Lloyd Bradley was born in London in 1955. As a teenager he was sucked into the nether world of north London sound systems, and he owned and operated the Dark Star system during the late seventies. For the last twenty years he has written about music for many magazines and newspapers, including NME, Black Music Magazine, the Guardian, Q and MOJO. He is also a classically trained chef and lives in north London with his wife and two children.
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published by Viking 2000
Published in Penguin Books 2001
12
Copyright © Lloyd Bradley, 2000
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
ISBN: 978-0-14-192817-3
For Diana, George and Elissa
‘The people that reggae was being made for never separate it into this style and that style. No. This is music that's come down from slavery, through colonialism, so it's more than just a style. If you're coming from the potato walk or the banana walk or the hillside, people sing. To get rid of their frustrations and lift the spirits, people sing. It was also your form of entertainment at the weekend, whether in church or at a nine night or just outside a your house, you was going to sing. If you're cutting down a bush you're gonna sing, if you're digging some ground you're gonna sing. The music is vibrant. It's a way of life, the whole thing is not just a music being made, it's a people… a culture… it's an attitude, it's a way of life coming out of a people.’ / Rupie Edwards
Acknowledgements
Foreword by Prince Buster
Part One First Session
1 Boogie in My Bones
2 Music Is My Occupation
3 We Are Rolling
4 Message from the King
5 Train to Skaville
6 Strange Country
7 What a World
Part Two Simmer Down
8 Soul Style
9 Dance Crasher
10 Mix It Up
11 You Can Get It If You Really Want
Part Three Studio Kinda Cloudy
12 Pressure Drop
13 Wake the Town, Tell the People
14 Dubwise Situation
15 Dreadlocks in Moonlight
16 Ah Fi We Dis
17 Trench Town Rock
18 Warrior Charge
19 Sipple Out Deh
Part Four Fist to Fist Days Gone
20 Ring the Alarm
21 Kid's Play
22 Johnny Dollar
23 Healing of a Nation
Further Reading
Index
Writing Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King has been an adventure. It's taken me to Jamaica, New York, Miami, parts of London I'd forgotten existed and the most distant recesses of my record collection. For all this I am enormously grateful. But far more so than that, it's got me into – and, quite thankfully in a couple of cases, out of – situations that have hugely expanded my life-experience, given me a great feeling of privilege or quite simply made me laugh. I've helped Leroy Sibbles move house; I've felt Prince Buster's head; I've sat on a wall with Big Youth eating windfall custard apple; I've talked to Lee Perry for an hour and got secondarily red; I've quaffed fine wine with Dennis Bovell; broken bread at a dreadlocks camp; been stopped, with Bunny Lee, at 3 a.m. by an eradication squad; got roped in as navigator on the Wailers' tour bus; been abandoned on a particularly twitchy Trench Town street corner for forty minutes while the guy that was carrying me round went off and did God knows what; had the piss taken out of me royally by Bobby Digital and Luciano; interviewed Burning Spear when, for no reason I could see, he had no trousers on; taken tea in the very room in which Dennis Brown was born; taken my life in my hands with Junior Delgado's driving on thankfully empty Kingston streets; and, most of all, during the six years it's taken to put the book together I've been treated with massive courtesy, hospitality, helpfulness and respect by almost everybody I've come into contact with.
It's no accident that the handshake you pick up within hours of touching down in Jamaica involves the right clenched fists being alternately struck top against bottom, then the knuckles pressed together. It signifies strength and unity, and sums up how I felt whenever I had to spend time on the island. Therefore, the biggest shout has to go out to the entire population of Jamaica. It was their creativity, spirituality, warmth, wit and resilience in the face of appalling outside manipulation that gave me something to write about in the first place. I hope I've done them justice. But on a more immediate level, very rarely was I treated with anything other than hospitality by anybody I met on my many visits to Jamaica – not just in the music business, but in the bars, in the cafés, in the streets, in the shops and in the hotels. London taxi drivers could do worse than take customer-relations advice from their Kingston counterparts.
Specifically on the island – and its diaspora – I have to thank those who gave up their time to invite a complete stranger into their homes or places of business and show him kindness beyond the call of duty as they told their tales. These were guys who had no product to push but were still willing to share knowledge, history, anecdotes and opinions on a range of subjects way beyond the music itself. Their reward, as several most flatteringly explained, was that somebody finally wanted to write that stuff down. In alphabetical order, a big five on the black-hand side goes to Dennis Alcapone, Monty Alexander, Horace Andy, Buju Banton, Dave Barker, Aston ‘Family Man’ Barrett, Big Youth, Pauline Black, Dennis Bovell, Burning Spear, Fatis Burrell, Gussie Clarke, Jimmy Cliff, Junior Delgado, Bobby Digital, Brent Dowe, Sly Dunbar, Rupie Edwards, Derrick Harriott, Cecil Heron, Junior Cat, Bunny Lee, Byron Lee, Lepke, Little Ninja, Luciano, D J Pebbles, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Ernest Ranglin, Michael Rose, Leroy Sibbles, Danny Sims, Spragga Benz, Jah Vego and Drummie Zeb. The inspiration was all yours, the mistakes are all mine.
