Three or four years ago, I was seeing this Haitian girl named Mimi. I returned home one day to find she had gone. I began searching for her, of course I didn’t search for her around the world, but I did travel around Manhattan and even down Haiti. I figured I would expand on that experience and made it an epic journey, like the Greek myths I was fascinated by as a kid.
– August Darnell (or was it Kid Creole?) talking to The New York Times in 1981
As far as I can remember I’ve always loved Tropical Gangsters.
August Darnell of Kid Creole & The Coconuts was born a decennium too late to enjoy the charms and spells of his favourite decade first-hand. Instead he created his amorous alter ego, the debonair braggadocio Kid Creole – an urban traveller and a likeable swagger in the Tropics, dressed to kill in his 1940s suits. His obnoxious routine was a constant nuisance to the three damsels in The Coconuts, but he was a wonderful thing. That is what he told us when he was diggin’ the scene with a gangster lean. “We marked the return of the spectacle and the integration of dramatics,” Darnell told Spin in September 1985. He put Kid Creole & The Coconuts in a dazzling cabaret setup. The shows were always extraordinary.
Tropical Gangsters (released in the summer of 1982) is by far the best crusade by the Kid and his seafaring entourage. Here we find them during their third and last mishap endeavour to find his runaway babe Mimi, and to bring her back to New York City and into his vainglorious arms again. The logbook to this story informs that, “On February 15, the banana boat was shipwrecked off Brindisi Reef. The survivors awoke on B’Dilli Bay. They remained there for nearly six months. Here then is the true untold story of their gruesome ordeal, the music they were forced to play, the mates they were allowed to choose and the escape they were bound to make.” Tropical Gangsters is a coat of many colours. It has the ambience of Key Largo (1948) – Bogey at bay in a hotel in the Florida Keys due to a perilous weather situation and dicey mobsters all around – and it has all the meet and proper sea, sex and sun. Here’s where Darnell really achieved his musical philosophy of “café au laition”.
August Darnell (b 1951) was raised in an “amalgamation of all worlds” – the Bronx – to French-Canadian and Dominican parents. A boon to anyone set to become a first-rate entertainer. “The act is Bushby Berkeley nightclub setup, not didactic – but I also want the audience to come away with something extra,” he informed New York Magazine in September 1982. “I haven’t got the time for essays in my life. These days ended when I left my university,” Darnell told me recently. But he is really quite open-handed, however, about his early major personal influences in Hank Bordowitz’s interview book from 2004, Noise of the World: Non-Western Musicians in Their Own Words: “My dad used to play Harry Belafonte like around the clock [...] Dad was a musician and an actor. He played guitar. So, I guess it just naturally came about that I would get involved in music.” And he continues, “My ex-wife was a Haitian. She used to play this calypso, reggae music all the time. What this did, I imagine, was regenerate in me my childhood experiences.”
Darnell formed Kid Creole & The Coconuts when he departed from his brother Stony Browder’s disco conglomerate Dr Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band. “Part of my design was giving the world alternatives,” Darnell declared to The New York Times in the early 1980s. “Remember, what we’re selling is not just music, but coexistence.” Part of these ideas were Cab Calloway, Glenn Miller and the big band era of the 1940s, contemporary, quintessential New York – always New York – and those forever cruises in international waters with the evident Caribbean long hauls. Darnell’s spouse at the time, Addy, the Swiss-born Adriana Kaegi, was the “Mama Coconut” of The Coconuts and she designed the trio’s costumes and did their choreography. Darnell also brought in Savannah amigo Andy Hernandez, who was the vivacious sidekick Coati Mundi – the little guy with the great diversions and stage props, turning the junk upside down. East Harlem man Hernandez was everything but a clown, he wrote the truly excellent “I’m Corrupt” for Tropical Gangsters.
Power, corruption and lies. Tropical Gangsters is about what happens when an outrageous “player” and a traveller of the Seven Seas gets stuck on a Paradisiacal island encircled by a tumult of waves – a Treasure Island surrounded by fish, turquoise waters and pink sand – and with a bounty of problemas: political chaos, combating gangs and looting mobs, poverty, poor health and la di da. Darnell created a lovely razzle-dazzle about the goings-on of that imaginary island, naturally from the standpoint of the egotistical Kid (even if it’s sometimes difficult to identify the narrator of each song), and he made this record, which is one of those rare cases where “commercialism” actually provides something of real value for almost everyone. One should probably mention that Darnell himself was kind of acrid at the time about the jubilant reception of Tropical Gangsters (especially in the UK), as if he’d only been throwing the easiest piece of music on the world, and that people had just swallowed it like a pizza slice. But Darnell has always been a considerably more modest and conservative man than the Kiddo, and this time he was wrong.
Darnell had a go on Ze Records founders Michael Zilkha and Michael Esteban in the 1970s when he told Zilkha that he’d produced the Savannah Band. That white lie, and Darnell paired with studio guy Bob Blank, elevated the label to levels of lasting importance.
Tropical Gangsters was recorded at Electric Lady and Blank Studios in New York in 1981–82 with a bevy of musicians. Darnell sent Kid Creole on a quest for Arcadia and appropriation. And the Kid himself showed us that there was a very wonderful world outside of his ego.
