Introducing Bob Bell and His Extraordinary American Musical Travels

Bob Bell - or Rob as he’s known to Blues fans - band manager, writer, fixer of ancient Jeeps and all-round good guy

One day a long time ago I was living high up on the Brendon escapement when a guy we knew who lived down the road asked if there was any way we could look after his sheepdog for a couple of weeks. 

It was a real working sheepdog. I remember that because the man in question was a real working shepherd. Which made it all the more remarkable to us that he phoned from the USA after a couple of weeks to ask if we could have the dog for just a little while longer, because he’d found a rock and roll band he really liked. 

We didn’t mind. Partly because that dog - called Glenn, I seem to recall - was a very pleasant hound to have around. And also because he had saved our lives one night when the house caught fire. But that’s another story… And lastly because we liked Bob Bell very much and were keen to do him a favour.

The tale I want to tell you about here is the one about Bob. Well, I’m not going to tell it - he is. 

Because all these years later - some 40 years later in fact - he and I have been talking (despite the fact that we live on opposite sides of the planet) and we have decided that some of Bob’s old notes about his extraordinary American travels with that rock-n-roll band should appear on this website. 

Getting back to that sheepdog story, we’d better get one thing straight right away… Bob was working as a shepherd, general farm worker and builder when I first met him, but that was only because he’d dropped out of the London music rat-race to live deep in the Exmoor countryside.  He’d had an extensive career as some kind of high-up at both Island and Trojan Records - as perhaps some of his writings will reveal as we roll out this series.

Bob had been to our West Country neck of the woods before. Here’s how he puts it…

“By the summer of 1968 I was 21 years old, was chief cashier at Butlins (holiday camp in Minehead) and handled huge amounts of cash every day, and in the summer months had a staff of around 20 cashiers. I was on call 24 hours day – if the alarm went off in the middle of the night, the cops would come to my place, and take me to the camp to reset it. 

“By the middle of that summer I was heartily sick of the entire business, and handed in my notice, determined to seek my fortune elsewhere. Taking a couple of friends with me, I set off in my ex-army Austin Champ – the British army’s answer to the jeep – and spent a few days exploring the south coast, and then ended up in London. 

“Island had, by then, moved out of the Kilburn space, and moved into Music House in Neasden Lane in Neasden. We pulled the Champ into the parking lot in front of the building, and I wandered inside. I had spent the past week in an open air vehicle during the days and a sleeping bag during the night. Unkempt and un-manicured was the least of it. Unwashed was probably the most of it.”

Bob Bell way back in the day….

As I say, Bob - or Rob as he was known in the UK music and record business - has written about his return to London and about his involvement in the record business, dealing with all manner of big names in what was then a young and growing reggae world. But as this is a food and travel website I will leave all that to Bob to deal with as he will. The main reason I’m putting samples of his writing on here is because he is a brilliant story-teller who has led a very colourful life - and I think he should turn the whole thing into a book, or a series of books. Maybe being highlighted on this website will help him to find a publisher.

It’s the Bob Bell diaries and notes which focus on trucking around the United States of America with a band called Roomful of Blues that we are interested in and keen to show to a larger audience. 

For years Bob managed the band and drove their big old bus down just about every highway in the USA. He must have done countless hundreds of thousands of miles. He must have visited more than half the music venues in North America. And his diaries and notes throw a rich beam of light on a world which is perhaps disappearing, and certainly changing. 

They offer a fascinating insight into the real fabulous, wearying, sweaty, pulse-inspiring, exciting, world of rock and roll - which is why we’re going to bung some of the extracts up here alongside the odd sting of music and photo. 

And why not? The diaries relate to one very classic form of travel. Hopping from gig to gig in an old bus with a big band.  And anyway it’s my website so I can do what I like - including highlight the work of a brilliant friend. Even if that is just a little bit tricky owing to the fact we live 10,000 miles apart - Bob in Oakland, California, and me in the British West Country. 

