Bob Bell's Remarkable Tales of the Music Trade
The following weeks went by in a blur. The band had been working on a new album at New York’s Hit Factory studios and were gigging on those days that were not spent recording. So we might be in NYC mixing one day and then playing a club date in Boston the next. I stayed with Doug and Rich for a week or two and then scored a flight back to the UK. I had flown out to the US in the spring as a courier for DHL, which had meant a free ticket, but for the return I couldn’t wrangle a free flight. Courier flights operated on a stand-by system, and I now didn't have the luxury of waiting around, just to save a few dollars. Fortunately, it was the time of Freddie Laker’s cut-price airline Laker Airlines, and the cost was cheap, cheap, cheap.
It was a time of wonderful and joyful reunions with my children who were living with my exes in Somerset and Bedfordshire. Mandy, Andrew and Aaron with Wendy in Timberscombe, Somerset, and Woody with Hilary in Keysoe, Bedfordshire, so more moving back and forth across the width of England, driving through the winter rains and gales in the old ex-Post Office Morris van that I had left all summer with Martin in Somerset. It was a bitter-sweet time in that although I dearly wanted to be reunited with them all on a more permanent basis, I had a strong feeling that the future, for all of us, ultimately lay over the Atlantic Ocean, in the far-off USA. I had encountered a positive sense of 'we can do this' in the states, a glorious and towering sense that anything and everything was possible, whereas back in Britain so much of the thinking was dominated by pessimistic 'that'll never ‘appen ‘ere, mate' gloom.
When in London, I met up again with Jan, after taking a long tube ride to where she was currently living, way out in the East End, and reclaimed my boxes of very very heavy 78’s, staggered off the next morning to the tube station and made my way to Clapham, to an apartment owned by friends of mine, that was my home when in London.
Bob at the Island offices in London
Because transatlantic flights were so cheap, I was able to go back to the US a couple of times, staying in Providence with Doug and Rich, and traveling to New York with Greg Piccolo and Paul Hubbard, the band’s sound engineer, to finish the mixing. After the sessions we’d drive back to Rhode Island, up Interstate 95 with its interminable toll booths, playing the mixes over and over on a cassette player in the band’s Chevy Suburban. At last came the day when the album was finished. Roomful’s previous two LPs had been issued, oddly enough, on Island, but had never been issued in the UK, and as I had been living and working the agricultural and pastoral life on the edge of Exmoor during the seventies, I had not then been aware of the band. And sadly, they had not had a good experience with the label, although as I later learned, the label had also not had a good experience with Roomful. Indeed, after I had ‘discovered’ them earlier in the year, I had spoken at length with Island’s US offices and had been warned not to get involved with Roomful of Blues - they were a pain in the ass and impossible to work with. Be that as it may, I knew what I had heard, and I also knew because of that I had a connection with these guys that no record company would ever have. It goes without saying that I often wondered how history would have been written had I stayed on at Island during the seventies: I am certain that had I heard Roomful’s initial US release, I would have campaigned mightily to have it released in the UK. But all of that was idle speculation - that was then, and this was now.
So what was the game plan here, with this new record, I asked Greg and the guys? The answer was a vague ‘shop it for a deal’ kind of answer. With just whom it might be shopped was not really addressed.
Autumn was approaching and I headed back to the UK, with cassettes of the new album in my bag. Alternating between Somerset, Bedfordshire and London, I also spent time at Island’s offices in Hammersmith, where I had worked the previous winter. Island gave me an empty office to use as a base, and I mapped out possible future strategies for Roomful and myself for 1981. Island’s art director Bruno Tilley made me a business card, and Rob Partridge, the company’s press officer, arranged an interview with Mike Atherton, who wrote for Black Echoes. Mike’s main interest was with my earlier work at the company with Jamaican music, the recent reggae and Jamaican blues releases I had overseen, but he was an R & B fan too and was interested in my involvement with Roomful, and my memories of Sue Records. Music Week responded to a press release I had sent out about Roomful and ran a few inches, and so, with a wee little buzz, I approached Ace Records armed with a cassette of what was to be the band’s third LP, ‘Hot Little Mama’, I sat down with Trevor Churchill and Roger Armstrong, partners with Ted Carroll at Ace. They listened to the first side, and then to the second. ’That’s the best thing I have heard in years’ said Trevor. ‘Me too’, Roger nodded in assent, 'we'd be very interested in putting this out'.
