Bob Bell's 1981 Hot Little Mama Tour - Part 11
Nick’s Uptown was a long rectangular room, with the stage kitty-corner at the far end.
And like Dallas itself, it was a swanky kind of place, the clientele groomed and manicured, the women well dressed, made up and scented, rouged and mascaraed, designer-jeaned, fancy frocked and sexy skirted, some sporting rhinestoned cowgirl hats over feather earrings, and the men in faded jeans, cowboy boots, tanned and clean-shaven mostly, expensive shirts, elegantly escorting their jewelled ladies courteously by their exquisite elbows, out on the town for the evening, having already eaten at some tasty and trendy joint, and now at ten, finding a table, waving to a waitress, and ordering cocktails, sitting back, expecting entertainment, a show of a quality to match their station in life.
Which was all of a good thing, because that was just what we were there for, to give these Texans a taste of musical elegance, a generous helping of blues for the musical gourmand, some spicy sauce for those discerning palates, indeed, we were there to give them a whole heap of booting roof shaking rhythm and blues like most of ‘em had never heard before, the kind of music that defied ‘em to sit still, defied ‘em to sit at all, enticing ‘em onto their feet, onto the dance floor, where they showed off their steps with an exuberance, with a flair, had ‘em Lindy hopping, jitterbugging, strolling, swinging and rocking and rolling all night long.
If the crowd itself was a far cry from the previous night at Fat Dawg’s in Lubbock, its reaction was stereotypically similar - big grins writ wide across faces, sweat streaked smiles, and before long the ladies started to lose that well-groomed look, spritzed hair falling across their faces, damp patches of sweat on their pricey blouses, audibly gasping at the blasts from the trumpet and trombone, making sexy with their eyes as the saxes groaned and churned and hollering as Ronnie laid into the blues, and the guys showed off their steps too, stompin’ down on those Cuban heels, shirts coming untucked, one moment an arm twirling their partners, the next the other arm holding their dates by the waist as they dipped and whirled to the beat.
Come the break, Porky came over to me with an older guy in tow. “Bob, you gotta meet Mickey. Mickey’s an old buddy … we go way back.” And so I got to know Mickey Scrima, a silver-haired gent with a beautiful woman on his arm.
“Mickey was on the Barnet band before me … he’s a helluva drummer,” and later that night after the gig Porky told us that Mickey had been with Harry James when Sinatra was in the band, had roomed with Frank, played with a whole heap of folks, and what a gas it was to see him again after all these years. This was the cool thing with Porky - we’d hear about so many cats, known and unknown, as we sat in the truck, rolling from town to town - to get to meet these guys from his past, often older versions of Porky himself, get to talk with them about band life in the forties, before the interstate system, a time when a five hundred mile jump really was a big ‘un, tales of suffering and joy, recording before the days of tape and you just had to hit those notes right or cause the entire band to stand there pissed and fuming, giving you the evil eye, for another take, of playing large ballrooms with minimal PA’s, no monitors, ears aquiver to stay in tune, how as youngsters they’d tune into radios to catch a signal from a far-off city hotel, that was hosting a residency of a band with hot soloists, up and comers, whose names were whispered amongst the hip, just got to hear these guys, catch a sense of a legend in the making …
Mickey was a cool guy indeed, and turned out to catch the band every time we hit Dallas thereafter. And I just have to mention here that Mickey was overjoyed to see that John Rossi was playing a vintage set of Slingerland Radio Kings, in a pearl finish, identical to the set Mickey had played with James during those days almost forty years before.
The Fabulous Thunderbirds were in town, and showed for the second set. Of course they sat in, and it was strange to hear the band with Keith Ferguson on bass for a couple of tunes, just as it was hearing Fran Christina instead of John on the drums. Fran, of course, had been the band’s original drummer, so it wasn’t that strange, I guess, but it sure was different. Fran had a lighter touch, and used different accents, which was only to be expected of course. Everyone has their own style. Jimmie got up there and he and Ronnie shared an amp. Jimmy had such a tough minimalist approach … the two of them traded solos, biting reverberating tones shimmying down the room, and there was Kim.
Kim Wilson, one of the finest singers of his generation, singing from way down in his stomach, full, rich and roaring, and then pulling a harp from his pocket, and bearing down on it in front of the mic, sounding as full and passionate on it as was his voice. There are, were, and always will be a lot of harmonica players in the blues, but in reality, very few have the chops of Kim. His tone, unerring sense of dynamics and faultless swing are in a class by itself. In 1980 the three saxes and Al had guested on the T-Birds ‘Butt Rockin’ LP, released in February of 1981, and I had heard the tapes from the session, which included ‘Someday’ which for some reason never made out onto the LP, which to my mind was wildly odd as the tune, and the performance was so damned good. Sure enough, Kim launched into ‘Someday’, turning it into a greasy operatic paean of longing, coasting on a raft of riffing saxophones, and made my night.
The dancers on the jammed dance floor, clung together in couples, close as pages in a book, drifting tightly in rhythm, eyes closed, swamped in sound, bathed in the blues. ’Someday’ sure was a heck of a song.
