Listen to Lee Perry's 1968 single ‘People Funny Boy’ and, essentially, you're listening to Africa. As it was in the sixteenth century.
Tangibly, the record is just a hastily knocked-off seven inches of vinyl, a cut that has a slightly faster tempo than might be expected and which follows the Jamaican music-business standard of using lyrics to insult those who have, or who are perceived to have, wronged the artist. In this case, Perry sticks it to former employer Joe Gibbs for that most heinous crime of going ‘big time’ and ignoring the people who helped him to do so. However, concentrate a bit harder and you will notice that ‘People Funny Boy’ has a subtly changed structure that differentiates it completely from the rocksteady of the preceding couple of years. True, it might still emphasize the off-beat, but there's much more going on than that slightly higher tempo – crucially, the electric bass is much more up-front and almost metronomically metered, while several guitars are used rhythmically rather than merely melodically. It's those guitars that produce a speedy strumming pattern not unlike mento's banjoes, while the overall measured percussiveness leaves all sorts of holes that are artfully filled in with Burru- and Kumina-style rhythmic statements. So, a little way beneath the surface lies a Jamaicanness so intrinsic that it doesn't need to worry about the here and the now as it draws a line – a thick black line – straight back to Africa.
In many ways, it's no surprise that Lee Perry should have come up with such a sound – check his very early singles ‘Tackoo’ and ‘Sugar Bag’ and you'll find a vivid mento influence; likewise in the later ‘Django‘-period (1968–70) Upsetters’ stuff: the banjo isn't actually there, but such are the structures that you find yourself mentally mixing it in. Plus it was arranged by Clancy Eccles, who was well known for his interest in traditional Jamaican music and had been part of the recording scene since the dawn of ska, and around performers since before then, being a skilled tailor who made stage-suits. What distinguishes ‘People Funny Boy’ from these other mento-type affairs is where it was pointing. Although perhaps not a textbook example of reggae, its 1968 release date makes it one of the earliest records to sound the part.
If ska was the birth of modern Jamaican popular music and rocksteady its fairly truculent adolescence, then reggae was its coming of age. The first official reggae-as-we-came-to-know-it records emerged in the early months of 1968, and although the most immediate difference between them and rocksteady was the speeding-up of the tempo, the new style really distinguished itself through the freedom it afforded the island's musicians.
Whereas no audience would deny the previous styles were both exciting and entertaining, from a player's point of view they didn't allow much scope for showing off beyond a bit of soloing. Structures and variations were more or less set in stone – even the spontaneity seemed to have its own rigid set of rules. Yet from day one reggae came across as fluid and flexible enough to incorporate a seemingly infinite number of sub-styles, and could thus accommodate the musicians' boredom thresholds as well as the most demanding lawn-dance crowd. Reggae achieved this by presenting itself as unique to the black Jamaican people, the sufferahs, from both a historical as well as a strictly geographical point of view. Then, once the music established its mento phrasings, Burru and Kumina leanings and its nod to Jah Rastafari, it no longer needed to apologize for or justify its own flights of fancy, because, to any Jamaican who heard it, it was so obviously theirs. This new music had such a nationalistic swagger that it could be anything it fancied. In putting together reggae rhythms and traditional sounds, as so deftly demonstrated by ‘People Funny Boy’, Prince Buster's near ten-year-old dream of making genuinely Jamaican records was finally coming to pass.
Reggae was the Jamaican style that at last had the confidence to call its own tune. It wasn't following or adapting any American fashion; indeed, it wasn't borrowing from anywhere apart from the island's own rich folk heritage. And for its evolution to include such longstanding and uncluttered-by-the-modern-world art forms meant that, practically from day one, reggae was an organic rather than a factory-farmed state of affairs. It has always been a tribute to the men and women making this music that, in spite of the by then galloping studio technology's influence both on the swift change from rocksteady and on the style's own internal development, such electronic advancements served to make what was created sound more rather than less human. Indeed, the arrival of reggae created an artistic and spiritual framework so deeply rooted that it was strong enough to support virtually any development; yet, because it was so strictly homegrown, whatever emerged from it would always be Jamaican.
‘People Funny Boy’ wasn't, however, the first example of the changeover from rocksteady to reggae. That distinction would have to be shared between Larry Marshall's ‘Nanny Goat’ and ‘No More Heartaches’ by the Beltones, with both records’ producers – Coxsone Dodd and Harry J ( Johnson), respectively – claiming the credit for entirely different reasons. Dodd has cited his use of a delay echo unit he'd recently imported from the UK, which he hooked up to the guitar to end up with a distinct skanga… skanga… skanga sound on the previously straight-down timekeeping stroke; a state of affairs that naturally served to hurry the music's pace along. Johnson, however, maintains that it was the rhythmic combination he created of arched fingers stabbing an organ chord, a conventional guitar stroke and a far more percussive bass pattern that produced the same effect.
In truth, both men have a point, and you'd expect nothing less from how this story's shaping up. But, if you listen to the overall feel of each record rather than try to isolate particular elements, each one clearly occupies a different notch on reggae's chronology. Harry J's horn-laden piece of harmony may demonstrate reggae characteristics but it's essentially a rocksteady record dressed up in some flashy new clothes; Dodd's tune, however, utilizes what was then cutting-edge gadgetry – as well as the delay echo he introduced a few more outboard FX to Brentford Road at the same time – and, almost immediately, so many other studios began to adopt and adapt that sound through the same technology. ‘Nanny Goat’ would seem to be linking forward, while ‘No More Heartaches’ ties with the past. Thus it could be argued that, while each played a significant part, Johnson's record is, in fact, the primary example.
What they both shared, although ‘Nanny Goat’ showed it off far more prominently, is what was known as the ‘shuffle organ’, a bubbling, brisk-paced keyboard style that allowed former pianists to show off on the electric organs that were by now studio staples. The first two real reggae tunes showed up on the Studio One and Harry J labels, and each set-up employed one of the style leaders along this new ivory way: respectively, Jackie Mittoo and Winston Wright. Mittoo, once the Skatalites' keyboardist, was now, at the tender age of twenty, Coxsone's resident musical arranger/talent scout. Wright had become acknowledged as Jamaica's undisputed master of the Hammond when, as one of Tommy McCook's Supersonics, his lush, infectious tones had been a significant factor in Duke Reid's ruling of the rocksteady roost. Wright had now gone freelance, and found regular employment with Harry Johnson. Johnson had no studio of his own at this point, and booked a room at Coxsone's for those sessions, which meant that both songs were recorded at 13 Brentford Road, with one of the best electric organs on the island.
It was this organ shuffle, probably more than anything else, that was responsible for speeding the music up. Indeed, the organ was so prominent in the studio hierarchy of the day that it defined a style which, just before reggae came into being, briefly carried the swing. This was the John Crow Skank, and Bunny Lee knew all about it.
‘It was just after rocksteady, when producers and musicians was wondering what to do next to please the crowds. It was faster than rocksteady, but didn't have the solid rhythm of what you would call reggae, and it started at Randy's studio on North Parade, with that creep organ thing, when the organ just try to steal up in the tune – the Wailers’ “Duppy Conqueror” and John Holt's “Stick by Me” both have it. We was looking to move from the creep organ to the shuffle effect, but Vincent's [Vincent Chin, the owner of Randy's studio and record store] organ was out of tune – he wouldn't throw the thing out – and when we try and get that shuffle effect on it could put it further out. So whoever was playing it had to be careful.
