Bob Bell: ‘California sure is a swell place’, Part 6 of The Hot Little Mama Tour.
Howlin’ Wolf was a constant presence on the tape player in the truck, and his ‘House Rockin’ Boogie’, cut at Sun Records studio in Memphis way back in 1951, was a particular favourite, containing as it did the line ‘California sure is a swell place’, and now Roomful was hitting the golden state for the first time, and exuberance was in the air, and Wolf’s tune, a romping introduction to the man and his music, “G’d evening’ e’erybody, the Wolf is comin’ into your town,” was apropos to the occasion, with his shouted exhortations to the guitarist on the recording, Willie Johnson, “play that guitar ’til it smokes, Willie Johnson’ and ‘whup them drums, Willie Steele’, and ‘lookout Piano man, step on it, whup them pearls,” and he name-checks the Willies but poor old Ike Turner, Mr. Piano man, never gets a name check, and neither does the bass player either. I’d bought the record when Modern had reissued those early cuts on a Crown LP, ‘Howlin’ Wolf Sings The Blues’ and the pioneering London import company, Transat Imports, had advertised it, in the pages of Melody Maker or the New Record Mirror.
Howlin’ Wolf
I’d sent off my postal order, and the record had arrived a few days later, with its gloriously multi-coloured cover, a pretty black girl with a cocktail in front of her, with red-lipsticked lips corroborating the legend at the bottom of the cover, ‘Full Colour High Fidelity’. Previous to this record I had just heard ‘Down in the Bottom’ / ‘Little Baby’ and the London American EP with ‘Smokestack Lightnin’’ and three other cuts. They were from Chess Records, and were well-produced and formidable in their intensity - the Crown LP was from his first sessions, and the sound was crude, distorted, overdriven guitar, and muffled drums, but it was great, powerful and emotional music, music that sang to me, permeated my very being, and I played the LP over and over and over. One of the little things that had endeared me to Roomful when I had first heard the band was that Al incorporated a couple of Ike Turner’s piano licks, from ‘House Rockin’ Boogie’ into one of Roomful’s staples. I remember thinking the first time I heard him played it, ‘Aha, I know where he got that from’, and have to say that it was those little details that so endeared the band to me.
We pulled into Berkeley, CA and checked into a hotel on University Avenue, and cleaned up, slept for a few hours, and then left to drive over the Bay Bridge into San Francisco, and made our way towards the Golden Gate Park, and Kezar Pavilion, the site for that year’s San Francisco Blue Festival.
It was a two-day event, and the previous day had featured Koko Taylor and George ‘Harmonica’ Smith and a whole bunch of other acts; Sunday had Carey Bell topping the bill, then Earl King and then us, with Jimmy McCracklin as a Special Guest. Inexplicably the great Little Milton was first on that afternoon and was playing when we arrived. The building was constructed in 1924 and was basically a basketball arena. Although it only held around 4,000 people which for a festival was on the small side, it was a cavernous space, and we speculated about how the band would sound. It didn’t take too long to find out. Simply listening to Little Milton gave us an indication.
Little Milton
Two or three acts followed Milton, and then it was our turn to explore the hollow-sounding, echoing, reverberating and booming acoustic qualities of Kezar Pavilion. To date my then-current six or seven-month experience of wildly different sounding spaces should, in principle, have prepared me for this, but in reality nothing could have. The place was a nightmare, it was horrific, excruciating, and basically unmanageable. The sound was cleaner the more one lowered the volume, but predictably it was cleaner because it was inaudible, so that wasn’t much help. The guy who owned the system leaned over and said “Ya just have to crank it - it’s gonna sound shitty whatever you do, but if ya crank it, at least the folks can hear something.” He was right, at least with respect to the something, whatever that might be defined as. When Ronnie Earl took a solo, and Ronnie was loud on stage anyway, the sound of his guitar shot out of the speakers like shards of glass, and then like the rumble of a series of vast metal plates struck by flying hammers. Piccolo’s voice chased itself around the hall as if I had stuck a three-second delay on it, and the saxophone solos either sounded like the groans of grounded whales or flocks of parrots. Jimmy Wimpfheimer’s bass rumbled and droned, and the sound of Rossi’s drums bounced back from every surface, turning each song into a polyrhythmic adventure the likes of which had never been heard, nor attempted before. Interestingly, the two brass instruments sounded the best, most especially Big Guy’s trumpet, which cut through the pandemonium like, well, a hot trumpet through those buttery spaces of the Pavilion.
McCracklin joined the band for two or three tunes, right at the point where I had come closest to getting Pic’s mic sounding halfway decent, and of course, I had to re-EQ the mic to suit Jimmy’s voice. The stage was seven or eight feet above the floor, and at the beginning of the tenor solo to ‘The Walk’, he motioned to Pic to jump onto the floor and walk the audience while playing his solo. Pic looked at him, looked at the big drop and gave McCracklin an incredulous look, and then walked to the side of the stage and down the steps to the floor. The band thundered on and Pic wandered among the first few rows blowing his brains out, but completely inaudible of course, as his mic was up there on the stage.
