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Blade it was in that period to survive,
for blade walked the gun talk of yesteryear.
Blade that would butcher a gutless man’s
back, cracking open skin like fine leather, and pumping
blood dark and horrid down his buttocks.
“Ah hear he get 76.”
“Well, ah had to give him mih mark.”
In a flashback to the dawn of the
sixties, the cutter man would pick at the scab on pan’s
conscience after leaving his mark (and his adversary in
serious stitches) on the cutting edge of an urban culture
that one day would advance to the World Cup of Mas.
Badjohnhood (badjohns in the ’hood),
flaunted its swagger as early as the mid-’40s, the tuned
pan’s first outing on the road, through the mid-’70s, when
steel band clashes in Port of Spain began to cool down.
Google the early period. You’ll be right
there at the rainy season, in the drizzle of the new pop
culture.
Look for East Dry River. See how it
simmers from a continually violent social storm? Now, watch
the toddling steel band movement meander from side to side,
bouncing this way and that off the concrete wall of an edgy
society.
See how they fret?
See badjohnsim posing as metaphor for
pan’s revolution? Hand-to-hand combat among pioneers for
experimentation props? The battle for the template of an
instrument that, it being still early in the day, finds milk
at the breast of its evolution?
Yet East Dry River, or “Behind the
Bridge,” a blighted quadrant of Port of Spain at one time or
another [Editor’s
note: - and still so treated today], has
always seemed to value stale glory above culture, what with
Catholic churches looking down on the peasants from the high
ground in Gonzales and Laventille. Not unlike the statue of
Christ atop the Corcovado Mountain in Rio that welcomes
visitors with gaping arms, instead of embracing
scratch-grain communities that loaf in the foothills.
Read that as scratch-grain communities in
OUR hills, behind GOD’s back; communities that had laid the
DNA of a new world culture, for Christ’s sake. Pan in the
Garden of Eden. In Hell Yard by the River.
In context, the badjohn story (a dark
celebration of the invention of pan) particularly its East
Dry River saga, and the Western element, too, carried the
keen edge of a parable back in the day -- like a cutlass;
like a barber’s ivory-handled straight razor -- that could
wring out gut-wrenching tears the colour and viscosity of
abattoir blood; even though the parable would read as blunt
as an iron bolt from the foundry, or as a bull pistle,
retooled from, well, a bull’s pistle.
One could argue that the drama was more
about a den of iniquity (men revelling in evil) and less
about an allegory of inner-city inventiveness, or urban
sociology, or the twinges of culture. All psychobabble to
the badjohn. Instead, he would implore you to feel the cut
of his cloth and the lash of his inner voice.
Check the cock of his hat:
* Justice is the will and the brute force
of the strong man. * The sweet man may rule, but his way of
life will inevitably sap his strength and tax the will,
because turf wars will spring up over, of all things, turf.
And women. And, yes, pan. * The glamour girl, the sweet
man’s lover, flirts with history as the femme fatale of the
new culture’s subculture, but loyalty has its price. It
could be as costly as a steel band clash. No ordinary woman
she, the femme fatale arrives (with whoever’s the prevailing
man) as a dangerously seductive siren.
These parables illustrate a morality of
its own.
Never interfere with unemployed unsavory
characters, including dressed-up dudes who shill for bands
like Casablanca and Tripoli, and especially those Red Army
panmen with housekeeperly ethics. Their fashion plate decked
out in Parson’s Grey, flannel or tweed pants, imported
hand-tailored silk shirts, “two-tone” shoes with white
eyelets, felt hats, stingy brims and gold teeth. And
soon-to-be-updated threads, like the Zoot suit worn by Cab
Calloway, the popular American bandleader and jazz singer,
who starred in the mid-‘40s movie, “Stormy Weather.”
Make no mistake, it was Red Army panmen,
gambling, and preening for women on Globe plaza, who adopted
the baggy high-waisted pants, narrowed at the ankles.
Forty-two inches wide at the knees and 16 at the fold.
Who’s to say, then, that the peahen never
gets jealous of the peacock?
“When you’re knocking about, fighting is
part of life,” says Norman Darway Adams, a pan historian and
former right-hand man of Ellie Mannette, the face of
Invaders. “And Red Army was the saga boys in town. Dressing
nice DID cause a fight -- between them and Casablanca.”
Extending the morality of the parables,
it’s worth the skin on your back not to “trouble” the women,
by and large prostitutes, who “mind” the badjohns to gain
protection. For not only was a man’s advances rebuffed, he
was also violently redressed by the sweet man.
Above all, never disrespect the badjohn’s
band, or a decent band that hires an enforcer to protect
itself from badjohns. For in a world without saints, one is
obliged to reverence personalities such as Slade, Gunbelt,
Big Sarge, Batman, Copperhead, One Man, Eddie Boom, Jeff,
Slim, Gold Teeth, Mastifay, The Butcher and the remainder of
their ilk. Boysie Singh, too, whose heart was later taken by
the executioner’s song.