Special thanks, however, have to be given to Linton Kwesi Johnson for the loan of the title and to Prince Buster for the Foreword, also to both him and his wife Mola for all the kindnesses they've shown me in Miami and London.
In New York, the reggae archivist, tireless soldier for the cause and all-round excellent fellow Tom Tyrell couldn't have been more helpful. The same goes for Lisa Cortez, who shared some fantastic information; and irrepressible Murray ‘Jah Fish’ Elias, whose Big Apple anecdotes are matched only by the sheer brilliance of the Big Blunts compilation albums he puts together.
At home in the UK are people who deserve as much credit for Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King as I do: Allister Harry read every word and passed a series of detailed comments as amusing as they were instructive; Rae Cheddie was the man who, thirty years ago, turned this dyed-in-the-wool soulboy on to reggae, and more recently answered even the most inane queries quicker than you might have thought possible; Eddi Fiegel, whose advice, conversation and friendship did so much to keep me focused; Keith Stone of London's premier reggae retailer Daddy Kool Records (020 7437 3535), who'd not only answer questions but let me listen to virtually any tune I didn't have from the last thirty-five years; Patricia Cumper of the Jamaica High Commission Information Service, who entered into the spirit of things with great gusto; and Margaret Duvall, Deborah Ballard and Gaylene Martin, whose casual reggae knowledge and perpetual helpfulness never ceased to astonish. And of course my family, Diana, George and Elissa, who shared their house, their lives and their holidays with a man who became somewhat possessed, and John Bradley (my dad), of whom I haven't seen nearly enough recently.
Vital to the whole process were Mat Snow, Paul Trynka, Jim Irvin, Paddy and everybody at MOJO for sending me to Jamaica several times on the flimsiest pretexts, for their excellent reggae coverage, general services to the vanishing art of music journalism and for putting up with me dropping into the office for extended football/magazine/music reasoning sessions every time the cabin fever got too much. Dennis Morris, Neil Spencer, Penny Reel, Steve Barrow, Chris Morrow, Don Letts and Rick Elgood have all added enormously to my enjoyment of and fascination with reggae over the years, while Rob and Tina Partridge, Liz Greader and Peady have been the definition of cooperation and good humour during this book's research process. And of course Kester, Stanley, Ron Shillingford and Wayne; the JBs FC and Arsenal FC; and all at Parnell's, Upstairs at Ronnies, Bluesville, the Q Club, the Railway in Harrow, Spinners, Columbos and the Birds’ Nests Waterloo, West Hampstead, West Ken and Paddington.
Then there are the people who without whom, quite literally, Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King couldn't have been possible. Jon Riley, late of Penguin Books, had the good taste to instigate the project; Tony Lacey, currently of Penguin Books, must be in line for some sort of medal for listening to nearly six years of increasingly unlikely excuses and having the good grace to pretend he believed them; and of course his pa Janet for sounding concerned whenever I phoned in with the latest and most blatant lie, which, of course, had the character-building effect of making me feel terrible; John Hamilton, the man responsible for the spookily spot-on cover and overall appearance of the book; and Trevor Horwood, whose patient and painstaking copy-editing of the final draft brought some semblance of order to the proceedings.
But finally, the biggest thanks goes to the late John Bauldie whose advice, instruction and encouragement taught me how to write.
Lloyd Bradley, London,
July 1999
I told Norrie Drummond in an interview in the 1960s that my music is protest music, music protesting against slavery, class prejudice, racism, inequality, economic discrimination, denial of opportunity and the injustice we were suffering under colonialism in Jamaica. We were taken from Africa where our fore-parents were kings and queens and brought to Jamaica on ships as slaves, where we were stripped of our names, our language, our culture, our God and our religion. But music is the soul of Africa – its spirit, its DNA, its heredity – and this they were unable to conquer, enabling the birth in Jamaica of the cultural revolution we call ska: the mother, the womb that gave birth to rocksteady and reggae, our way of life.
The minds of the Jamaican people were colonized by America's rhythm and blues. Its influence penetrated deep into the fabric of society and had a devastating effect on our folk music, our dialect, even our dress code. America's twang had taken over from our Jamaican patois, mento, Burru and Poco, which were exiled from the city to the hills in the country, and instead of Jamaican songs like ‘Slide Mongoose’ and ‘Linstead Market’ the radio station and the sound systems bellowed the music of Duke Ellington, Sarah Vaughan, Fats Domino, Louis Jordan, Wynonie Harris, Willis Jackson and Patti Page, while the great Louis Bennett, Ranny Williams, Bim and Bam – patriots of our culture – were cast aside. Now don't get me wrong, I love rhythm and blues, I love Louis Jordan, but I also have an intrinsic love for things Jamaican; its musical expressions and art forms that are of Africa's heritage.
