In 1959, the number of Jamaican radio stations was doubled when, to RJR, the government added the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation. Numerically, this might not seem like much, but in social terms it was hugely significant as Jamaica steered a path towards independence: RJR was a British-owned franchise, while the newcomer would be state-owned. The cornerstone of the new station's brief was to promote the indigenous arts and to reflect local taste accurately. A kind of populist positive discrimination. Or the promotion of the notion that what went over the airwaves ought to stretch beyond previous narrow definitions of culture.
If you bear in mind that just ten years previously the only radio-as-entertainment broadcaster on the island was Z Q1 (ZQ and a suffixed numeral was the call sign of any broadcaster operating in Jamaica), a transmitter set up in the 1930s and run by civil servants from four in the afternoon until nine at night, then you get some idea of what progress had been made. ZQ1 put out a very BBC Radio 2-style schedule of American and British popular hits and easily digestible classics; when RJR was franchised in 1950, it was allowed longer hours to broadcast essentially the same, only with a slightly increased US bias, since so many Jamaicans were opting for the powerful Miami, Nashville and New Orleans stations. With absolutely no sense of irony, the station's much-trumpeted first Jamaican Top 30 was made up entirely of American records.
Things might have stayed like that, if it hadn't been for two programmes put together for JBC by musicians and band leader Sonny Bradshaw, shows which actively sought out a younger, sharper audience. Teenage Dance Party would travel the country, broadcasting live each week from a different location, in front of a crowd of that area's youthful dancers. It featured singers and played records, but what set it apart was the unprecedented ‘Hit or Miss’ section, during which the audience was given the chance to endorse or condemn new records by cheering or heckling – a democracy that, just as the sound men had been observing, showed a distinct bias towards local product. Bradshaw's other show was Jamaican Hit Parade, a two-hour session going out on Fridays from the Regal theatre at Cross Roads. As the name would suggest, it ran down the records in that newly instigated Jamaican Top 30, but with the added frisson of the Top 10 being performed live, if not by the respective artists then by an available stand-in. Within two months the Top 30 had gone from being uniquely American to strictly Jamaican – even if it was largely Jamaicans doing their best to sound American, it was definitely a step in the right direction.
For Sonny Bradshaw to get it so right was hardly a Herculean task. His ‘day job’ playing jazz and R & B in the dances meant he knew exactly how the hipper audiences were arriving at their music. Thus, any similarities between Teenage Dance Party and a sound-system lawn – from its mobile nature to the vociferous audience participation – were far from coincidental. Likewise Jamaican Hit Parade's enormous debt to the Vere Johns Opportunity Hour, although now the participants were already stars rather than hopefuls looking for a break. Admittedly, Bradshaw's particular musical background gave his shows an initial bias towards R&B, but by drawing inspiration from the tried and tested ghetto rave-ups the sounds of modern Jamaica's musical development were never far behind. In bringing such a distinct flavour of downtown Kingston to the rest of the country, sufferah music acquired an artistic legitimacy. Coinciding with the green shoots of a domestic record industry, this offered up the means for our men in the dancehalls to challenge the existing power structure on what passed for a level playing field.
In the past, radio access had meant most to those who held licences to distribute American records. The main players were Ken Khouri, who held the franchise for RCA, Edward Seaga, for Columbia, and Byron Lee, for Atlantic, and they would see to it that their records were on heavy rotation before they pressed up copies accordingly. Although reliable rumour has it that payola was so rife it went as far as radio station staff being on record company wages, a more provable point is that the number of US records sent to programme chiefs so vastly outnumbered local product that it was impossible for the likes of Coxsone, Reid and Prince Buster to get a look in. Buster explains how the set-up worked (or should that be failed to work): ‘If people requested your tune then the radio had to play it, but for people to request it, it had to be played; but when a man have fifty or a hundred American tunes to get through, there was no space for you. Then you had to have big money pay the radio station people, so there was no way we could oppose the situation.’
Until then.
By the turn of the decade, the sound systems were so prolific they offered a viable alternative to both radio stations; and as the airwaves began courting the nation's proletariat so the programmers had to look to the sound men for guidance. At first this was a covert operation, with radio deejays or their people going to dances as punters to check out what was moving the crowd; then, as more sound men started making records, it was done in a spirit of cooperation. Not surprisingly, when popular taste swung away from US R&B the smaller operators’ clout increased accordingly and the price of airtime (both official and otherwise) fell to a far more affordable level. After all, these guys could deliver guaranteed hits, which in radio-station terms was probably worth more than hard cash. Even if such a hit went against everything they felt they ought to stand for.
At first, the idea of sound men getting records on the radio was geared up to publicizing the sound-system operations, hence the swift evolution from R&B to ska as operators sought to stay ahead of the game. But with this increasing exposure came a definite shift in emphasis in the Big Three's business plans. As the 1960s got under way – when the number of record players in Jamaica increased significantly – the selling of records was elevated from a sideline to a priority. Of course, the sound systems remained central to their business set-ups; it was just that now they had hard evidence there was more to life than Beat Street sound clashes.
