Bob Bell's 1981 Hot Little Mama Tour - Part 7
Forty years later, it’s hard to recall if we played a Los Angeles date - in a perfect world we would have, but to the best of my memory we weren’t able to get one - and so after Solana Beach, we had three days off, three days to drive fourteen hundred miles to Fort Worth, Texas. A late checkout on Sunday, and plans for a lazy kind of drive to Texas, with a planned arrival of Tuesday morning. Hotel rooms weren’t usually available until noon or so, but experience had taught us that ten unshaven and unwashed musicians lounging in a hotel’s reception area, taking up all the seats, with instruments and clothes bags scattered around the floor, were usually offered rooms quite quickly.
And so eastward we aimed the Suburban, leaving Solana Beach, San Diego and the Pacific swells behind us, abandoning that western promise of adventure beyond the sunset, and drove out on Interstate 8, through Pine Valley, Jacumba Hot Springs, Ocotillo, Plaster City, past signs for Calexico and Mexicali, playing tag with the Mexican border, the dusty Suburban flying by the dusty towns edging up to the Interstate, with its promises of trade and dollars, most of which just zoom on by at seventy miles per hour, speed and time being the currency of the moment, past Winterhaven, and then into Arizona to Yuma, that land taken from the native Americans, sitting on the Colorado River, west of the point where the Gila River marries the Colorado, and just sixty miles from the Sea of Cortez, known to Anglos as the Gulf of California.
The maps showed reservations everywhere. Fort Yuma Indian Reservation, Gila River Indian Reservation, Fort Mojave, Kaibab Indian Reservation, Fort Apache, Cocopah, Maricopa, Navajo Nation, Tohono O’odham Nation, Hopi, in short, Indian country. The invading white men stole their lands as they simultaneously stole the lives of enslaved men from Africa. Oh, America, what violence and sadness you have unleashed.
Interstate 8 merged into Interstate 10 a few miles west of Tucson, not too far from Florence, which spurred Porky onto a long discourse upon Tom Mix, cowboy star of the silent movies of the twenties who had made a lucrative career out of chasing Injuns across the silver screen. Mix had died in 1940 in an auto crash near Florence, and the cause of death had been determined to be by a suitcase full of money, jewels and valuables which became airborne during the accident and had stove his head in, breaking his neck. Killed by success. Kind of.
Apparently there was a memorial at the site of the wreck, and the Tom Mix Museum in Dewey, Oklahoma had the dented aluminium suitcase on display. Porky had visited the museum years before when he was with Charlie Barnet, and the storytelling, after exhausting the saga of old Tom, and aided by a few hits of pot and the diminishing pint of Courvoisier in his hand, went on to discuss tales of Joe Venuti and the time he, Joe, when working with Roy Rogers, was attempting to give Trigger an erection using his violin bow while simultaneously engaged in repartee with the oblivious Rogers. Venuti was a practical joker extraordinaire - he supposedly called five or six bass fiddle players for a gig and told them to meet him on a corner of a street in New York City, the corner upon which his hotel room looked out. A double bass is not an easy thing to haul around New York, whether by cab, bus or subway. But a gig is a gig. I can’t remember what the eventual outcome of this prank was, but several bassists did converge on the corner, hauling their charges, only to realise that they had been the subjects of Venuti’s particular brand of humour.
Once Porky got going there was no stopping him, he was an endless fount of stories. Like the time in California in the Forties, when he was playing with Charlie Barnet, they had a double date with the Ellington band, and Barnet told his guys to get Ellington’s men drunk before the gig, a task that the band, being boozers, fell into with gusto, but never reckoned with the fact that Ellington’s guys were even bigger drinkers, and the Barnet band were out-drunk and outplayed.
He’d tell of how after a show, they would get on the train, and yes, Barnet's band had their own coach, and that was how they travelled back then, and Barnet, who was a big drinker too, would lean out of the window, as the train rolled out of town, waving a fistful of cash, the takings for that night’s show, and shout ‘Fuck you, Oklahoma City,’ or whatever town they had just played. It had been a wild band, and Porky stories made it live again.
