Bob Bell’s Truckin’ Around the USA With a Band and a Bus
Epic journeys, expensive breakdowns - the untold saga of The Bookmobile, aka ‘Das Book’
I talked a little about the Bookmobile in an earlier post about band vehicles, so if you want to get some background to this strange mode of transport, please check out this post : https://www.martinhespfoodandtravel.com/hespfoodandtravelhome/bob-bells-roomful-of-blues-chronicles-suburbans-bookmobiles-and-buses
Roomful had owned an interesting assortment of vehicles before I met them, including The Blue Truck, which by 1981 was owned by The Blue Lights, who became Loaded Dice, and an assortment of vehicles, including an International Travelall which Duke Robillard had bought in the early seventies. That one got rear-ended.
Although I never saw them, two others stand out when reminiscing with older band members, the school bus, which had its original yellow paint hidden under coats of blue, applied by spray can by band members - bet that looked good - and a GMC 4104 - manufacture year currently unknown - that was a splendid looking vehicle but unfortunately its good looks exceeded the quality of its mechanical condition.
Greg bought it in 1979 for $10,000 from a gambler at the Jewett City dog racing track, and while I am most certainly a dog lover myself, it has to be said that the bus sadly deserved the pejorative use of the word dog, in the adjectival noun sense of the word. Its maiden voyage was to New Orleans, and it turned out to have a broken cradle - the cradle being the apparatus that contains and supports the engine. It had no power steering, and no Syncro-mesh, so each gear change had to be meticulously timed, and double-clutched. From what I heard it also had no heat. The ever-resourceful Ronnie Earl discovered the best way to warm his frozen feet was to go into the men’s room at a rest stop and take off his shoes, holding them under the hot air hand dryers until the leather got really hot. That lasted for only about ten minutes, but nevertheless it was a plus of ten warmer minutes. This tour was when LouAnn Barton was with the band, and while I heard that she split back to Texas mainly because she couldn’t stand the weather - Texans who have endured New England winters will understand - I’m sure the 4104 episode helped her make up her mind. The bus did get them back home again but was abandoned thereafter in a Connecticut junkyard, its bunks eventually being plundered to furnish the bookmobile.
When I initially met up with Roomful in 1980 they were running around in two Chevrolet Suburbans, which two vehicles they were still using when I joined the band in March of 1981, but within a week or two we were down to just one - the other was totaled while parked outside the apartment that Doug, Rich and I shared, on Hope Street in Providence - happily empty at the time.
After the endless miles spent touring to promote ‘Hot Little Mama’ - ten in the Suburban pulling a U-Haul trailer - the consensus was a simple ‘never again’. It was a decision that was not really discussed, the subject was not even tabled. It was obvious. It was a given - as reliable as the Suburban had been it was just too small - that we needed something larger, something roomier.
Greg found the answer. A bookmobile, a former travelling library, converted by Gerstenslager, of Worcester, Ohio, on a Ford truck frame with a Ford V-8 engine, the motor between the driver’s seat and the passenger seat, under a hinged and carpeted cover. Two doors - one in the front, and one in the rear - both on the curbside of the vehicle, basically there for the egress and regress of the library’s patrons. No door for the driver. He had to clamber over the engine cover to get to the driver’s seat.
The bookshelves were ripped out and bunks installed, not enough for everyone to have their own, so there was always a mad rush after a gig to find an empty bunk. Three pairs of old bus seats, from the 4104 I guess, were in the front, and the rear seat from the Suburban was installed behind the driver and engine compartment - this became John Rossi’s dominion, and by four in the morning he would be lying supine, on his back, often as not with his rug askew, knees up in the air because the seat wasn’t long enough to lie upon full length. Porky sat in the first pair of bus seats on the passenger side of the truck. Although he was often offered a bunk, the bus seat was his loge, his throne, his cathedra.
