re:Discovery
The Equals Baby, Come Back (RCA/Victor) 1968
studio to cut a few tracks, and he said to me, “Do you think you could do another ten or fifteen of these songs?” I said yes, but, of course, I’d never written that many songs in my life. When we went into the studio, everything that I thought to be ordinary turned out to be not so ordinary. The engineer would say, “Oh, you can’t have so much bass.” Remember, the Equals didn’t have a bass guitar in it to start with. We just had three guitars, which rocked like hell. But when we got into the bass, I wanted it to sound like how I heard it on the ska records. You know, deep and hard. I knew the sound that I wanted. It remained constant in my head and, as you can hear on the Equals record, just developed and developed in a kind of natural way. That has really stayed with me until now, because I make records in a way that is very organic. Although I’m into technology, I never let technology rule me. My personality must come through, and, more importantly, the Carib- bean must come through. I could play you the hardest of rock; if two notes are played, one must be calypso, you know what I’m say- ing? That’s my way. . Eddy Grant, as told to Jon Kirby
From my perspective, it’s not something I wanted to do. I wanted to go to college to become a doctor. But, one day, a friend said, “Listen, there’s a jam session up in Highgate, and you should come and see how you get on.” I went, but by the end of the night, I realized these guys weren’t serious. So I approached the drum- mer, John Hall, and I said, “John, I think we should form a band by ourselves with serious people.” He picked the two brothers, the Gordon brothers, and later we would choose Pat Lloyd. The Black component of the Equals came from the West Indies, and the White component came from England. John suggested that we call the band the Equals, because we would all be equal partners in whatever happened. Nothing’s more democratic than that. We played a lot of the Black clubs. Although we were a mixed group, we were seen in the prejudiced time of the early ’60s as a Black band. We got better and eventually started supporting a lot of the American acts that would come over and play in the night- clubs. I’m talking about people like Wilson Pickett, Vibrations, and Solomon Burke. I got somebody interested in recording us, Edward Kasner, who had just started President Records. We went into the
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