In 1957, in Kingston, I built my sound system at age nine-teen, naming it the Voice of the People. It was the first sound system to have a name that did more than just talk about the operator or about music and dance. Sound men such as Tom the Great Sebastian, Duke Reid the Trojan or Sir Coxsone Downbeat were at ease with the status quo; unlike them, I grew up a disciple of the Right Honourable Marcus Garvey, as did my parents. His words ‘You are a man like any other’ never left my head. My sound system was to be the people's radio station by way of the dancehalls, where their points of view would be heard, for they were not being heard on the major radio stations. To me it was important to name my sound system so, because the music of the ghettos and the countryside was being created for the people by the people. The ska was the first modern Jamaican music that didn't simply copy the American styles, and hence it meant so much more to the ordinary Jamaican people than the R&B and jazz that was coming out of Miami and New Orleans.
When I started recording this music I had to talk the musicians into playing it. At first, the radio stations wouldn't play it and the other sound-system owners laughed at it. But the people loved it. I can remember when I first played ‘They Got to Go’, the first ska record, on my sound system at Salt Lane and the people came running! Other dances fell flat because mine was a big system and could be heard from far away in places like the Coronation Market, Back-A-Wall, Smith Village, Hannah Town, Foreshore Road and the Parade, and the people knew they were hearing their own music for the first time. That was the music of the people, and the sound system that brought it to them was the Voice of the People: the means to allow their expression to be heard.
Since then Jamaican music – call it ska, call it rocksteady, call it roots, call it reggae – has always been the people's music. Their statements, their rhythms, their good times, their sufferation, their love songs. And every time the outside world catches up with it the beat changes again, so what's being played on the sound systems remains truly representative of the people who are making it.
Although the roots music of the 1970s, alongside the love songs, is commonly viewed as Jamaican music's first expression of the people's feeling about their lives, it had, in fact, been doing that since the beginning of the ska. There was ‘African Blood’, ‘Shanty Town’, ‘Black Head Chinee Man’, ‘Taxation’, ‘Too Hot’, ‘They Got to Come My Way’ (the first unofficial Jamaican national anthem), while the drums in ‘Oh Carolina’ reminded the people that Africa was not dead. And modern dancehall reggae music does the same thing, with records like ‘Black Man’, ‘Pharaoh House Crash’, ‘Police Trim Rasta’, ‘Hard Man Fe Dead’ and Us a Deliverer’. Every twist and turn of Jamaican music for the last forty years has reflected what has been happening to the people, either politically or socially, and often it's the other way around, with the music and sound systems influencing the country's politics.
The government angered the people when it charged me with possessing prohibited literature – a book titled Message to the Black Man, written by a black man and upholding the dignity of the black man – declaring my quest in the island at the time to be undesirable. This resulted in mass demonstrations with the support of the intellectuals at the university. There I dubbed Prime Minister Shearer ‘Pharaoh’, driven by the colonial mentality; after all, he was the one who told his police to shoot first and ask questions afterwards. He lost the election that followed and Michael Manley became Prime Minister. Manley learned from Pharaoh's mistakes and lifted the ban on Message to the Black Man and other literature written by people of colour.
Jamaican music has always been genuine folk music, but when its story has been told, it is seldom presented as the story of a whole people, describing how those with the ability and the talent were influenced by it to go into the studio or pick up a microphone at a dance. Too often only half the story is told, and the background, the upheavals and changes the island of Jamaica went through just before and since independence, gets forgotten in the face of so much music. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, however, omits nothing of what went into making the music from the small island of Jamaica such a force throughout the world. The rude-boy era, the banning of Walter Rodney, the IMF crisis, mass emigration to the UK, the bloody general elections, post-independence prosperity and the big let-down that was to follow, the British police, the Bob Marley effect, bauxite mining and mass tourism, technology's influence on the music… it's all here.
It takes a man like Lloyd Bradley to tell this complete story. I met him after he had telephoned to ask if he could come to Miami and talk to me in connection with a book he was writing. After hearing some of the topics he was interested in I gave him the OK. He arrived an hour and a half early. I'd been in the studio all night and was resting, so he sat and waited. When I got up an hour and a half later, I saw him sitting in my living room and asked him why he was so early. He replied that he was afraid of being late. I burst into laughter and that set the mood for the interview, which was originally scheduled for one hour and lasted for over three. Lloyd Bradley sees beyond the music to how real life in Jamaica made the music happen, and how it in turn affected the people, and he lets those people tell the story. He has worked hard to capture the pride, the passion, the struggle and the humour, but most of all the love that he heard in the music and saw in the people. He has understood the story and tells it with honesty, style and appreciation.
