Crazy in California

Master of racy lyrics, notorious for wild antics, calypsonian Crazy has in recent years been cultivating his more serious side. Michael Goodwin goes in search of the onetime "Lovable Lunatic" and finds him, of all places, in sunny Silicon Valley — and up to his old tricks again

It’s a warm afternoon in San José, California, about an hour’s drive south of San Francisco. In a beautiful house behind a lush green lawn (with a red Porsche convertible sitting in the spacious two-car garage), a smiling Trini, long hair tied in a ponytail, relaxes in t-shirt and shorts in front of his big-screen TV. Edwin Ayoung, better known as Crazy, is watching the Trinidad and Tobago football team lose to St Kitts.

What is Crazy, one of the world’s most popular calypsonians, doing in the heart of Silicon Valley?

Well, today being Saturday, he’s just back from playing defense with the Islanders, a first-class football team made up of Caribbean expatriates. Later this afternoon he’s heading up to Hayward for a jam session at the home of Cyril Boldon — Ato Boldon’s uncle, and the leader of Calabash, a local Caribbean combo. Tomorrow he’s running in a 10K road race with his wife Marla. After that he’s driving to San Francisco to catch a concert with Sparrow and Byron Lee. Later in the week he’s scheduled to record one of his 2003 Carnival tunes in a backyard digital studio with resident Trinidadians Ralph Gibbs and Trevor Deosaran. Next weekend he’s sitting in with Calabash at Caribbean Gardens, a club near the San Francisco Airport. And there’s a big concert in Los Angeles coming up in a couple of weeks.

Talk about California dreaming!

This seems like a far cry from the man who swung down to Port of Spain’s Grand Stand stage on a rope (with a monkey on his back) the year he sang Tarzan, the man who cheerfully interrupted the first day of a "hunger strike" across the street from the Trinidad and Tobago Television (TTT) studios (where he was protesting a lack of airplay for his tunes) to eat some jerk chicken before resuming the strike.

OK, everybody moves to America, but why couldn’t Crazy just live in Brooklyn like everyone else? "Ah ’fraid Brooklyn, boy!" he laughs. "Livin’ in Brooklyn jus’ mean yuh ent get shot as yet. Yuh not safe."

Crazy grew up on Maraval Road in Port of Spain (just across the street from TTT, as it happens). His parents were Venezuelan and Chinese. He played cricket, went to school, and sang occasionally at parties — where people admired his fine, strong singing voice. He made his calypso debut with the Mighty Sparrow’s Original Young Brigade in 1972, but it wasn’t until 1978 that he reached the finals of the Calypso Monarch competition at the Savannah, with a popular number called Dustbin Cover. Crazy’s uninhibited style of theatrical stagecraft was in evidence even then: he started his Savannah turn by emerging from a big dustbin. It may have been the first time anyone used a prop in the finals; it’s definitely the first time anyone climbed out of a prop.

That same year, he scored a major Yuletide hit with Parang Soca. It was the first time anyone had blended soca with Trinidad’s traditional Spanish-language Christmas music — and the first time a parang tune was played in Panorama.

"I say, ‘Look boy, people like this music!’ " says Crazy. " ‘If I put English words with it they could understand!’ Also, calypsonians didn’t have nothing to do from October, when Miami Carnival finish, to January–February; they don’t usually get no work. Now calypsonians who singing parang soca, like Scrunter, they take over from October to December!"

As if singing calypso and parang soca wasn’t enough to keep Crazy busy, he got involved with theatre in the early 1980s. He appeared as Godfather Crazy in Cinderama, played Chief Crazy Without a Horse in Snokone and the Seven Dwens, and even worked with Nobel Prize-winning poet-playwright Derek Walcott in Monkey See, Monkey Do. "I love to make people laugh," says Crazy, "but I think I’m a better singer than an actor."

Carnival crowds all over the world agree. Starting with Soucouyant in 1985 (a clever double entendre tune which won Road March honors), Crazy had a string of popular party hits: Chief Crazy, Drive It, Nani Wine, De Party Now Start, the infamous Paul, Jump Up And Wail, and lots more. By now, Crazy was King Crazy, closing the show at Kitchener’s Revue — and anyone who ever saw him erupt onto the Revue stage, long hair flying, careering from side to side of the apron, exploding with energy, will never forget it.

In 1992 he came within a hair’s breadth of winning a second Road March title with his awesome original, De Party Now Start, but at the last moment Crazy’s sometime writing partner, Superblue, took the honors with Jab Jab. Crazy’s darkly humorous comment was typical: "I’m a champion Road March loser," he said. "It come like nothing for me to lose a Road March. I done do that already seven times."

Many successful entertainers find themselves living abroad. Everyone knows about the huge, well-established Trinidadian communities in Brooklyn and Toronto — but the fast-growing posse of Trinis in the San Francisco Bay Area gets far less attention.

Crazy visited California for the first time in 1988, touring with Sparrow. He liked San Francisco’s Memorial Day "Carnaval," he liked Oakland’s Afro-Caribbean Carijama celebration, he liked the clubs, and the strong array of Trinidadian musicians. At the time, Patrick Arnold, currently president of Pan Trinbago, was living in San Francisco and tuning pans on top of a hill in Maclaren Park. There was a scene, a real sense of community.

Best of all, Crazy met a California girl named Marla. When they married in 1997, and their son Tashyi was born, it made perfect sense for the calypsonian to put down roots in Silicon Valley. Compared to the hard life in Brooklyn, California (as an American calypsonian, Woody Guthrie, once sang) seemed like "a garden of Eden, a paradise to live in or see". "Here in San José you could leave your house open," reports Crazy, "and if a neighbour come in and open your fridge and ain’t see nothin’, he go and buy groceries by Safeway and bring it for you. Is one of the best neighbourhoods I ever live in."