Naturally, behind the setting-up of the Jamaican Broadcasting Corporation and its conspicuous Jamaicanness was a self-serving political motivation. The island had been fully self-governing since 1957, and by 1959 independence from colonial rule was inevitable, so both the ruling People's National Party and the opposition Jamaican Labour Party had it at the core of their manifestos. Each sought to bang their nationalistic drum with greater gusto, and a state-owned radio station championing the nation's cultural identity made an ideal stick for the PNP.
More so than ever at this point, because as the fifties rolled into the sixties radio ownership in Jamaica had blown right up. In the previous decade, there were hardly any radios in the country, as most people couldn't afford what was on offer. Then, when technology advanced around the end of the war and inexpensive mass-produced models began to arrive, only 20 per cent of homes had electricity and batteries were in very short supply. If, back then, you had a usable radio and there was a big event on – a championship fight or a Test match – your home wouldn't be your own for the duration: neighbours or passers-by who couldn't get into your front room or on to your porch would be in the front yard or the street outside. During the 1950s, Rediffusion introduced cable-fed wall boxes for their broadcasts, which were rented by the week and required neither electricity nor batteries, and when JBC went on air it was hooked up to this scheme. By 1960, 90 per cent of households in Jamaica had a working radio, a fivefold increase since 1945 a figure greatly assisted as the electrification of rural Jamaica progressed; by the early-1960s about three-quarters of the country was wired to the national grid.
But while the undercurrents of JBC's instigation were pure politics – a high-profile sop to the masses – in view of what it actually achieved as regards sufferah music, such an itinerary was a relatively small price to pay.
At a midnight ceremony on 5 August 1962, nearly three hundred years of colonial rule came to an end as Jamaican independence finally happened. But it wasn't Norman Manley's government that officially raised Jamaica's new black, gold and green flag. In the general elections held four months previously, Sir Alexander Bustamante's more conservative JLP had swept to power on a ticket that drew on the party's trade-union roots to offer a package of worker-friendly proposals, and had tempered its pro-independence stance by overtly cultivating ties with America.
For the vast majority of Jamaicans, independence was far more exciting in theory than in practice. Being free from British rule meant something tangible to the politicians and the disproportionate few who controlled so much of the country's wealth. However, in the gullies of West Kingston or the remote rural hamlets where 70-odd per cent lived below the official poverty line, it had raised expectations to somewhere approaching danger level. During the years leading up to 1962, the idea of independence had been sold to the people as the answer to so many of their problems, with promises of prosperity, justice and, if not an end to, then at least a serious dent in the class divide. An understandably seductive situation, but, come the glorious day, one that did little to underpin an economic and social infrastructure that had been falling apart for years. The practicalities of life remained the same, and thousands of country folk drifted into cities such as Kingston, Montego Bay and Spanish Town looking for jobs that didn't exist and finding living conditions far worse than those they had left behind. Indeed, this influx sorely stretched the native Kingstonians' stock stoicism as they had genuinely believed things wouldn't be any worse now that they were out from under the colonial yoke.
Not that there wasn't a wave of optimism washing across the island in 1962 – there was nobody who didn't genuinely want independence to work. And besides, when you've got no past of your own then your future quite literally is everything. Government policy was to market this mood for all it was worth, but as far as real life went, the idea of happy, smiling darkies, jubilant with their newly acquired lot was strictly for the tourist brochures.
Less than a year after independence, on Easter weekend 1963, Rose Hall in St James saw the bloodiest uprising since Sam Sharp led slaves in revolt in 1831. Soldiers and Rastas fought a pitched battle that left buildings burned, hundreds arrested and eight people dead. Likewise, the music wasn't so two-dimensional as it's often portrayed. While the radio stations keenly promoted the upbeat side of things, the notion that black expression was limited to a carnival-type jolly-up contrived to dance unrestrainedly and unconditionally in on-going celebration is hopelessly romantic.
Of course, the music industry came to the party, with tunes such as ‘Independent Jamaica’ or ‘Forward March’ or ‘Anniversary Ska’, but their collective B-side was an equal number with titles such as ‘Babylon Gone’, ‘Time Longer than Rope’ or ‘Carry Go Bring Come’.
A couple of years into the 1960s and the music had settled down into what was to become the classic ska sound. There were still R&B and JA boogie tunes being cut – particularly by Duke Reid and Linden Pottinger – but the radio programmes had inadvertently set ska's tone with their constant demand for uptempo records. Naturally, producers and performers alike figured the way to get ahead was to give the stations what they wanted. What pushed the transition through, though, was something that was to become a noticeable feature of every major change in Jamaican music – a new set of musicians came on the scene.
