Bob Bell Recalls The Hot Little Mama Tour - Part 1
The Hot Little Mama tour … Part One
The summer of 1981 was a busy time. We had started our own record company, Blue Flame Records, and issued the band’s third LP, ‘Hot Little Mama’. I had a lot of help from Island Records’ New York City office - they pointed me towards the better independent distributors around the nation, and we did deals with Rounder Records in Cambridge, Massachusetts who handled the northeast, All-State Distributors oversaw Chicago and the upper midwest, House of Kansas City covered the middle of the country, City Hall the west coast, and we had two other companies looking after the southeast and the south. In addition to all this, Island's press office shared their mailing lists with me.
Having Island’s mailing list was a boon. I had never worked as a publicist before, but when you have a unique product, selling it is easy. I was in my early thirties, had spent a very large part of those years listening to Rhythm and Blues, and knew that there was no other band in the world that captured the sound and spirit of jump blues as did Roomful. Most of the other blues bands out there played Chicago style, with guitars, harmonica and perhaps a piano. Maybe just one sax here or there.
Roomful had this five-piece horn section, and man, they blew! The opening numbers were usually instrumentals along the lines of ‘Okey Dokey Stomp’, which opened with a chorus of guitar over rhythm, the chorus ending with a dynamic horn accent, which in turn led into a horn riff, a riff that blasted sound to the rafters. It was beyond dramatic and never failed to draw a collective gasp from the audience as it hit. So Roomful was different from the others - they didn’t just rock, they swung. Swung like a pendulum do, hypnotic, entrancing and Christ, it made you smile. Really smile, grin, and feel so righteously good.
So calling up writers and talking to them about the band was fun. It was a mission. We were not just in the music business - we were in the business of spreading joy, kicks and abandon. And I have to suppose that my English accent didn’t hurt. After all, it was a gimmick, albeit unconscious on my part. An Englishman calling, promoting a band that was playing a rather archaic form of American music, and sounding more than enthusiastic. Maniacally evangelistic was more like it.
Greg and I planned a large tour for the fall to promote the record. America is a huge and vast country, and for a little independent company like ours, the only way to promote was to make some national noise, and reinforce that with a local and territorial push. Armed with Island’s mailing list, right out of the starting post we got rave reviews for the record in People Magazine, Playboy and Madamoiselle, national magazines that were read from coast to coast. Immediately the band’s stock rose locally. Holy smokes - Roomful of Blues is in People Magazine! Playboy even? And the musician’s mothers, sisters and aunts just glowed at the Madamoiselle piece. Something was happening. We toured the east coast heavily, hitting Virginia and Washington, DC, areas where the band had a strong following, and upstate New York to Rochester, and of course all over New England.
The band had a good following in Texas, but the Lone Star state was thus far the furthest west they had ventured. This trip we decided to hit the entire country, New York, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, Utah to California - out west as far as you can go before you get wet, and then back along the southern route, through Texas, Louisiana, Georgia, and the eastern seaboard and then home. Putting it together was a lot of fun and a whole lot of work. Greg and I were on the phone with one another constantly.
I was living in an apartment in Providence with Doug James and Rich Lataille, and Greg lived in Westerly, about 50 miles to the south. Of course, we were gigging four or five nights a week, so we’d see one another pretty much every day anyway, but that was the evening, showtime. We’d get home after a gig, any time from two in the morning or maybe later than sun-up, sleep a bit, shower and then be up and at ‘em by 10 or 11 am. Both of us had big maps of the US on our office walls, and we’d calculate the distance from one town to another, trying to figure if we could squeeze in a date, reckoning on driving at an average of fifty miles an hour. Five hundred miles? OK, that’s about ten hours, that’s do-able.
Seven hundred miles? We could do it if we leave right after the gig, drive through the night and arrive in the late afternoon, that would work. We’ll be tired, but so what, we’ll be tired anyway. Plus we'll save paying for a hotel for that night. And so a date would get booked and Greg would give me the promoter’s phone number and I’d call him. How many posters do you want? Which newspapers cover your area? Which are the radio stations? I had quickly found that most bands just sent the promoters a few press kits, a couple of LPs and left it up to the venue to try to get press.
That approach would certainly save money on phone calls and postage, but I had already learnt that dealing with these people myself was an extra edge. It was that English accent again, the enthusiasm in my voice, the certainty, the knowledge that Roomful was not only different but remarkably so, dynamically so, that usually seemed to carry the day. We got great press in every market, and of course, the fact that we had good and quote-worthy national reviews in the press kit sure helped. For each date we tried to get a review of the record and a phone interview, to be published in advance or at the latest on the day of the show. Best was to get the Sunday edition of the paper the weekend before. Having someone just cover the show and review it was not much good - by the time the review came out we might be a thousand miles away.