It's been a long wait for a book like Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King, but it has been worth it. This is a book that takes folk music from that little island in the Caribbean and treats it as seriously and as intellectually as any other musical form, but never loses sight of the spirit, the strength and the joy that went into making it. A book that knows reggae is serious business, but never forgets you have to dance to it.
Jamaican music at last has the book it deserves.
Prince Buster, Miami,
February 2000
‘It was always a downtown thing, only among a certain sort of people. But more than just hearing the music, the equipment was so powerful and the vibe so strong that we feel it. Like when we were dancing you were actually part of it. It was ours, and so many of us wanted to do something to contribute to it.’ / Derrick Harriott
‘Being part of the crowd at a big lawn, like at Forresters' Hall down on North Street, when a big sound system was playing was probably the greatest feeling in the world to any Jamaican kid. But if you had aspirations to make music then it was magical. It was… It was awe-inspiring.’
Derrick Harriott is now a prosperous music-business entrepreneur, with a family-run record store in Kingston's Constant Spring area and an international CD reissue operation specializing in his own reggae and rocksteady recordings and productions. But from the late 1950s through the next two decades, he was among Jamaica's most consistently successful artists, one of the very few to progress through R&B, ska, rocksteady, reggae and dub producing international hits for himself and others with total conviction. While this dapper-looking fifty-something won't need much coaxing to get up on stage to rock a crowd, if you really want to get his attention ask him about his downtown teenage years. His face creases into a misty-eyed smile.
‘The sound system dances were where the ghetto people came to enjoy themselves. No airs nor graces, just be among your own people. This was a big attraction. Sometimes there was trouble, but, back then, more often there wasn't. It seem like to be a teenager in Jamaica during that era was the best thing on earth. The people would have on their best clothes – when it come to dressing up nobody can look fine like the ghetto people – and you would have a drink or whatever and hear the very best music. It made us feel real good about ourselves. Like we could do anything.’
This was back in the first half of the 1950s, and even then a sound system was more than just a cliff face of speaker boxes, each big enough to raise a family in, powered by amplification of apparently intercontinental capabilities. It was, quite literally, the community's heartbeat, which meant that the dance was always going to be more than simply somewhere to be. In fact, to introduce the sound system as ‘a mobile disco’, or even ‘a mobile disco with attitude’, would be to do it, its operators and this new wave of post-war Jamaican youth an enormous disservice.
A reasonable UK comparison to what the sound systems meant to Harriott's and subsequent generations would be Britain's football teams, because in downtown Kingston practically every youngster followed, or ran wid, a sound. Home and away, because when your guys played out in an area other than your own, your presence and your vocal support would be counted on. And if it was a sound clash, with two rival outfits slugging it out by playing alternate records and the victors being whoever won over the bigger, noisier part of the crowd, then to stand up for your sound system was a matter of honour. You were standing up for your area, your friends, your good name.
And by that time it had become second nature.
The idea of blasting music from the radio or a record player – the best in American R&B or hot jazz – through a configuration of open-air loudspeaker cabinets became popular in the mid-1940s as a way of enticing passing trade into bars and shops. Indeed, the reason the first sound-system rigs and, later, established dances were called ‘sets’ was simply because the equipment evolved from large radio and gramophone sets. And as a marketing device these rambunctious methods worked; to such a degree that by the end of that decade the music often became the main reason to visit whatever establishment. After all, with transistor radios not yet part of life and cabinet model wirelesses being beyond most pockets, it was the only way for so many Jamaicans to hear any professionally produced music.
Within ten years or so, the sound system had become a social phenomenon in its own right, and its operator, the sound man, one of the biggest men in his area. Outdoor dances kept by the extravagantly named likes of Tom the Great Sebastian, V Rocket, Count Smith the Blues Blaster, Sir Nick the Champ, King Edwards or Lord Koos of the Universe evolved from merely one more form of urban entertainment into the hub around which Kingston's various inner cities turned. For the crowds that flocked to wherever the big beat boomed out, it was a lively dating agency, a fashion show, an information exchange, a street status parade ground, a political forum, a centre for commerce, and, once the deejays began to chat on the mic about more than their sound systems, their records, their women or their selves, it was the ghetto's newspaper.
Absolutely vital, though, was the economic effect. Dances put on by ghetto men brought new money into the immediate and wider community as people came from out of town or other parts of the city, with money to spend. While this wasn't an enormous amount per head, the numbers involved made a worthwhile total; and besides, proportionately speaking, anything extra was a big improvement. Nor was it just the promoters and operators who were earning: a whole satellite system of ancillary trading occurred, making sure a percentage of that cash ended up in wider local circulation. The streets surrounding any major venue would be lined with hot-food tables offering jerk pork and chicken, patties or fried fish, and push-cart men arrived loaded up with fresh coconuts, sugar cane, bananas and mangoes. It was a rare thing for these vendors not to sell out. Likewise the flatbed drinks trucks, which would lurch up bearing teetering stacks of Red Stripe or Heineken beer and soda crates, supplying the bars inside and outside the arenas. Then, at the far end of this musical food chain, schoolchildren with any degree of nous would be up before sunrise, collecting discarded bottles to return them to the factories for the penny deposit on each.
