Photography courtesy Kelly Bell
In January 1995, a local blues vocalist decided to set out on his own and form a band. Its first record, Phat Blues Music, is still one of the best-selling local debut albums ever, and the bluesman is showing no signs of slowing down.
The Kelly Bell Band owes much of its early success to a Baltimore club owner, who introduced Bell (formerly of the band Fat Tuesday) and his new namesake troupe to a rock-and-roll legend…Bo Diddley. The elder took them on as his “house band” for nearby gigs, which led to Bell’s encounters with a star-studded list of more legends, all of whom liked what they heard. Whew!
So, what about Bo Diddley, anyway? The quote serving as the title of this story comes from an old TV sitcom. In “An Explosive Affair,” a 1981 episode of the CBS series “WKRP in Cincinnati,” irreverent radio disc jockey “Dr. Johnny Fever” (played by the late Howard Hesseman) reacts to a terrorist bomb plot called in against the station. Such a reckoning led him to pose this rhetorical question.
Kelly Bell has been directly and indirectly a willing ambassador of blues roots music in these parts for decades now. He recently gave us his perspective—on his career, his music, those legends he’s met along the way, and his other life pursuits, some of which may surprise you.
The first of those history-making entertainers just happened to be Elias McDaniel, better known to the world as Bo Diddley. Recognized belatedly for his influence on the birth of what was to become rock-and-roll, McDaniel’s most-covered song was “Who Do You Love?” (1956). The song scored a long string of hits for other bands, several of them live performances. Among the latter were psychedelic rockers, the Doors, in their 1970 Absolutely Live album; Ronnie Hawkins and The Band in 1976’s The Last Waltz album and film; and collaborations featuring Diddley himself joining the likes of George Thorogood and the Rolling Stones’ Ronnie Wood.
According to music critics, each of those musicians and a host of others played “a variant of the ‘Bo Diddley Beat,’” an innovative, syncopated rhythm with common roots in parts of the African continent. This influence was certainly not lost on Bell. Quite the opposite.
The Kelly Bell Band is Born
Over the course of our conversation, Bell told us that the notion of the current iteration of his band started at a Cross Street Baltimore nightclub. “In 1994, Giles Cooke, the owner of the old version of the 8x10 Club,” Bell recalls, “came to me knowing I was trying to get a gig for a new band.” Bell stresses that he wasn’t even a lead singer at the time—“Just a guy who played congas and would step out and sing maybe three or four songs to give a lead singer breaks when he needed them.”
In the end, what became known as the Kelly Bell Band got a big break. Knowing Bell was more a fixture in a party band than a feature band, Cooke pointedly told him, “I don’t have a gig for you, but I do have Bo Diddley coming to town, and I need a band to back him up.”
According to Bell, the pioneer of rock-and-roll didn’t travel with his own back-up at that point. “He came with a bag of clothes in one arm and a cigar-box guitar in the other,” Bell recalls.
“That’s how he showed up at the airport. He booked two shows, one in Baltimore (which was responsible for booking his flights), and one in D.C. (which was responsible for his lodging).” The 8x10’s Cooke told Bell, “He gets five grand a night—he gets two hours. You can get two hours together, or you can break it up into two one-hour shows.”
A Hot Tip from ‘Automatic Slim’
With his new band, Bell decided to break up the act into two one-hour shows. He had met someone earlier who turned out to be a shrewd businessman, an innovative musician himself, and eventually a great friend. Dave Carreon, who called himself “Automatic Slim.”
For the time being, Bell had been trying to assemble a new band without, as yet, a new name. This is when Slim intervened. “He said, ‘Look, man,’” Bell recalls, “‘go ahead and take the gig. I’ll find you the musicians.’” A fixture on the local music scene for 30 years, Slim got the rhythm section from The Persuaders, and he was already in the Rev-Tones at the time. “With those bands on board, I wanted us to be the “Baltimore Blues All Stars,” Bell says.
