Bob Bell Continues His Road Trip Memoirs With Roomful of Blues

With a car and two or three occupants, it’s about an eight and half hour drive from Chicago to Kansas City. On Broadway was way north of Chicago’s downtown so that eight and a half became over nine. Add the fact that there are ten people in the truck, and we were pulling a trailer also, that nine stretched to ten quite easily. We packed the trailer, hit the hotel just to grab clothes and take a rapid shower and we were gone, yawning and bone-tired, back in our bouncing, vibrating Suburban, the long stretches of concrete highway out of Chicago laid down in pads of a hundred feet or so, thus every two or three seconds was punctuated by a thwump as we passed over the joint, shaking and rattling the truck. Over and over and over. Stopped for gas in Springfield, Illinois, and a fast sandwich, but when there are ten people all needing to grab a fast sandwich and take a quick pee, it just ain’t so fast. 

Our latest member had quickly got into the swing of things, and by then we had all learned of his shattered dreams of the big time, the bus that wasn't, the subsequent and terrible unreachable luxury of being a star. No stars in this Suburban, that was for sure. It hadn’t taken more than a day or so for Doug, sizing up Enos’ stocky build, his love of sports, and his macho attitude, to dub him Big Guy, and Big Guy he was from that day thereon.

We hit KC around 6 pm and checked into a hotel for two hours. One room, that is. One room for the ten of us. A line for the shower, not enough room on the beds for everyone, tired musicians laid out on the floor being stepped upon by other tired musicians. Two hours later back in the Suburban, and head for Parody Hall. Our promoter was Roger Nabor, a blues-loving guy who worked at the Post Office and promoted shows on the side. We were tired. Loaded in the PA, which was a pair of Eastern Acoustic speaker cabinets, each with a 15-inch woofer and a little tweeter, a heavy as hell Crown amp, in a rack with an EQ, a twelve channel board with ten working channels, and a couple of monitors, and a motley selection of microphones, including two Shure SM 54’s which are those iconic 1950’s stainless steel microphones so beloved of bands over the last thirty years, but back then they were just what we had, and we used them, not for gimmicky looks for the singer, but to hang in front of the guitar amp. Pic’s vocal mike was a Shure 58, the saxes used Shure 57s, and Porky had some special mic whose brand I forget. Set up the drums, usually with just a 57 on the snare, mic the acoustic piano, which was the promoter 's responsibility to provide for each gig, with a 57, set up the bass rig and guitar amp, put the LPs and T-shirts in a safe place by the board, and get ready for showtime. Three or four hours later it was all torn down again, packed in the trailer, the last musicians dragged away from the bar and off to Fort Collins, Colorado, six hundred and fifty miles away. Two in the now Tuesday morning and none of us had slept, I mean slept as in deeply slumbered, since Saturday night in Ann Arbor. Albi, Greg and I took turns in driving. The first couple of hours of driving after a show was never too bad because most of the band would be awake, jazzed and high after an evening’s playing, music would be on the cassette player, bottles and joints were passed around and the party roared along the highway at 60mph. Fun for all except for the next driver up, who’d be trying to blot out the mayhem and seek sweet oblivion for just an hour or two, which was of course, just about impossible.