All in all, you won’t ever capture the
utter dread of the East Dry River badjohn, unless you had
scrutinized his lifestyle, as did Ret. Supt. Randolph
“Rannie” Babb, who grew up on Clifton Hill, East Dry River,
and captained the Hill 60 steel band prior to joining the
Police Force in 1953.
Babb would straddle the bridge between
pan and police work, his name carrying real, real weight,
both in the steel band world and law enforcement. A steel
band man crossing sides and stopping cops from raiding pans.
Not an easy feat.
“He’s a liver; an engaging, fun guy,”
says Leslie “Professor” Slater, a former Highlanders
arranger and president of the Trinidad and Tobago Folk Arts
Institute in Brooklyn. “An excellent people person.”
Babb, 80, who relocated to Brooklyn, New
York, in 1987, was involved in security operations for the
Labour Day festival. He cuts a more familiar figure, though,
walking the streets with his tenor pan, on his way to a
wedding or a wake or just for companionship, his wife having
died in ’85.
She had lived longer than badjohns like
Copperhead.
“Copperhead was a white [U.S.] Marine
stationed at Chaguaramas who used to search the belongings
of the workers as they were leaving the Base,” Babb recalls.
On occasion, at the end of their shifts
as MPs, Copperhead and his mates joined regulars at a Green
Corner bar. The toughest of his clique, Copperhead became an
untouchable because of the clique. His fame - infamy, really
- had gathered across the city like moss. And badjohns
yearned for the day he would slip up. For, how else to deal
with a Marine who, an example, would walk a suspected Base
thief out into the sea until the waterline inched to the tip
of the nose?
Maybe it was an accidental death wish,
maybe it was “I-‘fraid-only-God” arrogance.
Copperhead took a chance one evening and
drank by himself at the Green Corner bar.
“Word spread quick,” Babb says, “and some badjohns rushed down to the bar. They beat him up so bad he
died in the hospital the next day. But that wasn’t the end
of Copperhead.”
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Randolph “Rannie” Babb |
When Babb dredges up the local version,
the man who had stolen the rightful owner’s alias
materializes within your vision. He’s a strong, wicked
fighter, a flim-flam who limes with wrestlers on the bridge
at Duke and Nelson Streets. He can take you out with fists,
or with a knife, or, pity the adversary, his gilpin.
Inevitably, the vision always leaks – like the life of an
old street soldier.
Small wonder, because the wannabe
Copperhead ends up being charged for murder. Babb, and Darway, who lives in St. James, suggest he may have been
executed, for the last remembrance of Copperhead - like his
namesake - is toes up.
When Babb hopscotches across time it’s as
if he’s taking his pan back to the future. Recollecting the
instrument’s history as an outgrowth of happenstance. Difficult as it is to reconcile creativity with
extraordinary repercussions – like badjohnism. Clearly, he
wishes both feet were on one side of the river, not astride
it. On pan’s side, badjohns be damned.
“It started with rhythm,” Babb says of
the 1930s. “Young fellas would go in the Shango tent and
beat the drums. They took the rhythm to the streets and when
police harassed them, they took up the kittle pan (emptied
of lard), biscuit drums, bamboo, bottle and spoon and the
humdrum (the brake drum of a car).”
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Neville Jules at When Steel Talks Studios |
Neville Jules, a former captain of
Trinidad All Stars, soaked up the percussion as a youth in
Mango Rose. Up a ways, Hell Yard lay at the top of the steps
built alongside the west wall of the dry river. It sat
obliquely across the current location of Simpson’s, the
funeral agency, quite familiar to police because Second
Fiddle made a lot of noise and that could have been reason
enough to raid their “instruments.”
Jules joined the band as a tenor kittle
player when it reemerged as Cross of Lorraine. He says
during World War II he’d hammered out the first pan, convex,
like the surface of a sphere, 14 inches around, with four
notes. He brightened when he picked the do-re-mi chorus from
a King Radio calypso on the pan.
“The band was the first with that pan
when it went on the road in 1945 for VJ (Victory over Japan)
Day [celebrations],” says Jules, who also tuned a four-note
for Andrew “Pan” de la Bastide of Hill 60. Soon, the
assembly line started to hum and Spree Simon of Tokyo got
one from Andrew Pan. It surprised Jules, and Darway, too,
that in 1946 Spree told a newspaper he was the first to play
a melody on a pan.
“There are so many stories,” Darway says,
“but people ought to recognize Victor Wilson of Alexander
Ragtime Band in Newtown.”
Wilson, he insists, tuned a four-note to
the ping-pong chime of the QRC clock in 1939.
