Bob Bell Continues His Music Memoirs
I was on the phone with Greg Piccolo once or twice a week in the opening weeks of 1981, to discuss the ongoing discussions with Ace Records and Polygram, and on one of the calls, he asked me if I had ever done sound. I had not, but I did know how I felt a band should sound, and be balanced, and so figured it could not be too difficult. Oh, such sweet innocence. I had no idea of the wild acoustic vagaries of differing rooms, of how the sound could dramatically change from one end of a room to another, the technical attributes and deficiencies of certain microphones, how a stage was wired. No, I just blundered in, as I seemed to have done all my life.
“Well, no,” I answered Greg, “but I am sure I can learn pretty quickly.”
Sometime late in February I set off once again on Freddie Laker’s super little airline and made my way to Providence, and 549 Hope Street on the east side, where Doug and Rich lived, and so began the next period of The Great Adventure.
First order of the day was to get the record contracts for ‘Hot Little Mama' signed and mailed off to the UK and France, and the second was to take stock of just what to do with the record in the USA, how to promote it and the band.
Ace said it was scheduled for release in June or July that summer which seemed an age away. They had to design a sleeve before scheduling the release date. We wanted Polygram to use the same artwork for the sleeve as Ace, and so they obviously had to wait upon Ace for the artwork before they could schedule the release.
All these considerations were just so much yakking in the wind to the band. The record was done … just put the damn thing out. Roomful’s last release had been ‘Let’s Have A Party’ on Island's Antilles subsidiary in 1979, and there had been nothing since. In those times of physical recorded product, one needed a new release to get people talking about a band; it was a peg to hang publicity upon and helped to further a buzz, secure gigs, and make some green. Greg and the band had done nothing to find a US home for the record while I was in Europe, and now we were closing in on the beginning of March. It was obvious that it could take forever to find a third party to issue the record, and the solution was immediately obvious to me, old record company man that I had been. Start our own label.
During my years at Island, I had overseen hundreds of record releases, from mastering tapes, printing labels, the design of the jackets, liaising with printers and pressing plants. It was easy if you had the dough. The band certainly wasn’t awash with money, but the amounts involved weren’t colossal, and so that is what we did. Greg and I had the record mastered in New York, and the lacquers shipped to a plant in New Jersey. Rich Lataille mentioned a friend of his he knew from yoga classes, Bob Grattage, who was a graphic designer. Greg found a stock picture of a cowgirl sitting on a fence with a smoking gun - aha! Our Hot Little Mama! Grattage and local artist and dancer Brian Jones put together the front and the back - I paraphrased the liner notes from a Red Prysock EP - and I took the train to New Jersey to a printing company, artwork in hand.
While all this was going on, the band was continually gigging. Heck, there were nine guys in the band, Paul Hubbard the sound guy, and myself. Eleven mouths to be fed, money, money, money, we needed it. In that late winter and early spring, we worked New England and The Atlantic seaboard south of NYC. Clubs like Jonathan Swift’s in Harvard Square in Cambridge, over the Charles River from Boston. Swift’s was a long narrow club in a basement. The equipment had to be carried down the stairs, through the club to the stage which was set at the far end. With a low ceiling, it wasn’t a great sounding room, but the band had a strong following in the Boston area, and the joint was always packed. I used to get the horrors thinking about what would happen if a fire broke out. The place was a terrifying fire trap - just the one exit up narrow stairs to the street outside. God knows how or perhaps more to the point, just why the fire marshal had allowed the license.
Like all nightclubs, the patrons were an intriguing mix of hardcore fans, blues aficionados, music lovers in general, and a whole lotta folks who just wandered in, curious, eager to catch some action, slake a thirst or look for a partner for the evening. Swift’s had its fair share of characters. Shorty always turned up to our shows. A guy in his forties, dressed very sharply, head to toe in black, a black turban to match, speaking like a figure sprung from a 1940’s hep film noir movie, he’d dance in a cool and precise manner, feet twinkling and shuffling. Greg would bring him up on stage for some numbers, and they’d move and groove to a slow blues. Shorty would invariably lay a cassette tape on us, full of doo-wop obscurities. Doo-wop was his penchant, his main musical squeeze. Stone cool was his persona.
There was Al Goldman, short-haired, gold-rimmed glasses, neat in a preppy kind of way, forever standing in the same spot at the rear of the club, silently digging it all. He had a thing about saxophones, and managed a saxophone quartet, whom he was always pressing me to hear. Would have loved to hear ‘em too, but where was the time? Providence was an hour to the south, and as of yet I had no car, and more to the point, my waking hours were spent with Roomful. It was at Swift’s I got to know Pierre Beauregarde, longhaired beret-wearing lunatic who was a mad jump blues fan, an extraordinarily talented sound engineer and a harmonica fanatic. He was an accomplished musician and was designing his own harmonica. A little later he formed The Cambridge Harmonica Orchestra, an entourage featuring over seventy harmonicas. No other instruments - just harps.