‘What happened was the only way to play it was to bring your hands off it quick, which would draw the sound like it was flying. And we had Glen Adams, who was then just learning to play organ, and he used to flap his hands over the keyboard like wings, so the name John Crow Skank just come up in the studio, you know, when the musicians were just kicking ideas around. It caught on briefly, too, and when the people in a dance hear the tune is a John Crow Skank they have this kind of wheeling dance, with their arms out, like a crow circling.
‘But it didn't last long because the shuffle organ quickly changed things.’
It is, however, a good example of how the players’ keyboard exhibitionism was escalating. Soon, as the organs became more sophisticated, there was no such thing as a trill too many, and elaborate, almost baroque electric organ parts became early reggae's calling card. Indeed, it seemed entirely appropriate when, in 1969, Boris Gardiner came with ‘Elizabethan Reggae’, a single remembered largely for its enjoyably over-ornate organ (once more courtesy of the hard-working Winston Wright) and a Top 20 hit in Britain in the following year. But over a year before that, the shuffle organ chivvied up the Jamaican beat to reintroduce some of the upfulness that had been rarely seen since ska.
Once again, however, it was the dancehall crowds who precipitated this change in tempo.
There had always been a tributary of rocksteady that announced itself with the kind of barrelling piano riffs that might have been taken as a hangover from the previous decade's JA boogie – the Wailers’ ‘Jailhouse’ and the Clarendonians’ ‘Rudie Bam Bam’ are among the best examples. And either for nostalgic reasons or simply as one way in which sound-system operators kept the crowds on their toes, it was a branch of the music that deejays and dancers particularly enjoyed. It was this pumping quality that players such as Mittoo (both of the above examples were Studio One releases) adapted to their new electric keyboards. And as Bunny Lee, who was by now one of the new music's pioneering producers, recalls:
‘By that time in the development of the music, because so much music was being made to sell, there were a lot of record producers who didn't have sound systems. These producers, like myself, would have to stay around a lot of sound systems to see what the people were doing; which records, or which bits of records, the crowds were reacting to. Sometimes we'd see these things better than the sound men, because we were looking to see what was already there, not what we were going to try out.
‘We would see that when the organ carry it up a little faster the dancers were going crazy over these more uptempo bits, the organ shuffling. A lot of people used to complain that the rocksteady was dragging them down because the beat was too slow, and we knew that faster was the way to take it. The people were just ready for a new beat.
‘That was how reggae developed. From that organ shuffle with the rest of the music falling into place around that. But the people in the dancehalls were dancing to that organ sound quite a long time before the music got recognized. It was the certain dance they were doing – a much more jerky, stepping dance – that would be called the reggae.’
If further evidence about dancers directing the producers is needed, then look no further than the Maytals' 1968 cut ‘Do the Reggay’. The tune is taken to be the first to use the word in its title, albeit with an unusual spelling, and provides the same sort of musical proof as its predecessor Alton Ellis's ‘Rock Steady’. When Toots and the guys' lyric runs I want to do the reggay with you / come on to me / do the dance / is this the new dance going round the town / you can move your baby / and do the reggay, reggay reggay reggay, it could almost be an echo of Alton's words of a couple of years earlier.
The organ soon relieved the bass of some of the melodic duties it had assumed during rocksteady, allowing the bassman to play a snapping, more fundamentally rhythmic sound – the bass, like everything else, had to beef itself up in order not to be drowned by the organ. It was at this point that these newly percussive bass players began a natural and stylistically individual interaction with the drummers, thus setting up the cornerstone upon which twenty years of reggae music would rest, the drum ‘n’ bass. And, back then, these same drummers stayed with the one-drop – which is why rocksteady and reggae are so closely related, this singular method being at the heart of both – but in order to keep up with the organ they had to double up into a 2/4 rhythm pattern.
After the studied smooove of rocksteady, this new sound was taking on a dominantly rhythmic feel. Guitars, which had been all electric for some time now, were having crisp chords chopped out of them to roundly emphasize the off-beat, but with the creeping advances made by studio electronics like Coxsone's delay echo unit this strumming was becoming increasingly subtle and interesting. Sometimes, as in the Studio One case, the gaps left over the organ lines by these new bass and guitar ventures were filled with tricksy guitar effects, or, as was more common in the early days of reggae, by a couple more guitars working off each other to elongate the downstroke further and create a chugging eskanga… eskanga vibe. If you compare the two, this isn't far removed from the banjo strumming that formed the basis of mento. It's unlikely that such mentoism was done consciously, the guitar sound having evolved after the defining organ shuffle, but once recognized – and any reggae veteran will tell you it was – it would have been considered a huge bonus.
Perhaps, it was something locked in the music-makers' collective subconscious that had been waiting for the right, suitably receptive moment to burst out, a notion not too ridiculous when the other aspect of the new music's historic Jamaicanness are taken into account. The holes created naturally by reggae's virtual syncopation were ideal for percussion breaks, and the percussion of choice was of a strictly roots variety: bongos, hand drums, shakers and graters that harked back to the days of slavery and the Kumina and Burru. All of which had survived to the era of mento, which also persevered with traditional rhythmic instruments. Then, from a purely pragmatic position, these traditional sounds seemed tailor-made for the new music as they fell somewhere in between either purely rhythmic or absolutely melodic devices.
Of course, though, this being Jamaica, where very little is what it seems and even less is what it should be, such apparently artistic development had a little help from Government House.
It was now some half a dozen years after independence, and independence clearly wasn't working. The Jamaican Labour Party had retained power for a second term, but by the end of the 1960s it was feeling more than merely ‘uneasy’ about the black nationalist ideas coming in from the USA. Because such thoughts and concepts were imported, the Jamaican authorities could exert no control over them – they'd already tried banning books. Now the more politically aware sufferahs were taking what they wanted from the philosophies of activists such as Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, Julius Lester and the Nation of Islam and applying it to their lives in Jamaica in a more or less random manner. Or so it seemed to the government, which never had any idea what particular part of which specific rallying cry would be taken up next, or how the reaction to unpopular policies would manifest itself.
Perhaps far more worryingly for the Kingston power structure, though, and due in no small part to Walter Rodney's efforts, was the apparent strength and universality with which these radical new doctrines were being taken on board. These adopted dogmas served to galvanize so many black Jamaicans that they had the astonishing effect of cutting across the country's social hierarchy. The working classes, the middle classes, university students, the dispossessed, the gangsters… all could latch on to what was being said. And they came together in a big shout for black control of the means of production and popular influence on the economic consequences, comprising a large and apparently volatile section of the population which had to be appeased.