Other than the windshield, and glass to either side of the driver’s seat and the front passenger seat, plus a window in the top of the front door, that slid up and down, there were no other windows, apart from two skylights. So we traveled around the country seeing nothing, a submarine on wheels. Das Book we called it, after the movie of the time Das Boot, about a German U-Boat. In hindsight, it was really quite awful, but after the confines of the Suburban, the very fact of being able to get up and walk about for a few steps, and then to lie down, actually lie down and stretch out without touching anyone else was a luxury previously undreamt of. Interestingly, the German origin of ‘lager’ - the latter part of Gerstenslager - means a place to sleep … I believe that during the Boer War it was also synonymous with prison. And of course, the beer connotations are obvious. So submarine, sleeping beery prison camp … take your choice.
The rear door was opened and used only for storing equipment, clothes bags, etc. in the space beneath a rear bunk that stretched across the width of the truck. It was still tight quarters, and for a time we still pulled the ubiquitous U-Haul trailer, but my God, we could stand up or lie down when we wished. It is impossible to convey the new world of utter opulence this introduced.
The fact that it was a truck, and rode like one was forgiven. The lack of air-conditioning, especially during those steaming humid days in the south was not so easily overlooked, nor was the intermittent behavior of the heater, a small radiator bolted to the floor a few feet behind the driver, and between the front row of driver-side bus seats and Rossi’s bench. It was connected to the engine’s cooling system, and at least once a year a hose burst, soaking the carpet with steaming glycol, which is designed not to evaporate, and so remained as a sticky stinky residue which took about a year to fade and get well-trodden into the carpet. And by then the hose would break again.
But these were things we took in our stride. Thing is that in the touring business, the aim is to move a large crowd of people as quickly and efficiently as possible from point A to point B, and the band had learned the hard way that it could not afford a real bus. The bookmobile, for all its horrors, kept us in business.
In order to maximise the space, we put a custom cut thick sheet of plywood that we jammed into the space above the driver and the front passenger, about eighteen inches or so beneath the roof. The edges of the plywood rode on the tops of the passenger and driver windows, and to prevent it sagging was supported in the middle by a two by four that sat on the engine cover. We used the space created for clothes bags, merchandise etc. It worked fairly well most of the time except for one rather nagging flaw. As it wasn’t permanently fixed it was liable, if we hit a particularly vicious pothole, to come apart - the two by four falling, and the plywood tumbling on top of the driver, bags and boxes going every which-away. At seventy miles an hour, this could be quite disconcerting - whoever was driving trying to hold it all up with one hand while gripping the wheel with the other, hollering for help to a sleeping bus at 5 am. After two or three near misses, I had a carpenter friend install something more permanent, and the wobbly two by four was gone.
The two doors each had two locks, a Yale lock, accessible only from the outside, that secured the vehicle when parked, and a simple latch that was operated by a piece of quarter-inch square stock bent at a right angle. One stuck the stock into the lock and turned through ninety degrees, and the door opened. It was all very well until someone lost it. Then the only way to secure the door was to lock it with the Yale lock, which entailed leaning far out of the window to get to the lock, which was at waist height if standing in the street. It was just about doable, but very painful to execute. Much easier to pull up at the gig and ask a bystander if he or she would kindly let us out, and handing them the Yale key. This only happened a couple of times - we soon learned to keep a stash of spare ‘keys’ in the truck. I remember taking Ronnie to Westerly train station one time and not only was the square stock key missing but for some odd reason, the Yale one also. Ronnie had to climb out of one of the skylights and somehow shin down the side of the truck, swinging from the mirrors. Ronnie could look very charismatic on stage playing his guitar behind his neck - climbing down from the roof of the bookmobile he somehow looked more tragic than charismatic. Pathetic was probably the better adjective.
It didn’t take long for certain members of the press to catch on to the magnificence of our means of travel, and references to the bookmobile began to appear in stories about the band. Mac McDonald, writing for the Monterey Sun in April of 1982, talking up a forthcoming show, started his piece: “What has 18 legs, more brass than the Pentagon, has the power of a freight train screaming through a tunnel, travels around in a converted bookmobile and sports a trombonist named ”Porky?”