Boston has always been a music town. Musicians would drop by and sit in. Ron Levy, who played organ for Albert King in his teens, and then held the piano chair for BB King for ten years during the seventies, might swing by. A wonderful surprise for me was hearing Sarah Brown who played bass. She came down one night and Greg invited her up. Roomful’s bass player, Jimmy Wimpfheimer handed her his Fender, and she strapped it on. She was tall and slim - the same height as Jimmy, and she wore the instrument in the same way as he, slung low. She whispered a few words to Greg and the rhythm section, stepped up to the mic and counted off ‘I Brought It All On Myself’, a tune from Little Richard’s second RCA session from 1952. Roomful swung into action behind her like they played this tune every night. I was blown away. Wow, these people really know their stuff. Who else in the world is playing these tunes these days?
After the gig, we’d pile into one of the two Chevrolet Suburbans the band owned, and drive south to Rhode Island. Going down Massachusetts Ave, there was an obligatory stop at Hi-Fi Pizza, an eatery that catered to the late-night crowd. Pressed up to the counter was an assorted and miscellaneous cast of characters of the night. Slick and sharp couples dressed for the opera shouldered tattered winos, pierced punks next to pompadoured rockabilly fans, nurses just finished at night shift, a crew of firemen on their way back to the station after an emergency call, joshing each other in that particular and peculiarly guy way, and us, lined up at the counter, two-thirty or three in the morning, buzzing with post-show adrenalin, booze and whatever else might have been consumed during the evening. Choices made, money tended, slices grabbed, and then back to the Suburbans replete with tape players booming out blues and jazz, and head south and home.
During this time I was consumed with the fire of an evangelist. I had realised that no-one in the band had been doing any kind of publicity, any kind of promo and that everything was just left to the promoters to make gigs a success. I’d be at my desk in Doug and Rich’s living room by nine in the morning, while they slept, writing up press releases, walking down to Thayer Street on the East Side where there was a printer, get my releases printed up, go back to the apartment, stuff them into envelopes addressed to newspapers, radio and TV stations, and then walk down to the Post Office and mail everything out. And then back again to the apartment, and get on the phone to newspapers and magazines talking up future gigs. And then in the late afternoon, the three of us would be getting ready to get back in the Suburban for that night’s gig, which might be in Hartford Connecticut, or New London or up in New Hampshire. We worked at least five nights a week most weeks.
Apart from working on the upcoming release of ‘Hot little Mama’, which entailed lining up distributors around the country, I was also working on promoting an up and coming seven-day tour with R & B legend Roy Brown. Roy had been a major star in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. His biggest and most enduring song had been ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’ which Elvis had covered some years later during his stay at Sun Records, but Roy’s legacy went far beyond that one song. His vocal style had influenced Jackie Wilson, Clyde McPhatter, Little Richard, B. B. King and a host of others. He was hotter than a pistol during his heyday, but apart from short-lived comeback with ‘Love For Sale’ in 1970, his career had to some extent stalled. He had not been out to the east coast in twenty years. I had listened to the guys from Roomful talk about the shows they had done over the years with the founders of this music, artists such as Big Joe Turner, Jimmy Witherspoon, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Red Prysock, and Sil Austin, and was excited to be a part of these Roy Brown dates. It had been Aaron Fuchs, who was then writing for CashBox, who had put Roy in contact with Roomful.
Things were happening. Paul Hubbard had left the band, I was now the sound engineer. Also the publicist, plus taking care of our nascent little record label Blue Flame Records. I was on the phone constantly with Greg, who lived in Westerly, a little town in southern Rhode Island, hard by the Connecticut state line. Greg managed the band and booked the dates. We discussed possible bookings, tour routings, the new record, personnel issues, a truly endless string of issues, problems, ideas, fantasies and sometime looming disasters. I wasn’t the band’s manager as such at that point, but I was on the team and enjoyed every minute of it. Hell, this band had the goods, they played the music like it should be played. They weren’t just another Chicago blues-oriented band, with guitars and harp; these guys had this opulent and dazzling horn section, which put the roll back into rock and roll, put the swing into the blues and drew gasps of joyful astonishment from the crowds they played to.
It was healing music, was nourishment for the soul, it was food for the feet, it brought forth smiles and laughter, it put dancers on the floor. As Joe Turner had once sung. ’The blues’ll make you happy too’ and that was so true. Roomful of Blues was a celebratory band ... each show was indeed a party.
Peter Herbst, the writer from The Boston Phoenix, summed it up: ‘…. An unusually exciting and important band … a joy to listen to. They play elegant, arranged rhythm and blues and they also solo beautifully, creating a kind of authentically funky popular music which is both good art and good entertainment’.
Roomful was getting the accolades from all over - jazz critics like Stanley Dance, whose Jazz Journal columns I had read while still at school in the early sixties, said ‘Heard but nor seen, no one would have imagined that this was anything but a black group out of a fairly distant past. Everything was in character’ and from Clark Bustard at the Richmond Times-Dispatch, a man with whom I would develop a long-distance telephone friendship over the next couple of years, wrote ’The best little big band in America’.
I was just itching to tell the entire world about them.