Interstate 70, through Topeka, Salina, Hays, Colby, rushing through the Kansas night invisible prairies stretching out side to side, front to back, that great hugeness which is Kansas, where the sky touches the horizons and further is forever and forever, and still not far enough, and the highway, hours into the journey, is your only companion, the band having finally quietened, snoring, mumbling, the only noise a bottle rolling under a seat or the roar of an eighteen wheeler tearing through the dark in the other direction, its rear lights seen in the mirror vanishing red dots into the night, and despite the company of the road, and the presence of nine dozing passengers, the driver is a lonely man, holding the wheel, peering into the distance, squinting out along the yellow beams his headlights cut through the shadows, always watching, trying to keep alert even though his eyeballs burn with tiredness, checking the fuel gauge, calculating how many more miles before he has to make a fuel stop, and trying to remember just how far it was until the next stop did come up, having checked all this out on the map miles back before he had taken over the wheel, but that was a couple of hours ago, and now he couldn’t, with any real accuracy, remember, and bloody hell, how his eyes burned, and still along old 70 the Suburban and its little trailer hurtled, onward and onward, like the charge of the Light Brigade, just hoping that there were no cannons to left of them and none to the right of them, just that endless prairie, some times bright lights, glittering and incandescent in the far-off distance, a mysterious industrial complex squirrelled away on the prairie, making what, wonders the driver, and then it too is gone, left in the swirling wake of the Suburban never to be seen again, and so was it really there, did he just imagine it, and shit, his eyes hurt, and the road continues to stretch out ahead, an unwinding black ribbon, in a blacker night, it’s the road to eternity, the road to  …. where are we going wonders the driver, what are we all doing here, in this metal box, driving through pitch blackness at seventy miles an hour, and why, why this insane rush, this terrible tiredness, and then out of nowhere, a sound from behind, breaking this awful reverie, a voice calls out. ‘Piss stop, Bell, pull over, gotta piss real bad’ and a sanity of sorts returns, and the Suburban pulls onto the shoulder of the deserted interstate, and a handful of musicians stagger out, hungover, bleary-eyed and silent, unzipping and peeing into the night, and Albi, the only teetotaller in the band, gave me a wink and got into the driver’s seat.

Slumped in the space vacated by Albi, I tried to sleep, but jacked up by all the caffeine I'd drunk over the previous hours, and just energised on some odd level by the intensity of the driving, I was beyond tired, beyond consciousness too, slouched there, buzzing, eyes burning, my shoulders on fire from holding the wheel for so many hours, and just like Ernest Tubb's tomorrow that never comes, neither does my longed for sleep. I'd fought it off for so long it was banished, in exile, I knew not where, didn't know how to call it, didn't know how to seduce its embrace, and so nodded, my temple bouncing against the side window, now and then giving my snoozing partner next to me - Jimmy Wimpfheimer, the bass player - a tired desultory shove as his head fell against mine. Behind us rose the sun, dawn, long shadows dancing before us, traffic increased, not just big rigs anymore, but dusty pickups, shiny saloons and old beaters, the world stirring for work and toil, the hum of tires, all that crazy energy that creeps across the world every morning, aching bodies girding for action once more, and I'd gaze through lidded red-rimmed eyes out the window, thinking 'you lucky bastards, you got some sleep at least', but of course, who really knew, who knew what had gone on behind closed doors that night just passed, and probably half of these poor souls had had arguments, money panics, incomprehensible moral dilemmas that had kept them staring at the ceiling most of the long night, who knew? But the world was awake, the sun was up, and the night was gone and the hustle was on.

Ernest Trubb

Kanorado lay minutes ahead, astride the Colorado state line, and Kansas City was six hours in the past, and hello, Colorado, how do you do? How do you do? You don't look too much different to all these tired eyes, you know. These plains Colorado plains? Look like Kansas plains to us ... two hundred miles from the Rockies, and no mountains in sight yet, but we were setting for them, no doubt about that, no sirree, no doubt about that, certainly not from the way the Suburban was eating up the miles, aimed for Denver. But it still was taking forever, even at sixty five or seventy miles an hour, and of course we were dragging the U-Haul, which was always a worry lurking in the backs of our minds, we were pulling it faster than we should have, we all knew that but we had to get there, and it had to come with us, and we were in a hurry, and it didn't seem to matter just how much of a hurry we were in, it was still a lot of ground to cover, miles to make, and we watched the signs for Denver, and noted the miles diminishing, and the sun went from overhead to in front of us, rolling around in heaven with nothing better to do than watch our ant-like progress across the plains, that lucky old sun, and still we rolled west, now with Pic behind the wheel, and the Rockies appeared, blue on the horizon, and Denver was less then one hundred miles away, and music sounded from the cassette player, soft mellow Ben Webster tones, soothing hangovers, talk increased, and at last the end of the journey, if not in sight, was at least imaginable.