By this time Jamaica had completed its transformation from an essentially agricultural nation to one of diverse industrial and commercial aspects such as mining, tourism, manufacturing and real estate. But the boom of the years immediately before independence had, within half a decade, all but evaporated, creating an economic vacuum and a whole new set of problems. There was now an owner/management elite; unemployment had increased drastically; inflation, though not yet galloping, was breaking into a brisk trot; and the island was no longer producing enough food to feed its own people. Foreign and (less so) local investment slowed dramatically during the second half of the 1960s – understandably so, as there wasn't really much left to invest in – yet overseas capital had to be enticed in and what was already there had to be dissuaded from pulling out. The only way to do this was to present a rosy-hued picture of an island sufficiently safe and stable for you to want to build your resort hotel or factory, so the politicians had to keep the lid on things. In an historic show of cooperation, the JLP and the PNP struck an unofficial bargain to keep race and class issues off their usually lively campaign agendas for fear of kicking off a civil war. Each agreed that to attempt to gain political capital by stressing the other's poor records in these areas would serve to remind voters of exactly how badly they were being treated and possibly trigger an outright rebellion.
The way forward, the authorities deemed, was to turn the black-power tenets from the negatives they had previously been seen as into positives by using them as a springboard to promote Jamaican nationalism: a scheme that would make the most of the fast-fading memory that was Independence Day fever and, for the first time, give the people their own black pride. Or for the first time with any official acknowledgement. The thinking was that this state-sponsored, therefore controllable brand of black consciousness would be much more manageable and far less scary to American tourists than the imported variety. The government set about promoting Jamaican cultural self-awareness on a national scale, and it was out of this directive that Burru and Kumina music resurfaced, to fan the flames already burning in the ghettos' musical communities.
Much of the force behind this strategy came from Edward Seaga, rapidly rising through the ranks of the JLP, whose interest in and love for Jamaica's cultural heritage could never be denied, regardless of the programme's political agenda. A few years back he had been recording albums of original Jamaican music, and Prince Buster stresses that Seaga was one of the very few people to support his recordings with Count Ossie. Now, he instigated the National Festival, an annual cultural extravaganza celebrating independence through shows of Jamaicanness past and present. At the same time he launched the National Song Contest as an incentive for the burgeoning music industry to turn its attention to Jamaican-sounding songs. Then, as the 1960s played themselves out, traditional Jamaican folklore, music and dance were introduced into school curricula for the first time, while as another innovation, beyond the schools the government encouraged pursuit of Jamaican arts to such a degree as to provide government funding for programmes and practitioners.
Not that the country as a whole took too much encouraging to once again rejoice in its heritage. In spite of the previous – and, it should be said, still underlying – air of self-loathing, by this time blackness and its celebration were high on the social agenda, often for the simple reason that, among so much of the population, a notion of heritage was the only thing of any worth they could call their own. Ironically, even this self esteem was one more aspect of Americanization: post-independence, the British influence over the islanders had been supplanted by that of the USA to such an extent that driving on the left was about the only colonialism that hadn't been usurped by Uncle Sam. Then there was Jamaica's coming to realize its status as a bona fide Third World nation. Events in Africa have always been well covered in the Caribbean, so people were beginning to identify closely with the changing map of Africa and see themselves in the same light as such fledgling republics as Namibia and Zambia. Besides, to explore Jamaica's folk tradition at this point was to explore expressions of blackness or generations of underground Africanness which, in many cases, was viewed obliquely as being largely the point of independence.
It is a huge paradox that while the authorities were promoting Jamaican black pride, they were so out of touch with the mood of their own people that they banned Walter Rodney, a man who had done so much for the exact cause they claimed to be boosting, when the Guyanese lecturer was excluded from re-entering Jamaica following a visit to Canada. In the government's view, his preaching of Rastafari across class barriers was seditious. That in itself marks the degree with which the government and the people parted company on their interpretations of nationalistic pride, but this situation was so woefully misread it provoked major civil disturbances. They started on university campuses, among Rodney's students, then spread downtown to the working people and the sufferahs who genuinely tore things up. Maybe the authorities didn't think an educated man like Walter Rodney could mean anything to the lower classes. Or maybe they couldn't imagine insurrection spreading down the social scale. Or maybe they expected large-scale rioting to break out and simply didn't care – it probably isn't too much of a coincidence that a large number of Canadian soldiers were on training manoeuvres on the island at the time of Rodney's banning. After all, there was, at the time, much Canadian investment in Jamaica.
So while the whole notion of government-sponsored Afro-centricity may have been a sham, it played a large part in introducing blackness as an integral part of reggae – where it would remain and, over the next dozen or so years, be called into service as one of the people's most potent weapons against authority.
The main reason reggae took off commercially so quickly was that the music industry had changed enormously between 1959 and 1969. Essentially, this was to do with the large numbers of records now being sold retail, such a quantity that a great deal of small and not so small specialist stores were opening all over the country, supplementing the still-active bag men and establishments that sold a few tunes as a sideline to their main business – cafés, barbers, electrical stores and so on. To feed this consumer demand, there was a new generation of producers, like Bunny Lee or Harry J, who didn't have sound systems or shops but set up operations making records primarily for sale to the formal record wholesalers and distributors, who were now in place in the Jamaican music business alongside the less-conventional pedal-powered outfits. The new record production companies sprang up like weeds – figuratively speaking – after all, it involved far less outlay of either time or money if you didn't have a sound system or a shop, and there were enough studios to be rented by the hour. Which in turn meant that the amount of music increased vastly as new players joined the ranks and the established guys had to work that bit harder to stay ahead.
This isn't to say that the old ways of doing things had been put to one side, an assumption frequently and erroneously arrived at because there was so much reggae music available away from the lawns. But there was now a viable alternative, one which meant that those outside the actual sound-system axis – either punters or providers – no longer had to pay the dancehalls any mind – either physically or mentally. Therefore they didn't. But the core of the music industry remained the dances, and the most reliable way to have a big hit was to have a dancehall hit with it first. The sound systems remained operating in exactly the same way they always had: new tunes were recorded, dub plates cut which would, within hours, be spun at the dance; and crowd reaction was everything. And don't forget there were still drinks to be sold and gate receipts to be counted – in fact, because there was now so much outside competition for the music fans' minds and moolah, the competition between sound systems in the late 1960s was probably even more intense.
Every sound man continued to go into the studio to record the current hot artist or whatever raw kid he had a hunch on, then expose the tunes in sound clashes. All that had changed in this respect was what happened to the cuts once they'd moved the crowd. Of course, exclusive new tunes were still used to keep a sound on top, but whereas in the past the sound man/ producer would once have held it up as unique for a length of time that may have been measured in years, at this point in reggae's evolution if a record tore the place up he'd have to get it into the shops right away. Procrastination could cost him a small fortune.
By 1969, the radio was helping reggae's cause, too, albeit reluctantly. Derrick Harriott remembers how it used to be, and tells it from the point of view of one with a considerable vested interest in radio's promotion of local music – his label, Crystal, was firmly established; he had wholesale and retail record businesses; and he was successfully segueing his tremendous reputation as a producer of rocksteady into the world of reggae.
‘The radio people were supporting the music to a point, but I don't think they were supporting it in the way they should. I always used to fight with them, telling them “It's independence; you people should be playing Jamaican music – at least seventy – thirty.” Other producers would have the same arguments, and the people at RJR and JBC would tell us they didn't have enough Jamaican music to even play three days of it. Which we all knew was a joke, as at that time there was plenty out there.
‘We didn't think we were having much effect, but somebody must have been listening because at the end of the sixties there was a big uproar about a payola scandal. It was front page in the news over here in Jamaica and several people got fired from radio stations over it. All along they'd been taking money from the big distributors and those with licences to press American records. After that they played a lot more Jamaican music, but still not as much as they should have done. Maybe something like fifty–fifty. Which although it did quite a lot to help the homegrown music industry, the radio people were just bias against it, because next they come telling us “We don't know if all-reggae would work.”