Bob Claypool, of The Houston Post, a great booster of Roomful, always managed to work in a bookmobile reference somewhere in his advances for the band when we hit town, and it was forever a talking point when I was chatting with fans at gigs. We had it for many years, probably five or six, and by the time we parted ways, it had changed from being a large white whale to a large rust spotted off white whale, patched here and there with zinc sheets, and even when parked, gave off a vibe of, like an antsy dog, wanting to go for one more ride…
It had its hassles however. It never came with a spare wheel, and after a day in which we suffered a blowout, and the cost of road service and nearly missing a gig, I bought a spare wheel and fitted it with a good tyre. I can’t remember the size, probably a 750 x 20 or bigger. The only place to keep it was in the trailer, and it was heavy and dirty, and I had to hassle with it every time we loaded in or out, and of course, after buying it we never needed it. But I guess it was like having an umbrella with you - if you do, it guarantees it won’t rain. Ultimately we found we did not need the trailer - we managed to pack all the gear in the rear area beneath the last bunk, and we traveled without the security of the spare.
I remember going through the vehicle one time on the eve of a trip down south, cleaning the inside, attempting to make it presentable and comfortable. We were supposed to leave at 7 am the next morning, and getting out of the truck I dropped something and crawled underneath to retrieve it. To my horror, I saw the main leaf on the front passenger side spring was broken. Called around the band, and told them they’d have to hire a couple of cars and a U-Haul truck very first thing and meet me at Palmer Spring in Providence the next morning to grab the equipment. No huge terrible thing, but hiring vehicles for a one-way trip was always more expensive - a lot more expensive - than for round trip hires. Palmer Spring made a new leaf and got me out of there by early afternoon, and I caught up with the band a day or so later, and all was well, though the money for the first gig had been spent on the hired vehicles. Lying in my bunk a couple of days later I tried not think about what might have happened had I never noticed the busted spring. Quite possibly nothing, and it would have been caught the next time the truck was serviced, or on the other hand … well, the broken leaf meant that the spring was only connected at one end to the frame and that the stress thus exerted on that fixed end could have fractured it, with the result that the front axle would wander back and forth, the steering would be really sloppy, and at 60 miles an hour, the results potentially would be horrific. The more I thought about it, the worse the possible implications became. It was at those moments that the responsibility of looking after the truck became so much more than just changing the oil and checking the tires. The way we were constantly on the road, day after day, traveling mile after mile, all added up to having faith that the bookmobile was safe, that those slumbering bodies stretched out in their bunks would return home after each trip, and of course, that faith could not be blind, that faith had to be manifested by vigilant maintenance, and so the band exercised a very healthy paranoia about the truck’s mechanical health. Its health was our health.
We were always conscious of weird vibrations, odd noises … a bad u-joint bearing coming apart at sixty miles an hour had potentially lethal consequences - one can just imagine an unconfined drive shaft, disconnected from the rear end yet still attached to a functioning gearbox thrashing about underneath the truck, or perhaps even worse, the shaft coming away from the transmission but still attached to the rear end, and digging into the roadbed - man, that could send the truck anywhere. On one trip in Northern California, on I-5 going into Oregon, we were bedeviled by a vibration and a high-pitched squeal and turned into a truck stop. The mechanic put the truck on the dynamometer, which in this case was basically a pair of rollers that spin as the back wheels turn - you can engage the motor and drive at an rpm that would normally be taking you down the road at 60 but in reality you are going nowhere - the rollers just spin, and the device measures the power and torque of the engine. Here it was a way to listen to the noise while the truck was stationary. Turned out it was the baffles in the muffler - they had come loose and were spinning inside the case. Never encountered that one before, nor since. On that same trip, to Ashland, or Brooklyn, I forget which, Rich was driving, down a long, long grade, and he was worried the brakes were fading. I was fast asleep in the rearmost bunk when I was awakened by a sudden swoosh, the sound of shrapnel everywhere, and the shock of an immediate stop. Rich had pulled into one of the escape roads, designed to bring runaway vehicles to a sudden stop. It was a short two hundred feet long spur, off the highway, filled with pea gravel, two feet deep. It brought us to a halt, just like that. No driving out of that mess, not at all. The bookmobile was in up to the axles. The funny thing was that we could see the town the gig was at - just a mile or two down the road. Jimmy and Albie set off, walking, to get help, to make the gig, to get away from the rest of us, all verifiable possibilities.
