I don’t recall why I took a Greyhound bus to Seattle rather than the Grey Rabbit. Probably a matter of when the next bus left - Greyhound ran buses every day, and the Rabbit didn’t. Hitch-hiking was out of the question anyway, what with my boxes of records. Also, I recalled Doug James, the baritone sax player with Roomful of Blues, warning me against hitching in California.

“Don’t do it, Bob,” he had said. “There’s a bunch of crazies out in California - you’ll get murdered.”
Doug was from California, and I had taken him at his word.

The journey was long, boring and uneventful. When the bus arrived at the Seattle bus station, I rented a luggage locker and stashed the records. Now I was free again. Damn boxes were heavy. I called Jan and told her where I was. She was staying on a little farm on Point Roberts, a tongue of land attached to Canada, that extends south of the 49th Parallel, the western border between Canada and the US. To get there by land you have to go through Canada, which wasn’t on the cards for me because my new passport didn’t have an American visa, which my lost one had. And I couldn’t get a new visa until I returned to England.

Jan told me to get to Blaine, a little town just south of the border, and someone from the farm would come across the water in a boat and collect me. Which is what happened, and how I arrived at the tiny community of Point Roberts.

It was an idyllic time. We spent the days wandering the peninsula, clambering along the rocky shores, marvelling at the sea-tossed tree trunks that littered the shoreline, massive jetsam making walking a great climbing adventure, ducking under a trunk here, hoisting ourselves over another there. One day we walked along the shore and into Vancouver, simple as that. No border controls on the beach, no signs to say: ‘You are leaving the USA’ or ‘Welcome to Canada’. Just rocks, salt-washed dead trees, and the gentle wash and draw of the nation-less waves, the concerto of the ocean played in the key of life.

July morphed into August, the sun shone every day, and the going was easy. The little farm was owned by a couple in their thirties. He was a carpenter, a construction guy - 'twas he who had fetched me in the boat - and his girlfriend tended the village landfill, spending each day sitting outside a little hut, collecting fees from the locals using the dump. Jan and I visited her a couple of times. She’d sit there, outside her hut, naked to her waist, digging the sun, and sometimes getting her top back on in time to greet a local, and sometimes not. I imagine she was probably the talk of the community. But then, probably all of us were, as we too wandered about the place naked most of the time, and on occasion encountered fully clothed strangers, who very politely would say ‘Good Day’ and not miss a beat, which invariably made us giggle.

Over the course of the summer, I had been in sporadic contact with Greg Piccolo, the leader of Roomful, and had made a tentative plan of meeting up with the band again, on the east coast, when I would be on my way back to England. When I called him from Point Roberts, he told me that the band was coming off the road that week, and would be playing a club date in Providence, Rhode Island, the band’s hometown and base, the coming weekend.

And so the road beckoned once more. Jan told me she was going back to England in a couple of weeks, and she would happily take my records back with her. I gave her the ticket to the luggage locker, and we made plans to meet up once again, this time in London when I got back. I had become tired of hitch-hiking, tired of the uncertainty of it all, tired of not knowing where I was going to end up at the end of each day, just tired of the aimlessness. Things had changed, a purpose was revealing itself. I knew I had to hear the band again, my mad summer was over, and something, I knew not what, lay ahead, just over the horizon, sending urgent messages upon the wind. All of a sudden, I wanted to move again, but this time, fast. I’d catch a bus.

Back into the boat, back to Blaine, back to Seattle, and onto a Greyhound. Greyhound at the time had a deal going - just $99 for a trip straight across the continent, and if you wanted it, a return for an extra dollar. Tempting, but of course, pointless, for me anyway. I was going one way, all the way. I paid the ninety-nine bucks and boarded the bus on a Tuesday, and off we went.

Three and a half days on a bus is not a lot of fun. One can only sleep so much, read so much, look out the windows so much. We stopped for fuel a few times, and stretched our legs for ten or fifteen minutes, and then back to the seat. In Chicago, we had an entire hour to wander about, and then, back to the seat. That old bus just ate up the road, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and into New York, and then on up through Connecticut and finally Rhode Island, pulling in to the bus station around nine-thirty on Friday evening. All I knew was that the band was playing at a club called Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. I wandered outside the terminal looking for a cab, spotted one, and told the driver where I wanted to go. He gave me an odd look, but nodded, and told me to get in. Just two blocks later I understood the reason for the strange look, as he pulled up outside a club, with a neon sign proclaiming Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel in the window. ‘Yeah, wasn’t far, was it?’ he remarked laconically as I paid him.

I paid the admission and walked into the club, and serendipity upon serendipity, the band started playing at that very moment. Wow, three thousand miles - a straight flash right across this huge and immense continent and here I was, through the door at the exact moment the band comes on. Am I in a movie or what?