But Slim then offered Bell even more relevant advice that would change the trajectory of his career, a ride he continues to relish to this day. “Slim said, ‘No way, man. Go under your own name. You never know if you’ll want to do this again.’” Bell told him that he wasn’t a lead singer and that “I don’t even know an hour’s worth of songs!” Slim replied, “You’re going to come over to my house and I’m going to teach you!” And so, the band did its first performance with Bo Diddley on January 20, 1995 as “The Kelly Bell Band, featuring Automatic Slim.”
The rest is history. “When you’re the lead singer, and it’s your name in lights,” Bell emphasizes, “people are definitely going to expect you to be there.” And he’s “been there” ever since. “Bo loved us,” Bell remembers, “and that became an every-time East-Coast thing, regardless of what club it was at that point. That was pretty cool, and it went on for about four years. As the Kelly Bell Band thing erupted, Bo Diddley gave us the nod and said, ‘You guys need to go out, get on your thing, and do you.’ And so, we did us, and we played with other people, too.”
A partial list would go something like this:
Big Jack Johnson (2003 Acoustic Blues Album of the Year winner)
Robert Lighthouse (former Washington, D.C., street performer-turned-blues master)
Deanna Bogart (creator of The Musical Genre-Free Zone)
James Cotton (Muddy Waters’ harmonica player)
Son Seals (Blues Hall of Famer)
Bobby Parker (known for his 1961 hit song “Watch Your Step”)
Mark Wenner (front man for the Nighthawks)
G Love (from G Love and Special Sauce, a genre-defying band from Philadelphia that composed two songs on the first Kelly Bell album)
Photography courtesy Kelly Bell
The Essence of the Blues, Kelly Bell-Style
You can’t go anywhere in the world without hearing the Blues influence: Be it a commercial, be it the music playing at the doctor’s office, or something that’s the background of a movie. “We’ve never felt like Blues music was supposed to be background music, and we don’t treat it that way,” Bell says “I mean, we’re the Blues’ best-kept secret. But sometimes we’re the Blues’ bastard child, too, because we call it Phat Blues music and it’s a collaboration of a lot of different influences.”
The Big Man Meets The Big Man, ‘One Crazy Night’
Aside from his stint with Bo Diddley, we asked Kelly Bell whether there have been any points in his career when he had to pinch himself to make certain he wasn’t dreaming. “Actually, yes,” Bell says. It all happened at The Jetty, a dock bar just across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge on the Eastern Shore. “The owners knew me from being in Fat Tuesday, so when they heard that I had my own band, they sought me out. We had just played the first of three sets there, and the crowd was buzzing.”
At that point, the owners asked Bell to come over to the bar area because they had somebody they wanted him to meet. “As I was walking over to the bar,” Bell recalls, “this big dude spun around on his bar stool, wearing shorts and sandals. All I could say was, ‘You’re Clarence Clemons!’”
Knowing well that this was a key member of Bruce Springsteen’s E-Street Band, immortalized as “The Big Man” in the song “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out” from the Born to Run album, Bell says, “Every once in a while, I actually did have to pinch myself, reminding me that I’m sitting there having a conversation with Clarence Clemons, like a normal person who happened to be in one of the greatest rock bands of all time.”
As the Kelly Bell Band prepared for the second set, Bell asked, “Hey Clarence, did you bring your sax (saxophone)?” Clemons never hesitated and said, “Man, I was just waiting for you to ask.” He got his sax out of his trunk and came back and played the rest of the night, sets number two and three with us—one crazy night.”
Flowers, Champagne, and ‘The Godfather of Soul’
Seemingly deep in thought about another “crazy night,” Bell chimed in, “James Brown was an idol of mine, another guy I met and opened for.” He said he was “flabbergasted.” As he spoke with the star just before he opened the show at the 9:30 Club in D.C., all Bell could think was, “How great is my life that I get to sit here with James Brown and have a talk with him before we go on the same stage?”