Drumbago's rhythm section now faced increasing competition from a new outfit consisting of Lloyd Knibbs, Tommy McCook, Lloyd Brevette and Jackie Mittoo, hungry young players keen to prove they had chops. It was these guys – in 1963 they would form the backbone of that seminal ska band the Skatalites – who did much to determine the new beat. Rimshots on the downbeat heralded the change of style as a new beat that practically cut itself in half from what had established the style. While it kept that 4/4 time, with the bass drum accenting the second and fourth beats in that marching-drum style, the off-beat emphasis increased by presenting itself as a single stroke. Which was taken up by either the piano or the guitar; instead of waiting for the return to come over as choon-ka… choon-ka… choon-ka…, it quickened its step and made do with just the -ka… -ka… -ka… A punching brass section added to the emphases already going on inside the structure, while a creeping-type bass-line underpinned the whole thing.
It's a situation best illustrated by dropping the Eric Morris single ‘Humpty Dumpty’, Derrick Morgan's ‘Forward March’ and the Wailers’ ‘Simmer Down’, one after the other. They were cut in 1961, 1962 and 1963, by Prince Buster, Leslie Kong and Coxsone Dodd, respectively, and the progression is obvious. The first swings rather than jumps, with Ernie Ranglin's guitar going up and down and Drumbago pushing the whole thing along fairly evenly; ‘Forward March’ was also a Drumbago session, but by now they're chopping it up; and ‘Simmer Down’ is practically a gallop, putting so much on the upstroke – rhythm, horns, piano – it allows for melodies and a counter rhythm to go on inside.
As national radio took up Jamaican music, a far greater circle of prospective participants emerged. These newcomers – from all over the country, not just the incestuous Kingston scene – brought with them a variety of ideas, giving the music no option other than to broaden out. Artists and producers could wear their influences with pride, and the sheer number of shades of ska belies the popular perception of it being, thematically and artistically, a one-trick pony.
As so many of these arrivals were singers, when ska first blew up it was as a vocal expression presented across a spectrum of styles. Incidentally, singing swiftly rose in prominence after producers found the radio stations steering away from instrumentals, which they saw as strictly sound-system specials. Groups like the Jiving Juniors, the Techniques (featuring Slim Smith), Alton Ellis & the Flames and the Gaylads modelled themselves on American harmony acts in terms of singing style and presentation, with repertoires dominated by the kind of teenage-melodrama love songs that had been the US pop staple for a decade or more. Particularly active in this field were the vocal duos such as Keith & Enid, Bunny & Skitter, Alton & Eddie, Roy & Millie and Derrick & Patsy, who, in borrowing from country and western's proclivity for cheesy two-handers, were crucial in establishing the always popular smooove ska ballad.
So far so US residual; but, as new acts came through, ska moved to cover all lyrical bases. Most famously, the Wailing Wailers brought an adolescent swagger to the proceedings as they mixed self-penned tales aimed specifically at Kingston's mean streets – ‘Simmer Down’, ‘Holligan’ (aka ‘Hooligan’) and ‘Rude Boy’ – with what was their staple diet of love songs and such apparently ill-fitting cover versions as ‘What's New, Pussycat?’ Social comment or protest had been part of the music scene since 1959 and Clancy Eccles's ‘Freedom’ (a rudimentary R&B adaptation of ‘John Brown's Body’). By the early sixties, ska's conscience was busting out all over: Prince Buster was constantly outspoken with records such as ‘African Blood’ and ‘War Paint’; Alton Ellis's ‘Dance Crasher’ concerned itself with dancehall warfare; Stranger Cole's ‘Rough and Tough’ was a barbed comment on street violence; ‘Money Can't Buy Life’, by Monty Morris, and Lord Tamano and the Skatalites’ ‘Come Down’ are, respectively, dire warnings about the sins of avarice and conceit; Justin Hinds and the Dominoes’ ‘Teach the Youth’ was self-explanatory, like Desmond Dekker's equally obvious ‘Honour Your Father and Your Mother’.
Spiritually, ska's lyricists were on the case, too. The Maytals (who also worked as the Vikings and the Royals) came on with all the fervour of a particularly lively revival meeting. Lead singer Toots Hibbert's gospel-based hollering was backed up by equally raucous harmonies and showed a spiritual bent in numbers like ‘Victory’, ‘Never Grow Old’ and ‘Six and Seven Books of Moses’. This latter track seems to be a veiled reference to the transported black nation as the lost tribe of Israel, which, like Jimmy Cliff's deliberately ambiguous ‘King of Kings’ (it's ostentatiously about the lion as the king of the beasts), gives some idea of where Rasta stood in Jamaica's social pecking order. In spite of its phenomenal growth across the black population in general, disproportionately higher among the Kingston music community, it was usually sung about only in laughably oblique terms. Which made the blatant dread of Justin Hinds and the Dominoes’ ‘Mighty Redeemer’, ‘Botheration’, ‘King Samuel’ and ‘Carry Go Bring Come’ all the more remarkable.
