Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright

by Hank Bordowitz

But this guy was no Rasta, no matter what he or anybody else says. This was an uptown cat. A hipster. With his hair slicked straight back, his graying beard, strutting around cocky and amused, a diminutive lion in his kingdom, he at length danced over to the corner where I was trying to be inconspicuous, squeezed past me, grabbed a bottle and, straightening up, stopped a second to look me in the eyes close as the air, smiling knowingly, and I smiled back. A few minutes later he walked up to me and said, “You wine man,” and handed me a plastic cup and a bottle of something called Winecarnes, which is a local wine fortified with meat extracts that he seemingly drinks all day without ever losing his stride.

  Now, dear reader, I know that this—one drunk recognizing another— is not the most profound or miraculous occurrence in the world, but here, in the middle of Herb Heaven, with every righteous Rasta and American hiplet in sight belittling the rum culture like it was 1967 all over again, it qualified as outright mind-reading.

  As we were leaving Perry’s, walking down the driveway to the limousine, I heard a familiar sound and peeked for a moment inside the open door to the living room of his house. There, on the couch, his kids were watching a Road Runner cartoon on TV.

  Back at the hotel, I made arrangements to meet Blackwell for dinner. By the pool I met my colleague from Rolling Stone, and over drinks Blackwell asked him what angle he was going to approach his story from. “Oh, I dunno, man,” he replied, with no idea who he was talking to, “I’m just gonna use the gonzo approach for this one pretty much. I intend to do my whole story from the poolside bar and go out of the hotel as little as possible. I mean, who gives a fuck, y’know? I’m just in this for the free drinks and to see if I can get laid.”

  Blackwell looked a little green around the eyeballs, but went on to ask Gonzo what he thought of reggae.

  “I can’t remember ever hearing any. The last album I really got into was The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East. Hell, man, I don’t even have a record player!”

  Blackwell’s jaw dropped.

  Later at dinner, Blackwell is still staring sourly at Gonzo, who is raving at Michael Butler, a receding face behind a gray Van Dyke who was the producer of Hair and is down here getting ready to put together a reggae Hair with the projected title of Babylon. Don Taylor, Marley’s manager, a thin, light-skinned black man in a Toots and the Maytals cap, is telling me and the man from Melody Maker that many American blacks resent Jamaican immigrants because, he says, the latter tend to hustle harder and achieve more. He cites his mother, who he says worked at menial jobs but wound up owning her own apartment house, then: “It’s just like Bob. He is very dedicated to his music, but when it comes to his money, he is not going to let anyone cheat him out of any portion of his equal share.”

  Right. No good businessman would. A phrase often used by Rastas and heard in many reggae songs is “I and I.” It can mean me, you, we, etc., all balled up in one great big cosmic loving mulch; the old “I am he as you are me as you are we as we are all together” routine. But when push comes to shove . . . well, as John Martyn laughingly put it, “I and I means me so fuck you!” Which may not be exactly what Burning Spear meant when they sang “Give me what is mine,” but what the hell—I mean, we’re all 20th Century folk here, right?

  Saturday. Gonzo and I spend the day getting drunk and smoking dope in his room, reading Rolling Stone and The Village Voice and listening to the reggae which, for some unaccountable reason, is coming out of the radio. Wooly calls up to see how we’re doing, and we tell him we’ve become Rastas and ask to borrow his cassette recorder so we can listen to Iggy tapes.

  That night we are down at the bar when the photog from Time shows up and asks us if we want to go to some discos with him. I say sure; Gonzo stays at the bar. This shutterbug and I then drive up to Beverly Hills, the rich folks’ ghetto of Kingston, to pick up Clive, son of Randy, who is going to show us where the kids dance in this town. We pass blocks of beautiful houses with sculpted lawns, and the one where the owner of Randy’s Records lives is no different from the rest. Clive tells us, in fact, that their next-door neighbor is the French ambassador to Jamaica. A comparison of this picture with Perry’s and Tubby’s homes seems to confirm Clinton Williams’ figures, and I begin to wonder what Burning Spear’s house looks like. As for the discos, they look just like American discos: the floor lights up, couples dance to American soul records. The photographer keeps saying he wants more roots, and Clive just shrugs, so I translate: “What we’re looking for is one of these places with a deejay sitting up there playing dub records and hollering into the microphone while all the guys in the crowd stand around smoking herb and vibrating.”

