IT IS SAID that during your final moments, all the good and bad, all the successes and failures, all the hurt and pain, all the love and hate and everything else you would have experienced during your lifetime flashes before your eyes, presumably like a video speeded up a hundred times or more.
If that is true I suspect that as the recently deceased soul singer, Percy Sledge lay on his dying bed, one moment in his long and successful career would have paused and remained longer than any other. That moment would have involved Barbados and a performer, about whom he would have known nothing, our own Jackie Opel.
In March 1966, Percy rocked the entire music world with his first release, When A Man Loves A Woman”, which quickly took over the No. 1 spot in the United States before becoming a monster international chart topper. In fact, the record held its own record by being a hit twice in Britain The first time was in 1966 and then 21 years later in 1987, when it was reissued.
Sledge followed with a string of other international gold hits like Warm and Tender Love, It Tears Me Up, Take Time To Know Her, Love Me Tender, and Cover Me and the world was indeed his stage until a promoter decided to bring him to Barbados to thrill his multitude of local fans.
Back then, the Globe Cinema on Roebuck Street was the venue where most visiting stars performed, including the also recently passed Ben E. King, and it was that stage that Percy aimed to tear up as he had been doing all over the world. But unknown to him was the fact that Barbados was the home of a short, bow-legged, dynamo of a performer whose voice soared as high as any opera singer’s, whose dancing feet were as fast or faster than James Brown’s and who could deliver any genre of music, from jazz to calypso, with perfection.
In order to fill any venue for a show by a visiting entertainer, promoters usually booked Jackie as the opening act because Bajans liked nothing better than coming out to see if Man Face could mash up the big international star. The same was done for the Percy Sledge show.
The show was going smoothly with everybody sitting anxiously on the edges of their seats waiting to enjoy their idol, Mr Sledge. Then Jackie Opel hit the stage with one of the most explosive performances ever seen by anybody.
Subsequently, Percy Sledge’s starlight was hardly visible in the wake of Jackie’s brilliance with the result that at the end of his fourth selection, When A Man Loves a Woman, one man jumped up in the front row shouting, “Bring back Jackie”. The call quickly cascaded across the venue like a verbal Mexican wave until everybody was also screaming, “Bring back Jackie.”
Poor Percy tried to stem the rising tide but the start of his next song was totally drowned out by the even more intense screaming the audience for Jackie. The result was that Barbados became one of the few places, if not the only, in the world where a world-renowned star was forced to leave a stage in order to allow a local, internationally unknown to take his place as the man of the moment.
That was the genius of Dalton Sinclair Man Face “Jackie Opel” Bishop, whose legacy includes recordings like Mill Man, A Time To Cry and I Don’t Want Her with backing vocals by two of the greatest Jamaican performers of all time, the late Bob Marley and Peter Tosh.
Al Gilkes heads a public relations firm. Email [email protected]