We got towed out eventually, and made the job. For years after I would find pebbles wedged into corners under the truck.
Sometime in the late winter or early spring of 1983 we were on our way to California in Das Book and had a problem in Salt Lake City. It had occurred late on a Saturday, the motor had been misfiring and overheating, and the next day, early on Sunday morning I was fortunate enough to find a mechanic who was willing to work on it right away. His shop was a little outside town, and the place bordered on being a junkyard, but he turned out to be just the guy for the job. He not only replaced the water pump, but also painted it a nice Ford blue, plus he gave the old bookmobile the best tune-up it had ever had. His name was Robert, not that odd I should remember it, it being my name too, and also memorable was his demeanor, very polite, and his sense of organization, for in spite of the junk-yardy look of the place, in reality, it was very well kept and tidy, and at the end of the repair job, which had after all taken nearly three hours on a Sunday morning, he itemised his time and materials, and charged me $70, explaining he had had the pump in stock for years and it hadn’t cost him much. Maybe it was because it was Sunday and Robert was a devout Christian or Mormon, maybe it was because some other gods were smiling, or maybe it was because it was finally our turn to have some good luck, but I think it was simply because Robert was a decent, good and fair-minded man. He was certainly a wonderful mechanic, and the old bookmobile just purred after that. We hit the coast and collected my young son Andrew, 15 years old at the time, who had flown out from Rhode Island to meet us in San Francisco and to join the remainder of the tour, his Easter vacation treat. He, nor I, had any idea what a treat it would turn out to be. After the last date of the tour, in Los Angeles, at the Club Lingerie in Hollywood, we headed east in I-40, Arizona, New Mexico, and then Texas, across the panhandle, heading for New England, the bookmobile still purring like there was no tomorrow.
And then, while Al who was driving, cruising at around ninety miles per hour, very suddenly, there wasn’t a tomorrow. Not in the bookmobile anyway.
The engine blew as the highway was skirting Vega, a little town some thirty miles west of Amarillo. No cellphones in those days, you had to find a phone alongside the highway. Most interstates had an emergency phone about every half a mile or every mile. Here we could see the town, and whether someone walked into town and got a wrecker, or whether we found a phone, and the wrecker found us, was of no consequence. It was early in the day, and by nightfall most of the band had found their way in cabs to Amarillo, and got flights back to Rhode Island. Al, Andrew and I got rooms in town. There were only two motels, both seedy and run down. Before the Interstate came through, Vega had sat astride Route 66, and the through traffic kept the little town if not hale, at least reasonably hearty. The motels dated from that era, the signs from the Thirties or Forties, the kind of signs you see in old photographs or black and white movies. We chose the one that looked a little better, although once we got in the rooms, we found the black and white TV hardly worked, and the showers were so ancient and clogged you had to run around to get wet. The carpets were frayed and shabby, the rooms stunk of stale tobacco and disinfectant. Outside, weeds grew in the cracks of the crumbling tarmac parking lot, and tumbleweeds blew along what was once glorious old Route 66, now relegated to Vega’s main drag, and carrying sparse and impecunious local traffic, I-40 having siphoned away traveller’s dollars.
The three of us walked to the shop early the next morning. The news was not good. The engine needed a complete rebuild, and figuring in the need to order and get new parts, send the block out to be machined, we were looking at a week before the job was done. We decided that it made no sense for Al to hang around for a week, as I could drive back to Providence solo when the engine was back in the truck, and so Al ordered a cab and split for Amarillo.