The opening tune was Gatemouth Brown’s ‘Okie Dokie Stomp’ with its biting guitar lines buoyed by riffs and punches from the horns. Ah, heaven, pure pure heaven. The place was jammed, couples dancing, people yakking, drinking draft beer, doing shots, waitresses courageously weaving through the throbbing crowd, trays of drinks perilously held high above their heads, and the band roared on, the three saxes moaning on a slow blues, the trombone emoting with plungered tones, the piano dancing under it all, and the Beatle-coiffed drummer sweating, his eyes red and bloodshot, his hairy arms laying down a thundering beat.

I checked out the bandstand which was high above the dance floor. Yep, no changes in the lineup - same players I had heard months ago down south, and the same sound, the same glorious sound. Over the summer I had wondered if perhaps I had romanticised how good they were, wondered if possibly my mind was playing tricks upon me, but nope, they had it alright. They had that sound, they had it down in spades, they jumped the blues in that old way I had heard on records all my life but had never thought I would ever, ever get to hear in person.

And here I was, drenched in the sound, soaking it all up, and it wasn’t just me. Looking around I could see the ecstasy writ large upon the faces of the audience, the way they cheered a solo, the way they would look at one another as a phrase hit, the way they would scream ‘Yeah! Yeah!’ as the tenor player leaned into the mic, screaming on one high note after another and then finishing up with a cavernous earth-shaking deep honk.

The floor was awash in beer, the air thick with cigarette smoke, the bartenders running back and forth behind the bar, fetching, pouring, uncorking, keeping this mad crowd lubricated and joyful, and all the while Roomful thundered on, tune after tune, a Buddy Johnson big band styled number followed by a Texas blues, followed by a New Orleans rhumba on ‘Cry To Me’, then the band broke down to a quartet, the horns leaving the stage for a Chicago blues number, then the ‘bone player returning for ‘Caravan’ that very same tune that he had played on the night, months previously, when I first encountered them in Atlanta GA. They played right across the blues book, all the regional styles, and all played with nonchalant authority, great feeling and all imbued with a wild sense of fun.

At the end of the first set, I made my way to the dressing room to say ‘hi’ and was greeted like a long lost friend. Turned out they had all read the piece I had written for Melody Maker after seeing them in Atlanta and New Orleans. I had sent a copy to Greg Piccolo at the same time I had submitted it to Melody Maker. The paper had been on strike at the time, so it never got published, but I guess my understanding of the band had gotten across, and I was greeted like some kind of minor hero.

The band went back on for the second set, which was kind of the main meal compared with the hors oeuvres of the first. It was a take no prisoners lesson in dynamics, passionate soloing and the sheer joy that a well-drilled band can impart. These guys obviously knew each other's moves and ideas, the horns set riffs, the rhythm section underpinned the groaning saxes with a supple bounce and drive, the guitarist, a mean-looking guy with a scruffy little beard, a cigarette in his mouth, played with a tone to kill for, drenched in reverb. The two brass players, the bone and the trumpet used plungers on some tunes, growling and wah wahing, and the reeds swung in unison, pulling and pushing the band. The singer, Greg Piccolo, stood in front of the band, one hand holding the tenor slung from his neck, the other grasping the mic stand, declaimed the blues, eyes tight shut, face contorted, feet shuffling.

Lupos377 Westminster St, Providence - the original site.jpg

The night ended with a New Orleans instrumental, the horn players - all five of them - leaving the bandstand and parading through the crowd, while the rhythm section anchored the groove from the stand, chorus after chorus until one by one the horns ascend the stand for one long final blast and then Piccolo walked to the mic, his clothes drenched in sweat, and hollered: “That’s it! No Shit!”

It was over.

I walked out of the club with Doug James and Rich Lataille, his bandmate and roommate, and we drove to their apartment on the East Side. Doug and I sat up for hours as he played me cuts by Earl Bostic, Bill Doggett, Bobby Bland, Professor Longhair, Serge Chaloff …. music from all over the spectrum. An excitement welled up in me that was different from the excitement of the past few hours; it was an excitement of looking forward, beyond the present, beyond the here and now and to a future of which I had never before envisioned. I couldn’t really put my arms around just what that future looked like, but I knew it involved Roomful of Blues, and I knew, way beyond a shadow of a doubt, I was going to be involved too.

I was going back to music, or more to the point, going forward with music once more, those years of country living in the wilderness decisively behind me. Urban landscapes beckoned, I had found a band who played the very music that was a part of my soul, who understood the poetry of Percy Mayfield, the longing of Johnny Hodges, the madness of Red Prysock, the thrill of Fats Domino and the riff bound sound of jumping Kansas City.

Seattle, Chicago, the Greyhound bus and the past three days were all a long time ago. Now Providence, Rhode Island was the centre of my universe.