‘Of course it would. But they didn't try it until Irie FM launched in the 1990s and prove everybody wrong. It has been so popular that now all the other stations have stepped up their quota of Jamaican music.’
Something else that was undoubtedly working in reggae's favour was its tremendous width. Such was its spread that without even stretching too far it could happily embrace practically any influence or accent its protagonists fancied. By the time the music's fundamental structures had fully established themselves – at the end of the decade or so – what went on top would reinvent itself on a regular basis. It seems that reggae as an art form had become so strong, both physically and culturally, that it could take anything on board and not have to worry about being swamped. And, as the 1960s became the 1970s, it looked like there was room for everything. Reggae's rhythms flexed to form the backbone of a myriad sub-clauses from bouncy pop music, to strictly roots, by way of ‘sophisticated’ strings 'n’ things, dubwise, lovers’ rock, Latin swing (memorably the Ethiopians’ ‘Mi Amore’), harmony singing, deejay toasting and instrumental cuts. All with varying degrees of artistic success, it must be said, but none of it detracting from the fact that this was reggae. First and foremost. And the producers who were making this case so expressively were, in more cases than not, adding a new layer to the existing hierarchy.
Of course, Coxsone and Duke Reid were in effect, with the former far fuller than the latter. Buster was slower to move on from rocksteady glories. Presumably his frequent run-ins with the government, his establishing mosques and teaching Islam and his juke-box-hire business interests were all proving something of a distraction.
At Studio One Clement Dodd had chosen his musical directors shrewdly, and the idea of keeping them on wages did a lot for the idea of keeping them, full stop. His top men were Jackie Mittoo and Leroy Sibbles who, respectively, played organ and bass, then the two most important instruments in the new style – also, by way of an enormous bonus, Sibbles was a wonderful vocalist with the Heptones and a much more than merely ‘accomplished’ vocal arranger. Between the three of them they thoroughly assimilated the music's change of direction and it was during the first couple of years of the reggae era that, as a record producer, Coxsone went clear. In Studio One Dodd established a brand identity and a reputation unsurpassed by anything in Jamaican music before or since, and in doing so created a stockpile of rhythms and backing tracks that would still be in regular use long after the Brentford Road studios had closed down, Dodd had decamped to New York and reggae itself had shifted through roots, ragga, dancehall and beyond. More than thirty years later, aficionados all over the world continue to look on the Studio One or Coxsone logo as a sort of kite mark and make decisions to buy based on the label alone.
To call Studio One of the late 1960s ‘the Jamaican Motown’ would probably be flattering Berry Gordy's company. Relatively, it was of much greater significance in its field – Motown operated as a hugely successful aspect of soul's overall development, whilst for the first few years of reggae Studio One was the music's overall development.
These days, however, there isn't much to see at number 13 Brentford Road. Walk up to the padlocked gates and anybody passing – on foot, on a bike, or by car – will yell ‘Studio One!’ or ‘Coxsone!’ or ‘Murrrdah’ or words to that effect. The locals are used to tourists of all persuasions making this pilgrimage and feel obliged to play their boisterous part in their very own landmark. Which is a good thing. Not only because it's so sociable but it's good to know that Studio One, as a figurative and literal presence, isn't forgotten, because in fact there's not a great deal of history left there to be looked at. Even if it's the day of the week that one of Mr Dodd's relatives is there to let you in and snoop around, all you're going to gaze upon is shabby 1960s décor and some piles of boxes. Which may or may not have records in them.
It's probably best to stay outside the gates and look in on the dusty yard, where the great mango tree there used to provide the only shade for the hordes of young hopefuls who'd wait patiently for their turn at the Sunday morning auditions. Or stare at the sheets of corrugated that protect the back of the lot and prevent the studio doors being seen from the street, a function that, as we shall see, was absolutely vital to Studio One's domination. And while you're looking, make out that you can hear tunes like ‘Skylarking’, ‘Baby Why’, ‘I Hold the Handle’, ‘Yaho’ or ‘Armagideon Time’ floating out into the yard.
Of course you wouldn't always have had to pretend. Especially not when the 1960s were drawing to a close, when, as the music made the transition from rocksteady, the Brentford Road crew crafted classic tune after classic tune.
The Heptones, Alton Ellis, Larry Marshall and Carlton and his Shoes were just four of the established acts that adapted gloriously to the incoming style at Studio One, but it was the new blood, with bright ideas and fresh approaches, who did so much to instigate changes: the Cables’ ‘Baby Why’, ‘What Kind of World’ and ‘Love Is Pleasure’ were the highlights of their 1969 spent at Brentford Road; the same time and place as Horace Andy did his best work – ‘Skylarking’, ‘See a Man's Face’ and ‘Every Tongue Shall Tell’, for instance; while John Holt was getting his post-Paragons solo career off the ground there; and it was where Burning Spear started off, cutting prototype versions of many of the almost trance-inducing spirituals recorded for Jack Ruby in the mid-1970s. Continuing in this more reflective mood, the Wailing Souls began recording in their own right at Studio One – incidentally, like the Wailers, they were taught to sing by Joe Higgs and when they worked as session singers for Coxsone they used to stand in whenever Peter and Bunny didn't turn up for rehearsals. Then there was a series of instrumentals from the house band, led by Mittoo… or Roland Alphonso… or Ernest Ranglin… or, on one memorable occasion, Alpha Boys’ School's musical director Lennie Hibbert playing vibraphone. And as this band featured such brass warriors as Headley Bennett, Val Bennett, Cedric Brooks, Vin Gordon and Bobby Ellis, it would be safe to assume that – post-rocksteady – the horn section was coming back in a big way.
Although Dodd had been a major player since the inception of modern Jamaican music, his company had always been up against competition as big as – sometimes even bigger than – itself. In the rocksteady years it's not unfair to say he played second fiddle to Duke Reid's sustained successes. But as that era drew to a close it was Coxsone's turn. While the Duke was reluctant to move with the times, Coxsone relished the notion of a more percussive music, a style that was increasingly modal and less reliant on communication through conventional chord progressions than its immediate predecessor had been. It was far more in tune with his jazz roots, in the same way as Duke Reid's naturally soulful leanings had been right on the money for a smoother style like rocksteady. Also, at the heart of it all, Coxsone was a dance man. He has frequently spoken of how he made ‘dancing’ music as opposed to ‘listening’ music – borne out by the boogie-woogie, shuffle and wild style R&B he started off cutting and the tunes introduced to his public by his and Blackie's steps. These latest developments suited him much better.
Importantly, Dodd was trusting his own and his musical directors' judgement more and more. In spite of impressive jazz credentials, he was actually a deeply conservative fellow, seldom given to taking chances. Now, after three years of owning his own studio, he was starting to relax a bit. His increasing confidence in the musical innovations emanating from sessions at Brentford Road fired his release schedule to move ahead of the pack, and his whole approach to auditioning changed. Before he set up at Brentford Road, the Sunday morning auditions used to be open affairs, held at his Waltham Park Road shop, Coxsone's Music Centre. An audience would crowd in off the streets and loudly express their opinions of each prospective act – and Coxsone would decide which to record based purely on this. It was also good business: he used to sell enough on a Sunday morning to cover the shop's weekly overhead. When he first moved to Brentford Road he held auditions in the yard with the same trial-by-jury element, but by this point he was holding the actual auditions inside and relying on either himself or, mostly, Leroy Sibbles or Jackie Mittoo to make the choices.
