There are many people who touch our lives, but few people
who make a profound difference in the way we view ourselves.
One of the most important people in my life since I have come
to Trinidad has been SuperBlue.
I’m sitting here writing this column on SuperBlue’s
birthday, which was last Thursday, and I can’t help but
smile when I remember the first time I met SuperBlue, known
then as Blue Boy.
Dressed in blue from head to toe—he was wearing a blue
fedora and blue suede boots—Blue Boy bounced into the
old cocoa house which used to be the Express office. “I’m
here,” he announced with a wave of his hand.
Everyone stopped typing and gazed at Blue Boy in awe while
Keith Smith ushered him into Owen Baptiste’s glass office.
I was just off the boat so I had no idea who this strutting,
bold-faced man was. I would soon find out.
Keith Smith decided I would interview Blue Boy. While Keith
was giving me the highlights of his career beginning with
Soca Baptist, I thought: Blue Boy did all of that? By then
Blue Boy was slumped in a chair, legs crossed, right index
finger resting under his chin.
I asked him about his song, Lucy in the Savannah, and he said,
“You have pretty blue eyes.”
I asked him about his so-called “formula” for Road
March and he said, “Your eyes are blue. Very blue.”
I said, “Sparrow has a song about you and your formula,”
and he said, “Your eyes are very blue.”
I said, “They’re not blue. They’re green—like
a cat’s.”
His reaction was a combination of a laugh and a grimace. From
then on we operated with a mutual feeling of respect.
I thought he was all bravado, but then I had never seen him
sing. When I finally did see him step on the stage at Spektakula,
I realised he had a rare charisma that created an emotional
charge most performers could never dream of matching.
I can still see him crouching low, like a lion, grunting to
punctuate a point, turning in circles and tossing the microphone
from hand to hand. I can still hear the crowd roaring.
And then there were the dark years and the amazing comeback
with Get Something and Wave that transformed Blue Boy into
SuperBlue, the man who held the pulse of the country in the
palm of his hands. He took a bewildered country from its pain
and instilled it with a sense of hope and a feeling of patriotism.
SuperBlue was back and it was clear in the years to follow
with Jab Jab, Bacchanal Time and Signal that he was influencing
music more than any other singer after Kitchener. He was the
only serious contender for Kitchener’s road march record
and he would have had a good few more road marches with songs
like Poom Poom if he didn’t have that penchant for arriving
too late for Carnival.
Over the years, I learned to respect SuperBlue’s creativity:
his knack for creating mesmerising melodies, lyrical phrases
and punchy hook lines. SuperBlue has always been a singer
who had his ear to the ground. His songs are earthy, spiritual
reconstructions of the very fibre that makes us Trinidadians.
I learned to look beyond the bravado and eventually, once
I got to know him enough, I realised it was all a front for
a very shy man who never clearly understood his talent—where
it came from or where it was going. He simply followed it
and thought of it as a gift from God. It even frightened him
sometimes. Soca Baptist happened so fast and furious.
Still, he kept creating. He ushered in an era of J’Ouvert
songs and made moko jumbies fashionable. He celebrated sports
figures and musical heroes and even made a great song simply
out of Hello. He drove an audience mad.
Once I remember my good friend Daisann McLane giving a very
erudite explanation of his use of musclemen in the stage production
of Bacchanal Time. “You have turned the whole metaphor
of Carnival being about sinuous women on its head by using
muscular men,” she concluded.
He watched Daisann with a puzzled look and when she asked
if she got it right, SuperBlue said, “I was just trying
to have some protection for the kids on stilts.”
SuperBlue was always a class act and a classy man. One time
at the Deluxe cinema he saved me from a mob of irate supporters
who were yelling at me and threatening to beat me because
I wrote how he had dropped the microphone in a performance
the night the judges were in the tent and how he had run off
stage three times to gather his composure.
“You cost him his place in the Calypso Monarch finals,”
they shouted, much to my dismay. “Who told you to write
something like that?”
I was surrounded by some really rough characters. SuperBlue
took my hand and led me to safety. At one point he turned
and said, “I’m the one who gave her permission.
I tell her to write what she sees. Always tell the truth.
People will only believe the good things if you write about
the bad too.”
Amazingly enough, SuperBlue’s heart has always been bigger
than his talent. His place in calypso history is solidified,
but more than that, all the music around us today is a reflection
of him.
SuperBlue has always given us a feeling that music is the
key to our salvation. Let music be your salvation, SuperBlue.
Give yourself the love that you always gave to us. Come back
to us again with your dreams and your vision for us and the
mesmerising melodies that we can’t get out of our minds.
Be our Soca Baptist once again.
