By this time we were all bent over with laughter.
“Okay, Hugh, it’s too late now,” he said. “But first thing tomorrow morning I will take you and your man to a place where the white people stay, okay?” He continued, “I’m leaving you with these two girls.” Fela handed me four more pregnant spliffs. He walked away laughing, and two young ladies materialized out of nowhere.
The next morning Fela moved us to the Mainland Hotel, which was clean and full of international tourists. We spent the rest of the day at Fela’s house in Surulere, across from his garden club, the African Shrine, located in a suburb deep inside the confines of Lagos’s poorest and most overcrowded slums. When we entered Fela’s house, it was full of scores of women huddled on the floor panting, “Fela, Fela, me wo! Fela!” He ran past them to a side room, yelling at us, “Sit down, guys, make yourselves at home. I’ll be right out.” He emerged a few minutes later dressed only in bikini briefs, and joined us at a small table. Every time he ran to the bathroom, the women would stampede to get in there with him, as he fought to lock the door from the inside. “Me, me, me, I beg!” they screamed. One or two managed to get inside with him, where apparently they would bend over as he fucked them from the rear. We could hear their screams of passion, while the unfortunate ones left outside the bathroom listened at the door, panting, “Oh, Fela, oh, Fela, wo.” All I could say was damn. Stewart was looking at me, shaking his head.
After a while Fela came out with a big smile on his face, wiping his brow with the palm of his hand as sweat poured down his face. He panted, “Hugh, it’s a rough life, I tell you.” Before we could say anything, Fela screamed, “Smoooke!” Eko, one of his acolytes, showed up with a cigarette pack full of marijuana spliffs. We each got one, and the girls fought to light them for us. “Boooze!” he now shouted, and Ywami, his finance man, appeared with cognac, ice cubes, Coca-Cola, and bottles of beer. The girls poured. “Foood!” he shouted, and more girls entered with bowls of food and dished it into plates for us. It was an impressive demonstration of Fela’s power in his private kingdom, which he’d dubbed “the Kalakuta Republic.”
Although Quincy Troupe had briefed me about Fela, his report had been rather understated compared to what I was seeing now. Perhaps Fela and his people had behaved differently around Quincy; maybe the great musician felt more at ease around me, and just let it all hang out. Listening to his records and stories that I had heard, my perspective about him was strictly music-related. Never had I expected to arrive at the madhouse of a stud-in-heat and his sex-hungry harem.
Fela’s commune consisted of about a hundred men and women who made up his inner circle. These were members of his thirty-piece orchestra, the girls who did furious, ass-wiggling dances on the stage very much in the style of the old go-go clubs of the sixties, where women danced half-naked in knee-high boots. Fela’s women, however, danced barefoot in skimpy, tie-dyed, rainbow-colored loincloth skirts made from animal skins. Their bodies were painted with multicolored mud, and their faces made up like ethnic masks. Draped over their shoulders and bare breasts hung traditional African beads. And then there were the drivers, bodyguards, stagehands, and sound and lighting crews. Eko and Ywami and J.K., his manager, were his closest associates. The bodyguards monitored the behavior of the troops, and took down names of transgressors, who were later called to Fela’s court of law, where sentences ranged from lashes with a whip made from dried cow-blood vessels, to detention in the cramped chicken coop that was dubbed “Kalakusu Prison.” Band members who were late for rehearsals and performances, or who missed their music cues on stage, were subjected to similarly harsh punishment.
Beyond this group were Fela’s second tier of followers, posses, and groupies. They were known as the Young Pioneers, and numbered close to thirty thousand. They always shouted “Black President! Chief Priest!” wherever Fela showed up. Fela’s origins were in the Yoruba center of Abeokuta, from where his surname, Kuti, had its genesis. “Kalakuta Republic” and “Kalakusu Prison” were both derivatives of the name Abeokuta. He ruled his kingdom with a very tight fist. His word was law, but his style of governance was rib-cracking improvised humor. Kalakuta Republic’s specialty was the butchering of the English language as intensely as possible to create the ever-changing pidgin slang that the troops spoke.
That afternoon Fela invited us to a photo session for his new album, Africa 70, which contained the classics “Lady” and “Shakara.” The scene was a garden club on whose dance floor was drawn a large map of Africa. Topless girls were kneeling all around the map’s outline. We went up to the roof with Fela and the photographer. Fela then told the girls, “When I say smile, you must smile. I don’t want you to grin. You have to smile. You understand me?” “Yes, Fela,” they chimed in unison. “Okay. Ready? Smiiiiile!” he screamed. They all obeyed while the photographer shot feverishly. The new album was playing in the background while we smoked large spliffs and Fela directed the shoot from the roof.