  “Oh, those,” says Clive. “Not so easy to find now. They never held those like, you know, regular thing. And every time they did, seem like a gunman would show up and start firing. So now they are not allowed.”

  So much for discos. I suddenly notice that Clive has been taking swigs out of a half-pint bottle of his own. “What’s that?” I ask him.

  “Roots.” He hands it to me, emphasizing that it does not contain what the label says: no rum culture here. I take a swig—liquid cannabis root extract, mixed with something else unmistakable. “There’s wine in here!”

  He smiles slightly. “Yes. A little.” And takes the bottle back and pours himself another drink.

  After the Time man and I take him home, we are driving down a street in a residential district when suddenly we hear a sound like firecrackers; it’s pistol shots, and we see people running out of a bar ahead of us on the left, scattering in every direction. The Time guy slows down, and I begin to freak. “C’mon, man, let’s get the fuck out of here! C’mon, turn that corner!” He had almost stopped. I guess he hoped to get an exclusive shot of authentic Jamaican street violence, which I guess is good journalistic instincts. Me, I was more interested in my own skin. Then again, it may be that the streets of Kingston are, actually, comparatively safe for a honky next to those of Harlem or inner-city Detroit. When we stopped a few minutes later at a MacDonald’s (no relation to the American chain) for some curried goat, the steering wheel on my friend’s car locked and he couldn’t get it started for about 20 minutes. Nobody hassled us; all we got were some black people in a minibus next to us who asked what was wrong and tried to help us get going again. Then again, the bus did say “UNICEF” on the driver’s door.

  Sunday. This is supposed to be a big day, because we have been told that there is going to be a Grounation, which I can only interpret from the rather vague explanations as some kind of Rasta raveup, which we have been invited to observe. It seems dubious to me that the Rastas would want a bunch of white folk from the United States and Britain sitting in the bleachers gawking at their annual convention, but I am anxious to check this out nevertheless. We are told that it will run from early in the evening until about 1 A.M., and I am already wondering how we can gracefully excuse ourselves around, say, 9:30 if it gets boring. I mean, I’m all for Lowell Thomas, but seven or eight straight hours of the gospel of Rastafari, which the guys in Mar-ley’s backyard had already proved every Rasta is ready to testify upon vehemently and at length with little or no provocation, did seem a bit much. Gonzo and I spend the afternoon drinking Bloody Marys by the pool; we have decided to start the booze wing of Rasta and spread the truths of that to the unenlightened, hoping for an eventual migration of all the enlightened back to Seagram’s distillery in Waterloo, Ontario. Wooly and photographer Peter Simon, brother of Carly (“I’m Peter Simon, Carly’s brother,” was how he shook hands with Gonzo) just keep staring at us and shaking their heads as we tell them that the wisdom-inducing properties of Hops are at least equivalent to those of Herb. One thing is for sure: there will not be a bar at the Grounation.

  Of course, in Jamaica not even Grounations can come off on time—it’s my guess they might be sacrilegious if they did, so we wait well into the evening by the pool with Tom Hayes, an Island employee who, I have been told, is responsible for much of the label’s b
usiness dealings with artists. So I ask him: “How much does a group like Burning Spear get from Island as an advance?”

  “You should ask them that,” he replied. “I don’t think it would be ethical for me to tell you.” He pointed at Gonzo. “That would be like me asking him how much you make; don’t you see the unfairness of that?” Then, turning to Gonzo: “Ready for another Heineken’s?” And gets up and splits for the bar to buy us a round of drinks.

  Later, we’re finally ready to go to the Grounation, and when the Rastas are ready for us it seems we’ve momentarily lost Gonzo, who is flying in the face of experience (namely his burn upon arrival) by trying again to cop dope, I mean herb, from the guy in the hotel parking lot. When he gets in the car, I ask him, “What the fuck is the matter with you? We’re going to a Grounation, a festival of Rastafarians, don’t you realize there’s going to be more dope there than you could smoke in three lifetimes?”

  “I know,” he says, “but I gotta have some for later when we get back to the hotel and to get me through my flight back to New York tomorrow. I’m addicted to the shit!”

  A few minutes later, Wooly and I somehow get onto the subject of Rasta sexuality. “The Rastas are not a particularly sexual people,” he says, adding that “I’ve never seen one come on to a chick.”