This was A Good Thing. Ace was the hippest Blues, R & B and Rock n Roll label in Europe at that time, specialising in reissues of classic material from the forties and fifties, in addition to recording and releasing vibrant and very current new wave bands from around the country. I told them I’d love to do a deal with them but obviously had to run it by the band before anything could be signed.
Island’s director of International Sales, my old friend Tom Hayes, put me in contact with Phonogram in France, who expressed a strong interest in putting out the record on their Mercury label.
So things were looking up. All of this had happened within a few days of getting my Island office, and it was the energy that ran through the Island building that somehow made all this possible. It was fun turning up there each morning, chatting with Trevor Wyatt who oversaw much of the Jamaican releases, hearing the latest sides by Third World and Steel Pulse. Linton Kwesi Johnson was often in the main office and was a cool and funny guy. Dennis Bovell would show up now and then, and I was able to reconnect with Rico Rodrigues, whom I had first met back in the mid-Sixties at Island’s offices in Kilburn. Rastas would walk through the office, their dreadlocks rolled up and ensconced under huge knitted hats, and Trevor would shout out, ‘Go on, show us yr locks, show us yr locks’ and the be-locked guys would grin back, fingers snapping to the beat of the ever-present music on the office system, while promo women would be engrossed in intense phone calls to the press or radio, and production guys were on the line to the pressing plant, or the sleeve printers. Productive mayhem practiced in an atmosphere of pervasive madness was the regular order of the day.
Toots and the Maytals were in town, and Island hatched a fine and wonderful plan to record them live at Hammersmith Palais and release the record the very next day. Now when I had done production at Trojan Records in the late sixties we were masters at rush releasing records, and on occasion would get a single out within hours of it being recorded - Joyce Bond’s ‘Ob La Di Ob La Da’ was one of them. But we had never done an entire LP - this was wild and audacious. Island’s mobile recording studio was parked outside the venue, with Alex Sadkin engineering. Toots had brought with him his crack Jamaican band, with guitarists Hux Brown and Carl Harvey, bassist Jackie Jackson, drummer Paul Douglas, keyboard players Winston Wright and Harold Butler. Backing up Toots’ voice were his longtime original singing partners Jerry Matthias and Raleigh Gordon. My God, what a night it was. The band was volcanic, blistering, red-hot and smoking, and Toots and company were at the top of their game, gospel and blues flecked vocals buoyed on top a rhythm that was so intense, so relentless, so driving it went beyond hypnotic, beyond mesmerising, way past entrancing and opened the doors to a throbbing, pulsing undulating nirvana. ‘Pressure Drop’, ’Sweet and Dandy’, ‘Monkey Man’, ’54-46’ and ‘Hallelujah’ - all the old favourites, plus the newer ones like ‘Funky Kingston’ and ‘Get Up Stand Up’ … they were all there. Warrick Lynn, their tour manager, and years-long associate of the dear but departed Leslie Kong, danced at the side of the stage, behind a giant stack of speakers. The crowd went apeshit, bananas, jumping up and down on the offbeat, hollering and shouting, crying with joy, screaming with excitement, and still the beat went on and on.
After the show, Trevor and I watched Alex mix the tapes. Indeed, he had pretty much mixed the show on the fly in the mobile studio, and by around 1 am, less than two hours after the end of the show, Trevor had mixed tapes to take to Island’s Sound Clinic studio, behind Island’s St Peter’s Square headquarters, where John Dent mastered the tapes to lacquers. I left Trevor at that point and returned to Clapham to sleep, but our intrepid Mr. Wyatt drove off into the night, up the M1 to Leicester where he had the lacquers processed into metal parts, and then went to the pressing plant. Sleeves had been already printed up in advance - a limited run of a thousand or fifteen hundred. Because of the rush, the uncertainty of everything, no songs were listed on the album jacket - just the musicians, pictures of Toots and the legend ‘Recorded and Pressed in 24 Hours’. Trevor loaded his car with pressings, dropped off a few to a couple of stores in Coventry, and then drove back to London, and to the Maytals’ show that night, where he and I sold the records at the merchandise table. Trevor could scarcely keep his reddened eyes open - poor fellow was exhausted.