Never mind. I hope you’ll enjoy reading Bob’s adventures as and when we get ‘em on the website…

“Music, open skies, the fecund smell of damp earth, poetry, saxophones in the neon-lit American night, mysticism and the bonds of great friendships have been my muses over the years — to say nothing of an undying curiosity for what lies over the next hill…” Bob Bell, Oakland, California, December 2019

Roomful of Blues back in Bob’s day - photo by Joe Rosen

Journal - May, 1980 Downtown Cafe, Atlanta, GA

It had been a knock on the door of my cottage, in a farmyard at the end of a lane in Somerset’s Brendon Hills, that led me to the Downtown Cafe in Atlanta Georgia a couple of years later in 1980.

I had opened the door to a large and tall man with an American accent. He introduced himself as Cam Metcalf, saying he was staying over the hill at Richard Abbott’s Alternative Energy commune, and, leaning in conspiratorially, whispered: “They tell me you might have some pot?”

Welcoming him in to our little living room come dining room, we sat down to talk. Before we even got to the subject of his visit, his attention was drawn to the record I was playing, and the album sleeve lying on the table. 

“Piano Red?” he exclaimed in astonishment. “Piano Red. How the hell do you know about him?”

An interesting question, really, considering my shelves were jam packed with records by American blues and roots artists - some known, some quite obscure. To me, Piano Red, aka Dr Feelgood, wasn’t that obscure, but I guessed it was all a matter of perspective. He went on to tell me that a good friend of his, a lawyer in Atlanta, Georgia, managed him, and that he, Cam, had had no idea that people overseas were aware of him, or even that he had made a bunch of records. As far as Cam had been concerned, Red was simply an old black pianist who played in bars and restaurants.

Cam and I became good friends, and saw quite a lot of each other during his several week stay in the Brendons. He was based in North Carolina, and gave me his address should I ever find myself in those parts.

In February of 1980, I landed at JFK in New York, fleeing the breakup of a marriage, and eager to fulfil an old dream, to travel around the US, digging the culture and sort of looking for the ghost of Jack Kerouac whilst doing it. I’d made enough money doing archive work for Island Records during the winter that I had a couple of thousand pounds which I figured, by living cheaply, might last to the end of the summer.

And so I arrived in Asheville, North Carolina, and was met by Cam’s buddy John Graeter. John, his wife Cathie and Cam lived together in a small house outside of Marshall, a small township a few miles from Asheville. They were growing food and trying to live off the land like so many others, but supplemented their incomes by teaching. It was wonderful country, all hills and hollows, heavily wooded, with all manner of trees and vegetation so foreign to me.

I marvelled at the size of the leaves on the young plants on the forest floor, trying to grab as much sunlight as possible in the competitive environment. “The Green Machine”, Cam called it. I spent hours wandering the woods, until the day I suddenly found myself in somebody’s illicit pot plantation, instantly very nervous, and kept on walking fast, acting like I had never seen the plants. There are very few public footpaths in America, I was told, and people guard their properties jealously, often with guns in hand. After that, I took care not to overstep my welcome, so to speak.

Marshall lay about 8 miles from where Cam and the Graeters lived. The entire area was rural, dirt roads heading up hollows, petering out at run down dwellings, the obligatory junked cars out back, barking dogs and suspicious and squinting stares from overalled men, spitting tobacco, standing arms akimbo, harried worn looking women peeking through faded curtains and shouting kids riding bikes along dirt trails.

I left Marshall after a few weeks, headed to Atlanta to stay with Deveraux McClatchey the 4th, Piano Red’s manager, following arrangements made by Cam. Caught the legendary pianist in the flesh one night, and spent the half hour break talking to him. It was all a bit one sided as he was fairly taciturn, answering long questions with one word - me, struggling to understand his way of speaking. I rapidly ran out of things to say. So we just sort of sat there in a mutual silence until it was, thankfully, time for him to get back behind the piano again. Staying with Deveraux that night, he turned out to be an adept Piano Red imitator and entertained me in his living room pounding the piano until the wee wee hours, all helped along by copious draughts of bourbon.

The next night we went night clubbing, and the second place we hit was something else. The Downtown Cafe was a low ceilinged room, with a chalkboard outside advertising “Tonite: A Roomful of Blues”. We looked at each other, shrugged, paid the admission and entered. 