  “Oh, really? What do you think would be the factors in that?” I had noticed that Jamaican men did seem to believe in keeping the woman home tending to the babies—you seldom saw them in record shops, for instance—although it is well known that the Rasta men do a lot of cooking and will not let the women prepare the food when they are menstruating. In fact, Jamaican men seem to have a whole fixation on the subject of the menstruation cycle—the most popular swear words are “bloodclot” and “bummaclot pussyclot,” which are the worst things you can call somebody.

  “I think it goes back,” answers Wooly, “to the thing you see in lots of primitive societies: the belief that women are polluted, somehow identified with the forces of darkness, like witches . . . ”

  “I bet I know why they don’t care if they fuck or not,” interjects Gonzo. “Because they’re too stoned all the time! Hell, man, I’ve smoked so much dope before I didn’t give a fuck about pussy.”

  Wooly begins to get defensive—Jesus, man, don’t call the Rastas eunuchs—and brings up Marley’s four wives and numerous children before dropping the subject like a set of barbells even though I want to pursue it further.

  The seven of us—Wooly, Gonzo, Peter Simon, his collaborator Stephen Davis, Tom Hayes, me and a Rasta named Killy who is taking us—ride to the Grounation in two cars. I jump in the Volkswagen Killy is driving and begin asking him if he doesn’t think this white media influx might dilute the purity of Rasta ritual. He has long thin dread locks running streamers past his shoulders, and is wearing a T-shirt I had seen on Wooly and others this week that says “ROOTS” with picture of same on the front and commemorates Burning Spear’s recent gig at the Chela Bay hotel just outside Ocho Rios on the back. I have already been told by Wooly that Killy is not being paid by Island for services like this, so I wonder what his motivation must be. He gives me the standard Rasta sermon, adds that the Rastas want to spread their truths and rights to all the world and this is one way to do it, then gets into something about how “money is energy.” Meanwhile, we have stopped off on a side street in a rundown neighborhood that is still middle-class by Kingston standards, where Killy cops some dope for Gonzo, who makes the mistake of not asking for it immediately.

  Then we drive off the main boulevards into an area of rusty pothole streets winding around a lot of shacks in the classic mold—corrugated tin, clay, scrap wood and metal, cardboard, windows that cannot be closed and doors with ragged curtains for privacy, into the heart of Poverty Row. And this isn’t even Trenchtown, is in fact far better—this is a section called Olympic Gardens, but it doesn’t look like any garden. It looks like a slum, because that is what it is, and I doubt if sharecropper shacks in the American South a hundred years ago had much on the housing here. We finally stopped along one lane, got out of the cars and walked up to a small building out of which the least commercialized form of reggae was blasting. Black people were standing all around the outside, and the inside seemed to be jammed, but I peered over neighbors leaning against the wall into a window and saw a stage small enough to fit inside one end of a building about as big as the average middle-class American child’s bedroom. On the stage there was a table, and on the table a white cloth, burning candle, pot of red flowers, Bible, and smaller, tattered book which I presumed was a hymnal. Forming a half circle around and behind the table were a group called Ras Michael and the Sons of Negus, who have two albums out in Jamaica: a Chinese-looking organist and drummer, a bassist in the corner by the back door, lead guitarist, primitive amps, and in the middle Ras Michael, a tall thin man in wool cap and striped sweater, singing with ecclesiastical intensity into a microphone. In front of him was another half-circle of musicians sitting in chairs and on the edge of the stage, eight pairs of hands beating on congas and drums more primitive. In front of them about a half dozen rows of benches, which seemed mainly to be filled with little children, though there were women and older people there too. Directly across from the window where I stood I saw, in another window with his back to the street, the mild stringy-bearded face of Peter Simon, bouncing slightly and smiling as if bedazzled. It looked like a good way to get a knife in the ribs.

  In a few minutes a space was found for us inside and we were led around to the front of this seeming chapel, through a door and down to the very front, where Gonzo and I were seated amongst a bevy of little black kids who stared at us with a mixture of shyness, fear and laughter. I made a face at one staring at me and she dissolved in giggles. I was not so sure that the same thing would be a wise course of action for me to take, so whenever Gonzo said something funny to me I would stifle my laughter, which naturally had the effect of stifling laughter at the dinner table when you are a child—all those repressed chuckles just kept bubbling ferociously inside, burning to get out in howls while I kept translating them into stoned, beatific smiles as I swayed to the music. It was not that there was anything funny about the situation; I was merely nervous. Or rather, these people and this music was not funny—we were funny, our presence here was funny, or was something else more easily accepted as funny, and by the time Gonzo got around to screaming in my ear that “This is better than Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot! I see the light, Lester, I’ve got religion! And don’t ever forget that we could lose our lives at any minute!” I just had to laugh out loud.

