FAB FIVE @ 40 Reflections by Errol Lee
I had just started my first job in Kingston after graduating from Knox College in 1968, when I discovered a little club in Union Square called Club Bronco. It was a Friday evening and some newly-made friends had told me to meet them there after work if I wanted to meet chicks. New to the city, of course I wanted to meet chicks so I found my way to Union Square and Club Bronco.
You couldn’t miss the place because there was a crowd of mostly teenagers and young adults outside on the pavement and the sound of music playing inside drifted out onto the street as patrons squeezed themselves through the single door in to dance and mingle, and out to get some fresh air.
Inside was dark, smoky, crowded and hot, stiflingly hot. There was a band playing on a small stage, a bar with a few attendants trying to cope with what seemed like hundreds of thirsty patrons shouting drink orders over the loudest music I had ever heard and
soaking wet boys and girls doing the hully gully on the dancefloor.
My friends found me on the outside as I eased myself out to “get some air”. To my questions they answered that the band was The Broncos, and the chicks were everywhere. I just had to ask the one I liked for a dance and take it from there…as if a little country boy like me would know what to say to these city slickers. I played it safe and concentrated on listening to the music, particularly when I overheard a conversation confirming that the band was from Kingston College. That snippet of information made me empathise with the sweating musicians because for my last two years at Knox I had been lead singer in the school band, the Jaywalkers. We had played in Mandeville, Christiana, Spalding and as far afield as Brown’s Town where we had the entire student population of St Hilda’s (an all-girls school) screaming and shouting for more in a most
unladylike fashion. But the naturally cool climate in the hills of central Jamaica ensured natural air conditioning … nothing like the inferno that was Club Bronco.
Still they played with zest and skill despite the stifling heat and I was impressed with how much they sounded like the original recordings.
Club Bronco self-destructed…was it due to the heat? I don’t know. And the Broncos were no more. Instead I started hearing about the Fabulous Five Incorporated and how they had clashed with Tomorrow’s Children at a dance inthe ballroom of the Sheraton hotel. They were so thorough in playing the hits that they even reproduced a scratch that was on one of the current hit records.
Children, considered at the time to be the number one band in Jamaica, with such luminaries as Pluto Shervington, John Jones, Steve Batchelor, Garth Creary and Cornel Marshall in the line-up, had no answer and disintegrated shortly after.
Fab Five as we called them, held the fort at the fully air-conditioned Club Tit for Tat on Red Hills Road. On that same strip on Friday and Saturday nights you could hear new bands like Skin Flesh and Bones with Sly and Robbie, Now Generation with Mikey and Geoffrey Chung, Generation Gap, Fifth Extension, Boris Gardiner Happening, Revolutionaires, and a little known Band called the Bare Essentials.
In case you’re wondering why no mention of Byron Lee and the Dragonaires……back then in the early 1970s they were already established as a big time unit in the company of the Skatalites, Tommy McCook and the Supersonics, the Vagabonds, Kes Chin and the Souvenirs and the Mighty Vikings.
As the sole remaining member of the original Bare Essentials, I can state categorically that were it not for the kindness and big brother support of Fab Five there would be no Bare Essentials. We started rehearsing at the YMCA in 1971 during the heyday of Sing Out Jamaica. Fab Five was the band supporting the 60-member choir. Grub helped our drummer, a KC schoolboy named Rupert Whyte, to put together a bits and pieces drum set and taught him the rudiments of “keeping time”. Frankie assisted KG, our leader, to resurrect the old amplifiers and speakers that we were using to create noise and lent us a few odds and ends on a permanent basis.
Forty years ago it was unthinkable that a band only did “backing” duties for some artiste or the other. Sad to say, only a few of us have survived, with the Dragonaires being the grandfather of us all. Some twelve years later came the Fabulous Five and a year later the Bare Essentials joined the fraternity. If you are a musician and can recall playing for high school graduation dances in the 14 parishes of Jamaica; Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions Club, Lodge, Civic and Police Balls across the length and breadth of Jamaica; Festival Street dances; High school barbeques and concerts in most of the traditional high schools; birthdays, weddings, anniversaries, Christmas parties, carnival fetes and a few bar mitzpahs, then you have an idea of what we have been through.
I salute the Fabulous Five for being a big brother to us in those formative years. I salute you for sticking to the aim and objective of providing live music for people to dance to and not quitting even when the times get rough as they are now.
Long Live the Fabulous Five.