And now Bob Angell has left us ...

Photographer unknown

So now the New England music scene has lost another one. As most of you will know by now, Bob Angell passed away on December 6th - he had been suffering from cancer. 

Bob was not just a musician leading his long-established group Blues Outlet, he wrote for the Providence weekly The New Paper, he taught English - in short, he was a regular Renaissance man. He was also a tireless evangelist for the blues. 

As a journalist, he knew the importance of publicizing shows and records, of spreading the word, raising awareness about the very events and happenings that pay a musician’s rent. 

I first met him in early 1981 when I started working with Roomful - one of the hats I wore was that of publicist, and he was one of the first two journalists I got to know. (Tony Lioce of the Providence Journal was the other). Probably the first big story I pitched him was the one he wrote on the band for the Providence leg of the series of shows Roomful was doing with Roy Brown - he gave us the front page of the New Paper, and as a result, the show at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel was sold out. Rich Lupo was astonished, and unsurprisingly so - Roy was, after all, little known in 1981, his heyday was thirty years thence!  

Fans in general probably don’t know how the publicity machine worked back then - publicists with their rolodexes, mailing presskits and press releases, following them up with phone calls, all well ahead of the show, or record release. Nowadays, of course, it is all digital - emails, social media, all the relevant info can be transmitted in seconds. The flipside to this is the lamentable fact that most newspapers have disappeared, and it is the social media presence that has the impact. 

Bob was old school. Bob always took phone calls and always exuded enthusiasm. He and the guys like him were the oil that lubricated the machinery of the business, that made it all work, and it is a fact that many bands and musicians, both local and touring acts, owe much of their longevity to Bob and folks like him. His passing leaves an unfillable gap, but his presence will not be forgotten by those who had the pleasure and privilege of knowing him, of listening to - and often trying to comprehend - his machine gun way of speaking, the words tumbling out in a torrent of mad enthusiasm, his love for Hubert Sumlin, John Mayall, his keen interest in both Chicago Blues and the burgeoning blues scene in the UK of the 60s, and above all, his passion for all things blues. 

Happily for him, his abilities as a musician came into sharper focus during his later years, and he found great popularity in the UK, with his recordings widely played and listened to on blues radio both here and abroad. 

When I recently wrote about the late Rory McLeod, with whom I had worked for several years, many folks expressed their condolences for 'My Loss'. Obviously, such sentiments were, and are, appreciated, but as with Bob’s passing, it is not just ‘My Loss’. The loss belongs to all of us - all of you who read this, all of those who knew him, all of those who heard him play, and all of those who were yet to come to know of him. 

He was one of a kind.