Denver is not just out west, it's kinda up west too, as it is a mile above sea level. Sitting on the eastward side of the Rockies, it is the gateway to the west, and to the mountains too. As we closed in on the city's environs, the mountains soared and towered, and I couldn't help thinking about the pioneers looking for ways across, through and over. I imagined some had native guides, but even with that knowledge, and coupled with the undeniable fact that these pioneers were strangers, invaders, traveling a land that was not theirs, it had to have been more than a tough unmapped slog and physically a hard grind, but moreover a nightmarish endeavour. Although on this trip we bypassed Denver as we turned north for Fort Collins, and thus only saw the city from afar, I knew Denver had a large homeless population, and you had to wonder if it was the physical presence of the mountains that had stopped these folks from moving further west, to California, land of sun, surf, fertile land, farms, fruit and food and the prospect of prosperity. Idle conjecture, of course, because most if not all those goals require capital of some size or other, and most of these tattered down and outs lacked the price of a decent meal let alone the dough needed for a Greyhound ticket.

Late in the afternoon we entered the outskirts of Fort Collins, and pulled up outside Sam's Old Town Ballroom, turned off the motor and walked inside. It was five going on six, we were beat and exhausted, and just wanted to get the trailer unloaded, the stage and PA set, and get to the hotel and shower. We had two nights at Sam's, which meant two nights in the same bed. A bed that didn't bounce and rattle, a bed that we shared with no-one else, a bed with clean smooth sheets that we could lie on, at full length, and move arms and legs around and not touch anyone else. This was luxury untold, this was the stuff of dreams, but there was no time for dreaming yet. A fast shower for everyone, and then meet in the lobby, get back in the Suburban and hit the venue once more for the promised band meal. 

For this was the economy of the road. Booking a date meant several things. First, the band's fee, which was highest on Friday and Saturday nights. Next thing was to negotiate some kind of percentage deal, so that we made more money if we drew a big crowd - once the promoter had recovered the fee he was to pay us from tickets sold, he would pay us a percentage of the overage. Next thing was to try to get him to pay for the hotels, which was an obvious money-saver. Clubs on the touring circuit had bands coming in from out of state regularly, and so usually had some kind of deal going with a local hotel. The last item was to feed us. The food part wasn't just a money-saver, it often meant the difference between eating and not, because our intense schedule often meant we'd have to drive for hours from one gig to the next, arriving at the venue close to showtime, with no time available to search out and find an eating place in a strange town. Every deal was different, of course, and our fee depended upon past history in joints that we had a history in. Places like Sam's, places we were playing for the first time, paid us whatever Pic had been able to talk them into paying. We knew what we needed to make each week to survive, and gigs were taken accordingly. Sometimes we'd take something at a lower price just because the night was glaringly open, was a gap in the calendar to be filled, and made routing sense. A little bit of something sure beat a whole lot of nothing.

So there was a lot of traveling. Had to be. There would never be enough work for a band like Roomful were we to stay in one area - we had to hit new markets continuously. Guys would say we'll play for free, you pay us to get there, and on some levels that was how it worked. And so on a night like that first one at Sam's, that old adage was true enough. Sitting at the table in the club, as we all ate, it was beyond obvious that one and all were exhausted. No real sleep for going on sixty hours, just truck sleep grabbed on the lam, forty winks discounted to twenty, and two sixty minute sets stretched ahead. Perhaps, just perhaps, we might be back at the hotel by 1.30 am, it being a Tuesday night and all. So many of these venues had liquor licenses allowing them to stay open until 1 or 2 in the morning, and they wanted the bands to play as late as possible to keep the patrons drinking. 

The food finished, the band retired to the dressing room, to clean up, warm up their horns, and then hit the stage. We usually opened with Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown's 'Okie Dokie Stomp', a guitar-led instrumental with great horn punches that invariably drew gasps of wonder and appreciation from the crowd, most especially in a venue like tonight's, where the majority of the crowd had never heard the band before. And so it went. Reaching deep down and summoning forth an energy from just where is a question only the sages can answer, but the fact is that that night, as I had seen so many times before, and was to witness on innumerable nights later, the band ripped and roared, swung and grooved, rolling and rocking the blues with passion, joy and commitment that completely belied the fact of red-eyed beatness. The dust and weariness of the road were shed, they were baptised anew by their mutual love of what they did, and how they did it. Rising above the fatigue, the weariness, the debility and languor of the previous days, it was as if the band breathed in those miles from Providence to Rochester, to Toronto, to Ann Arbor, to Chicago, to KC, to Fort Collins, the huge distances of the country and the variety of its cultures compressed, digested and born anew by the band’s collective soul, and blew them out across the dance floor, sending messages from America directly to the hearts, souls and feet of the dancers on the floor. The delight writ broad and plain across the faces of the audience was contagious, strangers grinned at each other, high-fiving one another as they danced across the floor, shuffling to the left and then to right, rocking and rolling into the night. 