But it was in the actual music that things were getting really interesting. In 1960 Jimmy Cliff arrived in Kingston as twelve-year-old country boy James Chambers to tout himself round the recording studios, doing his best to disguise his youth by singing in unnaturally gruff tones. Now, comfortably ensconced in London's upmarket media hangout the Groucho Club, he still vividly remembers Jamaica's ska explosion and how the singers supplied a great deal more than the lyrics.
‘When I got to Kingston ska was still an option, like a new-fashioned thing not everybody was sure of. The first few tunes I cut were for smaller sound systems, like Sir Cavalier, who didn't want to take any chances, so the records weren't ska, they were R& B. But within about a year ska completely dominated the music scene in Kingston, maybe not yet on the radio but certainly in the dances. And anybody who have a tune they want to record would nod to the session band leader and tell him “It ska beat mi want”, because it was the only way they would take your tune seriously. The best bands could play any tune, in any style, in any arrangement, in any key, but with a good strong ska beat. It meant that you didn't have to adapt your style of songwriting to suit them – the chord progressions in my songs were always different from other people's. Like Toots and them brought a rawer style to it with the songs they wrote. Or Derrick Morgan – who I used to listen to when I was in school – he had a kind of rhythmic style of singing. Which was different to Stranger Cole, who was much more mellow. All these guys were singing ska, but they all did it in their own way.
‘You have to give credit to Prince Buster for this. He was the first singer/producer and he helped singers get more involved in the studio. He showed us how to get what we wanted from the band, so our ideas could make a solid contribution. It used to be that a singer came into the studio with no more than a quarter of a song, he'd sing this raw idea to the band leader and the musicians who would then have to structure it. To put it together and make sure it turns out as a song. But it would always turn out how the band wanted to do it. Buster taught singers to go in with the complete song written, melody and words and everything, then they could express how they wanted it at every stage. The guitarist or pianist would pick up the tune first, then the drummer would establish a basic rhythm and the bass would follow that – this was before the bass-line became so dominant. If there were horn players, they would work out their own arrangements, but they'd do that last of all to take up the lead part of the melody again once the rhythm was properly in place. Things were different with Drumbago, because he was a drummer as well as the arranger. He'd travel with a flute and you'd sing your song to him and he'd take it up on the flute first then pass it on to the keyboard player to do the chords.’
What this meant was that the singers were now doing as much as the musicians themselves to broaden things out, which is why the style went as rapidly wide as it did. Country-blues elements permeated so many of the love songs; Motown-isms were starting to creep into the back of a few of the singing groups' arrangements, and mento was alive and well. Really, it's least surprising that mento, the original Jamaican music form, should come to the fore: Independence Day fallout lingered a long time, and any cultural roots that existed were being keenly explored. Blending it with ska sounded good, too, as tunes like Eric Morris's ‘Penny Reel-O’ proved (this one also gave an airing to that other Caribbean music staple, the slackness lyrics). Other ‘nu school’ mentos were the equally lewd ‘Rukumbine’, by Shenley Duffus, and trumpeter Baba Brooks’ reworking of the old mento standard ‘River Bank’ into ‘Bank to Bank’. It's significant that the best mento-style ska tunes were Duke Reid productions. By this time, 1963 or so, the Trojan had not long returned to the recording industry, and he was very much a traditionalist, hence the mento connection. As a truly devoted R&B fan he viewed the ska beat with such contempt that he believed it to be a craze that wouldn't last, and opted to concentrate on running his sound system with US records rather than suffer the continued expense of recording. Perhaps more to the point, though, is that while he had to rely on R&B, his dances of that period, even the open ones, were known as ‘bull parties – jus’ a few man drinking rum, no gal’, which was when the Duke realized he couldn't ignore ska any longer. It must be said that, when he did put his mind to it, Reid produced some of the best ska ever made, courtesy of the Skatalites, Slim Smith, Don Drummond, the Techniques, Justin Hinds, Alton Ellis and Stranger Cole.
Brentford Road isn't what you might call ‘the ghetto’. It's much closer to the business district of Cross Roads than it is to Trench Town. On the short walk from New Kingston's luxury hotel complexes you won't pass very much graffiti'd corrugated iron or more than a couple of abandoned cars, and even in today's particularly twitchy times the only uneasiness you'll experience will be caused by the heat. Brentford Road is where uptown meets downtown: it's funky enough to have some Jamaican street soul, but never so spirited as to be intimidating. Perfect for a man like Clement Dodd to do business. There was more space in this part of town, with roomier buildings set back from the street in bigger yards, yet the area was not too far from ska's natural environment. In 1963 Dodd took over 13 Brentford Road, premises that previously housed a nightclub called The End, installed a one-track board and opened the Jamaican Recording & Publishing Studio Ltd, also known as Studio One.
