Bob Bell's Roomful Of Blues Chronicles
Roomful of Blues with Roy Brown 1981
Rocking’ with Roy Brown - March and April 1981
The guys in Roomful had intrigued me with their tales of performing with some of the storied and legendary figures of rhythm and blues, such titans as Big Joe Turner, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Red Prysock and Sil Austin. Just hearing the names gave me chills - I could only imagine how those shows had sounded. What extraordinary luck I had had in hooking up with this band.
And now Roy Brown was to be added to that list of pioneers. Originally from New Orleans, the singer had been wildly popular in the late forties and early fifties, writing and singing tunes like ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’, ‘Love Don’t Love Nobody’, ‘Cadillac Baby’, 'Boogie At Midnight' and countless others. His vocal range was phenomenal, and his style came very much from the church. He was in many ways the first link between gospel and blues, in that his style led the way to soul music. His melismatic sound can be heard on Little Richard’s early sessions, in B. B. King’s voice, and those of Jackie Wilson, Clyde McPhatter and many many more.
Greg booked a week’s worth of dates, stretching over twelve days, beginning at Rutger’s College in New Jersey on March 19th, catching Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island shows, and finishing up in New York, at the Bottom Line on Sunday, April 5th. I gloried in the opportunity to push and promote these dates - jeez - this was history in the making, and folks just had to know about it, the story had to be told. Money, as always with Roomful, was in short supply. Nine guys in the band and me - a lot of mouths to be fed, rents to be paid, so my usual instincts which would be to hire a graphic artist to design a poster, flyer, etc were suppressed and I did it all my self, with predictably amateur results.
We had reinstated a practice that Preston Hubbard had started years ago, when he was playing bass in the band, of collecting names and addresses for a mailing list, which I typed up, had printed and mailed out each month. The one detailing the dates with Roy also let people know that the new LP ‘Hot Little Mama’ was due for an April release. We printed up a poster for the Roy dates, and I called all the media within range of each show. The results were more than gratifying. Just why was a bit of a mystery, but I think the main thing was a kind of ’taking coals to Newcastle’ thing. To be frank, Roy’s name was by then rather obscure, but the fact that this English guy had moved to America and was now enthusiastically promoting a Rhode Island band and at the same time extolling the virtues of a relatively unknown black singer who was to be the band’s guest artist caught people’s ears. And the core of it all was that I was promoting a top of the line product, one that I believed in, with heart and soul. Cream rises to the top and all that.
Doug met Roy at T.F. Green Airport in Warwick, R.I., and brought him to the apartment. He sat on the couch as we prepared coffee and launched into ‘White Christmas’. Not a blues-tinged rendition, no nod to the Ravens / Drifters R & B masterpiece, but rather a note for note Bing Crosby impersonation. Seeing our looks of incredulity and astonishment, Roy laughed. ‘You know, when I started out singing, I was known as The Sepia Bing Crosby. I still love Bing … my favorite singer of all time.’ And thus was slain the shibboleth that all blues singers learn their craft from sleeping in hollow logs and drinking muddy water. Music is music is music, and dear old Bing, who started out in the business all those years ago as a jazz singer, lived on with Roy Brown. As Roy went on to say, ‘You know, Bing and all those cats enunciated the words, they sung correct English, they didn’t slur up the lyrics, didn’t use bad grammar.’
Doug and Rich left with Roy in tow to go meet the rest of the band, and to rehearse, preparing for the first date in New Jersey, and I stayed behind to finish up arrangements for a couple of in-person interviews with Roy the following day.
Of course, the local Rhode Island writers such as Tony Lioce (Providence Journal) and Bob Angell (The New Paper) knew about Roy way before I came on the scene, and were eager to come to our apartment on the East Side of Providence and interview the great man himself. Roy caught a cab to our place, and after he had walked in the door and sat down, he lamented the fact that he had just inadvertently tipped the cab driver $100 instead of $10. Well, that was a bit of a bummer, but soon forgotten as the afternoon’s interviews went on. Roy turned out to be a charming and erudite man, given to accenting the conversation with Woody Woodpecker imitations when confirming a point. He was hilarious.