When the bass began to assume a greater importance than the organ, Leroy Sibbles edged Jackie Mittoo to one side as the man in charge of the music at Studio One. Every tune had to have a bass-line but not all of them needed the organ. This was a clear case of the pupil outstripping the teacher – when both of them were teenagers, Leroy Sibbles had mastered the bass as one-third of Mittoo's jazz trio, a club-gigging group he moonlighted in to supplement his earnings from the Heptones. Mittoo gave him an enormous amount of help and encouragement with the instrument and let Coxsone know that the lead singer in his most promising rocksteady group had musical talents to match his vocal abilities.
In his various capacities as lead singer and songwriter in the Heptones from 1962, then bass player, musical arranger and interpreter, studio singer, talent scout, tunesmith and recording star at Studio One from the middle of that decade, Leroy Sibbles is one of the true giants of Jamaican music. When Coxsone's company was establishing itself as the Jamaican label of genuinely iconic proportions, Leroy Sibbles was responsible for the signing of so many artists and for the sound and feel of so much of that classic catalogue – although nothing would be released without Dodd's say so, by now he wasn't hands-on in the studio. In purely musical terms, Leroy Sibbles is probably the most important man in rocksteady/reggae, yet when he quit Coxsone in 1971, you had to know your stuff to even know who he was – understandably, it was lack of recognition as much as lack of payment that led to the resentful parting.
Any bitterness has now largely faded and Leroy Sibbles is happy to talk about the better times at Brentford Road. Willing to give up time even though he was moving house on the day I talked to him – ‘It might mean yuh haffi carry two box… heh heh heh’. No problem, I'll carry Leroy Sibbles's stuff all day if that's what he wants. As it was, it didn't wear me out, and after he directed the removal crew where to put several cabinets full of Jamaican, British, Canadian and American music awards we sat out on the balcony of his swish apartment in a gated development in Constant Spring. Leroy bought us a couple of big water coconuts from the vendor who, apparently, still tours the estate every evening about this time (well, it does no good to leave the streets completely behind), and challenged me to name a Studio One tune from his period there that he had nothing to do with. Anything I come up with was trumped with ‘played bass on that’ or ‘arranged that’ or ‘wrote the melodies for that’ or ‘auditioned them’ or ‘sung on that’, until, with his good natured laughter licking me in my head, I took my ball and went home, so to speak. At which point we got down to business and talked about Studio One until it was dark.
‘The Heptones come into music in 1962 or '63, just after independence. The mood of the people back then was nice… it was beautiful. Everything was beautiful and nobody had no problems for a time – when the rocksteady came in later, it wasn't just the music was changing, people were thinking about the situation differently. Musically at that time there was much more singing, and that was when a group like ours really came into its own. We were listening to American groups like the Impressions and the Temptations, a lot of the new, soulful R&B, and our style was always more mellow, slower than ska. The Heptones were partly responsible for the change; from “Fattie Fattie” onwards we were mellow when most other guys were known for their speed.
‘When the group get successful it encourages other singers – it was a trend thing, because Jamaicans will always follow a trend. The rocksteady thing made it much more possible for groups to sing like that because it was expected of them to be sweet, very melodic. Because we did “Fattie Fattie” at Studio One and it was such a big hit, other groups come there looking for the same hit sound. The Heptones had a lot to do with Studio One going massive like it did, because that record did so much to put it on the map.
‘When I write it the other guys still had jobs in the day and I wasn't yet full time at Studio One – I would stay at home and write the songs for the others to finish off and rehearse in the evening. “Fattie Fattie” came as I see this woman, Miss B, coming down the road who was short and fat and have a kind of waddle walk. I see her and the whole song fall into place because I start singing how I want a fat girl, which is a compliment in Jamaica because most man like their woman with some flesh on their bones. It wasn't about Miss B, she was a big woman – maybe thirty or forty when I had not yet turned twenty – it was just that seeing her made me think of the line “I need a fat girl”. When we sing it, people love it and we have to sing it so much they know it even before we make the record. Then when it come out the radio ban it – they say it too rude and will corrupt the children – but everywhere, in the jukeboxes, in the rum shops, in the dance, everywhere playing it. For nearly a year, pure “Fattie Fattie”. That's what made the Heptones and did so much for Studio One, because back then everything was Duke Reid, Duke Reid, Duke Reid.’
Leroy paused to take a deep draught of coconut water before continuing.
‘After the group started to spend more time at Coxsone's Studio One I got involved in the music there as a singer, writer, arranger, bass player. Jackie Mittoo get me involved. I'm responsible for the first hit song Dennis Brown ever did, I played on that. “Queen of the Minstrels”, “Stars”, “Sata Massa Gana”, “Declaration of Rights” and so much works by so many of the new artists like John Holt… I'm playing on first Burning Spear album. A lot of the time, especially when we're just voicing tracks, it was just me and the engineer in there.
‘Coxsone was around but he wasn't so much in the actual studio part, he didn't get involved too much and he leave me minding the store. Also, a lot of the time he was out on the road doing the business part, so when I'm round the studio I don't usually see too much of him. Most of the time he don't know what is actually going on in the recording, but nothing would leave there to be release without his say so as he would listen to the songs in the evening, and pick releases of what's going to come out. He wasn't just yes or no either, he would bring songs back and say things like, “It a good song and I want to put it out but it need more of something or less of something on it,” and then you would get the time to do more work on it.
‘How it work was singers would come in with a tune and sing it to me, and I would start thinking about what I was going to do with it. A lot of the time I already had ideas and arrangements I wanted to try out ready in my head – you could do that because nearly all the songs the singers would come in with were structured so similarly that there wouldn't be too many surprises. Like I said, Jamaicans are very trendy people so you always knew what to expect. They would sing each of their tunes two or three times, and because I could play the bass I would start to work out a riddim there and then. The singers would leave after that and I would then work out the arrangements for the rest of the band – sometimes one of them, like Jackie, might have some melody ideas – but mostly it was the musicians just played and the singers just sung. Everything else I worked out.
‘The singers coming in with new songs like that would usually happen first thing in the morning, at about nine o'clock or earlier. They'd come back in about two or three days’ time, when they'd practised it and by then, most times, I'd already have the backing track done and we just had to voice it. If it was a group I'd go through the vocal arrangements with them then – I'd already have figured them out – and we'd record it. I would maybe run through it a couple of times then do it in one or two takes, straight, all the way through. The engineer couldn't punch in.
‘We'd do five or six songs a day like that. Because it was single track or while I was there it soon went two-track – so we could voice the tunes separate from doing the backing – there wasn't any mixing to be done after the recording, that was all done with levels as the musicians played. But it was still real busy in there because those five or six songs would be done with different artists so there was people coming and going all the time. And that helped. That busy atmosphere was exactly right to create good songs, because everybody know they're part of something successful and they drive each other on. Those were good days there, with a fantastic vibe.