This was a highly significant development: Dodd was then the only black man in Jamaica to own a recording studio, and was the first sound man to take his profits from dances and record sales and invest them in something as long term as a recording facility (Duke Reid didn't open his own studio until two years later, and Prince Buster put his money into juke boxes and setting up mosques). This was serious business. It marked the coming-of-age of this generation of modern Jamaican musicians, proving that what they were doing wasn't going away and, most importantly, wasn't going away from where it all began.
Having his own studio provided time and space that was vital to Coxsone Dodd. While he might have been a businessman in his head, he was a jazzman in his heart, and what he wanted to do was to give his musicians the room to let go. Musicians who were equally unreconstructed, and whose technical expertise was matched only by a sense of adventure that came from growing up listening to Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker and Coleman Hawkins, then distilled in such big bands as Eric Dean's or Jack Brown's. Having removed the constraints of buying studio time, Dodd then took the unprecedented step of putting a nucleus of the island's best musicians on wages, rather than hiring them as 'n' when and paying them per side cut. His reasoning was that this would allow the players the chance to explore and be genuinely creative, and then to make sure they'd got it right. It's an indication of exactly what such an opportunity meant that, in spite of these wages being pitifully low, many of the best bandsmen in Jamaica took him up on his offer. (Of course, Dodd was buying their time, not their exclusivity, so they still supplemented their income by working elsewhere.)
Clement Dodd pretty much let the musicians get on with it, which was exactly the right thing to do, as it turned out, pushing Studio One into genuinely creating rather than essentially recreating. Until then, Coxsone's definition of A&R involved the teenaged Bob Marley sifting through piles of imported US singles to advise on which should be adapted, plagiarized or just plain bootlegged. More than that, though, Studio One set a trend that remains central to reggae's core – for successful artists to open their own studios, operations that remain as vital to reggae's development today as Coxsone's set-up nearly forty years ago. And for exactly the same reasons. The best ska or rocksteady or dub or dancehall or whatever form it was taking that year, has always had enormous spiritual and populist elements evolving in relation to Jamaica's black nation's mood swings. Such a connection can't be spun to order or to the mainstream music business's usual schedule, so to have your own studio allows unlimited time and a distinct lack of pressure to connect with this essence of Jamaicanness. It gives the room to experiment, the luxury of cutting uncommercial but musically/culturally important records, or to make loads of tunes just because you want to. It's a rare reggae record made outside this ambience that has actually moved anything forward. Hence, nowadays, there aren't quite as many tiny recording studios as there are jerk chicken shops in Kingston, but you get the general idea.
Back in Brentford Road in 1963, a loose collective of master musicians were about to organize themselves as the Skatalites. Essentially, this crew was Lloyd Brevette (bass), Lloyd Knibbs (drums), Jackie Mittoo (piano/organ), Tommy McCook (lead tenor sax), Roland Alphonso and Lester Sterling (sax), Don Drummond (trombone), Johnny Moore and Ba Ba Brooks (trumpet), Jah Jerry and Harold Moore (guitar) and Lord Tanamo and Tony DaCosta (vocals). Aside from paying the producer's bills by backing an A-list of singers for the Studio One label's string of ska hits, they had plenty of time to do their own thing(s). A by-product of this was to give substance to Coxsone's dreams of initiating a jazz genre with a genuine Jamaican flavour, by laying bebop-style solos and big-band instrumentation over a solid ska backing.
The shrewdest of moves on Coxsone's part was to give free rein to Don Drummond's skills, vision and discipline as a musical arranger. Trombonist Drummond had learned his trade at Alpha Boys' School, an establishment for wayward youth on South Camp Road that has more than earned its place in Jamaican musical history by numbering among its old boys a generation of horn players that includes Tommy McCook, Vin Gordon, Bobby Ellis, Rico, Leroy Wallace and Joe Harriott. Run by nuns, the only things stricter than the discipline were the music lessons, in which students were taught theory, composition, space and arrangement by learning the classics. And as one of the few ways to get out of such chores as scrubbing toilets or kitchen duties was to attend rehearsals with the school's acclaimed marching band (hence the emphasis on brass), few shirked music.
Don Drummond was such an outstanding student that after he left he was persuaded to return to Alpha to teach music, and his sessions at Studio One had all the rigid discipline and attention to detail of the schoolroom. Each player followed the leader's meticulously drawn charts, belying ska's later reputation as ‘happy-go-lucky’ – the Skatalites in instrumental mode could be as formal a proposition as, say, the Duke Ellington Orchestra preparing to play Carnegie Hall. But for all his intrinsic correctness the trombonist knew when to go for a head arrangement, and his real strength lay in his ability to observe the music from outside and direct it as a feeling or a mood rather than as a technical exercise. Often that mood was intriguingly dark. Don Drummond was a fierce black nationalist and a devout Rastafarian, who set out to make music that connected with both the soul of Africa and her displaced sons and daughters on a deeply spiritual level. In many ways, ska never meant so much as when Don Drummond and his mournful, soulful ‘bone were leading the Skatalites in such tunes as ‘Man in the Street’, ‘Addis Ababa’, ‘Eastern Standard Time’ or ‘Don Cosmic’. All minor-key material, music which, with spooky suitability, would be played largely on the piano's black notes.
