Bob Bell - Prose Poem - Driving Across The States Recalling An Early Love of Music
Sitting there in the truck my thoughts drifted to how this had all began, meaning my mad passion for music - how it had affected and shaped my life, and was the reason I was now rolling eastward, through New Mexico, Texas bound.
The first record I’d heard that I dug was 'Shake, Rattle and Roll' by Bill Haley and His Comets. I had just turned 8 years old and had been staying with my god-parents in Streatham in London in 1954. Their son Anthony, a few years older than I, had a wind-up gramophone and was playing the record, and although the lyrics didn't completely make sense to me, the sound energised me with its exhortations to ’Shake, Rattle and Roll’, made me feel deliciously alive.
Of course, at that age I was pretty energetic anyway, but I do recall asking Anthony to play the disc over and over again. In 1955, following a stay in the hospital where I had my tonsils removed, my folks gave me an old gramophone as a get-well present, and a pile of 78s. Most of the records were junk, although I recall playing 'In The Mood' by Joe Loss and some mildly risqué 1930’s tune called 'Connie in the Cornfields' on Decca. I forget the artist. After a couple of days, I craved something hipper, and so dear old mum came home with 'Rock Around The Clock'.
I dug the sound and the excitement of the hit side but it was Danny Cedrone’s round-toned hollow body guitar sound on the flip side, ‘Thirteen Women’, that really got to me. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was my introduction to the blues, and Cedrone’s reverb-soaked slurs resonated and gently sank deeply into my psyche.
From there I tuned into Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Fats Domino and Joe Turner. It was all rock and roll to me – guess it still is. I was hooked. Hung around the record stores after school. This was when they had little booths and you could take a stack of records into a booth, close the door, and crank up ‘Reet Petite’, ‘Jenny, Jenny’ or whatever. My friends and I were on first-name terms with the record counter clerks at the four or five record stores in our hometown of Winchester. It was a great time to grow up listening to music. Because of these stores’ policies of letting us hear what we wanted, we played dozens of artists before buying something – we got to find out who was hip and who wasn’t by listening. Not from ads, or even hearing a tune on the radio. Radio pretty much sucked in England then, anyway.
The artists we listened to were mostly American - the British ones seemed a bit lame, a bit second hand, although Lonnie Donegan had a mad energy, which was not surprising, considering his jazz roots, and familiarity with Blues and American folk. In a way, he was Britain’s answer to rockabilly in the mid to late fifties, with his drive and frenzied singing. In later years he went the way of so many of his British contemporaries, into Pantomime, Music Hall and variety. It was the United Kingdom, after all. Skiffle, which Donegan personified, was everywhere in the mid-fifties - the first do-it-yourself musical craze.
Everyone had a little skiffle group, including myself and a couple of boys who lived on our road. We’d play in the garage, a tea-chest bass with a curtain wire tied to a broomstick for a string, a plastic guitar and a washboard, hollering ‘Worried Man’ and ‘Don’t You Rock Me Daddy-O’ at the top of our tuneless voices, not bothering with chords, keys - the only aim being to achieve a cacophonous catharsis. Tommy Steele caught my attention for a couple of years before he too was pulled aside by Panto and show-biz. ‘Doomsday Rock’ with its dramatic opening, ‘Elevator Rock’ with it’s Haley like saxophone played by rising jazz star Ronnie Scott, were entertaining, as were his renditions of US hits originally recorded by Marty Robbins, ‘Singing the Blues’ and ‘Knee Deep In The Blues’.
Friends and I would check out junk stores, picking up Elvis 78’s on HMV, Louis Jordan on Brunswick, beat Fats Domino 45’s on London. On bicycles, we ride the 12 miles to Southampton and scour junk stores in an area that I think was around St Mary’s. Because Southampton was a port city, with ships docking there after completing transatlantic trips, many American 45’s were to be found in the junk stores. I guess sailors sold them for beer money. We’d pick up things like ‘Zing Zing’ by Art Neville, or ‘Lights Out’ by Jerry Byrne, both on Specialty, or perhaps Tiny Bradshaw, Little Willie John or Wynonie Harris on King. Then ride back late in the day, saddlebags bulging with trophies, eager to get the record player fired up and the music heard. So I went from Rock ‘n’ Roll to R & B and Blues and through friends, was introduced to the entrancements of jazz.
It had all led to a very long and strange trip indeed - I had never really seriously imagined or planned that I would end up in this foreign land, listening to saxophones in the American night, but then I had dreamt about it, in a very vague offhand daydreamy kind of way - and here I was, thundering through New Mexico, with the band of my dreams.
