“Is no have dis, mon,” replied Bob simply, and knocked on the hood of the car. We had been told the day before by Wooly that Bob had said the BMW stood for Bob Marley & the Wailers, so Swank offered this out somewhat sarcastically, and Bob came back, good natured as ever, with an even worse joke: “British Made . . . Warcar . . . ”
I tried to smooth things over, in my own bumbling liberal way. “So then this car belongs to all your brothers and sisters as well as you?”
“Belongs road, mon!”
Davis asked Bob what he thought about people coming down to ask all these questions. “Well,” said Bob, “as long as dem get da right understanding of da answers and write it . . . because plenty time, plenty guys just write for kicks, y’know, like jus’ turn in a joke ting is goin’ on, an is serious ting . . . ”
Marley was not amused by a certain recent interview in which a writer from New York asked him such questions as “Where did you get your jeans?” and “When you were in New York, did you go shopping at Bloomingdale’s?”
Still, he did not seem such a solemn fellow when all was said and done, so I asked him, referring to an old Jamaican motor sport, whether he had ever rammed a goat in this car. There was much laughter all around, after which he explained, “No no no, don’ think dat, man, people need live good purpose man . . . when you see a goat, you are supposed to stop, communicate to de goat, and make de goat knows de outcome . . . a goat’s smart, y’know . . . when you hit a goat, man, you sad!”
“Yes, Rasta,” interjected the Rasta on the other side of the hood with the tarantula on his brow. Bob then explained that ramming a goat was considered unlucky. By now most of us were packing up our tape recorders, readying ourselves for the trek back to the Sheraton, but Mr. Swank struck for one more shot at social relevance: “This is an election year, isn’t it, coming up?”
Bob took a long hit on his spliff. “Yeah? Dat so?”
The Rasta with the tarantula clarified: “You can’t serve two masters wan time, y’know.” Another, feistier member of the brethren behind him decided to take Mr. Swank on: “Do you know about da twelve tribes of Israel?”
This, for Swank, was the last straw. “Of course I do—I’m Jewish!”
“Oh yah? What tribe you belong?”
“Well, uh, I’m not exactly sure—”
“Yah? Then how you know you member twelve tribes?”
“Because my father told me!”
“Your father???!!!” The Rasta thought, apparently, that Swank was referring to his Father in Heaven.
“Yeah, my father and my mother!”
“Oh, you parents!”
“Yeah!”
“You read tha Oly Bible?”
“Of course!”
“All da way troo?” This guy was obviously not going to be easily convinced; from the beginning, several of those in attendance had been observably suspicious of the motives of these white foreigners with tape recorders. Marley just sat back smoking and laughing. Mr. Swank, who in his life had been known to take amphetamines for his weight and est for his personality, was getting frazzled, finally allowing himself to get truly combative after having to wait on Marley and suffer evasive answers. “Yeah, I read it all the way through!”
“How long it take you?” demanded the Rasta.
“Whattaya mean, how long—it was a long time ago!”
Triumph: “You read wan chapter a day, you can read da whole Bible in tree an’ a half years!”
Swank backed off enough to see the discretion of not countering with a “So what?” In fact, he didn’t have much of anything to say at all, just now, and the Rasta leaped into the breach, accusing him of not really being a member of the twelve tribes of Israel, since he didn’t even know which one he belonged to. They argued a bit, and Swank eventually allowed as how it was quite probable that he belonged to the tribe of Levi. I think at that moment he would have practically sworn an affidavit to that effect. So now he could slip out of further wranglings, Bob could go in his house for supper, and the Second and Third Worlds could, for this one evening at least, part gracefully and with a nice buzz on.