When Crazy first arrived here he got a day job working cargo with TWA at San Francisco International Airport. But he wanted to spend more time with the family. "Marla needed help," he grins, "so I workin’ as a babysitter. When they have a form to fill out and they want you to fill in occupation, I put ‘babysitter.’ I love kids! Is Uncle Crazy, you know."

And the Porsche in the garage? Many years ago, when Ato Boldon first came to the States as a boy, he fell in with Marla; she became a sort of foster mother. They’re still very close, and Crazy is now good pals with Ato too. So . . . earlier this year, when Ato drove to Stanford for a track event, and then had to fly to Australia for another one, he left the car in Crazy’s big two-car California garage. The Bay Area Trinidadian community may be smaller than Brooklyn’s, but it’s sweet.

Still, the second half of Woody’s verse about California goes: "Believe it or not you won’t find it so hot, if you ain’t got that do-re-mi." Even in Cali, work is work — and lately Crazy has been thinking about smut. No, not the kind of smut you’re thinking of — unless you come from the Caribbean.

To most of the world "smut" is synonymous with crude pornography. In Trinidad, however, smut refers to artful double entendre calypso, a highly literary form that ranges from the Shakespearean brilliance of Zandolie’s Merchant of Venice to the Rabelesian humor of Shorty’s Art of Making Love — or the exuberant foolishness of "party" smuts like Trinidad Rio’s exquisite Looking for Cups, Ronnie McIntosh’s Biting Insects, or Crazy’s own wildly popular Paul. Party smuts generally turn on the calypsonian almost saying a cuss word, to the delight of the Trinidadian audience.

"You have to sit down and think, to write songs like that," Crazy laughs. "Take the word ‘for.’ You could get a lot of smut from that word. Like ‘for Carnival.’ You take those phonics and you put them together and you got a song right there! You could use that word ‘for’ for a lot of things. Rio used it in Looking for Cups, for instance. I had one called, They Lookin’ for King Crazy. Or For Cough, Use Vicks."

Crazy’s hit parade of smut includes Electrician, Soucouyant, Finish It, and De Ride (all mostly written by Crazy), Paul (written by Winsford Devines) and Crazy’s biggest hit, Nani Wine, co-authored with Superblue.

Riding that string of suggestive hits, Crazy soon found himself the world’s most travelled calypsonian. During the 90s he was a fixture on the carnival and festival circuit, delighting huge crowds across the Caribbean, the US, and Europe. "I used to be on all the shows," Crazy says. "Ah doh think it have a Caribbean island that I never sing. And of course Toronto, Miami, New York, San Francisco."

But then something changed. Over the last five years — the same five years that have seen him sliding comfortably into a laid-back California lifestyle — Crazy has reinvented himself as a calypsonian. After 30 years as the Lovable Lunatic, he turned back to kaiso, repeatedly making his way to the Calypso Monarch finals with excellent topical songs like In Time to Come, Shoes, and Body Parts.

"I started thinking about Iwer George,"says Crazy. "When Iwer George career finish, when someone ask him what classic songs yuh sing, what can he tell them? Bottom in the Road? He don’t have a classical piece."

And yet, like the jerk chicken in the middle of Crazy’s hunger strike, those party songs are hard to resist. "I quit singing smut now three or four years, and ah doh even get wuk," he notes. "They don’t call me again for wuk."

So perhaps it’s just a matter of nailing down those touring gigs, but Crazy has been inching towards a renewed party flavor for his 2003 Carnival releases.

"Ah steppin’ back into smut," he grins. "Which Chalkie warn me, an’ tell me doh go back there. He say, ‘You singing good calypso, why you go back and sing that?’ If I wasn’t good at the serious stuff I would never have been making the Savannah. But they want me back in the party, so from dis year I’ll be coming back on the Crazy thing again."

For Ayoung, a complicated artist, "Crazy" has always been at least partly a stage persona, like the theatrical roles he played back in the 80s. "There is this character ‘Crazy,’" says saxman Danny Bittker, a musician who’s played with Ayoung countless times, "and there is this person Edwin. And he’s very aware. In the dressing room, sometimes, he makes allusions to ‘putting on Crazy,’ which I take to mean putting on the persona.

"The first time I ever met Crazy I was leading the band for Shadow. Crazy could see that for various reasons Shadow was having problems connecting with the audience, and he wanted to help out. So he came on stage during Bad Boy Peter and became Bad Boy Peter, and sort of acted it out.

"That was the last tune of the night, and when Shadow left the stage, Crazy was still out there. I was trying to get him off stage so we could get ready for the second show, so I’m yelling, ‘Crazy! Crazy!’ just trying to get his attention, but I didn’t realise that when you yelled ‘Crazy! Crazy!’ you were basically telling that persona to keep going."

Back in San José, Crazy sings excerpts from his 2003 songs. One, about a panty hanging on a clothesline, has the refrain "Ah pullin’ down de pantie tonight." Another (in which the singer’s girlfriend has put on too much weight) goes, "Yuh come too big, Tina." In the third song the singer wants to go home with a foreign visitor, and sings, "Ah wanna come in yuh country."

"So now," Crazy grins, "ah could go either way. Ah could go back in the party circuit, like what I’m doin’ next year, or I could do social commentary. Is very few men who can do that. Who can do that? Sparrow is the man, but there’s nobody else."

Certainly not in California.