‘Coxsone knew how to spur people on, too, and when he was there, he could be quite, yunno, sly. If he was in the actual studio and he didn't think a singer was giving the very best he could, jus' not up to scratch for whatever reason, he would say, casual like, to me “Hmmmm, try that without the singing, mi t'ink this would do well as instrumental…” He was just playing, the band would know what he was doing, but the singers who wouldn't have known about this trick would suddenly get better on the next take because they didn't want to lose the payment they would get for voicing the tune.
‘A lot of that Studio One sound was possible from the way it was engineered. Even when it went two-track the way it was balanced hadn't changed. Coxsone himself had set it up, because in the beginning he used to do all his own engineering and he knew what he was doing. He had bought two six-track mixers in New York, from a firm called Lang, and because he had so many different channels he could balance the instruments by giving them more than one track if he wanted them to be strong. He'd mic'ed up the bass and the drums to sound strong and fat – I think it was three channels for the drums and three for the bass, and only one for the horns – which was the foundation of that whole Studio One sound.
‘It could only have been balanced like that in that room, we had to be careful where the musicians were positioned. Because he wouldn't hire his studio out to other producers they tried to build their places like it, but nowhere else could get that balance. When Channel One took over from Studio One, they might have had that different drum pattern, but their sound was almost pure Studio One; they were the ones that came closest to copying it.’
He broke off to exchange a warm greeting with a passing neighbour, home from work. Leroy Sibbles is still very much a man of the people.
‘A big part of my job was to go in on Sundays to audition singers. Those sessions would start around midday and go on ‘til about five, depending on how many people was come down. It was pure singers, every time there was twenty, sometimes as many as thirty, and they'd have started a queue down the street before I got there. Then when they were let into the yard they'd wait, sometimes for several hours trying to find a bit of shade under the tree or against the wall. They didn't mind, because this was their big chance and at that time everybody wanted to sing for Studio One.
‘There was no band there, just me and maybe some of the other musicians and them in the front yard. Sometimes Coxsone would be there, too. The only time we'd need to go inside would be if Coxsone wanted to tape particular singers, and that would be played back to them when they came in to do the tune to remind them of what could be done.
‘Each man would have to come with four, five or six of him songs, because if you only had one song I'd think you're just trying something. That you're not really serious about your music and I wouldn't consider you. You'd have to prove that you'd worked hard by having already prepared more than one song. Then I'd be able to pick the best two songs a singer had, it was better for them like that because it gave me the choice of songs that might have potential but perhaps even they didn't see that. I would choose the guys and the songs that I liked, and give them a time – probably a few days later – for them to come back to the studio having worked some more on those songs. That's when we'd run through them with a band. Sometimes, you might see a potential in the singer but the songs he had weren't ready yet, so you might tell him to work on them some more or to come in anyway and you'd give him something to sing by somebody else.
‘Those audition Sundays were real exciting, because you never know who was going to come in with a song next. Cornell Campbell… the Mad Lads… Burning Spear… the Meditations… they all came through auditions I held on a Sunday. Auditions at Studio One and at other studios were taking over from the talent shows like Vere Johns' as the way for producers to find new acts.’
One of the successful new acts at one of those Sunday morning sessions was Horace Andy. At an audition conducted by Dodd himself, no less. Horace, known as ‘Sleepy’ owing to his ability to fall asleep almost anywhere and in almost any circumstances, got his career off the ground as a teenager at Studio One at the very beginning of the 1970s, when his beautifully lilting falsetto crooned tunes such as ‘Skylarking’, ‘See a Man Face’ and ‘Every Tongue Shall Tell’. Looking much younger than the almost fifty that he is, he's settled in London and still records and performs in London, New York and Jamaica. Recently, Horace recut some of his classics with Massive Attack, while his involvement with various drum ’n’ bass producers is bringing an interesting, traditional element to modern dance music while boosting roots reggae firmly into the present day. It had, at the time of writing, started something of a trend for over-ambient dub.
When I met him, at his management's offices in West London, he was back at Studio One with Leroy Sibbles and, occasionally, Coxsone. Horace puts it from the singer's as opposed to the management's point of view, and significantly, he always refers to the proprietor as Mr Dodd, whereas Leroy calls him Coxsone.
‘I was one of those people in that queue out here on a Sunday. Bwoy, it was hot! But it was worth it, because I audition for Mr Dodd, when I do “See a Man Face”. I just go in and sing it and he say he like it, ask me to come back in a few days and it start from there.
‘It was a good scene at Studio One. All the pros were there and it was like a school where I learn to sing. I learned from Alton Ellis, Leroy Sibbles, Sylvan Morris, Cedric Brooks, yunno. It wasn't as if I was taken under anybody's wing – I ask, that's how determined I was. And because they are all professionals and the vibe round there was so good, so communal, they would help the likkle yout' who just wanted to learn. It was like they took pride in coaching me in all aspects of music. I would be around the studio and when they not doing anything, when they get a spare time I would ask questions. I would say, “Can you show me G?” and the next day I would ask something else. I would always be polite because they were men I respected and they appreciated that. If they're in the studio and they sit down from doing a song and they're not doing anything I would ask, I would say, “Leroy, show me blah blah blah on the bass,” and he would do it. Then I would fool around on the bass until they ready to go again and I would give him the instrument back. Or I would bang the piano until they're ready.
‘To do it to this degree wasn't too usual. It was just the instincts that I have, all I wanted to do was learn, learn, learn, and when I could play an instrument, that's when I started arranging my own stuff.
‘Studio One was for learning. The people there, like Leroy and Jackie Mittoo, loved their music and what they did so much that they enjoyed helping other people. That was the vibe. Everybody who went there to sing came out better than they were when they started. It was like a college. That was down to the musicians and the experienced singers there, not down to Mr Dodd himself – he wasn't there much by then, Leroy was practically running things. There was always plenty of guys hanging out in the yard, at the back and the sides and out front, even if they weren't recording that day they'd jus' be there soaking up the vibe and learning all the time.’
It's easy to say success breeds success, especially in a village like Kingston's music community, and, like the point Leroy made about ‘Fattie Fattie’, once Studio One had established itself its hit parade mushroomed. Suddenly, it was attracting the cream of Kingston's players and singers, even though it didn't yet enjoy the reputation of, say, Treasure Isle or Beverley's. Why? Coxsone was adventurous in his outlook, but he'd always been that. And it certainly wasn't because he paid better, if many ex-Studio One stars are to be believed. At that point, as rocksteady became reggae, there was a much more straightforward reason why so many people went to Studio One. Horace explains:
‘You could smoke weed there. By now, Rasta was getting big in reggae and musicians want to build a spliff while they're working and Studio One was the only place where you could do that. You couldn't do it in Dynamic or Federal or Duke Reid's – skin up in Federal and they're gonna run you right out… physically. Duke Reid was once a policeman and apart from the legality – though that wouldn't have bothered Duke if it had suited him – he hated anything to do with Rasta and didn't want it in the place. And Dynamic was owned by Byron Lee, who was real uptown, and he definitely don't want that business in his studio. Mr Dodd, though, was sympathetic to Rasta people.