Thursday. I am in a cab with John Martyn, bombing through the streets of Kingston on the way to Strawberry Hill. John is an English songwriter who is planning to record part of his next album in Jamaica, but right now we are on our way to a Burning Spear recording session where he is going to do some guitar overdubs. First, however, we have to drive up to Strawberry Hill to pick up the guitar at Chris Blackwell’s hilltop estate. The road is long, narrow and whip-winding, with perilous curves and steep drops off the shoulder, but the country around it is beautiful, lavish with brilliant green and yellow. It’s a welcome respite, and the only time I will see anything close to still-existing primal Jamaica during my stay. On the way up Martyn points out to me the palatial estate of Blackwell’s parents, who made millions of dollars in decades of colonial enterprise in Jamaica. On the way back down we meet, pedaling uphill on a rusty bicycle as if floating, a friend of Martyn’s named Country Man. Country Man is a Rasta with university education, gifted, articulate and imbued with enough of the unimpeachably mystical that even a cynic like Martyn (who beats your reporter) believes the accounts of him levitating on occasion. Country Man lives by swimming or rowing far off the coast into the Caribbean, holding onto a rock among the Keys with one arm, and grabbing fish as they swim by. The best story about Country Man is that his wife complained once because he would go off on such expeditions for three days at a time leaving her alone; she wanted, she said, a radio for company. So Country Man sold their house, used the money to buy her a radio, and built a new house the same day.
When we arrive at the Spear session we discover, naturally enough, that we are the first people to show up even though we are over an hour late. So we take a walk around the corner, a risky proposition for whites in downtown Kingston at any time of the day, and have a couple of drinks in a black bar where sullen youth are playing billiards. I feel only minor drafts. An old man comes up and asks me where I come from, and expresses a sentiment I would hear from a few other, mostly older Jamaicans during my stay: “Many people say bad things about Jamaica, that is violence, bad place to live. This is not true. You know, there’s an old saying: believe only half of what you see—”
“And none of what you hear,” I finished.
He nodded and smiled. “Right”
We go back to the session, which is taking place in Randy’s Studios, which naturally enough is right over Randy’s Record Shop, which may be the best store in Jamaica and is the first place you should go if you have a shopping list—Randy stocks records by everybody, not just the output of his studio and star producer, Jack Ruby, who is himself a bit of a legend. Ruby, who has also worked as a hotel waiter, started producing two and a half years ago and his biggest success to date has been with Burning Spear, a vocal trio straight out of the hills whose U.S.-released album, Marcus Garvey, epitomizes the more purely African wing of reggae. There is something almost aboriginal about Burning Spear—Winston Rodney walks up to the mike and begins to sing a new song about living in the hills, Rupert Willington and Delroy Hines harmonizing behind him, and there is a haunting plaintiveness in his voice as he sings of his brother going to the river to get the water for his family. As he tells this seemingly simple story, the dozen or so black youths milling about in the control room, friends of the producer and band, laugh and comment to each other approvingly. The reason they are doing this is that many of them have probably experienced what Rodney is singing about—spending a whole day going back and forth to the nearest river, which may be a distance of miles, with a bucket on your head, until the drum or barrel which is the family’s only water supply is full. In the middle of the song Rodney sings “These are the sounds of the hills,” and begins making bird calls and animal sounds. Martin Denny it isn’t. Later Martyn, who has been warming up with some obviously overbusy Eric Clapton runs, will add a few spare, sustained-note and wah wah lines which fi
ll out the track perfectly, especially when he plays an intentionally “wrong” note which in its strange offness somehow is exactly right for Burning Spear, whose sound always remains primal no matter how arranged.
Perhaps most fascinating is that all this goes on with seemingly little direction from producer Ruby. He watches Spear sing awhile, then, in the middle of a take, leaves the control board to chat with the visitors and other musicians hanging around the studio, lounging later across the board to read a copy of Newsweek I’d brought; then, intermittently, he would unexpectedly snap up from reading or conversation, shout “Spear!” stop the take and bolt into the studio to tell them to bring this up, take that down, change the thing around till the sound is right and tight. All this is in such contrast to conditions in American studios, where not a pin can drop in the control room during a take and there is a red light outside the door barring visitors (who come and go freely in Randy’s) when the tape is rolling, that it is mind-blowing. In the midst of such seeming casualness, people talking, joking and rolling endless spliffs everywhere, there is enormous interior discipline; Ruby, while reading Newsweek with seeming indifference, is listening intently and in iron control all the way. I mentioned this to him, and he replied, “Of course. I always know the sound I want, and I always get it.” He also got two completed takes in one afternoon, which racks up pretty well against the output of any New York producer or studio, for all their comparative uptightness.
