Naked as He Born for the Stage

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY

BC PIRES

Naked I came, naked I left the scene – JV Cunningham

And naked was my pastime in-between – My pardner James’s addendum

WITHOUT BOOKS, I would not be myself. Time and again, great books – 1984, Catch-22, Love in the Time of Cholera, Miguel Street, Slaughterhouse Five, Waiting for Godot, Crime and Punishment, 15 Dogs Absalom, Absalom! – have brought me back from the very edge. If I hadn’t read The Catcher in the Rye, I’d likely be in a straitjacket in a padded cell today.

Just like Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Without film, I would have been much less of myself. How can a body (and mind) not be substantially improved by watching The Godfather, The 400 Blows, Funny Games, Aguirre Wrath of God and Incendies?

Without literature and cinema, I’d be either catatonic or locked up or both.

But, without music, I may not have been here at all.

Truthfully, I may not have made it through adolescence if Simon and Garfunkel had not written The Sound of Silence and I Am a Rock directly to me, the way Jean-Paul Sartre had written Nausea and Albert Camus, The Stranger.

Could I have accepted the harshness of the world and the wickedness of mankind at 15 if Jimi Hendrix had not recorded If Six Was Nine? If David Bowie had not written Rock 'n' Roll Suicide, and if Pink Floyd hadn’t advised me that, “balanced on the biggest wave/You race towards an early grave,” could I have accepted my own mortality in my own teenage daydream? Some days, even into my late 20s, the best I could do was smoke three packs of cigarettes and blast Led Zeppelin’s In My Time of Dying.

As a disaffected alienated Trinidadian youth, I turned to the music of disaffected adult English and American musicians because my own music spoke, not to the heart and mind, but to the waist and feet. If you had adolescent angst, you were on your own in Trinidad.

Or you were with Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Carlos Santana and them. Where Catholicism ceased to mystify, Jimi Hendrix explained the real world to me in any ten-second segment of Born Under a Bad Sign or Third Stone from the Sun.

Growing up on pessimistic – ie, realistic – rock lyrics, it’s impossible for me to overstate the musician Gary Hector’s importance in my life. Nigel Rojas’s Orange Sky, Trinidad’s best hard rock band, had preceded Hector’s band, Jointpop, but Sky had eventually gone the way of Black Sabbath.

Jointpop played Trini rock 'n' roll.

And it’s no exaggeration to say I had been waiting all my life to hear their debut album, Port of Spain Style. “Trouble now/Bacchanal” was a lyric that required a sweet electric guitar lick. I used PoS Style as the theme of my short-lived radio show that I know some people still think contributed to bringing down the Basdeo Panday government.

If it did, Gary Hector’s music played a big part.

On Sunday coming, April 16, Gary – who is now a friend, despite my enduring fan-boyhood – will do his first solo gig. The concert, Naked, starts at 6.30 pm at Queen’s Hall.

Even if you’ve never heard his music before, you’d do yourself a favour by buying a ticket and falling een. In our world, where you expect to get ripped off with every purchase you make, you will get what you paid for: a great show that, while you’re in it, will rescue you from what American GIs in Vietnam so accurately labelled “a world of sh--.”

Because Gary Hector is one of those rare creatures: a Trini professional who actually knows what he’s doing.

And has a beautiful voice and a very Trini turn of phrase and tune of melody.

Naked will, hopefully, pay the costs of recording his second solo album. But it will certainly repay you your investment.

On Sunday, the Gary Hector Posse rides together.

To hang with Gary, not to hang him.

If you’re not 100 per cent satisfied, I’ll give you the money myself.

BC Pires is not so much a national hero as national trash