BIG BREAK IMMINENT? : STILL HAPPY IN A ROOMFUL OF BLUES

After nearly 20 years of grueling roadwork, Rhode Island’s Roomful of Blues may be on the verge of cracking the big time.

The 10-piece group, which plays the Palomino tonight, is a favorite with the blues underground that nurtured the Fabulous Thunderbirds and Robert Cray before their recent pop breakthroughs. With a full summer of festival appearances on tap, recent exposure on national television and favorable response to a current demo tape, saxophonist/singer Greg Piccolo is encouraged to believe that Roomful is next in line for a major label deal.

Piccolo, 36, acknowledges that Roomful’s swinging brand of horn-driven jump blues and classic R&B; has benefited from the rock world’s surge of interest in American music.

“People like Robert Plant with the Honeydrippers and the Blues Brothers--things I’m not really musically fond of--have been exposing people to R&B;,” Piccolo said during a recent phone interview.

“It’s great those bands helped get the ball rolling and now the bands that are really doing the stuff good are coming into the limelight.

“Part of the reason we haven’t gotten bigger sooner is because we’re a big band. It’s hard to take an opening slot for $100 a night and go on tour because we’d literally be in jail for not paying our bills. We’ve always done what we wanted, for better or worse, and we’re still here because people have kept us going over the years.”

Roomful of Blues evolved from a group of high school buddies in Westerly, R.I., who picked up early albums by Paul Butterfield and John Mayall. They discovered the original sources of that music by reading the album jackets and songwriter credits.

Guitarist Duke Robillard formed Roomful as a Chicago-style blues band in 1967 and Piccolo, then principally a harmonica player, joined the group three years later.

The focus shifted in 1971 when they heard records by Buddy Johnson fronting what Piccolo described as “a 16-piece rock ‘n’ roll band in the ‘40s and ‘50s.” Rich Lataille and Doug James joined Piccolo in the horn section, and the group began featuring swing-oriented material by Count Basie, Jay McShann and T-Bone Walker. That edition of Roomful released one album on Antilles in 1977 before Robillard left to pursue a solo career.

Piccolo assumed leadership duties and began incorporating material flavored by his favorite sound, New Orleans R&B.; The horn section expanded to five pieces with the addition of a trumpet player and trombonist Porky Cohen, now 63, who quit a Dixieland jazz band he had played with for 30 years in Providence.

Roomful’s growing reputation for playing classic R&B; created demand for the group as a backing unit for blues veterans. The late Big Joe Turner, saxophonist Eddie (Cleanhead) Vinson and New Orleans songwriter Earl King all recorded studio albums backed by Roomful.

One knock against Roomful in industry circles may be the lack of original material.

Both 1981’s “Hot Little Mama” album and the current “Live at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel” LP (which features Los Lobos’ Cesar Rosas, David Hidalgo and Steve Berlin on “300 Pounds of Heavenly Joy”) are loaded with versions of obscure songs by outside writers.

“Dressed Up to Get Messed Up,” the group’s 1984 album, was largely composed of Piccolo’s songs, but a series of personnel changes and the need to keep working forced Roomful to shelve its plan to concentrate on original material until now. Piccolo had to surrender his singing duties for two years when operations on his vocal cords left him unable to meet the demands of the group’s heavy touring schedule.

“We’ve worked five or six nights a week for the last 16 years,” he said.

“Home now means we’re anywhere between Washington, D.C., New York and all of New England. If we get a good gig in Washington, we’ll drive down for one night, turn around after the show and drive 400 miles back to Rhode Island.”

Has Piccolo ever thought of calling it quits?

“Yeah, once a day,” he said with a chuckle. “Anyone who’s got any bit of sanity will wake up and think, ‘I must be nuts to be doing this.’

“You constantly walk a line there. But, you know, I didn’t join Roomful of Blues to be rich and famous. If I start getting down about whether it’s worth it to go on, I always try and remember how I felt when I joined the band.

“I was working in a rock ‘n’ roll band that was just a little local thing in Rhode Island. I was a kid, 19 years old, making money and popular at what I was doing. Roomful of Blues was nothing . . . except they were great musically. I didn’t care about anything else except I wanted to be in this band.

“So I’ll say to myself, ‘Remember how you felt when you joined the band? Is Roomful still that kind of band?’

“I try to step back from it as far as I can and, when it comes down to it, I still think Roomful is the best. That’s why I’m still here.”