He had played with so many people over the years and while he could hold his own, musically, with anyone, he never lost his love and admiration for Jack Teagarden. There would come a certain point in an evening in the truck, after differing subjects had been explored, discussed, dissected and ultimately abandoned, that Porky would bring up Teagarden.
Teagarden was an inexhaustible subject. His attributes and talents were also explored, discussed and dissected, but in the end, never abandoned. He was, as Porky explained, a Master Painter. I am not really sure if Teagarden actually became a Master Painter after I had joined the band, but rather think he had been so for a long time before my arrival. The analogy, or more accurately, the metaphor, was not only striking in its accuracy, it also gave rise to the opportunity of rehashing all that had been said before, but now in a painterly manner as opposed to a musical one. Tones and phrases became colours and strokes, and Porky would become increasingly animated, fortified by the brandy and the pot, waving his arms around, ultimately rounding on Ronnie Earl, shouting: “Teagarden didn’t need an amplifier, he didn’t need to drown everyone out” and it would be at those points in the evening that knowing looks were exchanged, lips curled into faint smiles, eyebrows lifted, and we knew that Porky would soon be snoring heavily, and all the time the Suburban and its trailer rolled through the Arizona night, and the ghosts of ancient native Americans wandered the deserts surrounding the endless road and its speeding travellers, silent witnesses to this unfolding madness of what passed for civilisation, progress and the pursuit of happiness.
Signs heralded Phoenix, then Tucson, and 10 stretched ahead, Benson, Wilcox, those towns that I had passed through a year before, hitch-hiking in the opposite direction, and now I was roaring east with the rising sun straight ahead, that orange ball obliterating vision, if only the road would curve just a little, just enough so that I could see the damn road and then one by one the slumbering crew awoke, and the cries for ‘Piss stop’ and ‘Coffee’ became urgent and somewhere close to the New Mexico line we pulled into a truck stop, dazed and stiff, hungry and yawning, headed for the restrooms to clean up, and then to the cafe for coffee, breakfast and to join the world again.
Gassed up, a change of drivers, and back out on the road again, a road now unimpeded by a horizon dancing sun, desultory conversation, some dozing, Pic behind the wheel, Rich and Porky next to him, me seated in the second row between Doug and Jimmy, in the third row John, Albi and Big Guy, and in the way back, in what we called the hamster cage, Ronnie. And behind us all, that old U-Haul trailer, faithful orange box on wheels, containing everything we needed to put on a show.
It’s hard to sleep sitting up, between two men, your head lolling back and forth, no headrest behind you, only the seat back which is just below shoulder height. You try to slouch, pushing your buttocks forward, knees up, back of the head against the seat, and it’s OK for a few miles, and then it’s not, and you have to reposition yourself, and you doze a bit, and then there is a noise, a joke, a sharp retort to something someone has said, and your eyes open, consciousness returns, briefly, but it’s nothing, nothing at all, and you drift again, the tires thrumming, the murmur of conversation, the occasional question from the driver to the map reader, the roar and whoosh of a passing eighteen-wheeler, the ever-present stink of stale booze, your dream state ebbs and flows, nearly asleep now, and someone puts a tape on, and you hear a snatch of a sound that sounds like it is from Louisiana, …’who the fuck is it? … I know that tune, that voice’ and your brain goes into overdrive, searching for identity, a label, a name, and you find it, and drift off again, wanting, so very very desperately, to block all of this out, to seek deep oblivion in sleep, but it is hard, if not impossible to escape, because after all, you are in a truck filled with madmen, nine other souls all consumed with the same passion for music, nine men with wildly differing visions for most everything in life but the music they make together, they make each night in a different town, when they forget whatever differences arose during previous hours of tortuous travel, and play together, in harmony, listening to each other, hearing each other, speaking to each other, the stage becoming the great catharsis that resolves the days travails, and the pains of hours and days in the truck vanish, consumed by the pure flame of the muse that replenishes all, the muse that enables all of this unending torture have a purpose, a meaning, and a reason, the cause of ten men being in a truck for weeks on end, in search of ecstasy ….
