Bob Bell's Roomful Of Blues Chronicles - Suburbans, Bookmobiles and Buses
Suburbans, Bookmobiles and Buses …..
When I first ran into Roomful of Blues, in 1980, there were nine guys in the band, one sound engineer and the ten of them traveled in two Chevrolet Suburbans - a station wagon type of vehicle with two bench seats, and a cargo area in the back.
Shortly after I joined the band in early 1981 one of the Suburbans was totaled (while parked and empty, thankfully), and the band was down to one vehicle. Roomful was not particularly flush with cash back then, and so we made do with the one vehicle, outfitted it with an extra bench seat installed behind the front two, and pulled a U-Haul trailer with the gear and instruments behind us.
My first task after signing up with the band was to start a record label (Blue Flame Records), and press and distribute the band’s third album ‘Hot Little Mama’ in the US. I had already arranged licensing deals in Europe with Ace Records (UK) and Phonogram (France). I had taken over the sound engineer’s job, so I was doing sound, publicity and whatever else was required, such as selling t-shirts and LPs during breaks, and a lot of driving.
Just a few days after we issued ‘Hot Little Mama’ we set off on a five-week tour of the US. The band had never ventured west of the Mississippi before - this trip took us all over. Ten guys in a Suburban, pulling a trailer. Three guys in the front seat, three guys in the next seat, three guys in the third seat, and the last guy, usually Ronnie Earl, the guitarist, in the little slot behind the last seat and the rear doors. We called this the ‘wayback’.
Not a bad way to travel if one is just going twenty-five miles or so, but doing one thousand mile jumps, as we frequently did on that trip was horrible beyond belief. It's hard to sleep sitting up at the best of times, but when you are shoulder to shoulder like that it is torture. To say nothing of the stink of ancient fast-food wrappers on the floor, empty bottles rolling around, the stench of stale beer, sweet fumes of brandy and rum, a constant fog of pot. Roomful was a hard-partying band back then, and those long rides after a gig would often get mad and boisterous for a few hours, until finally, the cassette player ran its length, and the last frenzied lunatic fell into an uncertain sleep. On and onwards the truck would be barreling through the American night, just one blear-eyed driver entrusted with his sacred and valuable cargo - America’s unique and quintessential jump blues band. Drummer John Rossi, bass fiddle player Jim Wimpfheimer, pianist Al Copley, guitarist Ronnie, three sax players, Greg Piccolo who was also the band’s singer, Doug James and Rich Lataille, trumpeter Bob Enos and 55-year trombonist Porky Cohen. No-one else in America was doing what we did on the scale that we did it.
An odd thing would sometimes happen on those long drives, with the entire band sleeping, upright, slowly bouncing with the rhythm of the road, fighting the discomfort of the guy next to you forever slumping on your shoulder. Someone, deep into a worried sleep, unconsciously conscious of the speed at which we were traveling and perhaps suddenly jolted by a pothole, would dream we were going off the road and would cry out. The cry would awaken someone else who, in a contagious panic, would think the same. Suddenly there would be three of four people shouting while the bewildered driver would have to call out - ‘It's Ok, it’s OK, shut up back there’, and grin to himself, maintaining a steady 70mph.
Five weeks of traveling that way really welded the band together as a social unit - it was like a 10-way marriage - but we all agreed that it would be nicer if we could come up with a better way.
Greg Piccolo found the answer - a retired Bookmobile. Made by Gerstenslager of Worcester, Ohio, it was a large white whale. No windows, except for the windshield and side windows at the front for the driver and the one passenger seat. We stripped the shelves out, installed rudimentary bunks made out of 2 x 4’s and plywood, and put in three of pairs of bus seats we had scrounged from somewhere. The long bench that had been in the back of the Suburban was installed with its back to the driver, so nominally there was a seat for everyone. We weren’t so lucky with the bunks however - just not enough room for everyone to have their own bunk. There was another door at the rear, through this we loaded and stood the equipment, suit bags, etc. We pulled the by now ubiquitous U-Haul trailer too.