That is just a snapshot of what went on at Island Records. Most of the folks that worked there were passionate about the music and were on a mission to spread the word, the sound and the feeling. It was still the hippest record company in the world, and everyone dug working there.
Guy Stevens
And then there was Guy Stevens. Dear, dear Guy. The last time I had seen him was about eight or nine months before, right back there at the beginning of 1980, when again I had had an office to use at Island. Then I had been organising the company’s Jamaican archives, and Guy was drinking. He would turn up in reception, loaded out of his mind, with a paper bag full of bottles of booze, mumbling incoherently, and I would get a pleading phone call from the receptionist, ‘Rob, Guy is here, can he come up to your office?’ Minutes later Guy would show, his face red and blotchy from the terrible psoriasis he suffered from, flecks of foam at his mouth, barely able to stand upright, and he’d stagger into the room, mumbling about Jerry Lee Lewis. ‘Er, Rob, gimme phone, the phone, gimme it … gotta call Jerry Lee … very very important.’ He’d fumble the phone, drop it, retrieve it, dive into his huge paper sack, bring forth a bottle of vodka, take a giant swig, drop it on the floor, pick up the phone again, fingers refusing to follow his mind, trying time after time to call Jerry Lee. ‘Got this great idea, fucking great idea, Jerry’ll go mad for it …’ and then another swig, this time from a rum bottle, and finally, an hour or so later, he’d be on the long couch that ran along the wall, out to the world, drunken dreams of Jerry Lee.
Now Guy was sober and had been all summer. We spoke on the phone and arranged to get together at his mother’s place in Forest Hill, where he was living. It was great to see him again … we had been friends since Island’s Cambridge Road days in the mid-sixties, and had gone to record collector’s shows together, discussed our mutual love of rock and roll, Jack Kerouac and the appropriate and very desired intensity of feeling required that made a recording truly great. It had been Guy who gave me the huge wooden cabinet he had had made to keep his 45’s and LPs in - a box that was immediately dubbed The Coffin by my family and friends.
I played him the tape of ‘Hot little Mama’ there in his living room, and he listened intently, striding around the room, grinning and gesturing to solos, riffs and phrases, eyes popping at a sudden lick, his body in constant motion and in synch with the musical moment. When the tape came to an end, he leaned over the machine, pressed the eject button, and turned to me.
‘It’s the real thing, Rob. It’s the real thing'. And then, with great emphasis, waving the cassette in the air, jumped around the room, shouting at the top of his voice, 'This is the real deal Rob, it really is the real bloody deal’.
His mother, alarmed at the sudden noise, poked her head around the door, but seeing that he and I were chuckling, shook her head in mock astonishment, grinned at us and closed the door.
Guy, the man who almost single-handedly introduced R & B to Britain, the man who got Chuck Berry out of jail, the man whose DJ stints at The Scene Club in Windmill Street had become the nights of legend, the man who oversaw the introduction of Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, and the Chess Records catalogue to the UK, the man who played obscure R & B rarities to The Rolling Stones, the Beatles and countless other bands of the early Sixties, he knew the real deal alright. Guy knew. We had a wonderful evening together. He laughed as he recounted how he produced The Clash’s breakthrough album ‘London Calling’ with mad, incendiary, drunken and speed riddled intensity. He had been there at the genesis of so many iconic moments of rock culture, the naming of Procul Harum and ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, his involvement with Free, Art, Spooky Tooth, Mott The Hoople. If Guy hadn’t come along and been so influential in the early sixties, music in the UK would have taken a vastly different course in the years to come. And, of course, it was Sue Records, Guy’s baby at Island, that had led me to make that phone call to Island back in 1965, and that had started me off on the path that had led to a music drenched life, to meeting up with Roomful, and this very reunion with Guy.
It was a night to remember, and I do remember it very well, and sadly too. It was the first time I had seen Guy sober in a long while, and lamentably it was the last time I ever saw him. He died a few months later, in August of 1981, overdosing on the very pills he took to control his alcoholism. He was 38 years old.
