Magna charter

Like last year's Dance All Night, which ended the band's seven-year recording drought, Turn It On is a collection of originals and covers of obscure postwar gems first waxed by the likes of B.B. King, Larry Williams, and Percy Mayfield. Each is done in high-energy style and imbued with a radio-friendly tone, which has helped to propel the band onto commercial radio and Billboard's charts for the first time.

"I think that we've gotten more radio play in the last six weeks than we've ever gotten in all of the band's history," muses a gleeful Bob Bell, Roomful's longtime manager/publicist, from his office in Providence. "I don't really want to get into sales figures, but it seems we're the biggest-selling thing that Rounder [Bullseye's parent company] has now outside of Allison Krauss. And we're very pleased about that. In addition to landing on the Billboard chart, the record is bubbling just beneath the Top 50 on the Gavin Report's Americana chart. So it's been really amazing. We're right in there beside the Beatles and the Rolling Stones."

Sticking to their musical guns has always damned these guys to an existence outside the mainstream, so nobody's going to begrudge them a little success. Few deserve it more than Roomful, who made their national debut on Island Records in 1977. Despite a good run in the decade that followed, thanks to a strong grassroots following, large-scale acknowledgment and the financial rewards that come with it remained elusive -- even after rave reviews and three Grammys for collaborative efforts with Earl King, Big Joe Turner, and Eddie Vinson in the mid '80s. There was hope for a time that a quickie tryst with rock-diva-turned-blues-dabbler Pat Benatar in 1991 would help usher the band to a place alongside other roots crossovers the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Stevie Ray Vaughan, but the union did little more than deliver disappointment. Unsigned for several years by 1992, Roomful had to pony up their own money to pay for the studio time to record Dance All Night.

After landing at the seventh position on Billboard's blues and R&B chart three weeks ago, Turn It On slipped back a couple notches, to number nine. Despite the slide, the group is extremely excited. The numbers show that almost every radio station in the country with some sort of a Triple A format is playing the disc, which means the band's fortunes are turning upward.

"I guess it's made people aware that we're recording artists again," offers current Roomful frontman Sugar Ray Norcia, who came aboard four years ago. "Seven years went by before this band made any recordings, and that's a long time. We've got a different sound now. I don't like to put labels on things, but I think we've got more of a contemporary edge to our music now. We got Phil Greene, who worked with New Kids on the Block, to mix our new disc. He's a big fan of the band, and he helped us to get a contemporary sound without bastardizing ourselves."

Which is true. After opening with a swinging read of King's Eisenhower-era classic "Blind Love," the disc downshifts into a slow, blue-light torch song written by Norcia titled "I Left My Baby." With muted trumpets and cocktail drumming provided by John Rossi, the song allows Norcia to croon like Joe Williams on a Saturday night. These two numbers are examples of vintage Roomful. They're bluesy and respectful of the masters who inspired them.

But the rockier edge on other originals, such as guitarist Vachon's title cut and Norcia's "Angry Woman," illustrates a direction the band could easily adopt from here on out. Sporting throbbing rhythms, grungy guitar, and plenty of overdriven harp, these rougher songs are what Roomful are hooking the masses with. And one can see the obvious problem in that. Now that they've found what sells to Middle America, will they follow the commercial route, as the T-Birds did when they broke through nearly 15 years ago, on their next disc? Norcia says that isn't going to happen, that the band's direction is clear. Billboard's charts won't dictate the route Roomful of Blues will take in the future.

"We never went into the studio and said, `Let's make this radio friendly,' " he concludes. "It just came out sounding that way. Now we might have had that buried at a subconscious level, but nobody came out and said it. We just sound like what we are, and that's not going to change."