People ask me all the time about the experiences I have had since Tradewinds started. Depending on the circumstances, on different days I will give you different answers, but now, given that I just heard the question again, this is today’s version.
One would definitely be the first time Tradewinds came to play back on the home soil after Honeymooning Couple had become a hit. The promoter was the late Cyril Shaw and the first show was at the now defunct Astor Cinema in Georgetown. Our rhythm guitar man then was Glen Sorzano, of Trinidad, and one of his expressions about something popular was, “hot like a pepper seed,” a Trini expression I never heard anywhere else, and that was us that year at the Astor. The place was sold out but Shaw kept selling tickets because people wanted in; so much so that many of them ended up sitting on the floor in what they called “the house” area of the cinema, in rows between the seats. There was this feeling of enormous tension in the place, at least that’s how it felt to me. I rarely feel nervous going on stage, but this time, the first gig back home since Tradewinds hit, I was. It was something so powerful in the building you could see it in the crowd. It felt like a dam about to burst and that’s how it was when we started to play. The performance itself is a complete blank. I can’t tell you how long it lasted, or what songs we played and what songs we didn’t, but the place was bedlam. I know enough to know that a big part of it was that I was a Guyanese boy who had made a mark, and to make it in Trinidad was part of the excitement. You remember things for different reasons. I remember this one for that “Guyana feeling” in the cinema; you could almost touch it. Later that day, of course, I had a singular experience of a different kind (I’ve written about this before) when we shifted gears and performed for a smaller but equally frenzied crowd at the Cambridge Hotel; having lived away, I had no idea of the place’s reputation and Cyril Shaw wisely didn’t tell me, but five minutes into the performance I found out, as I reported before, that we were in a bawdy house.
