The Great Reggae Music Americans Largely Missed
February 1, 2005 |WSJ| Ed Ward. In the late summer of 1970, I was Rolling Stone's record review editor, and I was bored. The albums coming across my desk were becoming formulaic, and at one point there was so little I wanted to write about that I began taking home 45s -- as uncool a format as existed. Then, one day, I opened a package of them and found a half-dozen miracles. Each disc had a different artist on each side, and these artists had names like the Maytals, Niney the Observer, and U-Roy. And each had a small note: "Recorded in Jamaica." The music on them was utterly unlike anything I'd ever heard before.
Well, not quite: The anarchy and homemade quality of the sounds reminded me of the doo-wop I'd grown up with, and I mentioned this to a friend in New York who introduced me to a childhood friend of his who lived near me in San Francisco and who'd done a spell in the Peace Corps in Jamaica.
What this guy told me was as weird as the music: A lot of Jamaicans belonged to a religion that eschewed combing hair, encouraged smoking dope, and prayed for repatriation in Ethiopia. And these "Rastas," as he called them, were making a lot of these records, some of which were popular in England. So I wrote a friend there, and before long I was receiving big packages of LPs and 45s from one Max "Waxie Maxie" Needham, PR man for Trojan Records. The world of reggae opened and, with it, the culture, language and history of Jamaica, all of which I eventually found in its grooves.
It's almost impossible to convey this enthusiasm to today's music fans, who've been fed a diet of sludgy, amelodic, Rasta-babble stoner reggae -- music aimed at a U.S. audience and almost never heard in Jamaica. The sound of reggae in its great years was the sound of Jamaicans talking to each other about life, love, religion and politics, a singing newspaper in which Kingston street gangs, a flu epidemic, or the death of a racehorse could be the subject of a catchy hit. It's the sound captured perfectly by Colin Escott and Bas Hartong on the four-disc collection "This Is Reggae Music: The Golden Era 1960-75," which came out late last year on Trojan/Sanctuary in the U.S.
To put it mildly, I am in awe of their accomplishment. True, they had the entire catalog of Trojan, a British company set up in 1967 to sell Jamaican music to emigres, at their disposal, but I can attest that Trojan put out plenty of garbage even during the "golden era." Still, since the Jamaican record business played fast and loose with the idea of "ownership," it was easy for Trojan to get British rights to just about every record of any interest at all at minimal cost. What would be hard for a compiler would be to make sure that every major artist and producer -- because reggae has always been a producer's art, with producers having their own studios and house bands and, therefore, distinctive sounds -- was represented, and every style. With one glaring exception, they've covered the turf.
But given that one of the main points this collection makes is that reggae was completely ignored by the U.S. black music industry, that exception is truly curious. Since reggae wasn't played on Jamaican radio for many years, it was exposed by huge record-playing PAs owned by entrepreneurs who would set them up outdoors and charge admission and sell drinks. Sound systems got their reputations through playing records nobody else had, having a "selector" who knew exactly how to string them together for maximum crowd enjoyment, and having a DJ who talked between sets, and, eventually, over the dub-sides. Pretty soon these DJs became stars themselves and began recording their rhymed routines. It was a Jamaican immigrant, Kool Herc, who was the first to set up his turntables outdoors in the Bronx and start rhyming over disco records, giving birth to hip-hop and rap. But "This Is Reggae Music" has only two DJ tracks (both total scorchers, don't get me wrong, but disproportionately few), and neither of them is U-Roy's groundbreaking "Wear You to the Ball," Jamaica's first "rap" record.
But we get all the other great stuff Americans largely missed: group harmony classics by the Ethiopians ("Engine 54"), the Paragons ("The Tide Is High"), and the Pioneers ("Long Shot Kick De Bucket,"); great singers like Desmond Dekker (one of the few Jamaicans to dent the U.S. charts, a spillover of his mammoth British popularity), Gregory Isaacs, Dennis Brown, Jimmy Cliff (yes, he was great once), and the tragic Slim Smith; goofy instrumental tracks like the Upsetters' "Return of Django" and Harry J and the Allstars' "Liquidator"; and, best of all, heaping helpings of the two greatest groups of this era, the Wailers and the Maytals. The former are heard in all their early, egalitarian glory, before Bob Marley took the limelight and his two longtime partners quit, in spirited productions by reggae's mad genius Lee "Scratch" Perry. And the latter, one of the most explosive and energetic groups I've ever heard, are present from their early "54-46 That's My Number" through 1973's epic "Funky Kingston," a revival service, sound-system style.
For me, the best part of this collection was discovering that there were still more gems out there than I'd never heard, despite Waxie Maxie's best efforts and my obsessive record-collecting: Fully a third of these tracks were new to me. So even though the word is overused these days, I have to use it: "This is Reggae Music" is essential. No better introduction -- and corrective to sludgy stoner reggae -- is on the market, or, at least at this length, will be.