I did an interview this week with Sean Devers on the Kaieteur News radio station and someone asked about the keys to a career in music and my answer was “business.” They were surprised and that’s understandable. After all, I am known as this lanky guy with a guitar who has written some popular songs about Caribbean life. On the surface, that’s true, but if you dig deeper and go past the musical talent, there’s something else in play that is actually just as significant and, in fact, more so, which is that you need a sound business approach. That’s the something else that is part of any successful career in the entertainment business; you have to be an entertainer, obviously, but you also have to be a business man, or woman. So, yes, I am the lanky guy with the guitar and the ability to write songs, but I’m also a businessman. It may sound like a contradiction but it is not. Any time, you see a successful musical career anywhere in the world, business sense is involved, if not in the artist then it is in somebody managing or steering the artist. Of course, this is true not just in entertainment. You can have the greatest product in the world, or the most innovative service approach, but if you don’t have the business paraphernalia surrounding it you’re going to have a difficult time. So, while only a few of you, or perhaps even none of you, do what I do, the business approaches I took would actually be virtually identical to what you do in your businesses.
In any business, there are some fundamentals, almost sign posts, and one of them is you have to know the territory. That’s true whether it’s Dave Martins selling songs, or New Thriving selling Chinese cuisine, or Shanta selling puri. You have to learn about the market for the product or the service your business will be offering.
On the topic of market, a second fundamental, as many of you clearly know, is find a niche. Find a product or a service that you’re good at and concentrate on that. A musical example of that is the late great Nat King Cole. Most people who love his work don’t know that Nat started out as a piano man, playing jazz in small nightclubs in the US with the Nat King Cole trio, and singing the occasional blues or the occasional ballad. A producer from a record company heard him play one night and afterwards he told Nat, “Listen. That jazz you’re playing is fine music, but the market for that is small. However, you see those two ballads you did tonight? The market for that is huge, you’re very good at it; your voice is like magic for ballads and that’s what you should be doing, not jazz.” The producer became his manager, Nat King Cole got up from behind the piano, and became the greatest ballad singer the world has ever known. Not jazz… niche. Having said that, finding a niche is not easy, but it can come in different ways, so you have to be alert. Tradewinds started in 1966 in Toronto and quickly built a following among the Caribbean immigrants in a tiny downtown bar on Yonge Street, the Bermuda Tavern. Around 1968, we started playing occasionally in a small place, The Mercury Club, and every time we played there the place was jammed. The two Canadians who owned the club had other businesses and overall the club was in the red, I could tell they wanted out, so I offered to buy the business. I didn’t even ask to see the books. They were stunned. But purely from eyesight, I knew that the place was full whenever we played there, and I knew that business was terrible when we were booked elsewhere or on tour in the Caribbean. I could count. I knew that with Tradewinds on stage, the gate receipts were there and the bar sales were great; the waitresses told me. I mortgaged my house in 1970 and bought the club, and it became Tradewinds’ home base, and for the Caribbean people in Toronto, a home away from home, six nights a week. I had found my niche. I paid off the loan in six months, and We Place was a success for 10 years until I sold it and moved to Grand Cayman in 1980. But finding the niche is just a start, you then have to be a businessman in nurturing it.
With the Mercury Club, I changed the name to We Place. Caribbean people knew what that meant Our Place… it confused the Canadians (they would call it The Wee Place) but they weren’t my market. We couldn’t do anything about the club exterior (it was a large building) but we remodeled the interior into plain walls with wide wood borders, took out the tacky ceiling decorations, brought in new chairs and tables with bright red table-cloths, and improved the lighting. We put cups of peanuts on the tables, complimentary. Along with the peanuts, I set up a membership system, with a classy membership card designed by a Guyanese friend (Raymond Rix), and I hired a soft-spoken but stern Trini (Felix Plaza) as doorman – West Indian patrons can be a handful. Every time we left the club to play elsewhere or to tour the Caribbean, I made sure we left good local bands on stage, alternating with other Caribbean names (Barbados Troubadours, Lord Shorty, Lord Brynner, etc.) so we didn’t let the product fall. We kept advertising costs down by using our membership list to promote the club, and that same list was all the advertising we needed for the dance we would run, in a big hall in Toronto, after every Caribbean tour. So, yes, find the niche, that’s a business key.
But equally as important, make it the best you can afford, and that means paying attention to the details. Many businesses in Guyana fall short on the details. In 2009, the first couple months I’m back living here, I go into a major hardware store, looking for 5/16 bolts, 2 inches long. The sales girl said, “We only got 3 inch….” I said, “Okay give me that and I will cut it. I need 6 bolts, 6 nuts and 6 washers.” She exhaled. “We have no nuts,” she said, looking up at the heavens as if she expected some to fall like manna. So I said, “Madam how you could be selling a bolt without the nut? That’s like selling a shoe without the sole.” She gave me the eyebrows thing along with the sideways twist of her mouth. Early home as well, I went into a well-known paint store on Water Street. I ordered a gallon of paint. “You need any brushes?” No, I’m good with that, but I need some paint thinner. She said, “We don’t have thinner. You will have to go to a paint store for that.” As God above me, that is what the lady said, “You have to go to a paint store.” I wanted to ask her, “So what alyou selling you here? Saltfish?”
