Bob Bell: Roomful of Blues Tour - Texas and Fort Worth - and Memoirs of Stubbs BBQ
Wednesday morning in Fort Worth, awake, smiling and enjoying that up and at ‘em feeling after eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, a breakfast of eggs sunny side up, bacon, grits, hash browns, cold orange juice and steaming coffee, lazy talk with fellow breakfaster Ronnie Earl, the inevitable and constant subject of guitarists we love, Magic Sam, Earl Hooker, and those sons of Texas Blind Lemon, T-Bone Walker, Gatemouth, Albert Collins and that long and winding line leading to the Vaughan brothers, the current Texan princelings, and the memorable records and performances that come to mind between mouthfuls of hash and egg, us grinning with delight as certain titles come up, or shows are recounted, a sudden recollection of something Earl King had said about Guitar Slim, which then leads to talk of dyed hair and mad outrageous suits, as when Slim would dye his hair red to match his red suit one day, and then be all green the next, and Ronnie, upon being questioned, demurred from actually doing that though I knew secretly he’d just love to do it but didn’t really have the balls to go through with it, and quite probably because of the endless ribbing he have to take from Porky and the rest of us …. ‘So, uh, Ronnie, so what’s it gonna be tonight, pink hair and a polka dot suit? Ya really want people to look atcha, don’ya?’ … and dear sweet old Porky could be a vicious mean bastard after a few weeks out, the effect of nightly libations of brandy, martini’s and the odd lines of coke turning the kindly old gent into a snarling and unpredictable tiger, with the ability to turn on any of us, the only predictability being that we’ve been out for close to four weeks now, Porky’s gonna blow soon, and blow he would, the frustrations of being cooped up with nine guys all at least a decade younger than he, with all the attendant accretions of such youth, differing cultural mileposts, the constant teasing of the ‘old man’, and just as all this stuff is flitting across my mind, Ronnie grinned from across the diner table, and actually mouthed these very thoughts, as if he’d been reading my mind…
‘Oh man, Bell, you know how Porky is, we all know he’s gonna crack any day - you imagine how he’d be if we start dressing up, dying hair and all that shit?’ And Ronnie was right, and I was right, it would be a madhouse for sure, it was mad enough already with the endless schedule, the discomfort of the truck, the entire shebang.
Grinning, we paid our checks, went to our rooms, gathered our meagre belongings, suit bags, toilet bags and instruments and headed for the lobby, and then the Suburban, laying the suit bags on top of the equipment in the trailer, clambered into the truck, and checked the map for the way to Lubbock, a little over three hundred miles to the west and a tad to the north. Back along 20, the road we had traveled the previous day, until we hit Sweetwater, a few miles past Abilene, and then onto 84, a clear shot through to Lubbock.
Lubbock, along with Houston, was one of the first Texan cities I had heard of when I was a kid, it being the birthplace and hometown of Buddy Holly, who had been such a popular and influential presence in the UK music scene in the Fifties. I’d lie on my bed, next to the record player, listening to ‘Oh Boy’, 'Rave On’, ‘Peggy Sue’ and the rest, reading the scant liner notes on the three LPs of his I owned, never dreaming I’d be visiting his home town in the years to come.
We’d played there a few months before at the beginning of June, a two night stand at Fat Dawg’s, the same joint we were headed for now. I had reason to remember that visit well, because we had two nights at a hotel within walking distance of the club, a hotel with a swimming pool, a pool beside which I had fallen asleep for three hours in the Texas sun, lying on my stomach and gotten burned to a crisp, my back and the backs of my legs redder than red, and had been in agony for days after, most especially sitting in the truck day after day. No way you can sit on a bench seat without those parts of your body coming into close and agonising contact, levitation sadly not being an option. Well, that wasn’t going to happen on this trip. No chance, no time. We stayed at the same hotel, but by the time we hit town there was just time to check-in, load in, and then go to Stubbs for barbecue.
Stubbs was already legendary in Texas back then, nowadays his fame has spread across the nation - his barbecue sauces can be found in stores from coast to coast. He loved music and his restaurant often had live music… when Roomful was in town he’d come to the show and invite us over for barbecue the next day. Barbecue was another thing I had never dreamed of back in those youthful Winchester days, it not being, back then anyway, a player in English culture. Campfire cooking perhaps, the ritual burning of sausages and eggs and baked beans over a campfire, smoke everywhere, coughing, choking, eyes running … the joys, wonders and ecstasies of barbecue sauces being things unknown, tomato ketchup and HP Sauce being the only cuisine enhancements we were aware of.