Roomful finished up the set and turned over the stage to Earl King, that great singer and songwriter from New Orleans, and it was Earl’s turn to challenge the acoustic demons. He had no more luck than we, and after listening to him from the side of the stage for most of his set, and then loading our instruments into the trailer, I joined Pic and a couple of the others sitting on the steps outside the hall. Pic was sitting next to an elderly black man, engrossed in conversation with the old man and with McCracklin. The old guy, who I noticed had no upper front teeth, just blackened stumps, was talking about a record date he had done years ago with Jimmy, and I realised he was Bob Geddins, the much-storied Bay Area producer, who had produced an amazing amount of great records by equally fine acts as Jimmy McCracklin, Lowell Fulson, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Johnny Fuller, Ray Agee and literally dozens of others, started labels such as Cava-Tone, Irma, DownTown, Vel-Tone and could justifiably be called The Godfather of the Bay Area blues scene, having been the most significant player out here for many many years. Bob was telling Pic how much he had enjoyed the band, despite the horrendous sound in the hall. Sadly, as tempting as it was to sit there and talk with Mr. Geddins, we had another gig that night, at The Palms on Polk Street, in San Francisco, and had to split to go load in and eat before the show.
The Palms was a tiny joint, a rectangular room with the stage at the far end. The stage was accessed by climbing four or five wooden steps and once up there, you had to bend down and swing over a hinged piece of stage, covering and blocking off the steps. It was basically a horizontal door, and without it, the stage would not have been big enough for the band. Hell, it wasn’t big enough anyway, but somehow the guys squeezed in and made it through two sets.
Back in Berkeley, I was sharing a room with John Rossi. John had been the first guy in the band I had spoken to on that night in Atlanta when I had first encountered them. He was on his way to the bar, on the break, and I had walked up to him, and said something like |Great show, love the band”, and because his style had so much soul and feeling it made me ask “Do you listen to Little Richard?” and he had turned to me with a wondering look that broke into a huge wide grin, and said, “Shit, that’s the man!” And we had been close buddies ever since. Apart from Porky, he was several years older than the other guys, born in 1942, and had come up in the first wave of rock and roll, when the lines between rhythm and blues and rock and roll were much more blurred than they later became, and so of course he dug Richard, and all those soulful cats from New Orleans, and those jumping horns, of course he did - that’s why he was in the band for chrissakes, and so John and I had a special bond, a rock and roll bond, we could talk about the finer points of Bill Haley and the Comets without it becoming a diss fest, we could jump from Freddie Bell to Red Prysock without missing a beat, and that night over several bottles of beer and a fifth of something or other, we sat in the room, talking music, reminiscing over shows we had seen, John recalling hearing Prysock at the Celebrity Club in Providence in the late fifties, and how Red had circular breathing down and would hold a note for many minutes without seeming to take a breath, and how the drummer had these huge cymbals, giving out a wide wash of sound, and indeed, that was the inspiration for his own style, and he did have 24” ride cymbals, bloody great Zildjians, that I knew, when standing at the mixing board, would wash through all those open mics at around five kilohertz, an ever present sizzle pumped by his bass drum, and whipped by his snare shots, he used the biggest thickest sticks available, and held them backwards, so the thick end hit the skin, and man he drove that band, fucking drove it, the king of the shuffle, the baron of the backbeat, his motto being aim the beat at the feet, and that is just what he did, night after night, driving dancers into a sweating frenzy until they could dance no more and stumbled back to their tables, and a beer, and a seat, grinning all the while, mopping brows, shaking their heads in astonishment at the madness on the floor. We stayed up until dawn, and wasn’t until around eleven that I showered and ventured out the door, blinking in the sunlight, head pounding, looking for a place to eat.
Little Milton was staying at the same place, and there he was out in the hotel parking lot, kneeling on the ground behind his bus, the engine’s inspection door up, and him peering in, his denim overalls a far cry from yesterday’s stage clothes. He looked up at me and smiled. “If I don’t got this baby runnin’ right, no sho’ tonight, bro, and ain’t no sho’ they ain’t no dough” and turned his head back into the bus’ innards. A bus like that was just a dream for Roomful back then. Pic had told me of Roomful’s bus venture of a couple of years before, of how they had bought a real cool looking ancient bus, of the same vintage as the music they played, but it turned out that the expenses incurred in running it were more in line with 1980’s currency than that of the 1940’s even if you could find the parts. Which it turned out, you couldn’t. So that dream languished in a yard somewhere Connecticut or Rhode Island, unmovable, unfixable - just another broken dream.