I thought further about the particular records I had heard that had led me to this moment, the sounds that had woken in me such a craving to experience certain sonorities, particular aural thrills. To be sure, there were the regional things, the obvious stuff like the New Orleans sound of Little Richard, Fats Domino, Huey Smith and so on, the riff-based Kansas City styles and the guitar combos out of Chicago, but there had been a handful of recordings that had stuck with me, and possibly the most significant had been an American Coral EP I had scored on one of those junk shop expeditions to Southampton, ‘Rock ’N Roll Dance Party’ by Alan Freed and His Rock ’n Roll Band. I knew that Freed was the American disc jockey who had waved the flag for R & B and Rock ’n Roll, and understood that he fronted a big Rock ’n Roll band on his stage shows, and the record defined all that I loved in the music.
Four heavy and driving instrumentals by musicians who were unidentified on the sleeve, but whose varying members I learned over the years included saxophonists Freddie Mitchell, Al Sears, Jimmy Wright, Heywood Henry, Buddy Lucas, Georgie Auld, Red Prysock, trumpeter Taft Jordan, trombonist Elmer Crumbley, guitarists Mickey Baker, Leroy Kirkland, bassist Lloyd Trotman and drummer David ‘Panama’ Francis. These guys were the nucleus of many of the R & B sessions in New York City, and so laid the foundation stones of Rock ’n Roll. And they didn’t just rock, they swung, they put the Roll into Rock ’n Roll.
Another album that not just turned me on, but tuned me into Rhythm and Blues was an LP I bought on a visit to London in 1962, at the HMV record store on Oxford Street. It was an import from Germany, a Brunswick LP of US Decca recordings, ‘The Rhythm And Blues Show’, and had artists that were new to me. Names such as Stomp Gordon, Big Bob Dougherty, Buddy Johnson, Clay Braddy, Tiny Davis, Joey Thomas, Charles Singleton and a bunch of others. All the bands had horn sections, some very large, all featured saxophones, and the lot of them swung the blues, evoking the mysterious and enticing sounds of Black America that whispered, murmured or yelled to the soul of this teenaged white kid from the south of England. From then on, while I never stopped loving all the previous styles I had discovered and loved, it was these urban horn-led aggregations that spoke to me in a language I came to feel as natural and understandable, that conjured feelings of adventure, the tones and rhythms had a siren-like quality, and here I was, eighteen years later in a Chevy Suburban, with the only bunch of guys in the world crazy and mad enough to try to earn a living playing this stuff. Oh man, heaven, pure, pure heaven.
The road led eastwards and then the Texas Line came and went, El Paso flashed by, the halfway point of this near fourteen hundred mile jump, and dusty old Texas stretched ahead, miles and miles of it. Stops for gas, food, bathrooms, then zombie-like back into the truck, through the night towards Fort Worth, turning onto 20 at the captivatingly named Scroggins Draw, through scrub to Toyah, and then onto Pecos, with images of cowboys and the sound of horses and the clink of harnesses flashing through my mind. Dry barren lands, nothing growing higher than your waist, just a paltry few inches of rain a year. Thinking back to my time living and working on farms in the UK, raising cattle and sheep on those green Somerset hills made me wonder how anyone in their right mind would raise cattle out here on such inhospitable land - even odder then that such country should thus be identified with cowboys. But this is Amerikky, durn it, and that was how it was and still is.
Of course, the main crop was oil, this was Texas oil country, the smell of it in the air, America’s lifeblood. Odessa, Midland, Big Spring, oil townships encountered, driven through and departed from in the night, left behind in our wake, unconscious of our coming and going, never knew we existed other than a few lonely hobos sleeping under overpasses, the air about their shivering tightly-drawn coats stirring at our passing.
A full moon lit the empty desert, mocking the puny yellow shafts of light from our headlights, ghostly buildings outlined behind barbed wire fence lines, oil pump-jacks nodding like giant spectral grasshoppers in the silver luminescence, stars points of light in the blue-black hugeness around us, as we sped along the bare highway, those stars silent cosmic witnesses to our insignificant journeying, this mad dashing about, an activity as seemingly aimless as that made by the galvanised and panicked circling inhabitants of a disturbed anthill viewed from six feet above, a truck with ten sentient beings with sentient worries, concerns, hopes, dreams and secret dooms, a truck filled with great importances and yet of no significance whatsoever to the great silent universe, witnessing the comings, goings and beings of galaxies beyond both comprehension and incomprehension, and those sleeping in the speeding vehicle were unconscious of it all anyway, so what did it all matter, just as long as we made Fort Worth an hour or two after sun up?