Toward the end of the session, the writer and photographer from Time arrive to interview Ruby, and later Martyn and I catch a ride back to the Sheraton with them. By now it is nine o’clock at night, not at all a safe time for whites, even in numbers, to be on the streets of Kingston. It is never safe for whites to go into Trenchtown. But now the Time photog is pointing at the myriad small, brightly lit black rum bars we pass, saying “C’mon, what the fuck, man, I could use a beer, let’s just go in.” Martyn and I cower in the back, laughing but praying these guys will not stop. Meanwhile, Time’s scribe is saying, “I’ve got to figure out a way to get into Trenchtown . . .” I tell him to forget it, and he replies that he’s been thinking maybe around five in the morning would be a safe time.
We arrive back at the hotel in a driving rain, running past the poolside bar where under the roof Canadian tourists are singing “Granada” to organ music almost as loud as the speakers in the record stores.
I could use a little bit of cross-cultural relaxation myself. I retire to my room where I watch Hawaii Five-O and an old Universal Grade D musical about singing soldiers from the late Thirties, on the TV I had to order when I first checked in. Jamaican TV is weird—there’s only one TV network, JBC, which turns up on several channels with things like “An Evening with the Jay-Teens,” an hour of young black girls doing folk dances from various cultures against a blank backdrop. (There was no announcer, they looked like a high school dance recital, and moved as stiffly as one through all the corny choreography except when it came time to do African dances, which they performed, of course, fantastically.) The first thing I saw when I turned on my TV on Tuesday morning was a woman demonstrating the use of a steam iron with stilted delivery: “This we use to wash and iron clothes, to keep ourselves clean and our people healthy . . .” Commercials for condoms and birth control pills also run regularly. Every afternoon the station goes off for several hours, leaving a test pattern and radio station playing the usual American pap. The rest of the programming is equally weird and scattered, featuring things like Bache-lor Father, The Six Million Dollar Man (8:45 on Friday night—some shows come on at times like 6:02, right after headline news) and Sesame Street, which seems to be a big favorite. I got to watch, since there was nothing else, the singing-soldiers movies for two nights in a row, leading me into dark speculations about propaganda, which were probably paranoid.
Friday. After breakfast I go for a walk around the block immediately adjacent to the hotel, and look into faces radiating undisguised hatred. When I stop a youth and ask him for directions to a local record store, he answers grudgingly in a patois I can’t understand anyway. I have not stopped being uptight in the almost four days I have been here, and feel a strong yearning to get the hell out of the fucking place.
Back at the hotel, I run into Chris Blackwell by the pool, and he invites me to visit a couple of recording studios with him. Blackwell himself exudes an air at once sanguine and blasé—he came from money, now he’s making more money, and everything about him indicates that the good life agrees with him. Sandy hair, brilliant tan that reminded me of many I’d seen in Hollywood, the kind of person who looks so healthy it’s almost obscene, too healthy. Or maybe it is merely endemic to record industry people, this air of bland hedonism. In any case, Blackwell always looks as if he is either on his way to or from a tennis court. Now we are in a limousine, riding out to the home studios of Lee Perry and King Tubby, who live in relatively affluent sections of Kingston; these guys are two of the biggest producers on the island. Their houses look like American working-class homes circa 1954. At Tubby’s I watch an engineer mastering a dub, and get to meet Vivian “Yabby” Jackson, leader (& producer) of a group called the Prophets, whose album, Conquering Lion, was recorded at Harry J’s studio across town and mixed here; I have just bought a copy of the album at Micron Records (not coincidentally, the store and label bear the same name) for five bucks, and show it to him. Then I lean over and shout in his ear over the booming dub beat: “How much money did you get for making this?”
“Nothing yet,” he says.