The consummate entertainer, dubbed “The Godfather of Soul,” had a 23-piece band, including dancers. During rehearsal, which was exhausting even to watch, Bell recalls that Brown played four different instruments, and he was “rehearsing this band like they weren’t the guys who traveled with him every night. But they were.” Bell recalls a six-hour sound-check prior to a show that lasted three hours. “And James was 67 at the time,” Bell points out.
At the behest of the headliner “and the girl who books the acts at the 9:30,” Kelly Bell’s mother was in the audience and was a huge James Brown fan. “They put her in the front row balcony, where they had actually cleared out a whole section and put a bouncer up there with ropes and all,” Bell told us, “so no one else could get around her. They also had a bottle of champagne and flowers, and stools for her and two guests. They treated her like a queen.”
After his band finished its set, Bell paid a visit to the balcony. “I said, ‘Hey Mom, you cool? How are you feeling?’ Her reply was, ‘I just saw my baby child open up for the man whose music I’ve loved for it seems like my whole life! How do you think I feel?’”
Photography courtesy Kelly Bell
What Makes the Blues P-H-A-T?
“If people ask us what Phat Blues music is,” Kelly explains, “we tell them that if you could imagine Muddy Waters wearing a Bob Marley t-shirt riding on a Black Sabbath tour bus, on the way to a Funkadelic concert, listening to a James Brown eight-track tape, singing a Run DMC song with a Nighthawks ball cap on…All in the glory of Bo Diddley, with just a hint of B.B. King and a smidge of Aretha Franklin—that would be nearly close to what we do.” Kelly Bell Band is available to listen to on all streaming platforms. To learn more as well as upcoming concert dates, visit kellybellband.com.
Live, From Quiet Waters
Assuming the Covid pandemic subsides, Annapolis-area residents can still look forward to an annual Kelly Bell Band appearance at the Quiet Waters Park Amphitheater off Hillsmere Drive. “We play Quiet Waters every year,” Bell says, when asked whether the annual event would resume. “We did a recording from there in 2016, a big-band show still available as a two-CD set.”
By “big band,” Bell refers to what he describes as an orchestra playing all original Kelly Bell songs, done in a big-band style for a two-CD set titled Live from Quiet Waters. According to Bell, “we also had a nine-piece horn section and four guitars, with one guy playing acoustic the whole time. It’s just a lot of really cool stuff. That’s one of my favorite albums right there. We’re always trying to do something new and expand the sound. I know any time somebody says my name, then it’s part of the brand. That’s why I got into professional wrestling and why now I’m on the radio, four nights a week on National Public Radio WTMD 89.7.”
The ‘Other’ Kelly Bell
Let’s roll that last sentence again. Professional wrestling? On the radio every night? Did we miss something? “Well, yes and no,” says Bell. “I also work in mental health. That’s what my degrees are in. I spend a lot of time working with kids with emotional difficulties.”
What about professional wrestling? “It’s been awesome,” Bell says. “I’ve been a professional wrestler for 14 years and I actually came back four months ago and wrestled one last match. I’ve also embraced the life philosophy of Nelson Mandela. I’m just super-appreciative, and I understand my platform. I get to make music that I love, with people I love, for people who love it. It’s the greatest job in the world. We’ve been in about 32 countries in the last nine years, visiting U.S. military bases where we’ve spent a lot of time entertaining troops. We’re also soon going to premier a benefit documentary on the floods that devastated downtown Ellicott City, Maryland, between 2016 and 2020.”
We ended by asking him about the radio show. “That’s me at WTMD, Monday through Thursday, from 7 to 10 p.m. I never really thought about it, but they called and wanted it to be a “Phat Blues” show. So, we’re going to call it “The Phat Blues Cafe.” Sounds like Kelly Bell has taken cue from Dr. Johnny Fever after all and will continue teaching the kids about Bo Diddley.