‘That's why Studio One was number one because you get the spiritual vibes mixed with the herb. The musicians and singers wanted to come there because they knew that, and then once you were there it help the vibe flow. You could feel relax, find a little corner and sit down and smoke and when the ideas come, the studio's right there and you just go in. Other studios you can't smoke in the place so you have to go out in the street, so you're no gonna get no vibes because it'll break your flow. Some places even sent you down the street because they don't even want you near their place with a spliff. Mr Dodd didn't like you sitting down in the front smoking because people are passing and you could be seen, so if you wanted to sit outside you sat at the back, on this tree that had been cut down, or round the sides behind the corrugated iron that screen you from the road. It was funny because although Mr Dodd don't mind, he don't want to encourage it either, so he used to make out he didn't know – if you were sitting down with a spliff and he pass, you have to hide it – kinda like a schoolkid. He knew about it, he just didn't want to see it.
‘But that was why Studio One was number one, because you could sit down and smoke your spliff in the place. People want to come there because they know that would make the right vibe for the music, and when they get there it means the music they make is even better. It do a lot for the community atmosphere in there too, because everybody share their spliff or their bag of weed.’
Maybe the reason Studio One's dominance waned as the 1970s progressed was because other smaller, more street-vibey operations took passing the chalice to be a prerequisite. Or maybe it was because Coxsone changed the gear to eight-, sixteen- and, later, twenty-four track mixing capabilities and lost that wonderful sound balance he'd been forced to achieve in mono with imaginative mic arrangements. Or maybe it was because by the middle of that decade both Leroy Sibbles and Jackie Mittoo had left. Time just moved on and Coxsone didn't.
Whatever the reason, the fact remains that, although Studio One enjoyed a last, early-1980s hurrah with a dancehall generation that included Johnny Osbourne, Michigan & Smilie, Willie Williams, Freddie McGregor and the Lone Ranger, Dodd's days at the cutting edge of Jamaican music were numbered. In the mid-1980s he shut up shop and moved to New York, where he runs a record shop and administers one of the world's greatest back catalogues in any form of music.
Duke Reid wasn't having nearly so much success. Perhaps the required syncopation and percussive nature of what was happening grated against his naturally oily ideals, but he found it conspicuously difficult to adapt. Not that he didn't have a few hits – Hopeton Lewis's ‘Boom Shaka Laka’ (a Festival Song Contest winner), the Techniques’ ‘My Girl’ and ‘Moonlight Lover’ by Joya Landis in particular – but he wasn't to stamp his mark on any post-rocksteady era until he began recording U-Roy in 1970. And dynamic as that was, it was never more than a retread of the Duke's rocksteady days. The same was true of Prince Buster. While he wasn't a complete stranger to success during this period – John Holt's ‘Rain from the Skies’, Dennis Brown's ‘If I Had the World’, the Heptones’ ‘Our Day Will Come’ – he pretty much took a sabbatical until coming back to make deejay music with Big Youth and Dennis Alcapone a couple of years later.
Derrick Harriott and Leslie Kong made the crossing from rocksteady with considerable ease. Harriott had two major advantages: (i) his Crystal label's house band the Crystalites featured Winston Wright on the organ, and wasn't afraid of a bit of rootsman percussion, and (2) his own soul-boy leanings and silky pipes. Right from the off he not only seemed to understand how each aspect of reggae worked individually, but could put them together with stunning effect. The Undertaker album of instrumentals is among the very best Western-inspired reggae, while the work he did with the Kingstonians includes ‘Sufferer’ and ‘Singer Man’, from that trio at their absolute peak. And there was still a great deal more to come from the man they call the Musical Chariot. Kong's work is the most widely known largely because he had the best international deal, but that shouldn't in any way detract from what he was getting on to wax. His roster included the Maytals, the Melodians, the Pioneers and Desmond Dekker: at the turn of the decade on the Beverley's label you had ‘54–46 That's My Number’, ‘Pressure Drop’, ‘Monkey Man’, ‘Sweet Sensation’, ‘The Rivers of Babylon’, ‘Long Shot (Kick de Bucket)’, ‘Easy Come Easy Go’ and ‘Israelites’. Leslie Kong also cut reggae with the Wailers, Ken Boothe, Delroy Wilson and the Gaylads. If he hadn't died of a heart attack in 1971, who knows how far he would have taken it?
Then there were the (relatively) new boys. Clancy Eccles hit his purple period about now, with the same band Derrick Harriott used, except they called themselves the Dynamites. He had hits for himself – the bawdy ‘Fatty Fatty’ and ‘Auntie Lulu’ being the most notable – while among his productions were ‘Holly Holy’ (the Fabulous Flames), ‘Herbsman’ (King Stitt), ‘No Good Girl’ (the Beltones) and ‘Please Stay’ (Larry Marshall), plus there were a string of hit instrumentals from the Dynamites. Bunny Lee came into his own at this point: the easy-action very post-rocksteady vibe he wove around Slim Smith, Stranger Cole and the Sensations gave way to his coaxing some serious reggae out of Pat Kelly (‘How Long’), Eric Donaldson (‘Cherry Oh Baby’ – another Festival Song winner), John Holt (‘Stick by Me’) and Delroy Wilson (‘Better Must Come’).
Joe Gibbs released some excellent early reggae records on his Amalgamated label, and was pretty much unfazed by Lee Perry's rancorous departure as he took on Winston ‘Niney’ Holness to fill the little fellow's shoes as engineer and arranger. It allowed the line that had begun so successfully with the Pioneers and the Versatiles to continue with the Soul Mates, the Soul Sisters, the Reggay Boys, the Slickers, the Hippy Boys (an instrumental quartet that were more or less the nucleus of the Upsetters – the Barrett brothers, Glen Adams and Reggie Lewis) and Nicky Thomas. Although Joe Gibbs didn't build careers, the one-offs scored by his acts form a memorable list that runs to ‘Them a Laugh and a Kiki’, ‘Wreck a Buddy’, ‘Long Shot’, ‘Never Come Never See’, ‘People Grudgeful’, ‘Trust the Book’ and ‘Love of the Common People’. Harry J, who was there at the beginning with the Beltones, stuck with it to build a sound around the keyboard skills of Winston Wright and Winston Blake (aka Blake Boy) for a string of bubbling instrumentals by Harry J All-Stars or the Jay Boys (essentially the same personnel) of which ‘The Liquidator’ will be the best remembered, but which included a cut of ‘Je t'aime (moi non plus)’ that somehow managed to stay on the right side of cheesy. He was also the man who paired Bob Andy with Marcia Griffiths for a cover of Nina Simone's ‘Young, Gifted and Black’ and ‘Pied Piper’, although Andy himself produced the latter single. Incidentally, ‘The Liquidator’ has lived on as the backing in several British TV commercials and is still played at Wolverhampton Wanderers' home games to rouse their fans – those distinctive six beats at the end of certain lines are tailor-made for chanting, ‘[clap-clap-clap-clap] – The Wolves!’.
Then there was Lee Perry. Scratch had split with Joe Gibbs and launched his Upsetter record label. He persuaded players to leave Gibbs and come to work with him, and his floating pool settled down from the group pianist Gladstone Anderson used to organize for him – regulars were Winston Wright (organ), Clifton Jackson (bass) and Lloyd Adams (drums) – to what became the Upsetters. The reason Perry could lure musicians of this calibre wasn't the money but the creative freedom he was offering. As a producer who had been experimenting in this new style for some time he more than understood how far it could be stretched. Considering he didn't have his own studio at this point, Perry put out a phenomenal amount of music between 1968 and 1972 that varied from the mentoed to the demented, with songs of love, protest or pure silliness, and instrument's that were at once mellifluous and downright spiky, thrown in along the way. If a musician had an idea, then Perry would make it work within a reggae format.
