recorded at Stan Plange’s house in Osu, Accra, on August 18, 1998.1
When did you first meet Fela?
I first knew Fela when I was in Nigeria playing for Downbeats from 1958 to 1962—I was also then the treasurer of the Nigerian Union of Musicians. By that time [1958] Fela was just leaving high school in Abeokuta, but he used to come to Lagos to play with highlife bands like Victor Olaiya’s [Cool Cats]. He played trumpet but was playing very badly. Fela was never very good on trumpet but was much better on the keyboards, especially jazz piano. But in those days there were no keyboards [for local dance bands]; we knew of the organ only in church.
It was at that time that Fela got into a good friendship with Joe Mensah, who was playing in the same band as me. The Downbeats was made up mainly of Ghanaians, but the leader was an Ibo Nigerian called Chief Billy Friday. Fela used to come to our shows and at that time he doesn’t drink. He was a very clean musician and even condemned people who smoked and drank. Fela was a very good musician and I must admit very disciplined at that time. This was before he became successful.
Then Fela went to Britain and came back, and the first time I met him again was in 1963 when the Uhurus were playing at a dance at the University of Ibadan. Every year they have a dance called Havana Night—a big thing—so many bands come playing at different places around the campus. That time Fela came to join with us on stage, playing trumpet and wearing a suit. That was the first and only time I saw Fela in suit.
How did Fela first come to Ghana?
It was through Zeal Onyia [a famous Nigerian trumpeter] that Fela first came to Ghana. In 1966 or 1967 Zeal wanted to bring Fela and his Koola Lobitos group to Ghana, so Fela first came alone in his small Opel Rekord car. Zeal brought him to Uhuru House [in Asylum Down, Accra] and told me to take care of Fela. I’ve known Zeal for a long time, even when he was in Ghana in the 1950s [with E. T. Mensah’s Tempos band]. So we went around to book clubs, but Fela wasn’t known in Ghana then at all and didn’t have any recordings.
Anyway Fela went back with Zeal and came back with his band, which was playing highlife but in a very jazz mood. We got the Koola Lobitos to play at Ringway Hotel, Accra, when Ignace de Souza’s Black Santiagos was the resident band. The Uhurus also played there [as did other bands like the Ramblers and Geraldo Pino’s Heartbeats]. Fela also played at a couple of other places, but it wasn’t successful financially. He was sharing the gate with the club owners. His boys were staying at Ringway Hotel. Fela was staying with me at Uhuru House, but he had been wasting all his gate money on their accommodation, so I suggested that Fela bring his boys to stay with mine, because Uhuru was a big band and Fela’s was just a small combo.
The Uhuru band on tour in Togo, 1968. Mac Tontoh is standing on the far right.
It was after that trip that Faisal Helwani began bringing Fela to Ghana and was promoting him through his F Promotions. Fela so loved Ghana that any time he stays in Nigeria he rushed back down to Ghana for a holiday, and then would stay with me. I could guess that he used to come five or six times a year. Even when I’m not in he will leave his trumpet at my front door, as whether he was with his group or not Fela was always with his trumpet.
I haven’t seen a musician who rehearses so much as Fela. I suspect it was because he didn’t have a very good embouchure, so if he doesn’t play his trumpet for one day he finds it very difficult to get a sound out of it. Immediately I come home and see the trumpet I know Fela is in and so I will open the door, put the trumpet inside and keep the key under the doormat. But once Fela is in I can’t stay in the house because he would bring women. He goes to see one woman off before he’s coming with another. So when he came I used to go to my parents’ or girlfriend’s place to sleep, Fela’s own [interest in women] is like a disease. There’s no day that he doesn’t have a girl, different, different girls.
Around 1967 or 1968 Fela took your Uhurus on tours of Nigeria?
Yes, we went twice, but the first time it wasn’t promoted by Fela but by Chubby Checker [the famous African American king of twist]. You see immediately after the 1966 coup here we toured Ghana with Chubby, and I remember how he regretted that Nkrumah had been overthrown because black Americans regard him highly. Anyway, a year later Chubby was meant to be going to Nigeria but at the last minute his group couldn’t come. So Chubby came down to Ghana and wanted us to back him in Nigeria. Our first night we played at Onikan Stadium in Lagos and Fela was there. I remember that he didn’t like the arrangement of one of the songs we were playing. Fela said he didn’t believe I did the arrangement.
After the Lagos show an Ibo promoter wanted us to tour the east, as he wanted to get into favor with Ojukwu’s government, as by that time [1967] the Nigerian Civil War was starting and Ojukwu [Lt. Col. Emeka Ojukwu] was preparing to break [Biafra] away from Nigeria. So on that trip we saw them preparing every night with sticks as guns, and we played in Nsukka the day before the federal government attacked the town.
It was a little later that Fela himself promoted the Uhurus in Nigeria. He was able to organize that trip because we had engagements already at the Yaba College of Technology and Nsukka University. So he took advantage of that, and we did two shows for him in Lagos, one at the Glover Memorial Hall and the other at Lisabi Hall. We stayed at a hotel near Yaba side and shared the gate with Fela.
Uhuru on tour in Uganda, 1968. Stan Plange and Faisal Helwani are standing third and fourth from the left in the back row.
At the student-organized show at Yaba College we played “Yeshe Yeshe” [one of Fela’s highlifes]. Fela was sitting behind us on the bandstand and just jumped and grabbed the microphone from our singer Eddie Entreh, as he was so much moved because we were playing as a big band.
All of a sudden I heard that Fela had gone to America and he was there for such a long time that there were rumors that he had got stranded, his boys had left, and even that Fela had been arrested and jailed for dabbling in narcotics. He was there for months. When he came back he told me he hadn’t been in prison but he had had it tough—but had the help of one American girl, Sandra. That was when he got involved in the Black Power thing and that changed his life when he came back completely.
He was smoking cigarettes and grass [Indian hemp] and I haven’t seen any experiment that that boy hasn’t done with grass. He would put it in brandy for it to ferment for some time and would then drink the brandy. He would even chew the grass and would always smoke some before he goes on stage. I remember one time I was there Fela told me: “Stan, I’ve got some cake, will you take it?” So I said yes as he also likes cakes and anytime I’m leaving Ghana for Nigeria I used to buy Ghanaian bread and cake for him from a confectionery in Osu RE [Osu Royal Engineers, a suburb] in Accra. So they cut this cake and when I took it I realized that they had used cannabis in preparing it. So I spat it out and Fela started laughing at me. Fela went deeply into smoking Indian hemp openly.
It was after his trip to America that Fela really began his Afrobeat. His first hit as single was “Jeun Koku” (“Chop and Quench”) followed by “Who Are You.” You see Fela is one of the few musicians who are credited with having invented a beat. He based it on highlife and a James Brown type of soul. I think he got the soul idea when James Brown toured Nigeria in the late 1960s.
It was immediately after a show [in Accra] that Fela invented Afrobeat. So I think it was a fusion of soul and highlife, as already Fela was playing highlife in a jazzy form. Fela was also particular in his earlier Afrobeats with his bass line, trying to get it [the bass guitar] to go like the patterns of the big African drums. He was also one of the first here to introduce piano and organ to dance music.
Personally I didn’t like the later Afrobeats he recorded when he became more political and made songs attacking the government. He wasn’t minding the music then, and I thought personally that they weren’t very good recordings. I preferred his earlier Afrobeats like “Jeun Koku,” “Who Are You,” “Lady,” “Yellow