At the end of a show there would be a mad rush for bunks by those who were tired or were next up for a stint behind the wheel. Others would sit in the seats behind the driver, getting high and playing tapes, listening to 55-year-old Porky regale us with stories of being on the big bands back in the ’40s, reflecting on the trombone mastery of Jack Teagarden, a mad wild 70 mph party going on for hundreds of miles. There was a heater on one side of the truck (for a truck it indeed was, with all the bone-jarring suspension one gets from a truck), and the heater was warmed by being connected to the engine’s cooling system. I’ve lost count of the number of times it would spring a leak, or the hose would break, and so the sickly sweet smell of coolant was a constant companion dish to the changing scents of alcohol, pot, stale sweat and gone off food. It goes without saying there was no air conditioning, so the summer months were stultifyingly humid, which richly seasoned whatever the current predominant odour was, and of course, the heating wasn’t really up to the job of keeping us warm during the bitter cold of the winter months.
So the picture looks pretty bleak, no? Well, not really. The bookmobile had two Great and Wonderful Things going for it. One, a person was able to get up and walk about a bit, standing totally upright. And secondly, one could, if one had been lucky enough to score a bunk on that ride, lie down full length and sleep. So the old bookmobile, for all its shortcomings, was a remarkable improvement on the Suburban.
We named it Das Book after the German movie ‘Das Boot’ about a submarine in WW2. Like a submarine, Das Book had no windows, so traveling in it shut one off from all the great sights of America. Sensory deprivation for weeks at a time. The vehicle did have two little popup windows in the roof, one of which was accessible from the rear bunk, which lay across the width of the vehicle. Curtis Salgado, when he joined us as a singer, (bringing the complement up to eleven) would sit on this bunk with his head and shoulders out of the window, singing wordless songs to the rushing wind like some berserk tank commander.
Finally, after several years of crisscrossing the continent, the Bookmobile gave up the ghost. The band’s fortunes having improved, we bought, brand new, a shuttle bus. The kind you see at airports moving people around between hotels etc. This time there was enough room for everyone to have their own bunk, and this vehicle gave decent service for several years. Made on a Ford Chassis, it was fairly comfortable, and again one could both stand and lie, so important when making great distances. It also had a cargo area at the back that could hold all the equipment. At last - no trailer. The trailers, by the way, were rented from U-Haul on a local basis. Little did U-Haul know that the trailer we had rented for three weeks had had perhaps 10,000 miles put on it, and been driven at excessive speed the entire time. The tyres would take a bit of a beating ……
Like the Bookmobile, the shuttle bus had no toilet, but did have the advantage of having a long pole very close to the door at the front. It took only a few days for the more adventurous musicians to realize that rather than having to beg the driver for a pee stop - (which always wasted time, both in looking for a suitable place, and in herding everyone back on the vehicle afterward, because, of course, everyone had to get off and take a pee, and hey, we are at a truck stop - let’s grab a sandwich or coffee or something) - one could open the door, hang onto the pole with one hand, unzip oneself, and pee out of the open door at 70mph. It didn’t take long for ugly dark streaks to appear along that side of the bus, evidence of these mobile piss calls. There were windows along each side of the bus that could be opened a few inches which made for a cool breeze in the summer - unlucky the poor fellow whose window was open when someone up front decided to take a pee.
In a future post I will talk about the endless mechanical tribulations we endured during our travels - vehicles always broke down, and when ten people are stranded, it gets very expensive. Not just the cost of the repair, but the cost of hiring several vehicles to get the band and the equipment to the next show and GET PAID. No play, no pay. The shuttle bus developed mysterious transmission problems over the years, and it finally gave up the ghost somewhere Arizona on the hottest day on record.
The then bandleader, trombonist Carl Querfurth arranged the financing of a 1979 MCI- 9, a real bus. With real heat, with real AC, real bus suspension, with a real toilet, although for number one only. This was luxury beyond our wildest dreams, was a joy to drive, and was what I was driving, on those occasions I returned to the road, for the last few years I was with the band. It was also hideously expensive to repair - it would seem that every time we had just about paid off the last repair, a new disaster loomed.
