Bob Bell Part Two - The Crescent Train to New Orleans & Its Music
Photo booth shot of Bob with Earl King taken in New Orleans, 1980
Journal May 1980 South to New Orleans
Three nights of listening to Roomful and I was jazzed. I had spent the last two days in their company, at their hotel and in restaurants. As I knew the editor of Britain’s leading music weekly, the Melody Maker - from when he had formerly ran the Island Press Office - I interviewed the members of the band and pieced together their story.
I was astonished to learn that they had had two albums released on Island, in 1977 and 1979. Neither had been released outside the US which was a pretty stupid mistake in my opinion, as even back then it was well known that blues was more popular in Europe than it was in its home country. The Island association had gone badly, I learned, and now they were out of the contract.
They were off to New Orleans after they finished in Atlanta, and I followed them to Louisiana on a train called The Crescent, excited to finally be heading to the legendary Crescent City, New Orleans, the mythic cradle of jazz.
It was a twelve hour ride from Atlanta to New Orleans, on a train that rattled slowly through the hot and humid south. That sentence doesn’t really do justice to the amount of rattles, nor to the interminable stops, and still not to the extreme heat and humidity, as the air conditioning was not working.
I spent much of the time with my head out of the window at the end of the coach, listening to the whistle blow. That oh-so-American sound, imbedded in our consciousness from countless movies watched over the years… And for me, a rabid blues fan, so reminiscent of the train sounds that harmonica players such as Sonny Terry had blown in my ears, lying in my teenage bed listening to blues records as I grew up in Winchester, Hampshire. An English boy with American dreams.
Onward the train rolled, past piney woods, abandoned fields with ruined barns and ancient cabins covered in creeper that I later learned was kudzu, an invasive plant that is not yet done invading. A languorous heat blanketed the land. Here a pasture with a few cows seeking shade next to a trough under spreading oaks… There, a small store with a handful of old men sitting on chairs under a spreading porch, cans in their hands. Shade seeking, thirst quenching … the great equaliser.
So this was Alabama. The Alabammy old Lonnie Donegan had sung of years back. Yup, I was Alabammy bound alright, Sheesh! I was right here in old Alabammy right now. Slipping into Anniston, and then Birmingham. Birmingham! “Goin’ back to Birmingham, down in Alabam…” Lines from old Little Richard songs buzzed my brain.
My god, the South, the South… Here and all around. Total immersion. I expected to see chain-gangs any moment, cruel overseers cracking whips, but gladly 'twas not to be.
Rolling out of Birmingham - just the cadence of those words evoking Chuck Berry rhythms. And we rattled and squeaked further on down the line, past swamps, woods and more woods and the ever present kudzu, softening the outlines of everything like some giant green comforter had been carelessly thrown across the landscape. After what seemed to be an eternity of Alabama, we crossed the Mississippi line, and in short order hit Meridian, Laurel, Hattiesburg and Picayune. The delta, home of the blues, and here I was. Hot and sweaty and digging every moment of the crazy whistle blowing journey south, south and further south.
And into Louisiana, fabled land of dreams, steamy nights, mysterious bayous. Huge bugs flew around the lights by the open window, people started checking their luggage in anticipation. We slid into Slidell. And then the wild ride across Lake Ponchartrain, where the tracks go on trestles clear across the lake, miles and miles, and you look out of the windows on each side and see only water, just water, no side of bridge or any kind of solid land like structure.
A clickety-clackety ride across the water, dream like and ethereal. A silent steam rising here and there from the water, spectral and shape shifting.
Then through increasing cityscapes, highways, roads and buildings. New Orleans. Oh, New Orleans, at nightfall… And what joys does this night promise? The Crescent reached the end of the line at the New Orleans Union Passenger Terminal, twelve hot hours after leaving Atlanta. It was eight in the evening, and Roomful had said they were hitting the stage at a club called Tipitina’s at 10pm. I grabbed my bag, which contained my worldly goods, a sleeping bag and a few changes of clothes, and hailed a cab.
“Hey, thanks, I want to go to Tipitina’s on the corner of….”
“Yeah, I know, Tip’s, on Napoleon and Tchoupitoulas. I know it. Hop in.” The driver, a grizzled old white guy, chewing on a wet cigar stub, spoke in that gorgeous southern drawl I had come thousands of miles to hear.
“Ya foist tahm in N’awlins?” he asked. I nodded, my feet tapping, eyes flashing back and forth, digging the street cars, the wide streets with huge oaks spreading across, meeting the outspread branches of trees from the other side. Spanish moss hanging in shrouds just like on the record covers.
