MY SHADOWMANIA By dalton narine

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Big Drum Nation Mighty Shadow Tribute:

MY SHADOWMANIA

By dalton narine 

NO STRANGER, THIS CALYPSOMAN SHADOW

We were writers on the prowl.

It was 1971 when Errol Pilgrim and I walked into Port Services to catch the Mighty Shadow’s first songs at a public venue. 

Amid the sparseness, the stage was as dark as the mood.

Then a small crowd started to build, and a figure in drag, so it seemed, walked across the stage as a skeleton.

Shadow had arrived.

He opened with Modern Housewives a funny paean of praise for the lady in the house.

Indeed, you cannot talk about him without mentioning her. So, Shadow found his crease and the audience was simply bowled over by him.

Then came The Threat — a challenge to his fellow Calypsonians.

I quite agree Kitchener is great

But in ’71 he must feel mih weight

If those steel band boys give this tune a little try

Kitchie boy, water in yuh eye

Nuff said. I became an instant fan of this musically colorful Kaiso man till the day I heard that he’d kicked the bucket.

 

THE WRIGHTSON ROAD FETE

Well, true to form, I hustled down to catch the bearded one.

Patrons had become antsy, the orchestra was full of intrigue and Shadow stood pat at my side. We would, God willing, later share our feelings over a proposed documentary about his life and voice, the songs of his spirit.

But now, he’s turning his head toward the orchestra and sucking his teeth.

The crowd is appealing to him to crank it up. When the music begins, his tension waxes.

Shadow goes off the rails.  Against assorted musicians fiddling with their instruments. Against the band without an elite sound.

Apparently, they don’t know that Shadow is a workaholic perfectionist.

They get their cue anyway.

Song after song, tune after tune, disaster fights back, and Shadow stews, fuming at his inability to work hand in glove with the musicians.

He screams at them, again and again, in the middle of a Ruso, at the end of a Kaiso. You get the drift.

Shadow walks off the stage, bellowing at the horn men, among others.

So I walk with him, far from the madding musicians and partygoers bawling for Shadow to come back.

No, not to behave. Many of them begin to walk in his shoes, but nobody catches Shadow on the warpath. It’s his way.

Several years later, I was with Shadow at a conference that was winding up on Wrightson Road.

We’re roadside at his car.

Shadow opens the trunk. A whole lot of CDs pelt a sorry look at me.

Shadow grabs a bundle, shoves the pack in my hands. Giddy as I was, I rested them on the back seat of my car, then walked back to him with as much money as I could afford humming in my hands.

“That’s for you,” Shadow says.

“And so is this,” I shoot back.

Shadow turns away, heads back to the conference.

We never got a chance to do the documentary.

Oh, sure we did. It was all live.

Bet on it.

 

LOOKING FOR HORN ON FREDERICK STREET THREE HOURS BEFORE JOUVERT  

NOW PLAYING: Yuh looking for Horn, one of Bradley’s best ever.

Caught the Band opposite St. Mary’s, near Park St., about 3 am Jouvert.

The best piece I’d heard on Jouvert in YEARS.

Lots of people taking in DESPERS’  Horn, including tourists dancing and wining for 3 hours to Shadow’s masterpiece, while sipping on their flasks, their cell phone jammed inside the other hip pocket, and HORN, spiritually symbolic, — no — so allegorically significant that that horny Jouvert transcended human understanding.

Believe.

In front of St. Mary’s?

Yeah, the mystical body of Christ rising up from the mas.

Memorable to say the least.

When Shadow rose, nature played a trick on him, and now he’s back to Earth, his songs spill away from dreams and fall softly like rose petals in our space.

_{Dalton Narine is a Belmont-born Trinidadian who dabbled in the arts and wrote about Trinidad & Tobago culture for local media.}

_{Narine migrated to the US in his late teens, attended Howard University and New York University, and became an activist following his service as a combat controller in the Vietnam War. He had a role with two other black veterans in the award-winning film, “No Vietnamese Ever Called me Nigger.”}

_{Narine wrote for the Village Voice, a New York news magazine, and won writing awards at Ebony magazine, The Miami Herald and Florida Sun Sentinel. Narine returned to Vietnam to write about racial warfare on the front lines for Esquire magazine, a story that received extensive coverage in The Voice. He spent the other half of his career as a writer, filmmaker and TV broadcaster during the annual Carnival in Trinidad. Narine is currently working on the final draft of a screenplay about the war in Vietnam on the advice of the chair of film at Columbia University. Narine is an avid collector of music by the late Calypsonian, The Mighty Shadow, a singer with a knack for telling stories on himself and his own country that, at last, has embraced him.}