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Legendary
In The Media CRUISIN'
FOR A BLUESIN' "During a rollicking Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise, everyone aboard the Veendam gets a backstage pass to the red-hot roadhouse style of blues concerts."
The night before our Saturday departure early this year, the Suncoast Blues Society held a precruise party at Tampa's Doubletree Hotel, featuring Jimmy Griswald and Chick Willis (the "Stoop Down" Man). Party animals filled the lobby and a big meeting room. My wife, Juju, and I heard a lot of guitar twanging and high- decibel yells, some of them presumably from Chick and Jimmy. We saw a few drunk women in floral muumuus, two-steppers in cowboy boots and a lot of guys coifed with aging-hippie ponytails. We never made it into the Doubletree concert hall, wherever that was. We fled back to our own hotel to rest up for what now promised to be an occasion that would demand 24/7 enthusiasm and a love of amplified guitars, screaming brass, shouted lyrics and constant movement. Blues Cruise was the generic title, and the Web site, BluesCruise.com, appeared on other banners around the ship. But the official title is Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise, a superior example of truth in advertising. That week, we wouldn't hear much traditional Mississippi Delta- style blues -- that slow-moving, plaintive poetry of rural juke joints, cotton fields, rib shacks and chain gangs. No, the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise is more like the fare served up at a red-hot roadhouse -- plenty of speed, lots of noise, sweaty dancers, teeth- grinding energy. Seven such almost-annual cruises, organized by two Kansas City, Mo., entrepreneurs, have become, well, legendary in R&B circles. So we had a ship full of affinity -- people with like interests. A lot of cruise lines are willing to indulge groups with identical passions: chocolate lovers, Star Trek fans, stock investors, Mac nerds, gays, wine aficionados, nudists, gourmets and cooking-school students. Organizers from time to time might offer language classes, wellness clinics, tai chi, yoga, golf lessons and all-kosher cuisine. This one would highlight wild concerts and late-night jam sessions. "There's probably at least 200 guitars that amateurs brought on board," noted Pat O'Neill, a Kansas City publicist on his second Blues Cruise. As the Veendam sailed on Tampa Bay toward the Gulf of Mexico, February exercised its right to visit nasty weather upon normally sunny Florida. Surveying the rain and wind, boss man Roger Naber ordered the big stage on the rear deck temporarily closed. Instead, Tommy Castro's 5 p.m. Sail-Away Concert would be held in the Rubens Lounge. Naber, then the owner of the Grand Emporium rhythm-and-blues hall in Kansas City (he sold it recently) and former postal worker, was in his third year of operating the Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise, which has become virtually a full-time enterprise. He hardly seemed wired when he mounted the Rubens stage that first night and casually explained the revised itinerary. We had signed up for a cruise that included Roatan, Honduras; Belize City, Belize; Santo Tomas de Castilla, Guatemala and Key West. Guatemala and Key West had been scratched off the schedule. "We had to skip Guatemala and change to Cozumel, because we heard there was some trouble there at the port, and that would not be very entertaining," Naber told the bluesin' cruisers, none of whom seemed to mind. They were waiting for the Tommy Castro band to finish setting up for what would surely be a rockin' Sail-Away Concert. "We also bagged Key West," Naber continued, "because we had to board at 7:30, leaving only five hours on land, and with immigration checks to go through, that would probably be more like four hours." That brought a few groans, but soon Tommy Castro appeared, bearing his guitar, wearing his tight black T-shirt and tighter jeans, his hair all slicked back and looking tough. "I don't know all of you," he said, "but I'm pretty damn sure you're workin' too hard." That drew lusty cheers. "You're workin' too hard, and life comes up and bites you on the butt from time to time. It gives you a whuppin' from time to time. That's what it does, man. That's why they invented the blues." Actually, nobody in the place looked too downtrodden or overworked. Naber told me the capacity crowd of 1,200 cruisers mostly belonged to the middle class -- teachers, truck drivers, professionals, skilled blue-collar workers. But they were rhythm 'n' blues lovers, every one, most of them ready to kick out the jambs for a few days. "We tend to get a lot of California people," Nader said. "They seem to take life easier than in other parts of the country." The overwhelming favorite everyday wear would be shorts and T- shirts, preferably shirts bearing old R&B bands' concert schedules or the logos of blues joints from coast to coast. During one frenetic concert by Taj Mahal, out on the pool deck stage, I saw shirts emblazoned with such logos as Conrad's City of Blues; the Sandbar, Longboat Key; Fair Wind, Kona, Hawaii; Kingston Mines, Chicago; B.B. King's Blues Club, Memphis. And, of course, a few shirts expressed sheer deviltry: "Beat Me, Whip Me, Tie Me to the Boat," "Jesus Hates Me," "Ronny, Are We Having Fun Yet?" and the word "Sleep" in a circle with a red slash through it. Everywhere the cruisers turned, they'd run into a wall of sound and a well-stocked bar at which Holland America's Indonesian bartenders clapped their hands and shimmied to the beat. Crew members in their tropic-white uniforms stared in open-mouth wonder at the shipboard antics and the loud, fast music. Some of them got out their video cameras.
