Bob Bell's 1981 Hot Little Mama Tour - Part 15 - Last Drive, Last Show
The last day, the last drive, the last show, the last few hundred miles, three hundred of them to New Haven, Connecticut, and then another hundred or so to Providence in sweet little old Rhody.
The atmosphere in the Suburban as we left DC was buoyant, enthusiastic, expectant. It had been a long trip, the longest time the band had ever been out, and the most ground covered, the most shows played and now there was just one left. We had the feeling of being a victorious army, returning home after an exhausting campaign, proud and secure in the knowledge we had been tested, really tested, and had passed with flying colors. The close quarters of the Suburban had been a part of that test, and could have quite easily have blown the band apart, but everyone had risen to the occasion, bitten their tongues when the moment arose, and indeed there had been a lot of moments, but the experience had melded Roomful into a cohesive whole, and so it was we rode the road home, up to Baltimore and through the Fort McHenry Tunnel, with its sign saying ’No HazMats’ which puzzled me for hours until it was explained that it was short for ‘No Hazardous Materials’, that wonderful American way of shortening and abbreviating words, like up in Boston no-one says ‘Massachusetts Avenue’, it’s always ‘Mass Ave’, and anyway we cut through Fort McHenry Tunnel - the alternative being the Baltimore Harbor Tunnel that also prohibits HazMats - and why are the HazMats prohibited, and what the hell constitutes a HazMat anyway? Turned out they included gasoline and propane tankers, vehicles, like RVs, that had propane on board, in short, anything that just might blow up if in an accident, and in that sad case the tunnel would act like a huge great barrel, and confine and direct the explosion towards each exit, giving it great power and a potentially massive and destructive force. So, no HazMats.
Happily we emerged at the other end of the tunnel propelled by nothing other than our own engine, and motored northwest, past Abingdon, Aberdeen and the Aberdeen Proving Grounds, the testing grounds of legend, where the prototypes of jeeps and wild four wheel drive trucks had been tested for decades, and then Havre de Grace, that divine port just a scant few miles from the brusquely named Port Deposit, no grace there, just dump your load and be gone, and then on towards Wilmington, through Wilmington, past Wilmington and Delaware slipped by, and the signs heralded the exits for Philadelphia, and were gone and up the seaboard towards New Jersey, now rolling on the New Jersey Turnpike, the fast toll road that takes you clear up to New York City, you grab your toll ticket when you get on, and pay when you get off, and by now the cassette player was on full blast, giving out with one of Ace Records’ great New Orleans compilations playing songs like ‘Blow Wind Blow’, ‘I’m Looped’ and ‘Gee Baby’, a whole heap of tunes that had been our soundtrack for the last few weeks, and indeed, not only had we listened to these numbers for weeks, many of them had been incorporated into the show.
‘I’m Looped, high as a Georgia pine’ was one of my favorites, and Pic sang the shit out of it, as he did Eddie Bo’s ‘I Love To Rock ’N’ Roll’, but the one that hit me over and over was ‘Silly Dilly Woman’ by Mercy Baby, with its insistently and deliciously greasy groove. It was absolutely and totally irresistible to dancers, and Roomful would show the dancers no mercy at all when the band launched into it, the saxes grinding behind Pic’s impassioned voice, the tune had a melody that you just wanted to go on forever and forever. Another tune that was on that compilation was ‘Please Don’t Leave Me Here To Cry’ by the Supremes - no, not those Supremes - which the band recorded a few years later, with Curtis Salgado on vocals. Roomful had already been performing Fats Domino’s ‘Please Don’t Leave Me’, and was also featuring a Lee Diamond tune - Lee Diamond formerly of The Upsetters, Little Richard’s road band - entitled ‘Please Don’t Leave’. So three imprecations not to leave … Roomful rarely used a set list, Pic preferring to read the crowd and call off tunes that fit the moment, so to avoid confusion on the bandstand, the tunes assumed new names. The Domino tune was called ‘Ooo - Ooo’, the Supremes’ ‘Rock ’n’ Roll in C’ and Lee Diamond’s song was privileged to retain its original moniker, ‘Please Don’t Leave’.