The next few days went by in a blur, Larry Blake’s in Berkeley, which was the complete opposite to Kezar Pavilion, but just as awful, this time a dry dead sounding room as opposed to Kezar’s mad echoes and bouncing sound, Joshua’s in Sacramento, where I was told to hook up our PA in conjunction with that of the club’s disco system, which I did, but couldn’t figure out how to put the club’s system all back together again at the end of the night, and so we departed, leaving an irate club owner behind us, Mountain Charlie’s in Los Gatos who had t-shirts announcing belly-bucking contests which sounded like some stupid drunken game of bashing one another with your belly, insinuating the game was only open to those with huge distended beer bellies, The Inn of The Beginning in Cotati, where the food for the band was one orange, divided between ten of us. Oh, yes, that’s you Mark Braunstein, tightest club owner I ever seen. Maybe we played The Catalyst in Santa Cruz, and maybe we didn’t. By the end of the week, we were down south, hard by San Diego, at the Belly Up, in Solana Beach, a great club in a huge Nissan hut, and to my great joy Stanley Dance and his wife Helen turned out to see us, bringing us a huge platter of food to boot.
So where to begin with Stanley? I had first come to know of him when I was in school, when one of the magazines I bought each month was the Jazz Journal, the best jazz monthly in England. Stanley had a column entitled ‘Lightly and Politely’ and he covered current goings-on in the jazz world, with particular emphasis on what was known back then as ‘mainstream’ - a term that he himself coined - that is to say, not too old (Dixieland) and not too new (bop), but all those great guys that came along in the pre and post-war years, playing straight-ahead swinging and soulful stuff, including blues. He and blues writer Derrick Stewart-Baxter were the reason I stuck with the mag during the early sixties, and I always enjoyed their writings, both for the erudition and the humour. Stanley had moved to the USA in 1959, although he kept up his Jazz Journal contributions for decades after the move. He had married Helen Oakley after the war - she had worked with many major jazz acts both before and after the war - and they made the perfect couple, their collective knowledge of jazz and their collective friendships with jazz musicians was unparalleled. He was a close friend of Duke Ellington and had read the eulogy at Duke’s funeral, both he and Helen had written books on jazz, supervised and produced innumerable sessions over the years, artists like Earl Hines, Johnny Hodges, Buddy Tate, Coleman Hawkins, Helen Humes and dozens more, had supervised countless reissues for RCA, Columbia, and other labels. He had come across Roomful in the early seventies, a time that the Dances were living in Connecticut and when Duke Robillard was leading the band, and had championed the band’s cause to anyone and all who’d listen. So I was very happy, excited and a little bit in awe at getting to meet him and Helen.
Pic introduced me and after a few stammered sentences about young teenagers reading Jazz Journal in the UK years ago and what an honour it was to get to meet him and his good lady, I had to get back to work, setting up the stage, checking the mics and all that went with my evening routine. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Porky, Pic and Rich deep in discussion with the Dances, who were pumping Porky for tales of his band days in the forties when he had worked with Charlie Barnet, Lucky Millinder, briefly with Benny Goodman, Tommy Dorsey and Artie Shaw. Man, what a history Porky had, taking lessons from Miff Mole when he was sixteen or seventeen, going on the road as a teenager with Barnet, one of three white guys in Lucky’s band when he was touring the south in the forties, and playing at one time or another with most of the big names in jazz. Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Coleman Hawkins, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker are just a few, a tiny tip of a huge iceberg.
Porky had played on a radio show in the later forties accompanying W. C. Handy, the man who wrote so many of the seminal tunes that literally kicked off the jazz age before and during the First World War, songs such as ‘Memphis Blues’, ’St. Louis Blues’, ‘Mr. Crump’, ‘Beale St. Blues’ and ‘Aunt Hagar’s Blues’. Now with Roomful he was getting to know and play with all the blues titans that were out there on the road with us - Albert Collins, Earl King, B. B. King, the Fabulous Thunderbirds, Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt and Stevie Ray Vaughan.
It’s kinda hard to think of anyone else who had played with both W. C. Handy and Stevie Ray Vaughan - but that was Porky. He was 55 years old when Roomful persuaded him to join the band, and come back out on the road. He was our secret weapon, he was the one who grabbed the audience’s attention when the band filed out onto the stage, his bald pate shining under lights, out there at the end of the horn section, ‘bone in one hand, plunger in the other, waiting on the word, the count-in, one more night in a lifetime of nights, of sweating under the lights, listening for his cues, and then aiming his horn at the microphone, blowing long and hard, flowing melodic lines, staccato bursts, elephant calls and mournful plungered tones.
Porky Cohen, the King of the Slide Trombone. He killed ‘em each and every night.
Roomful of Blues - photo: Joe Rossi
