It often happens when I get engaged with Tradewinds fans that I end up relating little episodes from my life with the band. Whether you’re a Tradewinds fan or not (what a boring world if we all loved the same music), or even not a music fan, period, a musician’s life on the road has its moments of drama and comedy.
Coming back to Guyana on trips starting in the late 1960s, people assumed I knew Georgetown folks. In fact I had lived in Guyana only on West Dem and at Atkinson Field, so apart from Jerry Goveia (the Banks one) I was blank on most of the Georgetown folks that people assumed I knew. An illustration of that: we were playing a function one night at Starlite Drive-in, massive crowd, and there was an Indian man, nicely dressed, but looking wobbly drunk, heckling me very loudly from behind the stage. Folks in the crowd were watching me to see what I would do, but I couldn’t clearly hear what he was saying, so I ignored him which sometimes works. This dude, however, kept firing. So I stopped the band and then made some remark about “the two-legged musicians on the stage and a two-legged jackass bringing up the rear”, and the crowd roared, and he shut up after that and drifted away. However, at the end of the set, Tradewinds’ man in Guyana, Freddie Abdool, comes over to me looking very concerned. Country boy as I was, I didn’t know − as most of the crowd did − that the boozed-up gentleman was, in fact, a senior minister in the government. I can’t even remember his name. I never got any feedback from anybody in government about publicly dissing a minister, but Freddie was nervous for a couple of days.
On our first Tradewinds appearance in Guyana, a theatre show arranged by the late Cyril Shaw, he came up to me as were packing up and casually mentioned we had to “play a few songs” at a place in Main Street where some folks were waiting to hear us. I should preface this by saying that I had been out of Guyana for 10 years and didn’t know the venue at all, but the name of the place, “Cambridge”, sounded legit, and I was totally persuaded by Cyril Shaw’s assurance, “It’s a nice place, Dave; really nice place.” So off we went by taxi. The place was rammed, ready to sport, but I still didn’t know the ants’ nest I was heading into. My first inkling was the unannounced appearance of two young women who just walked into the room upstairs where we were changing. Without knocking or saying a word, they sauntered in and sprawled off, as Guyanese say, on two settees, generously displaying their endowments, and I had to tell them, “We getting ready here…alyou gie we a break, eh.” Yes, the alarm bell went off – the ladies’ profession was immediately obvious – but we were committed already, the crowd had seen us arrive, and this was our first time back in Guyana so I felt I had to hang in. It turned out to be bedlam. One look at the mostly male crowd, and I could tell they would all fail the breathalyzer; men who can’t dance were dancing. The second we started playing, the professional girls, representing all ethnic groups, were up showing off their moves, and of course their equipment, and within seconds the place was a zoo. Long before pole dancing existed, one indigenous lady was doing exactly that on the microphone stand I was using. I didn’t know where to look − up, down or sideways. The place was in an uproar. We did two songs, and I leaned over and told the guys, “The minute we finish this next song, grab the drums and the guitar amps – we are out of here.” I don’t know what caused it (Shaw may have told them we would play for an hour) but within minutes of our exit some sort of melee broke out. As we were standing outside, cussing Cyril Shaw, and waiting for our transport, some riot squad police pulled up and started tossing folks into a black pick-up like so much bags of flour. I remembered afterwards Jerry Goveia (the Banks one) coming up to me, with a puzzled look, saying, “What you doing in this place, boy?” In retrospect I suspect Gov was just there out of curiosity – to see how this Hague country boy Martins was going to handle the Cambridge conditions.
One of the things you run into as a headlining group on tour is that the local band on the bill usually tries to show you up in various ways – coming on in new costumes, with added singers, courting the crowd, and especially staying on stage far longer than originally scheduled, thereby cutting into the visiting band’s final set. On one trip to Guyana we played for a fete at Milton Lowe’s residence in New Haven (what a lovely venue that was) with a bumper crowd, where the local group was the late Pancho Carew’s band. Tradewinds played a set, and then Pancho’s band (the name escapes me) came on; the place was packed, the crowd was rocking and, as usually happens, they ran way past their allotted time. We kept sending messages to the stage that they were running over, to no avail. So in the break, although not a drinker, I took a shot of XM10 and told the guys, “Brace yourself; we’re playing right through to the end of the fete; those guys aren’t getting back on.” The fete was now at its peak, it was a lovely cool night in New Haven, and we went past our allotted hour and kept going. As the time wound down, Pancho and a couple of the guys in his band were at the edge of the crowd waving and trying to get my attention (Pancho was practically jumping up and down, hair flying, and pointing at his watch). They were obviously pressing to get back on, but I ignored them. I kept checking the time, and as we reached the 2 am. shutdown I said good night, and added, “Before we go, a big hand please for Pancho and his crew who did such a great job entertaining you earlier tonight.” Carew was about 20 feet from me, mouth wide open, as if he was trying to say, “What?” Pancho was known as a sharp dresser, always well groomed, but that night he was so steamed even his hair was askew. It’s important to add that Mr Carew, previously a big Tradewinds fan, never mentioned the incident to me afterwards, nor I to him, and we remained friends. The musician’s life on the road; in the words of the late Godfrey Chin, ya tink it easy?