And so we drove up the New Jersey Pike, past Levittown, Trenton, Edison, Woodbridge Township, Rahway, Elizabeth, by the Hackensack River, past the huge landfill at Fresh Kills, flocks of seagulls darkening the skies, a littered, dead and poisoned landscape, through all this New Jersey growth and development but ourselves immersed in the sounds of Louisiana, our Suburban a southern bubble floating across Newark and the Bronx, the battered madness of the Cross Bronx Expressway, the roadway potholed, the lanes narrow, three streams of traffic bouncing crazily, just inches apart, at seventy miles an hour, white knuckles on the wheel, the dirty old U-Haul, that faithful old dog, running along behind us, straining, but the leash holding, and all the time Joe Dyson or Lloyd Price are hollering songs of celebration, and the Bronx is behind us, and we see the signs for White Plains, and we are on the New England Thruway, Pelham, New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, Rye, Port Chester, and we are on the Connecticut Turnpike, and Greenwich, Cos Cob and Mianus are writ white on the green road signs, with Mianus drawing the usual cries of ‘Whose anus?, Your anus? Mianus!’ Always corny, always predictable, always getting a wry smile.
Toad’s Place, on York St, New Haven, right across from the Yale’s campus, storied Ivy League college, was, and is, one of the best designed clubs in the USA. The main room is at street level so the load in is easy, a large dance floor in front of the stage, tables around the room and a big square bar towards the front of the space. The dressing rooms are in the basement, opposite the restrooms, and are accessed by stairs to the side of the stage, and also from another set of stairs beside the elevated sound and light engineers’ booth forty or fifty feet from the stage. Thus should the engineer need to access the stage during the show, he doesn’t have to push through a crowded dance floor, but can run through the subterranean tunnel and come up right beside the wings of the stage. The place had a good sound system so we didn’t have to drag our battered PA into the club and set it up as we had to do in so many of the joints we played. Toad’s wasn’t a joint. It was a good gig, and the night, being our long awaited and well publicized return to New England was equally good, with a full house which naturally included wives and girlfriends of the musicians. Albie, Greg and Jimmy lived in the North Stonington, CT and Westerly, RI area, so it was a given that their respective squeezes made the show, as did Big Guy’s wife, driving down from Newport, a friend of Ronnie’s from Boston drove down, as did a friend of Rich’s from Providence. Much hugging, canoodling and yakking in the dressing room in between bites of pizza, and swigs of beer and wine as one and all caught up, questions and answers zipping back and forth, from the mundane - rent and family, friends seen, problems encountered and solved, auto hassles - to the sublime, sister so and so just had a baby, and tales of unsuspected and auspicious good fortune befalling such and such a family … all the pent up tales and joys unspoken for five weeks all coming out in a mad torrent of communication because this was now, and now was at last the moment when eyeball to eyeball, lip to lip conversation was finally possible, and thus the hubbub roared.
The show was smooth, fast-paced and electric, the band polished, tight, seamlessly grooving, the solos emotional and cathartic, and the crowd danced the night away. And then it was over, instruments put away, stage clothes doffed, the trailer loaded one more time, and those who had rides home rode home, leaving the Suburban strangely empty for the last couple of hours of the trip.
Just Doug, Porky, John and myself, up I-95, through northern Connecticut, past New London, Clark’s Falls, across the Rhode Island line, signs to Wyoming - yes, there is a Wyoming in Rhode Island - Kingston, Warwick, Cranston and then Providence, and we are all quiet, lost in our worlds, and I am thinking that it was just around this time a year ago that I had arrived in Rhode Island for the first time, after a three and a half day bus ride from Seattle - that trip the culmination of a summer spent traveling the roads of America, to see past the next horizon, rummaging around in strange towns, through deserts and over mountains, looking for some kind of sign, I guess, but it was in a vacant kind of way, because after I had met up with Roomful in Atlanta that previous spring, I had really known, known deep down in my soul, that I needed to travel no more, but the urge was on me then, and so I roamed, until I’d suddenly had enough, and had bought the ticket in Seattle - to meet up with the band on its home turf, and how I’d then attended some of the recording and mixing sessions for ‘Hot Little Mama’ at The Hit Factory in New York City, and had taken the tapes to Europe and licensed the record in England and France, and all that had happened since then, the dates with Roy Brown, the setting up of Blue Flame Records, the excitement of being a publicist, a spokesman, an evangelist for the band, and all of this had happened in a scant twelve months, and here we were, gliding into Providence, a five week national tour under our belts, a regional name becoming a national name becoming an international name, spreading a message of joy and celebration, delivered with a unanimous feeling of righteous conviction. The band had the goods - it seemed that all I had to do was to tell the world about it.
If only it was really that easy.
