Bob Bell's Bookmobile Blues
The speed of the passing months in the nineteen-eighties was matched by the advancing decay of Roomful’s bookmobile. The steel sides and roof were rusted and rotting. New England’s severe winters, with the subsequent salting of icy roads, hastened the demise of the vehicles that ventured forth upon those wintry highways, and the bookmobile was becoming a prize exhibit of what occurs when salt meets steel.
I had cut and pop-riveted sheets of galvanized metal to cover and weatherproof the bad areas, sealing the edges with black pitch. Most certainly not pretty - amazingly ugly, in fact - but the patches kept the weather out and also kept the outer shell from shaking itself apart.
By now the interior was, well, pretty much indescribably smelly and dirty. The carpet, its color now impossible to discern as a mixture of grease, old coolant, spilled beer and dropped food contributed to a dull sheen, a loathsome appearance only matched by the equally abhorrent odor.
This situation was not improved by an incident that occurred on a short trip when I was alone in the truck driving down I-95 from Providence to Westerly, Rhode Island, for a Sunday evening gig at the legendary Knickerbocker Cafe. I had to get there a couple of hours before showtime to set up the PA etc, and then break down everything at the end of the evening. As it was a local show, the band members drove themselves to the club as doing so enabled them to get there a half-hour before hitting the stage, and then they could head for home immediately the show ended.
So there I was, about two-thirds of the way to Westerly when I smelled smoke. I pulled over to the hard shoulder, serendipitously next to a roadside emergency phone, and jumped out, looking under the truck. Sure enough, there were flames coming from the rear of the engine.
Jesus! Panic! What to do?
Call the fire department, get all the equipment out of the truck, quick, do something, do it all, right now. Without the truck, without the equipment, we are scuppered, out of work, total disaster, all these thoughts racing through my mind
I manhandled Ronnie’s guitar amp out onto the side of the road, plunged back in and grabbed John's rack and floor toms, and ran to the phone and breathlessly asked for immediate fire department assistance, giving them my location. Doing so somehow lessened the sense of emergency and my mind started to work logically, and I ran back into the truck and pulled up the engine cover.
An oily rag was aflame, it had been trapped by the engine cover and its edge had been laying on the exhaust manifold. Oh man, that was it? So I grabbed it, threw it out, jumped after it and stomped out the flames. A few cars rumbled by, no one had stopped. The entire scenario had been witnessed by an audience of one - me. I looked up the road. No sign of a fire truck. I put Ronnie’s amp and the toms back in the truck. Probably no more than four minutes had passed since I had first smelled the smoke.
Doom and disaster averted, there didn't seem much point in hanging around. May as well get to work, and so I started the motor, gunned it a couple of times and split, with my eyes on the mirror, looking for fire trucks and flashing lights.
When I arrived at the Knick, Doug James was already there and entered the truck to give me a hand. His nose twitched, and he looked around. ‘Christ, Bell, what the hell have you been smoking in here?’
By the later eighties, I was spending more time in the office and less on the road. Kevin Peterson was doing sound, and for an upcoming tour, we hired another local sound guy, Tony Gomes, to help Kevin drive, set up the stage and sell merchandise.
That trip took the band out to the west coast and while they were out there I heard they were having problems with the transmission, something about the bell-housing. On the homeward leg, Kevin had a death in the family and had to fly to Florida. I took a plane to New Orleans and met the band there. Sure enough, the bell housing had cracked, and a shop in California had welded it back together. Unfortunately not accurately enough. We found that that it was starting to crack again by the starter motor, and the temporary solution to this was to start the vehicle, and then, with the engine running, crawl under the motor and remove the starter., and thus remove the tension on the housing that was caused by bolting up the now slightly misaligned starter. The motor was a V-8, with a tangle of exhaust pipes on either side. It wasn’t impossible to get to the starter through the pipes, but they got hot very quickly and didn’t make the job any easier. It had been a horrific tour for Tony, who had become the de facto mechanic. What he had envisioned as an interesting musical couple of weeks touring the further parts of the USA had become a greasy burning nightmare, and by the time I arrived, he had burns up and down his arms, all his jeans were torn and stained, and he had developed a visceral hatred of the bookmobile and although he was too much of a gentleman to admit it, in all likelihood he had also developed a keen dislike of Roomful of Blues.
As I took over the mechanical duties for the trip home, I quickly understood the horror and dread that accompanied the removal and replacement of the wretched starter. Lying upside down on hot tarmac, lifting up the unit which weighed around sixty pounds, and fitting the bolts into place, and then ratcheting them tight wasn’t so bad when the engine was cold, but reversing the process after the motor fired up was no fun at all. The exhaust heated up instantly it seemed, and the socket would invariably slip off the bolt, and one would desperately replace it while the motor roared, the fan going two thousand rpms just a couple of feet away, the stink of oil, dust swirling about the motor and the noise combining to create a torment of excruciating and agonizing dimensions, and of course there were no safety glasses nor earplugs to hand.