Filled with ribs, pulled pork, smoked chicken, beans and collard greens, we went back to the hotel, cleaned up and walked over to the club, which was already sold out. The English band Savoy Brown had played there the night before, and the band’s singer and leader Kim Simmons stood next to me behind the board for most of the evening, and we shared comments on living and working in the US, the Texan heat, and the colossal distances between venues. Stubbs showed for the second set, and after the show, as we leaned against the bar sipping on beer and downing shots of VO, he invited us over to his place in the morning before we left town.
“C’mon over - I’ll take of y’all, put y’all out on that road with full bellies…” and so that was the plan - late breakfast at Stubb’s.
And so it was that a bleary-eyed Roomful showed at his restaurant sometime before noon, and gorged on barbecue one more time. Perhaps not necessarily the best and healthiest way of starting the day, eating all that meat less than a day after we had eaten the same fare before, but heck, old Stubbs had said he’d take care of us, and free is free. We all got fifteen bucks a day per diem, money that was intended to help defray the expenses of being away from home that was on top of the regular week’s pay, but fifteen bucks didn’t really go that far, and so any way it could be stretched it most certainly would be stretched. We finished up, wiping the sauce from our lips with paper napkins, one more last iced tea, and then an awkward thing happened. Stubbs approached the table with a huge box in one hand and a check in the other. So the free meal disappeared in front of our eyes: we reached into our pockets and scrounged up dollars, paid the check with muttered thanks and forced smiles and then, as he pocketed our money, Stubbs, with a triumphant flourish, placed the box on the table, momentarily opening the top. It was full of barbecue, enough to feed twenty starving musicians.
“Told y’all I’d look after y’all - that’ll get ya to Dallas!’ He said with that huge Texan smile, ‘that’ll give y’all fuel enough to make your show tonight.”
We looked at the box, at one another. It seemed that barbecue was taking over our world. The smell of it was everywhere, in the restaurant, in the air, on our clothes, the taste was in our mouths and on our tongues, chicken, beef and pork was stuck between our teeth, the sauce was on our chins, our fingers, hands, smudged on the table, great gobs of it on the napkins strewn in front of us, chewed ribs cast aside on paper plates, chicken bones astride abandoned piles of beans and all the while the restaurant was filling up with noontime diners, pouring in through the door, past the glowing neon signs with their ‘Bar-B-Q’ proclamations, tall men in baseball hats, short little guys with big bellies, Texan beauties all mascara-ed and lipsticked beneath cowgirl stetsons, kids in Mickey Mouse t-shirts chattering and giggling, bewhiskered granpas in overalls and John Deere hats with wrinkled old matrons hanging on their elbows, all of ‘em licking their lips in great barbecue anticipation, all eager for barbecue, barbecue on their minds, psychically broadcasting a 'gotta get me some of that Stubbs’ barbecue' vibe … scanning the huge menu behind the counter, yakking and babbling with unbridled barbecue expectations, saliva practically running down the sides of their mouths, drooling gluttons all of them, dreaming of briskets bound and smoked, watching racks of ribs blackening and dripping with thick sauce, trays piled high with pulled pork, steaming mounds of beans, anxiously regarding the sweating cooks behind the long counter adding raw meat to the smokers, retrieving great stainless skewers of ribs, chicken breasts, entire chickens, great chunks of nameless meat stacked in massive deep stainless pans, smoking, steaming, dripping, mirroring the actions of the crowd on the other side of the counter who were sweating, salivating, drooling, literally steaming with anxious hunger, as they pressed towards the order desk, inhabitants of a barbecue universe, all teeth, bile and an attitude of gimme, gimme, gimme.
Amid all this, the band looked at the huge box on the table, and a collective queasiness was felt. Once more we were in tune, but it wasn’t a tune that we really wanted to play.
“Ah Stubbs, man, you shouldn’t do that, man, that’s a whole heap of food,” was the rather muted response, and then we were out of there, shaking hands with our host, with all the attendant talk of looking forward to the next time we’d be in town, and eating barbecue once again, and back into the truck, already so hot inside from the noonday sun that it hurt to touch the vinyl seats and heading for the highway.
The omnipresent scent, the all pervading odour, the overpowering stench of barbecue filled the truck, from the front seat to the middle seat to the back seat to the way back, it wafted around the spare tire in the wayback, and under the seats and swirled up into the headliner. We all sat there, in a kind of stupefied and sated silence, loosening belts with still sticky fingers, conscious of the large box in Doug’s lap.
At a red-light, close to the outskirts of town, Doug wound his window down and beckoned to a bum standing on the corner. ‘Hey man, want some barbecue? ’S cool, nothing wrong with it - just too much for us’, and thrust the box into the puzzled guy’s hands.
The light changed and as the truck drove through the intersection most of the band swivelled around to watch the bum open the box, and witnessed a big grin spreading across his face. And then we were gone, windows open welcoming that cleansing Texan breeze, Dallas bound.