So the T-Birds got off and Boz Scaggs wandered up onto the stage, guitar in hand, and after a couple of words with Greg, counted off a blues shuffle. I think he was living in Dallas at the time - certainly on the later times we hit Dallas, he’d be there, at Nick’s, asking to sit in again.
The Nick’s gig was a two-night stand, and the next night we had an opening act - Buckwheat Zydeco. Although he was based in Louisiana, the state next door, this was his Dallas debut which I found a little strange as he had been around for many years. He was great, hitting a soulful groove on that big accordion strapped across his chest, and a heavy Creole accented voice to match, and when it was Roomful’s turn to play, it was a no brainer to invite him up to sit in. Oh man, he smoked with the full power of Roomful behind him - he dug it, we dug it, the club dug it. Before the night was over, we had one more request to sit in … this time from a cowboy hat-wearing guy with a black patch over one eye - Ray Sawyer from Doctor Hook. He did one tune - can’t remember what it was, or how it was, which is probably an accurate summation of what transpired.
Back on the road the next day, south to Houston … about two hundred and fifty miles, around four hours in our delightfully aromatic Suburban. Behind the wheel I thought back over what had transpired over the last couple of days, listening to the T-Birds, Buckwheat and everyone, and how far way it all was from England, and those days as a youngster, lying around in my bedroom, listening to blues on records, with a headful of dreams of maybe making it overseas one day, to the US of A, and to hearing all this stuff in person, and here I was, in big old Texas, land of the blues.
Always hard to pinpoint the beginning of something, the genesis. The butterfly beating its wings somewhere, tales of alternate universes and sliding doors, forks in the road, the what if’s and what if not’s, just where does a story start? At the beginning, of course, but where is the beginning? It can be a bit like those genealogies in the Bible where so and so begat so and so, who begat so and so, who then begat so and so … when does begat begin? I suppose that one has to look such capriciousness firmly in the eye and decide, arbitrarily, upon a point in time. To be sure, I wouldn’t have been in Texas had I not heard Bill Haley at the age of eight, but then I probably still wouldn’t have found myself in Texas had it not all started to happen that day in London when I had left Leslie Perrin’s office, with a few hours to spare.
Leslie Perrin was what used to be called a press agent, what we now call a publicist. My father, anxious that I find some kind of employment after spending a wastrel’s 1965 summer hitch-hiking around the West Country, in celebration of finishing college, and so had arranged for me, through his bank manager, an interview with Mr. Perrin. I was about to turn nineteen and Dad knew I was crazy about music, and I guess his bank manager knew Mr. Perrin was somehow connected with the music business. In fact, Perrin included among his clients The Rolling Stones, a salient fact of which I was completely oblivious. Dad, who dealt in antique clocks and surely knew nothing about The Rolling Stones, drove me up to London, dropped me at Perrin’s offices, and went off to Sotheby’s or Christie’s to attend an auction. We arranged to meet up at the end of the day.
Lord knows what Perrin made of the gormless and spotty teenager sitting across from him, a kid who seemed to have no idea of what he wanted to do apart from ‘getting into the record business’. We sat there for half an hour or so, I no doubt babbling all manner of incoherent fantasies, and then, as we stood up to shake hands, he gave me the best advice going, and that was to get into music publishing. Years later, I understand the soundness of that advice - publishing always has been where the money is, but I was a kid, and thus completely impervious to advice - good or bad.
It was around eleven as I left his offices. An entire day to fill before we were to meet up around six in the afternoon. Filled with the desire to do something momentous, something to prove to my dad, to Mr. Perrin, and to the world at large that I was capable of great things, I walked up to a telephone box and looked up the number to Island Records. I knew that Island was in charge of Sue Records, which was a fine R & B label run by a chap called Guy Stevens, whose career I had followed at a distance over the last few years. Guy had first come to my attention as the writer of some rather hilarious letters to the New Musical Express, where he had made a vow to eat his record collection if Jerry Lee Lewis’ latest record flopped. It had, and when challenged by a fellow reader, he made good on his promise, and described, in crunching detail, how each record had gone down. Later his name had turned up as a DJ at The Scene Club, spinning R & B records, and then as an advisor to Pye Records, supervising their licensing of Chess Records. I also later found out he had been the one to get Chuck Berry out of jail in the US and arrange for his first tour of England. In those early days of British blues bands, it was Guy to whom The Rolling Stones, The Who and countless others turned to find material. Remember, The Who used to advertise themselves as Maximum R&B. Amazing but true.
So I called Island and to my surprise was told that yes, they did have a vacancy, and so I caught the tube or a bus - hard to remember after all these years - and was introduced to David Betteridge, the Sales Director. He told me he was looking for a van rep, and did I have a license? Telling him I was taking lessons and expected to pass my test any day, he told me to start the next week. The fact that I had never driven before was a wee bit disconcerting, but I figured I could get lessons and get my test fairly quickly and that was my plan.
So I met dad at the six that afternoon, and breezily told him I had a job, and would be starting next Monday. Oh, and I had to learn how to drive.
Unsurprisingly it took a bit longer than I had anticipated, and Island hired someone else to do ‘my’ route, but David had fortunately taken a shine to me by then, and I stayed on.
And so that was how all this had started. And boy, was I doing a lot of driving.