Of course, the Skatalites went way beyond Don Drummond and Studio One. Just as many of the group's innovative instrumentals were arranged by saxophonists Tommy McCook and Roland Alphonso, or keyboard “man” Jackie Mittoo – who didn't turn sixteen until 1964 – or were cut for Duke Reid or the Yap brothers’ Top Deck label. And the group manifested itself in numerous guises – practically anything from that period with a solo Skatalite as the artist credit will involve the rest of the group too. It was this band's rip-roaring instrumentals such as ‘Phoenix City’, ‘Guns of Navarone’ and ‘Ball o'Fire’ that formed the lasting impression of the music – even Prince Buster, ska's most successful singer, remains best known for the practically instrumental ‘Al Capone’. But as strong and as talented as the individual Skatalites were, when Don Drummond left in spectacularly tragic circumstances in 1965 it became very easy for the group to fall apart.
To say pressure reach the trombonist would be to put it mildly. In post-colonial Jamaica, schizophrenia among the black urban poor was rampant – although it was seldom diagnosed medically, the victim simply being locked up or cast out of the community – and Drummond developed a pathological hatred of white people. It was for all the obvious reasons, but was enormously intensified by the sense of frustration he felt from years of trying to make ends meet in sterile north-coast cabaret bands. Then, when he did do something worthwhile, he felt he was not being taken seriously beyond the ghettos; his Alpha grounding would have left him well aware of exactly what yardsticks ought to be applied to music. There are reports of his walking around Kingston smiling beatifically at black people then spitting at white people, and he would regularly check himself into the sanatorium, emerging slightly more detached on each occasion.
In the early hours of New Year's Day 1965, for reasons that were never made clear but appear to be a particularly unfortunate example of black self-hatred manifesting itself in violence, Drummond stabbed to death his common-law wife, the dancer and singer Margarita. He gave himself up at Rockfort police station the next day and was committed to Bellevue mental asylum, where he died four years later. Besides his fantastic musical legacy, and there are several Don Drummond albums available today, the most fitting epitaph to his greatness is that one of his trombones, lovingly polished and cared for, is now on permanent display in the music hall at Alpha Boys’ School.
As soon as it seemed that downtown operators like Coxsone, Buster and Reid were getting fat from ska record sales, there was sudden interest beyond their own community. Before Jamaica had a record industry, the only means to make money from music there was to run a sound system, and there was no way that the likes of Chris Blackwell, Byron Lee and Leslie Kong would or could do that. Now, however, producing and selling records presented opportunities for large-scale profit from Jamaican music. Paradoxically, while it took their involvement to consolidate the ‘business’ end of the music market, from which everybody would benefit, this came with a price.
Chris Blackwell had enjoyed considerable success producing domestic acts in the imported music forms of R&B and JA boogie, but as ska took over the Kingston music scene, the creative process became far more impenetrable. Blackwell decamped to London in 1962, where he opened up an official ska export market by licensing tunes from his homeland's top producers for UK release. Long before that, though, he set up Kingston's first formal record distribution and wholesale channels. According to Jimmy Cliff, this boosted Jamaica's music industry by providing budding artists with a viable alternative to the sound systems.
‘Chris Blackwell was really the one that opened up the selling of records in Jamaica, because up until then there had been no proper wholesaling or anything like a proper distribution set-up. Producers had just supplied to a few shops they knew with somebody on a motorcycle – when they showed it like that in The Harder They Come, that was all exactly how it was – and there was no way anybody was going to sell a lot of records that way. Because Blackwell didn't have a sound system like the other producers and by now the radio was playing Jamaican-made stuff, he knew the way he could get the most out of the music business was to get his records to as many shops as possible.
‘Maybe through him not being caught up in the sound-system thing he ran his affairs much more like a business and used to pay higher rates to artists and musicians. That's how people got to hear about Chris Blackwell. They'd say “Go to the white man, him pay better money!” It meant there were quite a few artists willing to forgo the instant acclaim they might get if their record hit big on Duke Reid's or Coxsone's sound system. It was because of Chris Blackwell that artists started getting interested in selling records, yuh know, looking beyond the sound systems.’
Likewise Leslie Kong, the first Chinese-Jamaican to come into the business at the creative end, and who made his name as the most immediately effective ‘outsider’ producer of the ska era. Kong's reason to get into record production in 1963 was to become typical – he owned a record shop and wanted to make sure it would always be stocked with new and exclusive product. Together with his two brothers, Kong owned Beverley's, a combined ice-cream parlour, cosmetics boutique and record shop, into which walked an enterprising Jimmy Cliff.