Although the Upsetter label included a number of impressive vocal sides – Peter Tosh, Pat Kelly, the Ethiopians, Eric Donaldson, Busty Brown and the Mellotones all recorded for Scratch during this period – it was the instrumentals that really made a difference. On the surface, Upsetters’ tracks like ‘Prison Sentence’, ‘Baby Baby’, ‘Skanky Chicken’, ‘For a Few Dollars More’, ‘Dry Acid’, ‘Live Injection’, ‘Caught You’ and, the big UK hit, ‘The Return of Django’ are nothing short of barking mad; but look deeper into them – or have a long session spinning Upsetter cuts – and a crystal-clear logic emerges: musically, the whole point of reggae is its inherent pointlessness. To truly plug this new style into the music of the Dark Continent, reggae had to shuck off the very Western notion of melody as the defining clause. It needed to become apparently randomly rhythmic, out of which its own concept of tunefulness would emerge – one that, to an outsider, seems to exist for no other reason than self-celebration. Like it does if you listen to un-Europeanized ensemble drumming – Burru, Kumina etc. Lee Perry's ideas were subtly meshing to point away from rock-steady's soul inflections to a road that could only lead to roots.
It's small wonder that, in 1969, Bob Marley turned up at Lee Perry's door with the other Wailers looking to advance their cause beyond their teenage rudieisms.
The above-mentioned are the notables, but there were dozens of footsoldiers beavering away in tiny studios and, in general, as reggae progressed beyond the end of the 1960s it was wonderfully productive. Producers and artists seemed to feel they could do anything and in most cases they did. Nothing was safe from reggaefication. While an absence of copyright laws on the island might have had something to do with the astonishing number of covers emerging, this trend was then at its height as songwriters were finding out what they could or couldn't do. It was a ludicrously broad sweep of music, too. US soul tunes were standard fare for the one-drop makeover – the multi-volume CD collection Just My Imagination – Soulful Reggae For Lovers consists of nothing else. Likewise, a generous selection of UK Top 40 hits of the day would be overhauled from a reggae standpoint as would a smattering of C&W songs – in keeping with the Jamaican mainstream's fondness for that style: ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ was something of a one-drop perennial, the Maytals did a rousing version of ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’, while perhaps the most unlikely was the Wailers’ first openly Rasta song, ‘Selassie in the Chapel’, which retrod that much-loved Elvis weepie ‘Crying in the Chapel’.
Film and TV themes remained as popular a choice of material as they had been back in the ska days, with cowboy motifs a clear first choice – before the 1970s when American blaxploitation came to dominate Kingston's vibrant cinema scene, watching cowboy films was how young men tended to live out their bad-man fantasies, often – too often – joining in the on-screen gun-fights with live ammunition. There has been an album of early reggae western numbers, Magnificent Fourteen – 14 Shots of Western Inspired Reggae, available for about the last twenty-five years, just as there have been a number of reggae Christmas albums, notably one collection of late-sixties covers of traditional seasonal songs under the title I'm Dreaming of a Black Christmas. Taking that joke a little further was The Black Album, a Various Artists remake of the Beatles’ White Album including such dubious delights as the Rudies covering ‘My Sweet Lord’ and a Marcia Griffiths version of ‘Don't Let Me Down’.
Such diversity in reggae was inevitable, as the sheer weight of numbers of artists, players and producers grew. As with each previous change of style there was a new wave of musicians, writers and producers keen to break ties with the past and prove themselves with a new way of doing things. And by this time wannabe stars were coming to Kingston from all over the island specifically to try their luck. They brought with them all sorts of outside influences, specifically the ones Edward Seaga was so keen on, such as Kumina, Burru and Pocomania, which were always much bigger in rural Jamaica. These newcomers weren't complete chancers, for by now the music business had spread all over the country and the ideas they had were what they'd been trying out at the sound systems and embryonic studio scenes in such burgs as Port Antonio, Ocho Rios and Spanish Town.
Lee Perry firmly believes the country connection is the main reason for reggae's success. And he ought to know, being a country bwoy from Hanover, who in 1968, after ‘People Funny Boy’, set up his own appropriately named Upsetter label. From practically day one it forged a reputation for off-centre but very natural, warm-sounding reggae – look no further than his work with the Wailers in the following year, which is widely acclaimed as the best work the group ever did. In a rare moment of absolute lucidity he offers up the following explanation as to what a big contribution rural Jamaica made:
‘Until reggae it was all Kingston… Kingston! Kingston! Kingston! All the music business was a big-city thing. Ska… rocksteady… they were Kingston things with the same Kingston men doing the same Kingston things. It was when the country people come to town and get involved they bring with them the earth, the trees, the mountains. That's when reggae music go back to the earth. They used to look on country men as madmen, but so what? Sometimes it takes a madman because these madmen can't play the same thing the same way because it don't mean nothing to them, so they bring a different style. The roots! You hear it in the way they play the bass or bang the drum. The roots of reggae never came from Kingston.’
Extreme as you'd expect his point of view to be, few will deny its validity. While Derrick Harriott adds to the theory of dynamic evolution, going some way to explaining reggae's internal diversity:
‘The previous generation of producers weren't musicians. Nearly all of them were just guys with some money and, to be perfectly frank, they hear a song and think that it's a good song but they have no ideas on what to do. They depended on the musicians to actually put it all together for them, and because they didn't know what something might culminate in they weren't flexible enough. The producers know they have the money, so they hear so-and-so is playing a good bass-line or playing a good drum, so they carry them to the studio and tell them to do it a certain way.
‘Now, with all the little studios springing up all around the place, musicians and artists were turning producer and they truly understood what could be done with a tune. So when singers come in with a tune, but unprepared with the music – like most of them did – first the pianist, then the other musicians start to play it by feel and the song just falls into place. There was a beauty of going impromptu, because things really start to happen as the musicians start to explore all of a song's possibilities. It was loose. We tried things, so reggae took off in all kinds of directions and the musician-producers understood it enough to go with it. But you'd have to be a musician, or a very exceptional producer, to be able to do that.’
At this time, though, many of the producers were exceptional. They were about to take Jamaican music on a roller-coaster ride to towering sales figures, huge critical acclaim, jet-set glamour, deep spiritual awareness and global recognition – to such a degree that by the end of the 1970s one of the best-known faces on the planet would be that of a Jamaican reggae musician. And all of this without corrupting what it was all about.
At the height of its international popularity most of the best-acclaimed reggae tunes were still being knocked out in claustrophobic West Kingston studios, by men with holes in their shoes who were on a promise of ten pounds. The aim was still to hear themselves on the local sound system and maybe have enough cash to buy two brew. But thousands of miles away in the blues dances of Stoke Newington, Handsworth or Chapeltown that very excitement, experimentation and naked anticipation would boom out of speaker boxes to put the new generation of black British in touch with their roots. In contact with who they really were.
During the next ten years or so, reggae music and its self-appointed prophets would take over where Marcus Garvey and Walter Rodney were forced to quit, and it would become the force that would unify the first and second waves of the black diaspora.