An old Sierra Leonean friend, Frank Karefa-Smart, who worked with the diamond company of Maurice Templesman, joined us at the end of the session. He was working from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Niger, where he had homes, aside from his Riverside Drive apartment in New York. We rode back to Fela’s compound in his slick Mercedes. More food, smoke, and booze. Fela always traveled in a convoy with a minimum of fifty people. That evening we went to a club called the Gondola. Our entourage must have totaled seventy-five people, mostly women from his concubine stable. An Afro-beat combo was performing, featuring a very talented mulatto vocalist. At the end of the set, Fela took me to meet the singer. He warned me, “This guy loves you so much, he might jump on us and kiss you, Hugh. Watch out.” He stopped the young man and said, “Hey, you, you’ve been bothering me so much about Hugh Masekela. Here he is. I brought him to you.” Stunned, the young singer responded, “Who?” Fela repeated, “Hugh Masekela. Here he is.” Confused, the young man said, “Ah! Wow. Me, I no sabie um at all.” (I don’t know who you are talking about.) Fela whistled the first few notes of “Grazing in the Grass,” and the young man went wild. “Hoojie, Hoojie Makaselaaah.” He embraced me and then lifted me high into the air. He couldn’t stop screaming “Hoojie Makaselaaah.” He ran back to the stage and started his next set earlier than scheduled. “This is for my greatest idol, Hoojie Makaselaaah.” He sang his heart out for an hour and some change. We were dancing up a storm and throwing back double cognacs all night. When Fela got the bill, which included drinks for about seventy-five people, he said to the owner, “I don’t have this kind of money, but I tell you what, I’ll come and do a couple of nights here for you for free.” The owner agreed. He couldn’t stop laughing. Fela couldn’t either.
Back at the Mainland Hotel the next morning, I woke up early and realized that I had run out of toothpaste, so I went into the marketplace next to the hotel to find some. It was a long, rectangular structure with a corrugated iron roof and large wooden beams holding it up. The earthen floor was swept spotlessly clean, and hundreds of stalls crowded neatly next to each other, displaying all manner of traditional herbs hanging from nails. The cabinets were lined with thousands of bottles filled with dark mixtures of tonics with bark and roots floating at the bottom. The pungent smell of leaves, branches, and barks smoking on top of braziers filled the air. Many elderly men and women, their skin pulled very tightly against their skulls, stared at me with glazed, bloodshot eyes from their chairs and benches, where they sat looking past me into space. They seemed slightly hypnotized. From some of the shelves hung animal bones and human and animal skulls. I had just asked one of the attendants near the entrance if she could tell me where I could get some toothpaste, when I realized this was not a grocery store. Chills ran through my body, and goosebumps were breaking out on my skin. A cold feeling hit the back of my neck. I ran out of there with my hair standing on end, my teeth chattering. I was shaking like a leaf.
After breakfast we took a taxi to Fela’s house. I told him about the mysterious market.
He stood up. “Hugh!” he screamed. “Nobody has ever walked into that place alone and lived to tell about it. That is the supermarket where all the witch doctors, diviners, and traditional healers shop. It is the city’s main juju and voodoo supply store. You are one lucky motherfucker to be standing here in front of me.”
At the Gondola, we had met the managing director of Decca Records in Nigeria. Excited to meet me, he invited us over to dinner the following evening. That evening we left Fela’s compound in a convoy of ten minibuses. The girls were carrying Fela’s records and singing in the minibuses while hanging head and shoulders out of the vehicles’ windows, banging on the side panels. In Frank Karefa-Smart’s Mercedes, following the convoy, we were shaking our heads in utter bafflement. When we arrived, our host was startled to see close to one hundred people. Fela’s girls burst into the huge living room, started to move furniture from the middle of the room, put on some of Fela’s records, and began dancing frantically. It was the beginning of a roaring party. The poor guy’s wife was crimson as the girls pulled her to the dance floor and gyrated sensually all around her ass, urging the woman to imitate them. The couple was mesmerized as we emptied their bar. Fela used the most vulgar language he could come up with in conversation with the man’s wife. Our host was dumbfounded. We never got to eat. We just danced all night with the girls and drank ourselves silly. Our host and his wife had no choice but to join us.
