Most people I meet have this impression that the life of a travelling musician – as we say, “on the road” – is one big joyful experience, seeing new cities and countries, playing before ecstatic crowds, doing well financially, meeting famous people, after hours parties, nuff woman and food and drink, as well as the harder stuff, with the pattern repeated more or less every day, on and on. While the impression is very overblown, it is true that a musician’s life takes him/her into situations that most folks rarely see, and it can be very heady. But there’s another side, which most folks don’t know about either; it’s not all fun and games, and if your music becomes popular the life on the road that results can put you into circumstances that test your resolve, and they come in different ways.
One such for me was a situation in Dominica involving the creature known in Guyana as yowari, essentially a large bush-dwelling rodent known among Guyanese for the pungent smell released by its glands when it is killed. As Guyanese also know, however, yowari, scorned by us, is known in the Caribbean as manicou, a wild-meat delicacy in such places as Trinidad and Tobago, and the French islands where it is prized for the dining table beyond any other dish you can imagine. I saw an example of it first hand in St Lucia, when I was with my friend, the late Bobby Clarke, on a drive from Castries to Vieux Fort. Bobby, known as a mercurial chap, surprised me when he suddenly shouting out in patois, “M’syay”, slammed on his brakes, pulled over on the shoulder, opened the car door and was gone running like a madman into the nearby forest. In shock, I got out the car (had Bobby perhaps had “gone off”?) calling to him, but he had disappeared. About five minutes later, Bobby emerged from the forest, looking somewhat bedraggled but clearly upset and telling me, arms waving, “Manicou, mate. Manicou.” That’s right. Mr Clarke had spotted a manicou on the roadside and had gone after the national dish of St Lucia.
My encounter with yowari came shortly after when on a trip to Dominica, where we had become friends with the local band Swinging Stars who invited us to dinner. The five Tradewinds members arrived with primed appetite for this very gracious meal, and Norman Letang, the band’s leader, stood up and remarked how they were honouring us with a “special mil”, as the Dominicans say it, as the waiters came around passing out bowls of stewed manicou. I sat there contemplating how to tell Norman we couldn’t eat that stuff, but turned to my right and saw the plate before Joe Brown, our bass player at the time. Joe’s plate had what is considered the ultimate delicacy – the head of the manicou. Joe looked at me in total disbelief at what was before him. At that point, I caved in. I told Norman, with much apologies, that we didn’t eat manicou. Fearing his disappointment, what I got instead from Norman was, a huge laugh, “No problem, mate. Dat leave more for us.” Nonetheless, Guyanese will understand when I say that life on the road can mean you end up eating yowari. Yuk.
It can also lead into the most staggering fatigue your body can encounter. I remember being in Piarco on Ash Wednesday morning after playing for four nights straight in Carnival, where all the music is calypso or soca at breakneck speed, at fetes that end at daybreak. I was at the airport after having no sleep the night before, and I was literally falling asleep on the chair. As the comedians say, I was so tired even my eyebrows hurt. I was past fatigue, and venturing close to coma in this life on the road. On another occasion, Tradewinds were driving back from a Saturday night fete in Montreal and heading for a TV show on Sunday afternoon in Toronto. It was winter, and ordinarily I would have slept in Montreal, but the TV show was the Cross Canada Song Contest in which I was one of five finalists, and I obviously couldn’t miss that. I was driving back with our guitarist Glen Sorzano, who had no driver’s licence, and I had to do the five-hour drive alone. Glen promised to talk and keep me awake, but 20 minutes outside Montreal he was snoring. I tried the radio, no use. I opened the window and stuck my head out into the cold, sleep still had me. I pulled over to the side, scooped up some snow and rubbed my face; two minutes later my eyes were closing again. The crux of it was yet to come. I was on a two-lane highway and with a car ahead of me on the right, so I moved left to overtake him.
I was abreast of that car, going about 80 miles an hour, and I felt my eyelids beginning to close. Try as I might, I couldn’t keep them up. Fully alongside the car, my eyes closed down completely. I was conscious, but blind. I held the wheel as straight as I could and after about 10 seconds of blindness my eyes came open. I had passed the other car, drifted slightly to the right, and was now in the right-hand lane – going 80 miles an hour. Life on the road, in that case, could have been death.
The experiences include changing into our band uniforms in an island where there had been a big rainstorm and the area of the venue was flooded. The room where we changed was two feet deep in water. We had to stand on a concrete ledge in one corner, braced against the wall, to change. After the fete, we didn’t change back. We went home in our band gear.
We had the experience of being in a small plane taking off from Kayman Sankar’s airstrip in Anna Regina, Essequibo where the aircraft almost stalled on takeoff (the alarm went off) with a tractor parked at the end of the runway.
We spent a terrible night once in Trinidad, having played in San Fernando, when the van carrying our equipment back to Port-of-Spain was hit head-on and the driver was instantly killed. We were in the city when we heard the news and we drove back to the scene of the accident to see the driver, who had refused drinks at the fete because he was driving, at the side of the roadway, dead in the grass; that was one night when we were sleepy but sleep wouldn’t come. Similarly, when the rising calypso star Maestro was killed in a car crash in the capital, we were with a group of musicians in Diego Martin, Lord Kitchener among them, grieving for Maestro who was to leave the next day for a show in New York. Along with the fun and the games, life on the road can range from a yowari meal, to near death on a wintry highway, or to careful men sadly dead before their time.