The first show, at Rutger’s College in New Brunswick, New Jersey, was an eye-opener. Roomful did a few songs, and then brought Roy on, and things were never the same again. He sang, he wailed, he caressed the lyrics of ‘Love For Sale’, slowly, intimately, passionately, and then launched into ‘Love Don’t Love Nobody’ - despite the grammarlessness of the lyric - with its romping rhythm, and then into ‘Boogie At Midnight’, ‘Good Rockin’ Tonight’ with a searing take no prisoners tenor solo from Piccolo. At the beginning of the second set, Roy came up to the board where I was mixing the band, grinned and clapped his hands. ‘Bob, these guys are good, they’ve got it. Now that is a band’. And in the next moment,’they’re riding the mics too hard, too close, we need to get ‘em to back off a bit - it’ll sound sweeter’ - the old band leader in him coming out, the built-in professionalism, that competitive strain, the striving for perfection. And it was so, for in Roy we had found a perfect match.
The shows went well, the band traveling in two Chevy Suburbans to the gigs, Roy riding shotgun in one of them, regaling us with stories of playing the R & B circuit back in the forties, his surprise early seventies hit with ‘Love For Sale’, of getting checks from Elvis for ‘Good Rockin' Tonight’. He loved the band, just loved us, knew exactly what Roomful was about, and unlike so many of the other legends that Roomful had done dates with, who were really content to just coast through their usual repertoire of greatest hits, Roy was eager to critique the evening’s show as we drove back to Providence each night, suggesting we drop one song and substitute it with another, that so and so should take the solo on that one, and generally tightening up the show. He was into it, he was back in his element. After a couple of dates, he came right out and said he wanted to join the band, become our singer. He promised us fame and fortune. He had a little sentence down so pat that on the ride home after the show, someone would pipe up, 'Tell us about the house and the car again, Roy', and he'd oblige, saying in his plummy and mellifluous tones, 'When we make it, boys, and believe me, we will make it', and then slowing his delivery, savouring every word, and making each one count, 'every one of you will have a ...' pause ... 'a house ....' another pause ... ' and a car', and we'd all cheer like maniacs.
The press releases and phone calls I had made paid off - the gigs were all sold out. We got the front page of the Providence Journal-Bulletin for the Sunday before the following Friday’s show at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, Roomful’s home stomping ground in Providence, and that was followed by getting the front page of the New Paper a few days later for the same show. Lupo’s was sold out, amazing the club’s owner Rich Lupo, who came up to me saying, 'This is wild, we never had a blues show sell like this before'. PM magazine, from one of the local TV stations, filmed the entire show and then interviewed Roy and the band afterward. A couple of nights before, we had played Jonathan Swift’s club in Cambridge, just outside Boston, and Robert Nadeau, usually the food critic for one of the papers, turned music critic for the night and had mocked Roomful. Asked about this on camera, Roy bristled. ‘Let me tell you this, that Robert Nadeau is an asshole. He has no business writing about music - he obviously knows nothing about it’. It was a decidedly satisfying moment. Roomful had long battled the ‘bunch of white guys’ slings and arrows, which was more than innately unfair, and belied by the fact that musicians with unassailable pedigrees, from Count Basie to Albert Collins, lauded Roomful, and knew and understood what was going on musically. After all, it was a musician's band. 'That Robert Nadeau is an asshole' line lived long in the collective Roomful memory.
The tour ended up in New York City, at The Bottom Line, the showcase club down in the Village. The word had got out, and the place was jammed, and on a Sunday night too. It was more than gratifying to see the crowd digging Roy, the band, the sound; the blues was alive, well, hale and hearty. The future was beckoning, enticingly, and all was good with the world.
Roy was flying out that night, back to LA, and we were headed back to Rhode Island. We took him uptown, close to the subway he could take to get to JFK and dropped him off at a corner. It was a cold, freezing, early April night, and my last sight of Roy was of him walking around the corner of a deserted side street, next to a chain-link fence at one in the morning, collar up, hunched against the cold, his bag hanging from his shoulder. And then he was gone, and we headed for old Interstate 95, and a long haul through the wee wee hours back to Lil Rhody.
Roy had a slot at the New Orleans Jazz festival a couple of weeks later. We had time off, and our piano player, Al Copley, went down to catch the show. He caught up with Roy and plans were laid for him to return to the east coast.
A short time later, on May 25th, came the news that Roy had died of a heart attack. He was 61.