I'ts been said that sound-system dances existed only to sell beer. That was never ever true and, with great dismissiveness, it removes any notion of passion and inventiveness from the sound men to imply that the shifting, culturally cutting-edge sound-system phenomenon was driven by outside-the-ghetto big businesses. Of course there were the mutual benefits enjoyed by the sound systems and the drinks trade. Jamaica's Red Stripe brewery built itself up and kept going thanks to the business it did in the dancehalls back then. And, later, Red Stripe, Guinness, Heineken and the larger rum distillers became actively involved in promoting sound-system events – as they still are today. Also, it's no coincidence that the two men who did most to elevate and sustain the situation as the next era's front runners both had liquor-sales connections before they got into music. Coxsone Dodd's family owned liquor stores, as did Duke Reid himself – in fact the first advertisements for Duke Reid's services read, ‘For the best in sound and liquors see Reid's Sound System and Liquor Store for Clubs, Bars, Parties and Home.’ It was an additional dancehall-related income that allowed them to survive and expand beyond what was achieved by the original operators.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
Critically, while these communal and personal fiscal advantages meant that sound systems were there to stay, the defining aspect of them as the crux of ghetto life was that they were cultural, as opposed to being merely a culture.
In an environment where any emerging indigenous – i.e., black – artistic or social expression was either discouraged to the point of being stillborn, drastically diluted in the name of artistic sophistication or blanded out to appeal to white tourists, the sound system had been created by and for Jamaica's dispossessed. Thus it would always thrive so long as it remained their exclusive property. To reiterate Derrick Harriott's point, there was a huge sense of self-worth involved here: a warm night inside a big lawn's bamboo fence (clubs were so named because most of the action happened on the grassed-over area outside the actual hall), under the starry Caribbean skies, was about as good as life – anybody's life – could get. When the sweet smells of jerk chicken, bougainvillaea and collie weed swirled around your head, you could feel the hottest R&B jump-up vibrate through a cold bottle of beer, and cut some crisp steps with a big-eyed daughter… it was enough to overwhelm anybody. To the point at which it didn't really matter what you didn't have for the rest of the time, because right there, right then, at the sound-system dance, you had it all.
Different areas had different systems, an idea of turf that was taken entirely seriously as far as sound clashes were concerned. However, lively as these cutting contests might have been, they were largely good-natured affairs with audiences out to enjoy themselves. Serious crowd violence was rare (it came later, and then at the instigation and orchestration not of the audience but of some of the more colourful sound men). Of the first generation of significant systems, Tom the Great Sebastian set up camp at Luke Lane and Charles Street, King Edwards controlled the Maxfield Avenue/Waltham Park area and Count Smith was in Greenwich Town. All this was happening in an area which was no bigger than a small London borough, but which accommodated an extraordinary number of venues. Forresters' Hall, where lodge meetings were held, and Kings Lawn on North Street were separated only by Love Lane; both had huge outside areas and would take crowds of four figures. Liberty Hall and Jubilee were both on King Street, yet each could pull in several hundred people on the same night. Dancehalls such as Pioneer in Jones Town, Carnival on North Street, the Red Rooster on Tower Street, The Success Club on Wildman Street and Bar-B-Que on Fleet Street in East Kingston had three-hundred-plus capacities. Cho Co Mo on Wellington Street, though, with its huge lawn out front, was the biggest, easily accommodating a couple of thousand, with a good deal more just outside the fence grooving on the music.
Dances were on most nights of the week, with weekend functions lasting through to the next morning. Many of the smaller places held afternoon sessions – it wasn't unusual for kids to be coming from school, get kinda sidetracked by the music, sneak in, lose track of time and expect a beating when they eventually did get home. Then there were the Sunday outings to the Palm Beach, Gold Coast or Hellshire Beach to the west of Kingston or, more popularly, to the beaches along St Thomas Road to the east of the city. This is the road that runs to Bull Bay (if you turn right when you come from the airport road, that's St Thomas Road), and on the beach side were a series of purpose-built ‘clubs’. These were fenced-off open-air areas, with large concrete floors on which the sound system would be set up, and there would be a purpose-built bar area. This way the equipment would stay well away from the sand, but as the dance floor went down to the beach itself the patrons could take full advantage. By far the best along that stretch was the Palm Beach Club, which had trees and shrubs planted around the dance floor with tables placed among them, and little huts woven out of palm leaves to create secluded chill-out spaces. Sound men would organize coaches to pick up from pre-arranged ghetto corners from quite early in the morning, and whole families would come out with picnics, with the serious ravers arriving much later to keep the dance going until Monday morning. And to imagine that British teenagers in the late 1980s thought they invented all-night open-air raving!