Andrew and I settled in for the long haul. It’s flat land out there in the Texas panhandle, flat agricultural land, no matter which direction you look. No woods, no hills, no footpaths, no inviting rambles in any direction. Just two small restaurants, with identical menus, chicken fried steak, French fries, burgers and hot dogs, apple pie and ice cream. No cinema, no library, just a little old country town, or really what would be a village in England. Less than a thousand inhabitants, and to cap it all the county was dry. No alcohol on sale unless you made it to Amarillo. The TV barely worked, no cable, just three flickering stations. It was as if we found ourselves inhabiting the lines of that old song “Life Gets Teejus, Don’t It?’ as we sprawled on the ground outside our room, backs to the wall, watching the tumbleweeds cartwheel about.
First order of the day was to choose which greasy spoon to breakfast in. And then to decide whether the eggs should be sunny side up, scrambled or poached. We tried the sausages in both places, and found them to be beyond horrible. The bacon was always burnt, the bread was white, and the orange juice warm and weak, made from concentrate. But with a sense of cheerful determination, we could spin out the breakfast time to about an hour and a half.
A daily entertainment was visiting the shop to inquire about progress on the engine. A highlight of those visits was an opportunity to gaze at the ancient side-valve motor that ran the shop’s air compressor, the engine being from a World War Two era jeep. The head mechanic, a laconic and bored guy named Wayne was puzzled by my interest in the old engine. Indeed, he seemed to be puzzled by anyone that expressed an interest in anything. Interest, it appeared to him, bordered upon a critique of his lifestyle, of dangerously disturbing his placid state of ennui. I felt that this wasn’t a positive attribute for a mechanic working on our engine, and hoped his partner Gene, a more cheerful and engaging fellow, would act as a counterbalance of sorts, ensuring that torque specs were followed, that the rules of good engineering were observed. This daily visit used up about an hour, which left about another 12 or 13 to fill. We would return to tumbleweed watching for a while, and then it was time to walk the length of what remained of old Route 66 until we hit the outskirts of town, and then turn around and walk the other way until we arrived at the other side. This took about 15 minutes each way, the entire town being about 15 blocks wide east to west. After that, we had the opportunity of traversing Vega north to south, again a total distance of around 15 blocks. Sometimes a pick-up might drive by, and other times the roads were eerily empty. Not much seemed to happen in Vega, other than the tumbleweed shows, which, Andrew and I had to admit, were not up to much anyway.
The same routines applied to lunch and supper, eaten at one or the other of the two little restaurants. The food got worse every time we ate. On occasion, we might supplement it with a stale candy bar bought at the town’s one convenience store. Vega sucked. Really sucked. Bigtime.
On the weekend we hitch-hiked the 30 miles to Amarillo, and caught a movie, and bought a six-pack of beer, and when leaving Amarillo around sundown, had the good fortune to be picked up by the one other inhabitant of our dismal little hotel in Vega, which made for good time getting back to our hovel, but which also depleted the beer stock by 50 percent. We spent an hour or so finishing off the remaining 50 percent in the guy’s room upon our return, but made our excuses and left after he smoked pot and turned into a gibbering imbecile. Maybe I’m being too hard on him, but after a few tokes, he became incomprehensible and was even less entertaining than our flickering TV. Boy, life sure was getting teejus.
Monday finally arrived, the motor was back in the truck, was road-tested and by late afternoon Andrew and I were on our way back home. The band had a local gig on Wednesday, and as the equipment was still in the truck, we needed to be back home by late Wednesday afternoon. It was a little under 2000 miles from Vega to Westerly, Rhode Island, where Andrew and I were by then sharing a house with Doug James. Greg had left me enough cash to pay for the rebuild, the hotel and the gas needed to get home. We didn’t have a band credit card in those days, and I certainly did not have one myself. Heck, in those days I was in the US illegally, my visa had run out a couple of years earlier. It wasn’t something that bothered me, indeed, I rarely thought about it. If the band had a gig in Canada, it just meant I couldn’t go, that was all. My English driver’s licence was still valid and had worked on the one or two occasions I had had to produce it.