Past little juke joints, advertising Dixie Beer and Po’ Boys, run down streets with houses with peeling paint, and washing hanging limp on lines, Winn Dixie supermarkets with big SALE signs in the windows, and then… “We heah - behave ya self now…”
And I paid the guy his money, grabbed my bag and walked to the door, paid the cover and went in. A big long rectangular room, with the stage at the far end, with a huge backcloth of Professor Longhair, the hero of New Orleans piano, who had died earlier in the year. I had been so saddened when I had heard the news, because I had really wanted to hear him in person, but as an old farmer had once remarked to me, upon seeing my sadness after passing of a favourite ewe: “Bob, without dead stock, we’d ‘ave no live stock.”
And so had to be content to listing to the Professor on records. It was one of his songs, ‘Tipitina’ that the club had been named after, and in one of those ‘it’s a small world’ ironies, it had been an old friend of mine - the recently deceased Mike Leadbitter - who had ‘discovered’ Longhair in the late sixties, and brought him to the attention of European fans, promoters and musicians alike.
Of course, those in New Orleans didn’t have to be told he was still living and playing amongst them. They knew that all along. But in the weird way that American music only seems to be appreciated by those living a few thousand miles away, it was Mike’s story in the English Magazine Blues Unlimited that helped the venerable Prof kick his career up a notch or two.
New Orleans being New Orleans - and really, really hot - there was a huge hole in the wall out to the street that was filled by a giant fan, stretching from the floor to the ceiling. It was in the wall close to the front of the stage, where the dancers would inevitably congregate, and as the evening was to prove, was most efficient.
I met up with Roomful in the dressing room, and we shared travel stories of the last twelve hours. They had arrived considerably earlier than me and were going to head out to Texas, right after the show, They were playing Houston the next night, and wanted to travel during the dark to avoid the heat. They introduced me to a fellow with a big grin and an accent which put even the cab driver to shame: The Governor, aka, Jerry Rigney.
The Guv was a native, and hearing I was basically homeless, invited me to stay at his place after the show. Up until that point I hadn’t even given the nights lodgings a thought - I was just mad to hear more of this jumping horn driven blues music.
I went to the bar to grab a beer. The bar was covered with paper ephemera, posters, photos etc, all under a thick layer of perspex. My attention was taken by a flyer that I had only seen before in blues books. Printed and distributed by the White Citizen’s Council of Alabama in the 1950’s, it was an unbelievable racist screed decrying Rock and Roll as animalistic jungle music, using all the racial epithets one can imagine.
It was rather satisfying to now see it there - not only as a racist relic - but rather as an object of scorn and derision, to set one’s beer upon, while listening to good old African American music in this bar dedicated to one of the regions most respected African American’s. As I put down my beer on the counter, I thought with relish how the White Citizen’s would have hated this joint.
I was honoured to meet Earl King that evening. Earl had been making great records since the early fifties, and I had found a couple on my junk store expeditions in Southampton as a teenager. And here I was talking to the man himself. To honour the occasion he suggested we duck into the little instant photo booth that was in the club and memorialise the evening. Which we did.
Roomful came on to a great roar of appreciation, kicked immediately into ‘’Okie Dokie Stomp’ and took no prisoners for the entire night. To my great pleasure, they called Earl up to the stage, and he played three or four tunes, including Guitar Slim’s ‘The Things I Used To Do’. Slim was Earl’s hero when he was coming up, and in fact Earl used go out and do dates in place of Slim if Slim got double-booked or was sick. If you hadn’t seen Slim before, you wouldn’t know the difference. Earl had Slim’s guitar style down, playing wild jangling runs that seem as if they are heading for musical disaster, but somehow make sonic and soulful sense, the kind of heritage that folks like Hendrix built on.
After two - count ‘em, two long sets - the band left the stage around 1am, packed the equipment and got into the two Chevrolet Suburbans they were touring in and went off to Houston.
Before they left, the baritone player, Doug James and Greg Piccolo came over to me and thanked me for following them down from Atlanta, gave me their phone numbers and said to stay in touch. And in parting they said: “Be sure to come here tomorrow night, a good friend of ours will be playing. He’s really good, and we know you’ll dig him. His name is Stevie Ray Vaughan.”
And with this advice ringing in my ears, the Guv and I left Tip’s and headed to his house. My N'awlins adventure had begun.
This photo - taken by Joe Rosen - features Jimmy Wimpfheimer, Doug James, Al Copley, Ronnie Earl, Danny Motta, John Rossi, Rich Lataille, Greg Piccolo, Roy Brown, Porky Cohen.