However, Darway acknowledges that Jules
invented the guitar (cuatro) pan and the first bass (from a
caustic soda drum).”
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Ellie Mannette
at When Steel Talks Studios |
Mannette turned the pan inside out and
grooved notes onto a 55-gallon drum. Anthony Williams
innovated a tuning and note-placement technique called the
spider web. Bertie Marshall invented the double tenor; the Bertfone, an amplified double tenor that could control tone
via damper pedals, like an organ; and the amplification of
the steel band. Rudolph Charles contributed the quadrophonic
pans.
“And the whole thing spread like
wildfire,” Jules says.
So had steel band riots.
Tokyo and Invaders warred in 1947. It was
over Mannette’s biscuit tin Barracuda pan.
“They had a song, ‘We looking for
Ellie
Mannette, We want to cut off he hand,’” says Darway of
Invaders, who kindly refers to badjohns as defenders of the
steel band.
Apparently, Tokyo stole the pan, which
fell on the street during an earlier brawl, Darway says.
They hung it on a tree in John John with a note attached. If
he wanted it that bad, Mannette had to come and get it.
“That’s how the 55-gallon drum became
today’s pan. He never went. He wanted a better drum.”
Riots usually spill out during J’Ouvert,
which provided a sweet opportunity for bands in heat to paw
their mark, lay down their music, on Charlotte Street,
between Park and Duke Streets, whether or not All Stars was
back in the panyard. In 1950, wheeling into the band’s turf,
Invaders “bounced up” advancing troops from Tokyo. In a
classic military ambush as old as warfare itself,
Casablanca, an Invaders ally, swooped down from Observatory
[Street] as a backing force. The “planned” battle was
joined.
The clash of Titans centred around a
woman nicknamed Little One. She had befriended both Zigilee
of Casablanca and Carlton Blackhead of Invaders. And, of
course, Tokyo had this thing about the Barracuda pan.
“We, the defenders, are always prepared
for war,” Darway says, “so you’ll find us at the front of
the band as well as the back, just in case. Razor in the
back pocket, cutlass concealed under your arm and slipped
into the waist. You wouldn’t even know it.”
But the combined firepower of both bands
overwhelmed Invaders. Many people suffered wounds and
injuries. “Ellie cut a man with a knife before police
intervened,” Darway says, “so they laid a charge on him.”
Later that morning, Boysie Singh, a local
don and Invaders supporter, stormed into the panyard and
begged the men to finish the job, offering five guns and
ammunition. Monday evening, the band, newly armed, found
Tokyo on Park Street.
“When they saw Boysie and his henchmen in
front the band, Tokyo took off and ran back Behind the
Bridge,” Darway recalls.
Days afterward, a truce signed, all
charges were dropped.
It wasn’t always love that made the blood
bad, though. Musicianship also took blame. Music being the
food of love, panmen fought for it in the gut. Indeed, when
a steel band was kicking, the music would elicit taunts from
supporters: “Yuh hear pan, yuh hear pan.”
Such attitude might have laid a
protracted siege in the Laventille hills during the “war”
between Tokyo’s “Marabuntas” and their neighbor Desperadoes.
“At the time, two ignorant bands,” says
Ret. Supt. Babb. “It was about who could beat better pan and
who could take away whose woman.”
Babb attributes the battle for the hill
to the THC, marijuana’s main psychoactive ingredient, in a
potent form of the drug. “THC can disturb the nerves and
alter your thinking.”
Four decades ago, a lot of altered states
came together on a Carnival Tuesday at the Savannah,
resulting in “a lot of cutting up” before police eventually
broke the back of the fight.
“It’s a pity, because many bands were
respected not for [bravado] but for their music, like All
Stars, for instance.”
All Stars was “protected” by just three
badjohns. Big Head Hamil took advantage of everyone he met.
Big Jeff, a pimp for thieves, could swell your face with a
punch. And Big Sarge lost three encounters with Jules. He
also lost both arms in an incident that involved another Sarge and his brother who had earlier robbed a sailor, the
Yankee returning to the Boysie Singh club with a grenade in
a bag. Big Sarge died in the Carrera prison while serving
time for cutting up his woman, his case called after the
grenade action.
All Stars brooked no nonsense, though. The riot act read to prospective members included no arguing
and no visits to other bands. Members were fined for
infractions.
“We’re not a fighting band,” admits
Jules, who, in 1958, authored the Bomb, classical music
played in calypso tempo particularly on J’Ouvert. Jules had
had Invaders, the most popular band, on his mind.
“They would take the whole of town back
to the West,” he’s saying now, “and I found that by dropping
the Bombs (three or four) people came back.”
