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.