But more than just being a lot of fun, or even culturally correct, these sound-system sessions changed Jamaica and its relationship with the rest of the world for ever. It was the continuous stream of exciting, imported American R&B records they generated that gave birth to Jamaica's highest profile, most valuable and as yet inexhaustible export: music. Because, in the mid-1950s, entirely due to the sound systems, the country began to go music mad and something serious had to happen. Quickly.
Eyes shining now, and slapping an index finger on the shop counter to force his point across, Derrick Harriott takes up the story.
‘What happened was the musical thing was real widespread, but only among a certain sort of people. It was always a downtown thing. But more than just hearing the music, the equipment was so powerful and the vibe so strong that we feel it. Like when we were dancing you were actually part of it. It was ours, and so many of us wanted to do something to contribute to it. Check and you'll see that of the wave of Jamaican musicians that started making original music the majority of them would have been at sound systems back then, soaking it up and feeling how the people would love a good song.
‘It's easy to see how they were inspired. Which is why, once the sound systems started making a big impression back in the fifties, five years later there was such an enormous amount of youngsters wanting to make music. There was much more music coming out of Kingston in the early sixties than should be expected from a city that size.’
Tom the Great Sebastian's was the most important sound system in the first half of the 1950s. Most veterans agree that his was the original Big Rig, with the most powerful amplifiers and the biggest number of speaker cabinets – or ‘houses of joy’ as they were called, in reference to their unit size. Close behind in terms of power and prestige were V Rocket, King Edwards, Sir Nick, Nation, Admiral Cosmic, Lord Koos, Kelly's and Buckles. And the rhythms that carried the swing at their dances were very different from the well-mannered tunes wafting across the local airwaves courtesy of Radio Jamaica Rediffusion.
To appeal to as many people as possible, radio played it safe by leaning towards the insipid. A ghetto crowd, however, out to enjoy themselves on Saturday night, wanted to dance until they dropped. Any sound man worth his title couldn't be doing with the conventional Jamaican airplay hits and only the most soulful would do: the fieriest R&B, merengue or Latin jazz; the bawdiest mento; the deepest ballads. Naturally, Jamaican radio wouldn't touch the sound-system specials, no matter how popular they proved with the people, because the airwaves at that time were controlled by middle-class types who aspired to ‘dignity’ and looked upon anything too wild – too black – as bordering on the savage. Most crucially, though, if the sound systems played the hits then they'd all have the same records, and where would be the sport in that? In the pressure-cooker competition of the dancehall, what gave an operator the edge over his rivals were records that nobody else even knew the name of, let alone owned. This was the rare-groove scene in its purest and most original form, where you'd go beyond the beat to a place in which exclusivity and obscurity were the only yardsticks.
And audience appreciation, of course, which would be instant and unreserved. One of the major attractions of going to a sound-system dance was the chance to participate with some mad noise. Records unique to a particular operation – which assumed a kind of trophy status – or old favourites would be greeted with a big cheer as the dancers settled down to bust their moves. New records that made the place really come alive would end with a barrage of shouts to Lick it back, or Wheel and come again – an occurrence that could be repeated dozens of times, as long that tune continued to move the crowd. If a record was wrong, though, and the crowd didn't like it, they'd make themselves felt just as lustily – you'd hardly be able to hear the music for the booing and the operator had to change it. Double quick! A feat in itself, because those guys only ever used one turntable, therefore cross-fading was out of the question. It was done like this: one hand would hold the next record between the third and little fingers and the palm; the other hand would lift the needle from the offending disc; the first hand could then be moved over to pluck that record from the turntable using the thumb and index/middle fingers, and drop the other one on to the centre-dome all in the same movement. A flick of the wrist. Snap! Then the other hand would replace the needle.
There was always much more of a connection between a Jamaican deejay and his crowd than the idea of a disco or nightclub might imply. A good dance would be a group experience; a mutual-appreciation society between deejay and disciples. The crowds would join in singing favourite or exclusive-to-that-set cuts and the operator would kill the volume on choruses to let them do so. It was proof of a system's popularity in a manner that could be heard all over the area, thus vital for the sound man's standing. In return for such a boost the sound man had to live up to his hype. Hence the spectacular stage names, the flamboyant behaviour, the sense of showmanship that went beyond simply spinning tunes and a continual supply of the best, the most exclusive and therefore the most prestigious music. It was out of these self-contained cycles of give and take that the sound-system scene's inherent partisanship evolved.
This immediate response to music kept the deejays close to the people and meant that the records offered on sound systems were always popular choices. When a record really kicked, the average sound man would work it to death while he set out to find more just like it for future use, but all that this would achieve was to keep him running on the spot. Essentially, this was a short-term proposition. Although it was absolutely vital to let a hot tune run its course, an audience expecting to hear it several times a night, the real challenge came in anticipating what that same crowd would want next, and advancing the music on offer to just such a point. To keep moving on was the only way to maintain continued audience interest, and so build a lasting career. Thus, the dances became testing grounds for new styles of music as well as new records, and the people were always closely involved with how things developed.