I sat in with Fela’s band at the Shrine, a shed with open sides and a corrugated fiberglass roof. The venue could accommodate up to a thousand people on the dance floor. There were seats near the stage on both sides and in the front. In the rear of the long hall were more terraced bleacher seats. Fela’s band comprised two alto saxes, two tenor saxes, a baritone sax, three trumpets, four guitars, a bass guitar, four rhythm jembe hand-drum percussionists, one conga and bongo master drummer, a regular trap drummer, and two male percussionists who marched back and forth in front of the band playing a cowbell and wooden blocks called claves, acting as a metronome for the whole ensemble. Ten or more girls sang unisons with and background responses to Fela’s guttural but beautiful melodic chants, scatting, and riffs.
Fela stood in front of the band, his keyboard on one side of his vocal microphone, his tenor saxophone on a stand next to its own microphone. Fela started every song with a long keyboard introduction while his “electric dancers” shimmied and shook their asses feverishly in front of the band on their own stands and all around him. When he broke into the vocal verse after rousing, jazzy passages by the saxes and trumpets with thumping drum, conga, and guitar cross-rhythms, the crowd would go crazy, screaming, “Felaaaa!! Chief Priest!! Black President!! Fela I Yoo!!” Then came his long saxophone solo, more vocal calls and responses, breaks, stops, conga flourishes, loud orchestral riffs, stops, rhythm grooves only, and shouts from the crowd. Then he would call me to the front to solo. Slowly the rhythm guitar would join Fela’s keyboard behind me with the bass and tenor guitar relentlessly repeating the same licks they had commenced with, holding down the groove like a mighty herd of cool elephants, along with the percussionists. As I continued with my solo, the saxes, then the trumpets, would gently join the accompaniment, taking me to a climax in the song where the female vocalists were riffing in the upper register and I felt like I was sitting on a fat cloud of music with my eyes tightly shut. The experience was incredible. I did not want to stop soloing. When the roar of the band, the percussion, Fela’s keyboard, and the girls’ voices came to a sudden stop, leaving only the two male dancer-percussionists marching back and forth, tapping on the claves and the cowbell, with the bass and the tenor guitar, it felt as if I just had been pulled off at the height of very passionate lovemaking, just before orgasm. The anticlimax was painful as the crowd yelled joyfully, “Ayeye! Ayeye! Na wow wo!” applauding wildly while Fela smiled happily at me. What must have been easily twenty minutes, felt like thirty seconds. The textures were too beautiful. I just couldn’t wait for the next solo. The band would sometimes play one song for three hours without stopping. Afro-beat’s hypnotic vocals, Fela’s quasi-rapping pidgin-English singing, percolating guitars, and haunting percussion counterpoint, all wrapped up in a burning, molten groove, was an intoxicating diet of food for the ears and feet, a magical sound. With his band still playing, Fela would walk offstage, go across the street to change clothes, eat, or frolic, but they would just keep on playing. On his return he would pick up from where he left off and repeat the routine over again. I rarely enjoyed playing music as I did with Fela’s band. They were tighter than a flea’s pussy, meaner than a broke-dick dog.
I had enjoyed playing so much that when Fela introduced me as “this na JJC, na JJD,” and the people applauded while roaring with laughter, I kept saying, “Thank you! Thank you!” It was only later that one of the girls whom I had met through Chuchu Horton, my banker friend in Liberia, was surprised that I had been so thankful. She was also a banker from a very upper-crust Sierra Leonean background, and held Fela in great contempt for his attitude toward women. “Hugh, ‘JJC’ and ‘JJD’ mean ‘Johnny just come, Johnny just drop.’ Johnny come lately. How could you let him make such fun of you in front of all those people?” She was truly upset, and I never saw her again. I knew Fela was having some innocent fun at my expense. When I asked him about the introduction, Fela said, “Hugh, I don’t care how hip you are. When you get to a new place, you are a square until you pick up the slang and the local groove. That’s a fact, my friend. Don’t take it so seriously. How else are you going to learn our ways?” Fela was right.
One morning, Fela, Stewart, Fela’s manager J.K., and I were smoking some serious spliffs in my hotel room. “Fela,” I started, “I’m tired of having to write music down for the guys I’ve been playing with in the States and taking hours to explain the feel and the groove. I know that musicians in this part of the world all play mostly by ear, like you and me. I know that they will understand the grooves easily because of our similar beginnings in the way we were taught music. I would love to put together a good rhythm section of bass, drums, keyboards, guitars, and percussion to play with. I think you might help lead me in the right direction.”
Fela said, “Hugh, I know exactly what you’re looking for. Next week we embark on a West African tour, starting in Ghana. We leave here on Wednesday. Why don’t you fly to Ghana and meet us in Accra? Check into the Intercontinental Hotel near the airport, and we will hook up with you from there. There is a fine band that is going to open for us. I think you will love them. If you don’t, maybe we will have better luck in the next country after that.” We agreed.