Standing behind the soundboard, with the dance floor between me and the stage, I was in the perfect spot to both hear the band and watch the action on the floor. Roomful was a musician’s band, in that the members were good, really good, and the music world being what it was, Roomful always attracted any musicians who weren’t working on the night that the band was in their town. And it was a great blues band to boot, and although in 1981 the blues boom was only just getting underway in the US,  the blues fans antennae were always out, and so we’d draw them. And it was a horn band - most of the blues bands played either Chicago blues style, or Texas / Louisiana style, harmonica, guitar and rhythm, so the section was a huge attraction - there were no bands out there then traveling with a section as big as ours. And to cap it all, Roomful was an unashamed dance band. That was was got the band sailing, that was what gave them the energy - watching the dancers, seeing them react to the riffs, play out the solos with their feet and shoulders, eyes and lips, and most nights there were one or two couples - often older folk - who knew the Lindy Hop steps, what the English called jiving, and what came to be known years later generically as Swing Dancing. It was a stone joy to watch a couple who knew time, who knew each other's moves, and who would read one another’s intentions during a song. It was a fluid display of dexterity and understanding, of grace and glee, wit and wonder, fun and finesse, a mastery of rhythm coupled with a pinch of madness, and over the years I have never tired of it. Roomful drew all these types, and some of the time back then, the band with its big horn section, kinda baffled some folks, who had never heard music like this before, which was all quite odd really, as it was this type of music that had been very popular only twenty-five years before. Memories are short in America, where new fads and styles are the meat of Madison Avenue, and so for many of our dancers, this was a very different kettle of fish from what they were used to, be it The Rolling Stones, The Allman Brothers, Little Feat, disco, country, . Some would struggle to label the band, calling us a jazz band, or perhaps a swing band.

Who cared? The thing was, it was fun, undeniably great and fantastic fun, and great art too, should anyone have paused a few moments and considered it.

Tune followed tune, and then most of the band left the stage, and Porky, trombone in hand, walked to the centre of the stage where Pic was adjusting his sax mic for Porky to blow into. John Rossi lit into his floor tom, Albi played the introductory phrases, and they were into “Caravan’, the tune written by Juan Tizol and Duke Ellington. This was Porky’s showcase. He played it every night, his big feature. He’d calculate how many more nights left on a tour by how many ‘Caravans’ lay ahead. If it was ‘just six Caravans to go’ it was six more shows. It was an unfailing showstopper, this tour-de-force by this little bald-headed old geezer, looking to be at least thirty years the senior of anyone else in the band. The arrangement had solos by Albi and Jimmy, but it was Porky’s baby, the Porkster’s specialty. Pic would jump up on the stage at the tune's end, grab Porky’s hand, raise it high, and holler into the mic, ‘Porky Cohen! Porky Cohen!. The King! The King of the Slide Trombone!’ And old Porky would be grinning, his eyes owl-like behind those glasses, sheepishly look at his horn, raise it, and wave to the crowd. 

Doug and Porky

Roomful knew an astonishing amount of songs, and often they would come out with something I had never heard them do before, maybe featuring Rich on ’No Name Jive’, or Doug on ‘Playboy Hop’, or Ronnie on an obscure Albert Collins thing, and it was often on these sorts of nights that these tunes would be called out. Tired as the band was, the energy seemed to increase in a kind of inverse ratio to the exhaustion, as if they were challenging the gods, laying down markers of creative derring-do, a perpetual motion organism that recycled fatigue into energy, bearing good and joyful news as a part of the process.

Finally, the second set was over, and two encores later, after the five horns had walked the dance floor during an exuberant second line Rock and Roll instrumental, they returned to the stage, played one last chorus, and Pic sidled up to the mic, drenched in sweat, and hollered: 'That's it! No shit! We are a Roomful of Blues, and we'll be back here tomorrow night. Tell your friends!'

And indeed, it was over. The miles were behind us, and soft and stable beds beckoned and murmured, 'Come, come hither, and sleep … sleep … sleep ...'