back of the room. Christ, the place really is mobbed, it’s shoulder to shoulder, hard to move. For a moment I think back to my farming days, and how I’d read the ads in The Farmer’s Weekly, for fertilisers, cattle pens, sheep dip, chicken troughs, gates and for cattle prods, small electric wands that one used to get the big beasts to move. We never had them on our farm, and they had always seemed to me to be a bit on the barbaric side, even though they only deliver a little jolt, like an electric fence. Thing was, it is in crowded joints like this that the old electric cattle prod always came to mind, as an aid to get through the crowd, to gain a pathway to the stage to replace a cord or adjust a microphone. A couple of tunes into the set, and the PA seems strangely muffled, so I crank the gain, give it some more juice, try to get the band to cut through what seems to be an acoustic fog. I want to walk the floor a bit, check out differing places in the room to see what the sound is like in different areas, but it's too crowded, and I don’t have an electric cattle prod. Three of four tunes in, I can see Pic gesturing to me from the stage, and then he steps down and makes his way towards me. I leave the board to meet him halfway. The closer I get the louder the band becomes.
“Christ, Bell, turn the fucking volume down, we’re not Led Zeppelin, this is killing people…”
And he's right - the sound is deafening, plangent, head-splitting, ear-piercing and this is just halfway across the room. I can only imagine how loud it is on the dance floor. The entire club is an acoustic sponge, the carpets on the floors and walls, the sheer press of the sardined crowd soaks up the sound, so much so that what seems like a whispered aside at the back of the room is the shrieking of ten million banshees halfway up the room, and the catatonic wailings of all the tortured souls burning in hell closer to the stage. Pic is right - this is loud indeed. I scurry back to the board, as fast as scurrying can be when trying to penetrate a shoulder to shoulder mass, anxiously scanning the crowd for blood coming from the collected ears of Fort Worth’s finest, and bring the master volume way down, and then walk the club, prod-less, to ensure the sound is fairly well balanced. The rest of the set is spent by the board, in comparative silence. I can see the band, and know they are playing, but can only just hear them.
And that was the last time I ever voluntarily set up the mixing board at the back of the room.