After all these years I can’t recall the shows we may have played on the way home. It’s quite possible that we just drove a straight shot from New Orleans to Rhode Island. I say this because it is what happened the following week that really sticks with me. We had a day at home and then were scheduled to play a festival somewhere in Virginia over the weekend. Festivals always meant a decent payday, and we set off in good spirits. We were to play one ninety-minute set and to be finished by 5 pm, as the event had a curfew imposed by the town. All well and good, except when we were within two hundred miles of the gig, the motor inexplicably died. We cruised to the side of the road, and I got out, holding the starter and tools, and crawled under the truck. We had been running for hours and the heat of the engine was indescribable. Mid-summer on the Atlantic seaboard is invariably hot and humid, and that day appeared to be setting records. With the starter in place, I hollered for someone to start the motor. Usually, it started right up, but this time it took several cranks before it fired. At least it started, though God only knows just why it died in the first place. Unscrewed the bolts, gingerly reached between the exhaust pipes, and pulled the starter away from the bell housing, and wriggled out from under the cursed truck.
A few miles further we left the interstate to take smaller roads to the festival. At the top of the exit ramp, the blasted engine quit again. This time it took longer for the motor to fire up, but fire it did, and once again I engaged in that awful mechanic’s dance I was, unfortunately, becoming so proficient at.
This irritating and confounding sequence of events continued as we slowly closed in on the festival, We had planned to arrive around one-thirty, a couple of hours before showtime, but time was a-wasting, and we were looking at our watches with increasing despair. The worst stall came as we were halfway across a busy intersection, and the bookmobile sputtered to a dead stop.
Horns blared, brakes squealed, and that unrelenting old Virginia sun blazed down on the windowless vehicle, and down on the sticky tarmac as I squirmed once again under the engine. Cars and trucks gingerly drove around us, drivers hollering at us through lowered windows as they passed, cursing and swearing. For chrissakes, this was an inconvenience to them? My god, they had no idea. Were they thinking this was all just an act? If I had been armed I likely would have shown them what real road rage was all about. The overarching worry now was that the battery would die before the engine fired up. The accursed motor would not catch, until, inexplicably, it did. As it was, by this point I had become some kind of automaton, not really caring about the burns, the heat, the dirt, the din and the sheer bloody frustration of this doomed, damned, bedeviled, hexed, star-crossed vehicle. The day had become an endless string of repetitive actions, crawl under truck, install the starter, remove the starter, crawl back out, crawl back under, install the starter, remove the starter, get burned over and over again, knuckles skinned, grease all over my hands, arms and face.
We did make the gig. Arrived at four-twenty, and were on stage and playing by four-thirty. And finished a bit past five. And miraculously got paid in full.
The journey home was more of the same. We looked and looked to find the cause of the stalling but could see no obvious short anywhere.
We hit Providence as the sun was coming up and I dropped off the Providence dwelling musicians at their homes, first Porky, and then as I was dropping Rich over on the east side, the truck stalled again. Out the truck, wriggle under, replace the starter, get back in the truck, start it up, get out, remove the starter, get back in and drive. Then another stall as I was taking John Rossi home. Repeat the process. And then it was just me alone in the bookmobile, turning off Route 10, and heading for home, in Providence’s south side, the Elmwood neighborhood.
One block from home, the inevitable happened once more. And once more I lifted the engine cover between the driver and passenger seats - the same reflexive action that had caused me to do it several times over the past twenty-four hours. Just what the hell is the matter with this god-forsaken truck?
This time, however, I saw a spark coming from a wire that lay across the right-hand valve cover.
There it was, a wire with broken insulation, the cause of all our troubles, all the burns, all the exhausting anguish, despair and unending horror of the preceding hours.
The next day we ordered a brand new vehicle, a shuttle bus like those to be seen at airports. A Ford frame, motor and transmission, and a body by National.
I wrapped the bad wire with insulation tape and advertised the bookmobile in the local Auto Trader, with a caveat that it had a bell housing problem, and had a call on it immediately from a junkyard operator, who needed something like it to carry his oxy-acetylene tanks around his yard. An hour later he appeared at my door, with five hundred bucks in his hand. I took the bills and gave him the key, and he got in, started it up and pulled away.
I stood on the sidewalk and watched the bookmobile drive away, saw it halt at the stop sign at the end of the road, and then it turned the corner and disappeared from view.
Gone, but not forgotten. Some memories, some experiences are burned into our psyches.
Forever.