We wanted folks through the door, we made more money that way. At the same time, I was calling radio stations to talk to Programme Directors or Music Directors to find out if they were playing the record. Radio people are like sheep. Once you get one station on a record it is easier to get a second. Once you get three, the fourth comes along, and so it goes. I had coloured pins on the wall map in the office indicating which areas we where we were getting played. I was in heaven, gigging most nights with the band, doing sound, selling copies of “Hot Little Mama’ and t-shirts during the break, and then donning my publicist and record company mogul hat during the following yawning and eye-rubbing day. Greg was always urging me to try to make my phone calls after 6 pm, when the rates were lower, but for most of the calls I had to make, daytime hours were the only ones that worked. And so, inevitably, disaster struck. The phone bill was in Rich’s name, and one month he left it too late to get money from Greg to pay it.
The result. Disconnection. Shee-it, as they say down south.
We got it back on of course, within a few hours, but I’ll never forget standing at a phone booth on Thayer Street in Providence, trying to hold on to worksheets flapping in the wind, the inked notes running in the drops of my sweat from the endless summer humidity, with a bulging pocket of quarters, trying to conduct business while being jostled by passers-by and straining to hear distant voices over rumbling and honking traffic.
As successful as my radio promotion was going, we just didn’t have the funds to keep it up at the frenzied level I had attained. It was paying off in increasing plays, no doubt about it, but the phone bill made it too expensive. Years later I would have hired a radio promo guy, but back then it was really out of the question.
The thing was, we were poor. Very poor. Broke and frayed, but not quite busted. The future looked great, the present annoyingly and frustratingly impecunious. Poverty was simply a temporary inconvenience that somehow had to simultaneously ignored and accepted. The apartment at Hope Street was the middle one in a three-storey building. When I had arrived in Rhode Island in February it was winter, a hard snowy icy winter, and we couldn't afford heating oil, so we wandered about the apartment in sweaters and coats. The folks in the apartments upstairs and downstairs must have had to crank their heat way up to compensate for our miserliness, but we benefited from their aversion to the cold. Had there been no-one else in the building we would have froze.
Summer brought humidity and heat, and we had one or two ageing AC units, stuffed in windows, that gave some relief, but not much. It was all a far cry from the cool and breezy Brendon Hills back home in Somerset, England.
Rich usually ate by himself, subsisting on what looked like an exclusive diet of miso soup and crackers, while Doug and I occasionally ventured forth upon a culinary adventure, invariably doomed. Doug's specialty was The Wedge, which was a large chunk of meat and a random mix of vegetables tossed into a large pot. Everything was thrown in whole, un-chopped, no seasonings other than salt and pepper, and then boiled for an hour or so. It was always horrible, but was eaten in the spirit of it being a satire upon dining, and thus was consumed with exaggerated exclamations of both horror and delight.
Howlin’ Wolf
The accompanying bottle of whatever was at hand, usually a jug of cheap wine, would go some way to increase its palatability. The apartment was bare. Table, chairs, a sofa, a TV, and a record player which was on for most of the day. Both my roommates had great record collections, and for me, it was like living in an Aladdin's Cave. Musicians who previously had been but names and photos in books came alive, both through their LPs and through the endless anecdotes and often scurrilous tales Doug and Rich would tell about them. The variety, styles and eras became gloriously jumbled and mixed, and in the course of an evening we'd go from Lockjaw Davis to Phil Woods, from Jimmy Lunceford to Hank Williams, Buddy Johnson to Howlin' Wolf, The Fabulous Thunderbirds to rockabilly, Buddy Tate to Bobby Bland, from Lydia Mendoza to Los Lobos. I was all ears, full of questions, absorbing the answers, a crazed sponge, soaking up more and more, as if it was my ambition to become some kind of walking encyclopaedia of useless and pointless knowledge, useless and pointless to all except me, of course. Every day was consumed with music, whether listening to records, the band, discussing it, or promoting it.
Buddy Tate
I was in the spirit and God knows, I exulted in it, thoroughly, entirely, unreservedly, forwards and backwards, up and down. It permeated me, soaked me, , transformed me, alchemized me, transfixed me, transfigured me. Bewitched and mesmerised, I just burned to tell the world about Roomful of Blues, my enthusiasm fuelled by the radiance of saxophones, trumpets and trombones blazing in the north American night, the thrill of a hammering boogie-woogie piano and a slashing and reverberating guitar, all carried on a buoyant raft of upright bass, shuffling drums, press rolls and cracking rimshots basking in a great sheen of cymbal wash.
Ah, heaven, pure pure pure and unadulterated heaven. And I was in its midst, floating on clouds of joy, riding lightning bolts of epiphanies ... I tell you, the blues'll make you happy too.