You have to get the details right. One year, Tradewinds played Trinidad Carnival. There was a place called Trinidad Dairies in Port of Spain, known for lovely icy frappes with different fruit flavours – guava, mango, papaw – all delicious. I went in there one evening with a young lady. (I know alyou Guyanese; you want to know who the lady was – let me put it to you this way: it’s none of your damned business.) So the waitress comes over, chewing gum, “So what alyou want?” The young lady said, “I’ll have guava.” Chewing Gum says, “We outa dat.” The young lady says, “Okay, I’ll have coconut.” Chewing Gum writes. My turn came, so I said, “I’ll have barbadine.” Chewing Gum says, “We outa dat.” I say, “Okay, I’ll have mango.” Chewing Gum starts to write and stops, “Listen, na. Why the two alyou just don’t order one flavour and done?” Now mind you, the frappes are great – the problem is getting the flavour you want. Product is king and that includes service, because if you’re in the service business that service is your product (except in the case of Trinidad Dairies, of course), and the product is the core of any business, so you have to make it the best it can be; I know in Guyana, problems in other businesses can hamper you – you know, the stelling that float away; or the container blocking the road so your truck can’t pass; or government hire somebody to build a road who never built a road – such things are beyond you, but there are things you can control. For instance, I can be writing a song and it feels finished, but every time I go over it there’s a particular spot that bothers me…it could be the flow of the melody, or a rhyme that isn’t quite right, or the wording is weak. Sometimes it can be a single word… one word, which jars every time it comes around.
You can say this is in the area of creativity, but it’s actually a quality control decision: I am making the song as good as it can be. I hear songs all the time that I know the song-writer didn’t fix the flaw; it sticks out; it’s obvious when the product isn’t right…. like years ago in town, this is in the tough years, you know, stores empty, lining up for kero, Pegasus half a roll of toilet paper…. I’m going down the seawall road and a taxi passes me on right with no left side back door. You get what I’m telling you? Yes, you could look in the taxi and see what shoes the people wearing; hard times. That was an unusual case but a good example of a business that wasn’t quite ready.
Here’s another signpost: launch your business properly. For persons starting out in business, ensure that you have enough financial resources to launch yourself in a manner that gets attention and establishes quality at the same time. If you don’t have enough money to do that, wait until you do. The cliché about not having a second chance to make a first impression is true. As the Trinis say, “come good or don’t come at all.” I learned that early, but it’s my mantra. I started Tradewinds in 1966 in Toronto to create music for a Caribbean audience. That’s a bit of a conundrum; I was living and playing in Canada but starting a band for an audience from somewhere else. But again, I had been watching the Caribbean market where small groups were emerging, as opposed to big bands, and I had seen in Canada the economic value of small groups where everyone played an instrument and could sing – that was Tradewinds. In the band’s first year, with my market in mind, I wrote four songs and decided to launch the group in the best way I knew how, which was to appear in the biggest music event in the Caribbean – Trinidad carnival. But how do you get a booking in carnival for a completely unknown band? I decided on a long shot. Trinidad-born Glen Sorzano, one of the original band, knew the head of a radio station in Trinidad, so I took the band in a studio, we recorded the four songs, and I bought four return tickets to Trinidad. We took the four songs, two 45 rpm recordings, to Sam Ghany, head of Radio Trinidad and he listened to them, liked the material, and said the station would definitely play them, and he also put us on his Sunday Serenade radio show heard throughout the Caribbean. Some Trini friends arranged for us to play, pro bono, three or four small engagements in Port-of-Spain, we enjoyed the carnival and flew back to Toronto. We got a small write up in one Trini newspaper (Glen was a Trini coming home) but we had made no splash, made no money; in fact, paying the airfare, we were out of pocket. However, unknown to me, one of the songs, “Honeymooning Couple,” had taken off on Trinidad radio after carnival, and two months later, completely out of the blue, Telco Records called me in Canada to release the song in the region. Inside of a month, “Both O’ We On Top” was a hit all across the Caribbean, and Tradewinds, a nonentity six months before, was a name in Caribbean music and appearing in Barbados, Trinidad, St. Lucia, Antigua – we came here and played at Astor. Okay, the band was good and different and all that, but the key there was the launch. For about $3,000 we had exposed our material in the biggest Caribbean song market of the day and we were a name overnight; what a bargain. Of course, it could have been money wasted – the songs could have flopped; indeed two of them did – but if you make sure the product is right, and you launch it effectively, you’re being a sensible businessman.
