In the year of the Bassman

I let a lot of things stop me from playing mas years ago. So long ago that people have trouble reconciling the now-me with a long-ago-me who could possibly engage in such cavorting and carrying on.

My mother treated my mas playing like she treated like my exams. It was important (maybe one carried a tad more weight) and so we had to prepare. She vitamined me. She fed me. She made sure I tried to rest if there was even a hint of a panic attack coming on. There were years I played mas without the benefit of preparatory fetes because I was all raw-nerved and anxious. But Carnival Monday was not meeting me at home. I rose from my sickbed, costumed myself and found my band.

My mother knew what healing and joy there was in it for me. Something I could not get anywhere else, at any other time. But then the drowning despair took me and I stopped.

In 2024 we celebrate (how often do I use a word like that?) 50 years of the Mighty Shadow’s Bassman, a song that announced that no matter what came before or what might yet be, this song would change everything. Shadow would continue to do things – strange things, surprising things, curious things, magical things – that made us listen differently.

A doctor once told me that everything we experience affects our brains. He didn’t mean only things like concussions or doing hard drugs or PTSD. He really did mean everything. And so, if people were listening to not-Shadow all their lives and all of a sudden there was Shadow, all serious and bass, how could it fail to change not just the music, but the way we heard it? What we compared it to?

Bassman was not a line in the sand. There was no more sand. Its sound was deep and full, but it whispered: “Everything is possible.” And it was. Year after year after year, Shadow gave us music for the road and for fetes. Songs we could and do play all year round, like the anthemic Dingolay – not something many other soca musicians have achieved.

What he did not do was win a Calypso Monarch crown until 2000, 26 years after the release of Bassman. He may have looked untouchable, all in black, the long jacket, the hat – an understated midnight robber – but all the interviews I’ve read over the years show a man who knew his darkness well. From where I stand, he looks like he tried to fight it.

In a 1995 Caribbean Beat interview with Debbie Jacob, you really get a sense of Shadow’s love of nature, and the kind of simple, quiet life he liked. I got to a bit where he’s talking about a particular disappointment in about 1970 – there would be many more to come – and he decides to go back to Tobago for a while. He says, “I didn’t really fail, but there were people stopping me. It was a sad, sad thing to go in the bush with all that music in me.”

I wish I had a really big rug, but the cats won’t let me. Because all I wanted to do was lie on the floor and roll myself into a giant rug and never come out. That feeling of being full of something unfulfilled. Potential? Beauty? A thing you want to share and you can’t. Maybe you don’t have it yourself, but I know you’ve felt it. When your favourite competitor in a singing contest, dance-off, Panorama – when they don’t win, something in you goes flat. Or splat.

The Bassman has been with me and many readers all of our lives. I’ve started to level up my reading of it. Sure, there are many songs about either the astuteness of the mad person in society or a general acknowledgement that all-ah-we-mad.

For those who may not know the lyrics word for word, in the story that unfolds, Shadow is plagued by one Farrell, the self-identified bassman from hell. Nothing Shadow does can rid him of this most adamant musician who drives him to sing and dance. But then:

“I went and I tell Dr Leon

“I want a brain operation

"A man in meh head

“I want him to dead

“I know I hearing a bassman

“He say it’s my imagination

“Pom pom pe te pom…”

Gods. Someone in your head. How could you not want him to dead?

Shadow survived Farrell and the deep sadness and gargantuan disappointments and kept giving us music to help us survive. So everybody could dingolay. Ay ay ay.

Remember to talk to your doctor or therapist if you want to know more about what you read here. In many cases, there’s no single solution or diagnosis to a mental health concern. Many people suffer from more than one condition.