‘I knew of Leslie Kong's establishment, Beverley’s, and how he was interested in the music, and I thought that if I wrote a song called Beverley it would make him listen. I wrote a song that night called “Dearest Beverley” and next day, just as they were closing, I went in and asked the three Kong brothers if they were into recording. They said they weren't, so I said, “Well you should. I'm a singer and I can help you get into it.” Leslie Kong said, “You're a singer? Go on sing.” So I sung “Dearest Beverley”. The other two brothers just laughed, but Leslie said he thought I had the best voice he'd ever heard in Jamaica and that was it; he wanted to know how he could get into making records. I knew all the musicians, I knew the studios, I knew the business, so I could help him.
‘I knew Derrick Morgan, who was ahead of me – already a star – and talked him into joining us, because he was experienced and so Leslie Kong could work more easily with him. Also, he need somebody established like Derrick to start off with so people would take notice and know how serious he was. Leslie Kong had lots of ideas and a good feel for the music but no rhythm whatsoever, so when he came into the studios to put his ideas across to the musicians he had difficulty. It could take a while, because he'd say play it like this, and what he'd tell them would make no sense, so they'd have to try and work out what it really was he wanted! They'd play something and he'd say, “No, a bit faster”, or, “Put a break in there”, and they'd do it over and over until he said, “Yes, that's it”. The first session Leslie Kong had was with myself, Derrick Morgan and Monty Morris, in late 1961 or early 1962, and that was the beginning of the Beverley's label. We did ska right from the beginning, and although we didn't get hit records off that first session, during our second session we got a hit record with my song “Hurricane Hattie”. That's what established Leslie Kong; then came Derrick's “Forward March”, which was massive.’
The established producers were not so accommodating of Leslie Kong's swiftly escalating success; in fact, they deeply resented the idea of a Chinese-Jamaican moving into what had been an exclusively, and importantly, black neighbourhood. None more so than Prince Buster – Morgan was one of the sound man's best friends, one for whom he'd produced a string of hits, and he believes ‘Forward March’ ripped off one of his tunes. Soon West Kingston was left in no doubt as to where Buster stood on the matter when the Voice of the People sound system started blasting ‘Black Head Chinee Man’, a single tempering its unambiguous chastisement with dire warnings: You done stole my belongings and give them to your Chinee man… Are you a Chinee man? Are you a black man / It don't need no eyeglass to see that your skin is black.
The song kicked off a war of words and music, in which Morgan and Kong responded with a tune attacking Buster, who in turn felt obliged to answer. Such seven-inch battles would become a regular feature of the Jamaican music industry, more often than not bitchy digs at rivals or former employers, but in this case Buster's motives were as political as they were personal and professional. Buster genuinely was a man of the people, enjoying a kind of Godfather of the Ghetto status as people came to him with problems or for advice and providing a genuine role model through his artistic and business achievements. But by 1962 he had converted to Islam, meaning that black advancement through self-help had become an imperative instead of merely a priority. While he sought to maintain the cultural thrust of the developing music, he also saw the business side of this unique art form as – means to generate wealth from outside the ghetto and keep the black shilling in community circulation. Now here was a Chinese man, far less musically gifted than the core of ska producers, looking to clean up. Never less than aware of just how deeply the black Caribbean psyche had been scarred by decades of colonialism on top of centuries of slavery, Buster was determined to speak out against the alarming prospect of black artists becoming subordinate to producers/label bosses of other races – scarily, this could be coming about through force of habit as much as anything else. It must be remembered that his stinging musical rebukes to Morgan – titles that followed included ‘Thirty Pieces of Silver’ and ‘Praise without Raise’ – always offered counsel to the man who remains his friend to this day.
Jimmy Cliff, however, was aware of another reality of the situation – like Chris Blackwell, Leslie Kong paid better.
‘Most of the other Nubian producers were bitter,’ he says. talk about “How could we let the Chinee man come into the business? How did we let that happen?”, but he was doing well and they couldn't stop him. It was because he paid us. He had a reputation for being straight and paying the going rate, which was what we all wanted. I'd had experience with two other producers prior to Leslie Kong – Nubians – and one of them didn't pay me, so Leslie Kong made a big difference in that respect. Outside of his race, he was a good person.’
The fact that Blackwell and Kong appeared to play straight – or straighter than the black producers – in their direct dealings with the artists is another damning indictment of slavery/colonialism's aftermath. Having to show respect to white people meant that the only people most slaves were able to pull fast ones on were each other, and the only chance many had to assert any sort of cleverness was to do just that. Back then, this blatant lack of self-respect was one of the main reasons Prince Buster joined the Nation of Islam in 1961 and worked to spread the word of an alternative racial reality. But such a sorry state of affairs hung over so far past emancipation and colonialization that many would argue it still dogs the reggae industry. Too many black people within it remain far too willing to be ‘smart’ with each other, yet will practically roll over and wave their legs in the air for anybody else.