Two thousand miles is a pretty good chunk of miles to cover solo - Andrew was too young to drive - but we did it, through Oklahoma, Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, fighting tiredness for hours at a time, but conscious of the need to make it by Wednesday afternoon so we could make the gig. By the time we got to the end of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, a toll road, we were perilously short of cash. Conscious of the new engine, I had done my best to run it in, and not push the motor, a practice that also meant we were being economical with the gas. Nevertheless, I figured that we would need at least one more tankful of gas to get home, and what I had in my pocket would not stretch so far as to pay both the toll and a tank of gas, so I tried to talk the toll booth operator into believing I had no cash. With a cold face, he motioned me to park beside the toll booth, while he called his boss. I could imagine the conversation. ‘Got a bum out here, driving some kind of weird RV. Says he’s got no dough, and by the look of his truck, I bet he’s telling the truth’.
We waited. No boss came. Thinking that maybe I could pay him just a bit and be let off the rest, I approached him saying that luckily I had just found ten bucks under the seat, and would he take that? No, he would not. Back to the truck, wait another 30 minutes. And then back to the toll booth. ‘Hey, just found another five, will that get us through?’ ’No, it won’t. Get back into your truck and wait for my boss’. Casting caution to the winds, I miraculously found the balance, and we paid the toll in full, having wasted over an hour. We made it to Westerly by early afternoon on Wednesday, the tank showing empty and one dollar bill in my pocket. It had taken 42 hours, which had included two hours somewhere when I had pulled over to sleep. As Andrew and I walked in the door, Doug told us the gig that evening had been cancelled.
Later that year we were in the Midwest on our way home after a couple of weeks on the road and were leaving St Louis bound for Chicago for a two-nighter, the last gigs of the trip, when the engine blew. The engine that had been rebuilt in Vega earlier that year. So here was the dilemma. The band had to get to Chicago to play the gig that night. We were beside the road, miles from a train station or bus station, and with very little money, and even less time.
We called a tow truck from one of the emergency phones beside the road, and a guy turned up in an ancient, but obviously well-loved wrecker, polished chrome here and there, faded but clean paintwork, neatly coiled ropes and chains strapped to the sides of the bed. I told him we needed to get to Chicago, which was about 300 miles away. He wore oily blue coveralls, and a red Champion Spark Plug cap, the peak brown and shiny. He was chewing tobacco, scratching his chin, mouth stretched in a wide smile, showing his brown-stained teeth, ‘Well, shoot, ‘he said, ‘thing is, ’tis against the law for me to pull something with people inside, can’t really do that, y’know, cops’ll bust me something awful. So y’all got to be in Chicago, eh?’ Pulling another chaw from his pocket, and carefully putting it inside his cheek, he wandered over to the truck and examined it. ‘Heck, ya got no winders in this here … thing.’ He rose an eyebrow, ‘ ’S a heck of a way to travel’. He leaned over to one side, and expertly expelled a long stream of brown spittle. Then he motioned to me to follow him to the door of his truck, away from the band. He leaned in, conspiratorially, ‘Now look, I do think it can be done, but I’m gonna need you guys to help me. I’ll take y’all to Chicago, but them folks in that …that thing … they gotta keep out of sight. Can’t be stopping for no piss stops, no dumps, no nothing. We gonna go straight to where you want to go in Chicago, Ford dealer, I imagine, and then we’ll stop. So tell your guys to piss now, and then get in the truck, and keep their heads down. They just gotta stay out of sight’.
Our saviour proceeded to pull the rear axle shafts, motioned the band members to get back in the truck, with final and firm admonishments to keep their heads down, and not sit up front by the windshield, hooked up the front of Das Book, hoisting the front end way up, so the bookmobile was at about 30 degrees, told me to get in the front of his truck, and we were off.