In this respect, everything that is Jamaican music today can be traced back to those first sound-system operations – it's important to recognize it was a status quo in place even before there was anything that could be called Jamaican music. Today, more than forty years later, the sound system remains the mainstay of the Jamaican music industry, since nearly all the island's top producers have their own systems, or exclusive links to one. Thus musical evolution remains, quite literally, by popular request.
Such proximity to the people and the need constantly to reinvent itself at this pace meant that Jamaican music, although then based on an American form, would find its own personality sooner rather than later. As it was, less than ten years after sound systems became big news, Jamaican music had forged an identity so strong as to be completely unrecognizable from its original form. It was, however, instantly identifiable all over the planet, and so culturally distinct that it couldn't be made – with any credibility – by anyone with no Jamaican blood in them, or who hadn't been totally immersed in the culture.
But to get from a Denham Town yard dance to a vibrant international recording industry, you must, as so often in Jamaica, take the scenic route.
During the first half of the 1950s, the Jamaican economy was undergoing yet another series of extraordinary upheavals. In fact, it was as near to booming as it ever had been, with a 10 per cent year-on-year Gross National Product growth up until 1957, which for the rest of the decade only slowed to 7 per cent. Sugar and bananas were premium exports, but what was making the difference was the long-haul holiday market opening up as a fashionable upper-bracket pursuit for both Europeans and Americans. This meant the international aluminium industry was in overdrive, as the commercial airline business took off and passenger planes had to be built, while exotic destinations for travellers had to be found. Jamaica was well equipped to service both these demands.
Bauxite, the chief mineral source of aluminium, was present in abundance in Jamaica's red soil, and between 1950 and 1957 the island was the world's largest supplier of said mineral as such companies as Alcan, Reynolds and Alcoa staked claims on the country's interior. During the same period, vast stretches of the north coast were turned into building sites in a concerted bid to meet the need for luxury hotel rooms. Subsequently, there was rapid job creation in mining, construction and the tourist trade. Also, because most of the money behind these operations came from US-owned multinational corporations, the Jamaican Treasury got a boost when the buoyant yankee dollar replaced the weaker pound sterling as its crutch of choice.
Emigration played a big part, too, there being what amounted to an exodus of skilled and unskilled labour. During the 1950s, immigration to the UK, Canada and North America was virtually unchecked – because Jamaica was then a British colony, her citizens were actively encouraged to go to the UK. They had no problem entering Canada, either, as it was also a British colony, and even after the USA introduced immigration controls in 1952, Jamaicans could get into the States on the British immigration quota, which was always undersubscribed. Over a quarter of a million people, or, astonishingly, about one-tenth of Jamaica's population, left for those three destinations during the decade. To this must be added the enormous number of seasonal, short-term agricultural labour contracts – cane cutting a speciality – taken up by Jamaicans in the American South. So, as long as Jamaican jobs were being quit for a chance in one of a choice of Promised Lands, there was less competition for the new vacancies at home.
A significant knock-on effect of this mass emigration was the regular sending home of cash by relatives working abroad, producing new incomes out of, quite literally, nothing. Although this factor has never been taken too seriously – perhaps because there are no official figures – in the tenement yards and the rural cabins, a few pounds arriving from London every month could mean the difference between eating or not, sending children to school or otherwise, and must be counted as a significant contributor to those boom years.
Politically, things were upbeat as well. In 1955, Norman Manley's PNP had come to power on an increasingly appealing independence ticket, and proceeded to push hard in that direction. By 1958 Jamaica's bauxite wealth was such that, in competition with oil-rich Trinidad, it was confident enough to undermine the solidarity of the West Indies Federation (an economic cartel of Caribbean islands plus Guyana and what was then British Honduras) with an escalating gung-ho bullishness. All of which produced a widespread sense of national optimism; a factor which, if you were sitting on the dirt floor of a cardboard shack in Jones Town, was probably of far greater significance than your actual fiscal improvement.
It is true that there was a certain amount of economic-boom moolah trickling down the hill to a certain amount of ghetto people, which, probably for the first time, allowed them disposable income. And yes, some conditions had improved after the hurricane of 1951 left many homeless, resulting in a programme of municipal housing which provided for the building of small, modular, cement dwellings with kitchens and inside plumbing – the ‘government yards’ or the ‘concrete jungle’ that Bob Marley would write about in years to come. But the downsides of all these improvements were ominous.
