Bertie Marshall Speaks on the Steelpan
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I did everything on little funds
Trinbagopan.com Staff Article
Interview Recorded: March 13, 2005
Posted: March 18, 2005
Pan Trinbago could do more for the pan industry in general. But if I ask them to assist me with the experiments, they would stay too long. I would have time dead and come back in the next life. I have to go by myself. The pan instruments want developing and Pan Trinbago remaining too satisfied with the way things are. The pans need to develop more. Patrick Arnold is a tuner, and he should have more understanding about the pan instruments. If you ask them for money, they never have money to help. Some bands have good sponsors, but as far as experimenting with the band, most of them would say that is for the pan body. But they don't realize the problems that going on.
I experiment and cause them to be putting sheds on their pans. I did that since in the sixties with Highlanders. People feel I was studying the men, but it was not the men I was studying, I was studying the pans from the sun. The heat expands the steel and it don't maintain the tone it has. A pan could be well tuned, and when the twelve o'clock sun start to hit it, that nice sound you was hearing would disappear. That is why, when we burn the pan, it is to take out all the impurities in it and whatever they have in the drum too, we try to expel it. I hear a man get poisoned by the fumes. I heard that while I was sick, as a matter of fact, they thought it was me. Remember I went back in the hospital. Before I went up to Mount Hope, I went in Parks Nursing Home. Remember "Boogsie" was sick. Well Pan Trinbago still owe the hospital bill, which is fifty-three thousand dollars, so I would not have gotten the cat scan. It is a good thing Nestor Sullivan was there. He had some money, well up to now I have not paid him back, because the government is not giving me any assistance.
I did everything on little funds that someone raised for me. And the old fellah, Dr. Blake who give me therapy, is a serious man, he never miss a day. He treated me three times a week, and he comes every time since I get that stroke last year October. Everyday that he has to see about me he comes. Is he who make me all right. I got the stroke on the left side. The sugar (diabetes) was so uncontrollable, but they have it under control now. It was a diabetic stroke I got. I am sixty-nine.
The most I do is look at TV, I am a TV man, and I listen to music most of the time. But, it is through sickness that caused me to be listening so much more. It was a long time I wasn't listening much, but I could focus my hearing more this year on bands that coming through the savannah; on Tuesday evening I hear Exodus.
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