When we got to Accra, Ghana, Fela met us at the airport with a Lebanese dude by the name of Faisal Helwani. After checking into the Intercontinental Hotel, we went to Fela’s evening show. The outdoor venue was packed to the rafters by the time the opening band, Hedzoleh Soundz, took the stage. They were dressed in traditional, stylized kente cloth and batakari outfits, with fancy boots also made out of kente. Lipuma played the pennywhistle and small hand drums, Morton played the tenor hand drums, and Okyerema Asante played about a dozen master drums mounted on wooden stands next to a conga drum. He was beating the hell out of them with two hoe-shaped sticks with hammer-like tips. He wore a Viking-style hat of animal horns. Salas played bass drum, high hat, and snare. He had all kinds of gourds of different sizes in place of tom-toms. Stanley Todd played the bass guitar, Jagger Nii Botchway, the guitar. They sang traditional chants with a modern highlife flair. They blew all kinds of whistles, and beat the shit out of the drums and all kinds of cowbells and percussion toys, creating a joyful mélange of the medieval and the contemporary. Their sense of fashion, a cross between 1970s disco haute couture and ethnic Ghanaian royal garb, had a happy and humorous look to it. Their music, too, had a comedic flair—joyful, intense, and wild, sometimes very soft and then suddenly loud again. They blew us all away. Fela and Faisal, the band manager, came and sat next to me. Faisal asked, “What do you think, Hugh?”
/> Mesmerized, I replied, “I would love to play with this band.”
“It’s settled, then. I thought you would love this group,” Fela said, then turned to Faisal. “I’m leaving Hugh in your hands.”
Fela left the next day for the next stop on his tour, while Stewart and I stayed and met with Faisal at his Napoleon Club/bar/residence in the suburb of Osu. It was decided that I would spend the month of August in Ghana working with the band. Stewart would leave for Los Angeles and then return to Ghana the first week of September. We would then all go back to Lagos to record.
By the second week of rehearsals, I was conversant with Hedzoleh Soundz’s repertoire, and was performing with them nightly at the Napoleon Club. I began to teach them some South African songs at rehearsals and began singing in Twi, Fanti, Ga, Ewe, and Hausa, the five Ghanaian languages they used. It was a joyful baptismal process. Even with the tight schedule, I still found time to make new friends among Accra’s music lovers and hang out with some of the South African community in Accra. Stokely passed through Accra in transit to Uganda, and passed on my mail from Guinea. Among the many letters was one from Jabu. She said that if I wanted to cultivate our relationship further, she would welcome it and I should call when I returned to New York. It made me feel good that she felt that way about me.
At the beginning of September, Stewart returned to Ghana and we flew down to Lagos. The band drove down with Faisal. Fela had arranged recording time at EMI Studios in the Apapa neighborhood of Lagos. Because we had jelled so well as a unit in Ghana, our recording sessions were smooth. Stewart engineered the recording, and after three days we had completed the project. We spent our nights at Fela’s African Shrine, where I had a chance to sit in with his incredible band once again. Eventually we bade farewell to Hedzolah Soundz, who returned to Accra. Stewart and I then caught a flight for Monrovia. President “Speedy” Tolbert and his delegation were among the passengers on the Lagos-to-Liberia leg. It was a jovial flight until we ran into bad weather over Liberia. Rejecting advice to divert our course and land in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, the president instead ordered the pilots to continue to Liberia, saying, “We are in God’s hands. He will see us through if He so deems.” No one was more outraged than Milton Greaves, the president’s personal secretary and one of my closest Monrovian drinking buddies, who had sent the note to “Speedy” suggesting that we divert to Abidjan. Sitting in the same row with Stewart and me, where we had been happily throwing down triple whiskies, his light-skinned complexion had changed to the same crimson as Stewart’s. I must have been blue in the face from the fear of death. We were all shit-scared and pissed off at the president, especially the non-Liberian passengers, who felt that Tolbert did not have any rights over their lives. We were all fastened very tightly to our seats as the plane rollercoastered up and down with lightning bolts flaring all around us. After nine gut-wrenching, turbulent attempts to land in the electrical storm, we landed safely at Roberts Field airport on the tenth try. Some of the passengers wiped tears of terror and joy from their eyes. We were all so relieved that we even forgot how pissed off we had been with President Tolbert, who disembarked to a brass-band fanfare, a hero’s welcome, and a throng of government officials, army and police officers, who applauded him for more than ten minutes while he smiled as he waved a white handkerchief high above his head. Stewart and I cursed him under our breath.
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