As would be expected, working people with the means to upward mobility quit the slums as soon as possible, taking up residence in the new breezeblock bungalow developments sprouting to the north towards Half Way Tree, so hardly any new money stuck to the ghetto. On a wider scale, it must be remembered that the hotel construction sites were miles away from the capital, so the jobs they created had little direct fiscal effect on West Kingston. Then, perhaps most significantly, the apparently wealth-generating bauxite mines (again not in the capital) did more harm than good to the general population; the farms that were bought up and shut down to accommodate the vast open-cast tracts displaced far more country folk than they employed. Around 300,000 people were forced to move in order to create 10,000 new jobs. Unsurprisingly, a massive percentage of those left without homes or work gravitated to Kingston. The already overcrowded slums downtown mushroomed into a maze of squatter camps around the concrete ditches, gullies and open sewers that gave Trench Town its name.
The bottom line was that, while the economy was expanding for the country as a whole, in much of West Kingston poverty still meant ‘desperately poor’. It was at this time that the middle-class/land-owner flight began in earnest, as those with real money relocated to the Blue Mountain foothills and whitewashed, landscaped, luxury villas, with high walls and secure gates. Two nations within the one country, defined by geographical as much as social altitude. Old-timers who remember those days talk of the sense of isolation among the ghetto sufferahs, which intensified the sense of ownership and pride as regards anything exclusively theirs. Such as the sound systems. Thus, as the 1950s progressed, the speaker boxes were booming, numerically as well as literally.
As well as the better-known outfits, there were a host of others whose reputations may never have travelled much beyond their particular Kingston corner but which were still contributing to the sprawling cacophony that had turned music into a national obsession. And this music was guaranteed to lift the most down-pressured spirit. Becoming dominant above the Latin and mento was a raw, ‘cross-the-tracks funk, fresh off the boat from the dark sides of Miami, New Orleans and New York. Louis Jordan was a perennial favourite, and prolific enough to meet demand; the big blues shouter Wynonie Harris always went down well – his US hit ‘Blood Shot Eyes’ was virtually stuck to Jamaican sound men's turntables between 1951 and 1953. Jimmy Reed had a number of sound-system hits, the biggest being ‘Baby What You Want Me to Do’. Bill ‘Mr Honky Tonk’ Doggett's records would regularly rock the crowds, as would Professor Longhair's. Fats Domino and Lloyd Price took them to the roots of rock ‘n’ roll. Jazz would be present and entirely correct courtesy of Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughan or Earl Hines; while the honey-dripping likes of Nat King Cole, Billy Eckstine, Jesse Belvin or the Moonglows were the lurrrve gods of their time. Although the artists' names had changed since the big-band dominated 1940s, music for getting down in a house party or lawn session in Jamaica was still largely about extremes – the buck wild or the silky smooth.
Only the very biggest operators could afford to travel to the USA to shop for records, so the majority of sound-system music arrived courtesy of merchant seamen and returning migrant workers looking to supplement their income. (True, there were official importers and one or two licensing companies, but if a record was available in the shops that stocked U S records it would be far too accessible to be of high priority to any self-respecting sound man.) A proportion of that informal import trade would be pre-arranged, with the secondary level of sound men having made deals with seamen whose judgement they respected, asking them to shop for certain types of record by certain artists or producers, occasionally allowing the voyager to surprise them. But the majority of business was with the little sound men and strictly freelance, resulting in spirited bartering, or ‘higgling’, being carried out on the quayside between entrepreneurial arrivals and their prospective clients. Kotchels of American singles were negotiated against such desirable domestically produced resaleables as rum, fine cigars, coffee and ganja, or women – time spent with, that is, as some of the liveliest sound-system sets took place in Kingston's most renowned brothels.
But to be a sound man you had to be a showman, so hot new tunes were hyped to a point just past sizzling as soon as they changed hands. The major deejays would be far too grand to meet the boat themselves, so they'd have young runners waiting out on the docks, seeking what shelter they could from the sun and looking for particular ships to tie up. These youths would then get the designated deals over with and proceed to make an enormous performance of whisking the records – by bicycle – straight to their employers, leaving as many observers as possible in no doubt as to how fresh that particular sound system's dance would be that night.
By the time tunes came into Jamaica their original US release date was pretty much irrelevant. Their exclusivity was what was valuable, thus the most important piece of equipment for a sound man bringing in American records was a coin. Any coin, the edge of it being used to remove any information printed on the records' labels. This needed to be done quickly, too, because industrial espionage, employee bribery and all manner of coercion would be brought into play to discover a disc's identity, so the fewer people who knew a killer tune's actual name the lower the likelihood of a rival getting hold of a copy. After all the label copy had been erased, it wasn't uncommon for a newly anonymous tune to be renamed, usually with a title glorifying the sound man or sound system that was playing it – ‘Count Smith Shuffle’, ‘Goodies’ Boogie’, ‘On Beat Street’, and so on. Interestingly, the original cool operator Tom the Great Sebastian never scratched the names off his records. While this had much to do with his obsession with keeping his things neat, that he never felt the need for such subterfuge is a mark of by how much sound-system competition had escalated in the 1950s.