We introduced ourselves. ‘Henry, that’s my name, been doing this shit all my life, but not never ain’t never pulled no band of musicians to Chicago before, no Sir, this one’s a first’, and we settled down to a long haul as I attempted to untangle the knot of negatives in his last sentence. He told me about the truck which he had bought new in the late Fifties. ‘Been a damn good truck, this ‘un. Rebuilt the motor once, but this here gearbox, still the original, never got into it. The rig got over a million miles on it', and he spat out of the window. I watched him drive. Much of the time, he shifted without touching the clutch, timing the engine rpms with perfect seamless, silent smooth shifts every time, using the clutch when he had to downshift in a hurry, or on the rare occasions the vehicle was temporarily at rest in heavy traffic. Henry was a cheery fellow, and apart from the way he fussed over driving his truck and of course his present very illegal activity, seemed not to have a care in the world, his big booming laugh accompanied his recounting of stories of his life on the road, journeys he had undertaken, cars and trucks he had pulled, bore out the undeniable truth that he was a man who had the perfect job, no matter the weather, no matter he had to crawl under vehicles in blizzards, ice storms, pouring rain, lying on half-melted tarmac during midwestern heatwaves, it was all a huge laugh to Henry, he had the perfect oily greasy job that only a mechanically minded Champion Spark Plug hat-wearing man could wish for. His laugh rolled around that cab, guffaw following guffaw, and when the guffaws subsided, why then his humour just kinda simmered, chuckles bubbling and popping, as he regaled me with stories of having to rescue preachers who’d broken down miles out of town with ladies in the car who were not their wives, or un-sober judges who had gone off the road late at night, all these events were punctuated with great haw haws and slapping of thighs at the same time as he would negotiate a perfect downshift, dancing on the clutch and accelerator with big oil-stained workman’s boots, spitting out of the window, and tuning in a country station, his head bobbing with the beat, smiling at the lyrics, his eyes searching the road ahead, reading the traffic, watching for fools, his whole being right here in the present, his glorious old truck pulling the bookmobile along at a steady 50 miles an hour, Henry was the epitome of the fables, myths and legends of the men who inhabited the old west, all humor and laughter, and all underwritten by a great care and compassion, evident in his well loved truck and his attitude to life, to us, who less than an hour ago were complete strangers to him, and now he was hauling us to Chicago in defiance of the law, because he understood, he was a working guy, he understood that without him we wouldn’t make tonight’s job, and thus wouldn’t get paid, and he had known, just by looking at our sorry beat old bookmobile, that we were out there just like him, hassling and working our asses off to make a living, and so, by golly, old Henry just went and did what he had probably been doing all his life, and that was to lend a hand.
He reminded me of old Howard Allen, the junkyard owner / wrecker operator I had known in North Carolina back in 1980 who, while not quite so humorous, also chewed tobacco, wore battered caps and had similarly pulled folks out of jams for most of his life.
It was one of the greatest rides of my life, sitting there on that worn vinyl seat, my feet on top of a coil of chains, the radio tuned to country oldies, Floyd Tillman, Lefty Frizzell, Ernest Tubb and dear old Hank, and Henry greeted each tune with a big roar, and he knew the words to most of them, and hollered along in a big beefy baritone, spitting tobacco juice out of the window during the solos, guffawing at the wry lyrics, the way the words in those old country tunes play with the language, bouncing phrases off one another, each tune was simply one more episode in life’s series of unending comedies to Henry; the atmosphere only leavened by my glancing in the mirror to see the bookmobile behind us, angled up at the end of chains, big old white whale following our every move, and I wondered what the atmosphere was like inside, most of the guys probably in their bunks, listening to the ever-present roar of the road and the traffic, the zoom, swish and rumble of America, in their windowless environment an unseen anonymous America, an America that existed in imagination only, for the only America that was visible and tangible was the underneath of the bunk above, the plywood insides of the vehicle and the all too familiar truck interior, to all the passengers it was just one more strange saga in the story of Roomful of Blues, one more breakdown, and yet the day saved by the simple expedient of two vehicles bound to one another, heading for a Ford dealership hundreds of miles in the distance, and then to hire a van and get the equipment to the gig, and then deal with the aftermath, after the show, after getting paid.
The miles vanished under us, the road ahead sprouted signs for Chicago, the traffic thickened, the lanes widened, and green fields and woods were replaced by billboards, malls, factories, railroad yards, houses, apartment buildings and Chicago, the Windy City, that Toddlin’ Town, was upon us and around us.