An amazing sight and sound met our senses. People were literally dancing on the tables, the floor and every available space. On stage an elderly man was blowing trombone, his eyes and cheeks bulging, the drummer played pulses on the floor tom, the upright bassist slapped the pattern and the pianist comped in the gaps, adding accents. The number came to an end, and a curly haired guy ran to the mike, a saxophone slung around his neck, and shouted “Porky Cohen! Porky Cohen! The King of the Slide Trombone.”

A massive roar went up, and four more musicians walked onto the stage, one carrying a guitar, two holding saxes and the third a trumpet.

The curly haired guy, obviously the leader and now the singer, called out “Long Distance Operator” and the guitar player launched into a T-Bone Walker-ish intro, with the horns playing the swingingest riffs you ever heard, guitarist inserting stinging fills. He sung with an insouciant confidence, swinging back on his heels with the beat, eyes closed, fingers snapping. Come the solo, the horns elegantly riffed while the guitar stung. Jeez, this was amazing! The outro was equally hypnotic, a series of fading riffs from the horns and dying notes from the guitar.

“Now you’re packed up to leave me, and lord knows I‘m about to die…” moaned the singer, repeating the line and following with “Just please before you leave me darling, just give me something to remember you by”… And the saxes groaned and churned, and then the brass lit up the top of the riff with mournful light.

Shit, they are playing Guitar Slim - who are these guys? Then into a T-Bone sounding instrumental with guitar , then tenor sax, bone solos, all over the most delicious horn lines. The table top dancers were back up, miraculously keeping their balances. The floor dancers jitterbugged and Lindy hopped from one end of the dance floor to the other while waitresses braved the mad throng with trays brimming with bottles and glasses held dangerously high, sidling between the dancers all the while keeping time.

The entire joint was in uproar, a seething mass of rhythmic ecstasy, a ringing guitar with a killer tone, and that boogie boogie piano riding along, pushing and pulling. Under it all was a powerhouse drummer, playing killer shuffles spurring on a screaming trumpet solo, then a tenor sax burning through the clamour followed by a baritone sax exploring the sonic bottom, and then the elegance of an alto, leaning back into the casual elegance of Duke Ellington’s and Johnny Hodges' ‘Jeep’s Blues’. On 'Jeep’s Blues’ Porky pulled out a plunger and growled the blues, leading into an exquisite exchange with the alto player, trading choruses over a a beautifully arranged sparse rhythm, culminating with emotional horn riffs underpinning all. 

The singer picked up his tenor and without a word, pulled the gooseneck mic down to the bell of the horn, shouted out ‘’One, Two Three, Four” and blew dat dat dat dat de waugh, and the band kicked in behind him, the drummer socking that Rock n Roll shuffle in mad metronomic time, his face and arms drenched with sweat, eyes red with salt, snare, kick drum, snare, kick drum , snare, kick and ride cymbal coating all with a wash n sizzle. Tenor player, leans back, eyes tight shut, left leg flexing with the beat, blowing full fat tones, the sound shimmering with emotion and intensity, each chorus growing in fervour. The horn section now laying back, then pushing him on with fevered riffs.

I watch the baritone player turn to the alto player and play a few notes at him. The alto player listens, nods, and turns to the trumpet play and relays the riff. The trumpeter passes it on to the trombone player and on the next go round this new riff appears, upping the ante and throwing a bit more gas on the fire. Just when it seems that the tenorist can wring no more emotion from his horn he bites the reed, and squeals for eight bars, and then leans forward right into the mike and blows a series of earthquake inducing honks.

And then silence. And then more uproar. The entire evening becomes like an express train with each song a flashing coach a catharsis. By the end of the night, after the last encore has been wrung from the band, the singer stands at the mic, grins, and says: “That’s it, no shit! We’re A Roomful of Blues, and we’ll see you tomorrow.”

And so went my Atlanta epiphany… Roomful was there for the next two nights and I went back each time. I had found my artistic and spiritual home. I would be their evangelist, and tell the world about them, and their brand of joyful healing music - and glorious amalgam of Thirties swing, Forties jump blues and Fifties rock n roll, all played with great artistry, tremendous zest and a great big dollops of feeling.