  Luckily, it was swallowed by the music, which was amazing, or seemed so under the circumstances. Ras Michael sang songs like “None a Jah Jah Children No Cry,” “In Zion,” and “Glory Dawn,” alternating cooking reggae with gospel chants as the drummers smoked spliff after spliff, some of them sitting there in total trance never removing the things from their mouths, sucking the smoke like air, cooking up an enormously complex rhythm conversation which was pure Africa. Killy had sat down at one of the congas, lit up two spliffs, and handed them to me and Gonzo. I smoked and tried to lose myself in the rhythm, as Ras Michael sang of flying away home to Zion and Gonzo screamed in my ear “Right! Right! Fly away home tomorrow!” One particularly driving chant-like number (number?) which sounded like a basal link between African reggae roots and Elvin Jones caught the whole room up and in that moment alone, perhaps, we all were united, flying through the rhythm. The end of each song was signaled by Ras Michael, who would intone loudly into the mike “Jah Rastafari!” to which the little children, women and men present would shout back “Rastafari!” I remember particularly one tot behind me, screaming “Migh-ty God!” It was like a cross between a Wednesday Night Prayer Meet-ing and a very local garage gig by a band which was itself the link between the tribal fires of prehistory, American black Revivalist Christianity, and rock ‘n’ roll electricity. The guitarist would get into riffs that occasionally sugges
ted that he had been listening to Keith Richards, Duane Allman, maybe even Jerry Garcia, but this was a religious service and nobody clapped. Except Peter Simon, who kept leaning over and cooing in my ear, “Isn’t this great? I just love it, don’t you?” He had begun dancing in a manner that I can only compare to Joan Baez doing the Funky Chicken at the Big Sur Folk Festival, and little kids in front of him, shifting out of awesomely intricate boogaloos of their own, began laughingly to imitate him. He thought they were all getting together in One World brotherhood, laughed back and did what he was doing with more fervor; what he didn’t see was that they were having a laugh over his performance with other children behind him. At the end of the set (set?) I saw him in the center aisle, palms together and head bowed in prayerful attitude. Meanwhile, the grass was wearing off, the bench was hard, and, as at many concerts, I was ready to go home before the music was over.

  I don’t mean to sound jaded. It had been intense, both musically and situationally; it was a capital-E experience, and, as Gonzo said, “Take a good look, Lester—this is as close as we’re ever gonna get to Africa.” But there was a pervasive irony to the Experience, which could not be escaped. It was in seeing Peter Simon, after Ras Michael and the band had left the room as the hand-drummers and congregation kept shouting and chanting, mount the stage and stand there behind the table with the Bible and candle, smiling and clapping his hands as if leading the faithful.

  And there was irony a few minutes later, as we were led out of the chapel into a space behind the house next door, where we were given herb soup (“As an offering,” I was informed) and tokes off the chalice,a ceremonial, elaborately carved pipe. Ras Michael stood outside; I shook hands with him and told him, “I really dig your music, and I’m going to buy your album tomorrow.” We both laughed, there may have been a moment of mutual recognition, and then he launched into the gospel of Rastafari, quoting extensively from the Bible and prophesying Armageddon. It was boring, and after a few minutes I edged politely away, after which it seemed each of our party took his turn at the same course, until Ras Michael got to Peter Simon, whose name he delighted in transposing into Simon Peter, laughing and shaking Simon’s hand vigorously. (Upon this rock I will build my church in . . . Martha’s Vineyard?) We all laughed at this, and a few minutes later I saw Peter Simon inside the house where the Rastas stood smoking herb and testifying to Jah. I could see him, through the smoke, first in the main room, then later coming out of another room in the back. I assumed at the time that that was the john and he had to use it, later realized that was ridiculous since it was almost certain that the only toilet anywhere around here was the ground. The rest of us stood around just inside the door of the house; it was a while before I realized that behind me, in the darkness, all the Rasta women were sitting in chairs or hammocks along the fence, silently watching as their children hopped around them and the men declaimed inside. The only woman I saw inside the house was one young brown-skinned girl about 20, sitting in a chair in a corner with a spliff in her hand upon which she occasionally took another hit; she was beautiful, as yet unbrutalized at least to the eye, but as she stared vacantly into space all the herb in the world could not have been cosmetic for the utter desolation that, in her silence, in her stillness, was radiated by her very youth and beauty.