Henry, still chuckling and smiling, brought us to a Ford dealership, parking in the forecourt, the radio playing Webb Pierce and George Jones, and I got out and walked into the showroom to ask after the shop foreman. A couple of salesmen approached me, dressed in the kind of polyester leisure suits that appear to be de-rigeur for car salesmen. The showroom had glass windows floor to ceiling on the wall facing the forecourt, and a big mirror on the rear wall, not only reflecting the polished and gleaming new models on the showroom floor, but also the forecourt, the wrecker, and the suspended bookmobile. As the two salesmen approached me, their eyes went past me, out to the forecourt. In the mirror I could see the bookmobile door open, the bottom step being a good five feet or so above the ground. Doug James emerged, and carefully jumped out, followed by Ronnie Earl, wearing a rumpled pink suit, then Preston Hubbard, his eye make-up visible from the showroom, followed in turn by John Rossi, his wig a little sideways, who after alighting, turned, along with Doug, to lend 58-year-old Porky a helping hand. The salesmen’s eyes widened, their mouths opened, shut, opened again, but no sound came forth. I turned around to watch with them, and soon all nine musicians were standing on the tarmac, stretching, blinking in the light, and obviously wondering where the hell were the restrooms. And then one of the polyestered duo, finally finding his voice, discovering his composure and trying to act as if such a scenario unfolded at least once a day, asked, ‘Why, good afternoon Sir, why … er what … um, er, well, what can we do for you … all? From the looks of things, seems you might be wanting to speak with the service manager. He’s right through that door there’, motioning to a set of double doors close to the showroom entrance.
As I walked into the service area, I could hear behind me frantic musicians asking for directions to the men’s room.
And thus followed a situation with which I was already too familiar, and one which over the ensuing years would make deja-vu appear to be a constant and unremarkable fact of my life. The service manager took down the details, told me to call him around mid-morning the next day, and then had Henry back the bookmobile into a vacant bay.
After he had lowered the truck and unhooked the chains, Henry and I stood there on the shop floor, looked at each other, and he gave out with one last guffaw, kind of a final encore if you like, and said, ‘Well, this here’s a job I’ll never forget’, and we shook hands; I gave him a copy of ‘Hot Little Mama’, paid him his fee and a good-sized tip, and still smiling, he climbed up into his cab, stuck a chunk of tobacco into his mouth, gave me a big wink and a thumbs up, grinned, engaged first, pulled out of the shop and was gone.
The gig was in Evergreen Park, a two-nighter, Friday and Saturday at a club called Ryan’s, a place singer Koko Taylor had told us was run by Al Capone’s niece. We hired a van for the equipment, and the band caught cabs to the gig. The Capone relationship hung there in the air, unspoken, but present. It did arise in an oblique way when, sitting at the bar, eating the band meal and talking to the niece who was behind the bar, Greg was explaining some legal hassle the band had once had, saying something to the effect that it was a situation in which no-one could really do anything, and the niece, leaning forward, an emphatic finger upon the bar, rising up two or three inches and looking down at the musicians seated before her, said in a perfect Chicago accent, ‘You’d be surprised what I can do’, the implication being that certain people possessed certain powers, and the statement hung there, just kinda adding a little colour to the niece thing, and Greg, Al and the guys next to them made busy with knives and forks, politely not talking because their mouths were full.
It was a good gig. Larry Birnbaum from Downbeat magazine was there, interviewing the band for a future Downbeat article, one that would remain in the band’s press kit for years.
On Sunday the band flew back to New England, and Albi and I stayed in Chicago, waiting for the engine to be rebuilt. We took turns visiting the dealership, sitting in the service waiting room to talk to the foreman, drinking stale coffee and learning the Ford acronyms from bitter and jaded customers, the two most popular being Found On Road Dead and Fixed Or Repaired Daily. Turned out the block was cracked, the expensive rebuild that had been done only months ago in Vega, Texas, had not lasted very long.
When Al and I finally left town, with a brand new engine a few days later, we passed a sign beside the highway, advertising the services of a cobbler. It said ’Time Wounds All Heels’ and we had to wonder if that just by chance might include a certain pair of mechanics in Vega, Texas.