Good that All Stars initiated the
tradition of serenading police at their headquarters on
Carnival Tuesday with those Bombs. Plain-clothes cops
willingly joined revellers one night after the band received
a tip that Tokyo was on the warpath. Thereafter, the Prime
Minister’s children took their annual las’ lap with the
band.
Meanwhile, the fighting flared across the
city. Stromboli, a Belmont band, destroyed pans belonging to
Nightingale and Invaders on Cipriani Boulevard, triggering
The Belmont-Woodbrook War.
Badjohns were dismembering each other in
East Dry River. Gold Teeth, who had a devilish right hand,
was beaten in a fight with “Pone Head” on the hill. The
police strengthened its hand with the addition of a
narcotics unit and the Vice Squad. Elephant Walk, perhaps
the Pat Garrett of the Force, flexed his muscle in the San
Juan area, “walking down any stretch and leaving it clean.”
A Holy Thursday night on Wrightson Road,
Renegades, Desperadoes and Invaders duked it out with iron
bolts and bottles. Mannette bent over to check an injured
shin and an iron bolt, on target to bust open his face, was
deflected by Darway. The night ended for him with six
stitches in his left palm.
In 1968, in front of the hospital, East
Side Symphony of San Juan chopped its way through
Highlanders, a Laventille band with amplified pans.
Franklyn Ollivierra of Diego Martin and
Phase II Pan Groove still can’t shake the experience. He was
playing the amplified tenor pan that Carnival Tuesday
afternoon. “We had 30 double tenors and they were
chopping them up.” Ollivierra, administrative manager of the National
Steel Orchestra, took off with his pan. Others tried to
rescue instruments as they fled. A few players bravely
wheeled the amplifier into the hospital compound.
“Almost everything was destroyed. The
drum set was in ribbons, but we escaped with our lives.”
It was the second time within two years
the band had been attacked. Ollivierra attributes the
licking to jealousy. “There were girls from San Juan playing mas with us, and East Side didn’t like that.”
The incident reminds one of a teenage
girl at the centre of the Belmont-Woodbrook riots in the
late 1950s. Rival gangs butted heads for four years over the
local Cleopatra. In 1962, Gene Williams of Belmont, 16 and
enrolled at Fatima College, went along with The Chaplains
who had planned to celebrate the release of two members from
the Youth Training Centre. They had allegedly stabbed a Navarrone gang member. Now, they were going to stage a
“we-get-them-back” raid on the enemy.
That eerie night, on its way to Woodbrook,
the band of young warriors stormed through the Savannah,
chasing the wind with lighted candles.
“People in Woodbrook started to shut
their jalousies,” Williams recalls. When the gang found no
action on the street, it vented on the police station with
bottles and iron bolts.
“Understand, we had come out to riot,”
says Williams, who resides in Lauderhill, Florida.
That they did. With police on their tail,
they roughed up innocent people, stabbed a man and threw
acid on a couple before escaping to Belmont.
Williams appeared at a police lineup with
a prayer book in one pocket and a Novena booklet in another.
He wore a Rosary and a Scapular with a pendant of the Virgin
Mary around his neck. When the couple who got the acid
didn’t show, his family put him on a plane to New York.
“We had nothing to do, no guidance, no
challenges,” says Wilfred “Fatty” Blanche, a former
Navarrone who lives in Miami. “It was like living in another
world. Everything was so easy. But we didn’t have guns. You
had to run down a man to chop him up. If he got away, OK.
Nowadays, kids got Glocks. No time to talk. No time to
compromise. Hostility doesn’t pay. Kids should stay in
school.”
In the battle of street smarts versus
book smarts, street smarts reigns when life is at risk.
Darway tells of an experience that could
have led him and Mannette to a dead end.
It is late.
Both men head down Charlotte Street after
visiting Mannette’s wife, Joyce, at the hospital.
Sunland badjohns depart Royal cinema.
They bop up the street on the way to Belmont, Shaker Bones
leading the side.
Darway and Mannette pick them up under
the dim lights. Only two nights ago, Darway had fired on
them five times when things got ugly at the Stork Club on
Wrightson Road.
Now they are many against two.
“Ellie, you have anything.”
“No. You?”
“No. Nothing at all. Don’t run. I’ll stay
on the pavement. You walk in the canal.”
Darway slips his hand under his jersey.
Shaker Bones thinks he’s got the gun.
“Red Man, wha going on?”
“Nothing.”
“Ellie, wha happening?”
“Everything cool.”
The gang moving on in the rear view,
Darway whispers to Mannette: “if they turn back, run for
your life, eh...”
The author Dalton Narine grew up in Belmont, East Dry
River and Success Village, Laventille. He played pan for
Trinidad All Stars for 20 years and Highlanders for a
Carnival season.
Contact Dalton Narine:
narine67@bellsouth.net
Published
with the express permission of the author, Dalton Narine
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