Out in Tubby’s back yard, I meet U Roy, who is not I Roy, and whose album, Dread in a Babylon, has just been picked up by Virgin Records in the U.K. We shake hands, and I tell him how much I like his record. I do not tell him that I thought on the first cut, “Runaway Girl,” his vocal sounded much like Mick Jagger circa Aftermath. It is interesting to note that on the album cover he looks like some ragged shaman, squatting on the ground almost hidden behind a giant cloud of ganja smoke, dreadlocks spearing out in every direction. Now, in person, he is dressed in a beret, red sweater, and brown slacks. He puts a record on a turntable and the unmistakable, cannonade-in-a-cavern sound of dub thunders from two giant speakers set up in the dirt in Tubby’s backyard. A little kid dances in front of one of the speakers, on which “Tubby” is spelled in Chinese-style lettering, pressing his ass against the speaker cloth, getting off on the vibrations, looking at me and laughing. The record playing consists of a deep rumble of Echoplexed drums, out of which, every so often an Echoplexed and perhaps reverbed male voice (which I will later discover belongs to Big Youth, one of the most venerable dub artists) hollers, “What the world needs now, is love, sweet love . . .” I blink. Blackwell laughs: “I wonder what Burt Bacharach would think of this.” I suggest that Blackwell bring him down here and show it to him. One thing seems certain— old Burt is not going to get any royalties on this one. Not that he needs them. I think for a moment that perhaps there is a certain democracy in the rip-offs permeating Jamaican music, dismiss that as a dangerous notion, and start babbling to Blackwell about “folk technology.” We agree that dub is fascinating, but neither of us has any idea what to do with it. Which is perhaps as it should be. The young blacks sitting around smoking spliffs and listening to this record at the customary earsplitting volume ignore us, except for one who, later in the studio, introduces himself as Clinton Williams and beckons me outside, where he hands me a piece of paper, which looks like a blank invoice, upon which is printed “The Golden-Age Furnishing Co.,” along with a phone number. Williams has written his name on one of the lines, and this serves as his card. He tells me he is doing some independent producing in Kingston, has in fact produced five records, and has been a contender for the amateur lightweight boxing championship of Jamaica. I ask him how he finds time both to box and produce records, not bothering to mention that the number he has asked me to call him at seems to be that of a furniture store. He tells me that he wants to become a big-time producer, that the
competition is fierce, and that established figures like Tubby and Scratch Perry pretty much have a monopoly on the scene, making it extremely difficult for a young cat to break in. Which sounds a lot like the States, actually. I press him on boxing vs. production; I mean, which is the sideline? He finally laughs. “Boxing.” I ask him if he can give me a percentage breakdown on record profits as split between artists, producers and record store owners. Sure, he says. “Usually, about sixty percent goes to the store, thirty percent to the producer, and ten percent to the singer. But sometimes the producers and stores get forty-five percent each.”
Back in the limousine and over to Lee Perry’s. Perry is a big man in the island’s music scene; he produced Bob Marley’s early (and superior) sides, and his current star artist is Max Romeo, with “War in a Babylon” by Max Romeo and the Upsetters a hot item in both Jamaica and England. “The Upsetter” is one of Perry’s aliases, and it is a measure of what stars producers are in Jamaica that the clerk in Aquarius had showed me an album called King Tubby Vs. The Upset-ter, a kind of dueling-control-boards, mock-championship-match soundtrack consisting entirely of instrumental dub violence fit to shatter your eardrums. In Perry’s studio, behind his house, he is a little potentate, mixing and playing back his tapes for a steady stream of admirers who stand in herb awe as he dances around his control board, changing levels and flicking switches or whirling dials with a flourish and a knowing smile of infinite humor. I can’t say exactly how or why, but merely to meet and watch him work for a few minutes is to be irrevocably impressed, to know you are in the presence of genius. The decor of his studio is also instructive: blacklight posters and big color pictures of Bruce Lee (who is a big hero on the island, because guns are banned and he fights with his fists) over walls and ceiling fitted out with an interplay of bright red and green carpeting, which I found out later are, with gold, the colors in the flag of Ethiopia.
Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Page 8