‘Out of many, one people’ was the new Jamaica's motto. Exactly the sort of heartwarming, let's-put-the-past-behind-us sloganeering needed by a nation emerging from centuries of subservience into serious economic problems and a massive inferiority complex. But if you lived on the wrong side of the tracks, as over two-thirds of the country did, it was exactly that – a slogan. With no tangible value whatsoever. It doesn't really matter what was spoken in the speeches given on 6 August 1962, or contained in political manifestos leading up to the event, or was put in to fuel the programmed optimism of the immediate aftermath; one simple truth remained. If there had been any economic reason whatsoever for the British to hang on to the colony of Jamaica, they would have done so. The bauxite deals were already boxed off, the sugar trade was dying on its feet, the banana trade was never going to sustain an economy and the sophisticated hotel chains that were cornering the tourist market were American owned. The spectacular growth in Gross Domestic Product of the 1950s had shrunk both considerably and rapidly, meaning one thing only – Jamaica just wasn't worth it any more.
In fact, more worryingly, it would only be a matter of time before the island and its under-employed islanders started costing its government huge amounts of money. Better that government be those islanders themselves. In the years following independence the gap between the haves and the have-nots in this supposed One People opened up to enormous proportions.
On the music front, ska's popularity was, by now, phenomenal. It had been kicking for the best part of four years; it wasn't unheard of for records to sell over 50,000 copies, and the combination of this and the attendant uptown business interest had given the music a sheen of respectability. The Skatalites had a great deal to do with this, for when musicians of their stature on the north coast and in the up-scale jazz clubs started taking it that seriously, the higher orders of Jamaican society got curious. The group would regularly be invited to play at municipal garden parties in the well-manicured uptown parks.
More critical to this onslaught of respectability, though, was Byron Lee and his touring band the Dragonnaires, who were by now spreading the music further afield both sociologically and geographically. Lee, a Chinese-Jamaican who was probably as successful a businessman, record importer and concert promoter as he was a band-leader, would travel the country playing a live version of ska in villages, tourist resorts and upmarket functions. He was not a ghetto man and enjoyed access to the island's upper echelons of society through a close association with Edward Seaga: the politician produced Lee's first record, ‘Dumplin's’, in 1959 and it was Seaga who encouraged him to play ska in the early-1960s; later in the decade, Lee bought Seaga's W.I.R.L. studios to rename them Dynamic Sound, and his Lee Enterprises Ltd never had any bureaucratic problems with show promotions or bringing artists or records into the country. After coming down to Seaga's base at Cho Co Mo Lawn to familiarize himself with ska, he set about smoothing the rough edges off it to include as much of it as calypso and American pop in the band's repertoire. Lee himself maintains it was this and practically this alone that took the music to the furthermost reaches of the island, and by presenting it in an uptown fashion to an uptown crowd he was the catalyst for radio-station interest. While ska had been on the radio for a couple of years before he took it up, it is true that he opened up new arenas to the music, as there were still large parts of Jamaica with no electricity and thus no access to the airwaves.
Although his motives appear wholly altruistic, an astonishing number of musicians seem to view Byron Lee with suspicion. This is a shame. It would seem to have much to do with Lee becoming Jamaican music's first indigenous millionaire (Chris Blackwell was wealthy to start off with), and such paltry, resentful carping – bitching about instead of getting behind their own success stories – is something that continues to dog the reggae business. Talk to people in the industry and very soon you'll learn how everybody (else) ripped off everybody for both ideas and money; no one (else) can be trusted; and nobody (else) who ever made it would have done so if some kept-in-the-background third party (oddly, usually whoever's telling you the tale) hadn't had all the talent and done all the hard work. Maybe such small-mindedness is to do with Jamaica's continuing painful social problems, or perhaps lack of vision is an integral part of an island mentality, but it's always been such perpetual petty squabbling that has held the industry back in the international arena. By the 1970s, ‘difficult to deal with’ could almost be mainstream record company jargon for ‘reggae act’. The fact remains, though; Byron Lee's championing of ska outside its original environment stimulated the sort of widespread interest required to give it legs.
Curiously, the tune that lent its title to this chapter is one of the most seriously mistitled records ever to come out of Jamaica. To call it ‘Train From Skaville’ would have made more sense. Firstly, it was cut at the back end of 1966, by which time ska in the heartlands of the Jamaican music industry – the ghettos – was maybe not buried but very definitely dead. And any notions of Skaville will make even less sense when you listen to the tune – in terms of time signature, arrangement, and general easy-does-it vibe, it's a textbook example of rocksteady. The cooler, more restrained rhythms that, for the second half of that year, had been battering down Trench Town.
And while there were these changes happening on the island, greater things were happening elsewhere too: ska, in its original form, had gone international. Either officially or otherwise, the men and the music were starting to make waves across the sea in both Britain and the United States. And, wouldn't you know it, it was the organic end of things that was doing best.