The list wouldn't end there. From time to time, special surprise guests appeared, including Johnnie Johnson, a certified father of rock 'n' roll, and the Rev. Billy C. Wirtz, self-proclaimed leader of The First House of Polyester Worship and Horizontal Throbbing Teenage Desire. Wirtz, a tall, bearded, long-haired performer, is a sort of blues Victor Borge, a seriously talented pianist (R&B/ boogie division) who plays it all for laughs. One afternoon in the Rubens Lounge, he took the stage and told the cruisers that there are three kinds of blues. "You have happy blues, and they go like this," he said, playing a few bars of "Kansas City." "Happy blues are about going to places like Kansas City, drinkin' whiskey, drivin' Cadillacs and chasin' beautiful women." After that, Wirtz played a few mournful notes. "Then you have sad blues. Any blues that goes like this is about bein' in jail in Kansas City 'cause you got drunk and wrecked the rented Cadillac and you found out that the crazy little woman there was actually a crazy little guy." The third kind defied definition -- maybe call it theatrical blues. Wirtz demonstrated by thrashing out chords and twisting his face into contortions expressing profound ecstasy or agony, or both. Usually, Wirtz could be found holding forth in Mitch Woods' Club 88, a late-night piano lounge commandeered by performers who wanted to tickle the ivories and/or sing rowdy lyrics. The boogie-woogie there (Woods is a master) drowned out the clanking of slot machines in the casino next door. Johnnie Johnson, in his 70s and still going strong, played piano all over the ship -- from the Rotterdam Dining Room to the pool stage to the Rubens Lounge. He was a revered figure, the man who appeared with Chuck Berry for 20 years and had a hand in such hits as "Johnny B. Goode," "Sweet Little Sixteen," "Rock 'N' Roll Music" and "No Particular Place to Go." Johnson has worked with a variety of musicians, including Buddy Guy, Eric Clapton and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. "A blues cruise requires 24/7 enthusiasm and a love of amplified guitars, screaming brass, shouted lyrics and constant movement -- a k a sweaty dancing stem to stern."
Late one evening in the empty Rotterdam Dining Room, a group of waiters and busboys gathered around the grand piano with their instruments and joined Walter "Wolfman" Washington for a blues session of their own. The Legendary Rhythm & Blues Cruise differed from the standard cruise in a lot of other ways. There weren't any formal nights, and the dress code was pretty much "anything goes." One man managed to stay barefoot for his entire time on board. The ship library and adjoining game room became stores holding inventories of clothing and souvenirs. In the same area, performers also could market CDs. Instead of holding all purchased duty-free booze until debarkation, which is a common, the ship sold bottles for in-cabin consumption, adding a 20 percent surcharge. The prices are still low, and, on the first day, the line to the liquor counter spilled into the atrium. Passengers festooned the corridors with tinsel, paper lanterns, posters and Mardi Gras beads. Dozens of cabin doors wore similar decorations, plus pictures of musicians, plastic musical notes, artificial flowers, Hawaiian leis, trinkets, rubber chickens or strings of flashing red chili-pepper lights.
The highlight of a rainy, windy day in Belize City came even before we got there, when a terribly hip-looking cruiser climbed into a waiting tender and promptly saw his cap fly overboard. He sat down, pulled out a harmonica, blew a few riffs and sang, "I lost my hat, lost my hat. I got the blues 'cause I lost my hat." In Cozumel, Juju and I went to the beach -- a commercialized stretch of sand called Playa Sol, complete with water toys for rent, a cafe, food booths and loud disco and mariachi music. A hyper emcee tried to whip up enthusiasm for limbo contests, tugs of war, margarita chugging and conga lines. The water was fine, the sun was hot, and for a moment, back on board, the Blues Cruise nearly seemed sedate by comparison. Mexican beaches can rock with nearly equal velocity. Our post-Cozumel ennui didn't last long. The shore leave underlined the idea that this was a floating R&B concert, where, as Taj Mahal puts it, "everyone has a backstage pass." "Your room, your cabin, is always in close proximity," Naber pointed out. "You don't even have to walk across the street. There's no rough urban environment to mess with." At breakfast one morning, we overheard a couple chatting as they consumed omelets and coffee. "I could get used to this," the man mused. "I think this is what I was born for." The woman nodded vigorously and said, "Plenty to eat, no chores and listenin' to the blues." |
