Bob Marley: The Untold Story. Chris Salewicz

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СКАЧАТЬ one day Nesta came home and told his mother that the restaurant had been broken into and all its contents stolen. The boy and his mother decided to sleep the night in the premises in order that it be protected from further attacks, but left and went home after a friend pointed out that if the thieves returned they would almost certainly kill anyone they found there. Soon Cedella sold it to her brother John, who resolved the problem of night-time break-ins by turning the property into a twenty-four-hour business.

      For Cedella’s son there were too many unanswered questions, not the least those surrounding his parenthood. Why did he never see his father? Why had he been cursed with light skin, a clear indication of white blood flowing in his veins? It was a weapon for other youth when they wanted to taunt him for something. So much moving around from place to place, from home to home … As Nesta roamed Kingston, often playing truant, he would sometimes find himself in the area he spent time in during that year in the capital when he thought he had lost his mother for ever; and at those times he would feel an inexplicable chill run through him. Within him was a gnawing sense of unease, a fear of opening himself to others. He was no stranger to a feeling of tears of frustration and anger welling in his eyes. No wonder he veered between an appearance of shy timidity and that pure screwface mask that was the habitual shield of the ghetto youth. As he grew older, he often seemed to wear a permanent frown.

      In Jamaica in the late 1950s, there was an undercurrent that suggested everything was up for grabs. People were redefining themselves, working out who they were with a new confidence. The increasingly uncertain, guilty and repressive hold of the British colonialists was about to be shaken off. Already there were whispers of independence being granted to the island, as, in the wake of the Second World War, it had begun to be around the world. New times were coming.

      This sense of optimism was reflected in the music. Jamaicans had developed a taste for American R’n’B when US troops were based there during the Second World War. During the late 1940s, a number of big bands were formed – those of Eric Dean, who had employed both Don Drummond and Ernest Ranglin, and Val Bennett, for example. Jitterbugging audiences would dance until dawn to tunes they drew from American artists such as Count Basie, Duke Ellington, and Glenn Miller.

      By 1950, in the USA the big bands were being superseded by newer outfits: the feisty, optimistic new sounds of bop and rhythm and blues. In Jamaica, these new American popular-music forms were absorbed but in each case given a unique, local, stylistic twist.

      There had always been a large traffic of Jamaicans to the United States, a country ever eager – as the United Kingdom was – for fresh supplies of manual workers to undertake the jobs disdained by its more successful citizens. Ambitious, musically inclined Jamaicans would return from the USA with piles of the hottest, most underground 78s; to conceal the tunes’ identities, the labels would be scratched off before they were used by sound systems. Sound systems were like portable discos for giants: they would consist of up to thirty or forty speakers, each as large as wardrobes, joined by a vast, intricate pattern of cables that seemed an organic growth from Jamaica’s profusion of dangling liana vines. Music, which would sporadically and often eccentrically be commented on by the disc jockeys spinning the records, would thud out of them at a spine-shaking volume.

      The sound-system dances took over Jamaica. Few people owned radios, and the only way to hear the latest rhythm and blues was to go to the big outdoor dances held at ‘lawns’ in locations such as Chocomo on Wellington Street and Jubilee on King Street. Setting up in 1950, Tom the Great Sebastian was the first significant sound-system operator. He would ‘toast’ as a DJ on the microphone, also using Duke Vin (who in 1956 began the first ‘system’ in the United Kingdom) and Count Machuki, another legendary figure from the days of sound systems. Many believe Tom the Great Sebastian was the all-time giant of sound systems. ‘He is the man,’ said Prince Buster, who later ran his own system and became one of Jamaica’s most innovative musicians. Goodies, Count Smith the Blues Blaster, Count Joe, and Sir Nick the Champ, among the leading contenders, never triumphed over Tom the Great Sebastian, as would be apparent at the dances billed as sound-system battles in which two or more systems would compete, each playing a record in turn. Tom would mash up the opposition with the uniqueness of his tunes, straight off the plane from the USA, and with the originality of his DJing and the sheer power of his equipment.

      Although there was a clear ironical purpose in the taking up of aristocratic titles, it was also the only way non-white Jamaicans could possibly hope to aspire to such dizzy heights. Duke Reid the Trojan was also named after the Bedford Trojan truck he used to transport his equipment – the money for it came from the liquor stores owned by his family, an empire that began when his wife won the national lottery.

      Reid, who had formerly been a policeman, was a contentious figure. Sporting a pair of revolvers in his belt, from which he would indiscriminately loose off shots, he was more inclined to destroy the opposition through violence than talent. To Duke Reid, who began operating a couple of years after Tom the Great Sebastian, may be attributed the genesis of much of the gangland-like behaviour that became a later feature of the Jamaican music business. Instead of mashing up the sound-system opposition by playing the heaviest, loudest tunes, he would simply charge into opposition dances with his gang, beating up people or stabbing them and destroying their equipment. And if that didn’t work, Reid was always partial to resorting to a spot of obeah. Undoubtedly a colourful character, at dances Reid would even have gangs of tough, sexy women, controlled by a female lieutenant called Duddah, all dressed in the same uniforms. But he also had tons of boxes, tons of house of joy, as sound-system speakers were sometimes known.

      Soon, however, there came a contender for Duke Reid’s crown: the Sir Coxsone Downbeat sound system, which took its name from the Yorkshire cricketer Coxsone and was run by one Clement Seymour Dodd. Dodd had first earned his spurs as one of Reid’s myriad helpers and his family was also in the liquor-store business. King Stitt and Machuki, two of Dodd’s principal DJs, built the set; ‘Brand-new – dig, daddy’ was one of their great catchphrases. Another of the leading disc jockeys employed by Coxsone, as he became known, was Prince Buster, whose former occupation of boxer also ensured he was a sizable deterrent to the thugs run by Reid.

      Although not always. By 1958, Prince Buster was running his open sound system; Reid and fifteen of his thugs went to a dance at the Chocomo Lawn on Wellington Street looking for him. Buster wasn’t there: he was playing dice down on Charles Street. Hearing that Reid and his gang were up at Chocomo, Prince Buster hurried up there, and a man immediately pulled a knife on him. In the mêlée that followed, another of Reid’s hoods split the back of Buster’s skull open with a rock. Later, he and Reid became good friends: ‘He became a nice man: he was just possessed by what was going on.’

      Soon both Coxsone and Duke Reid began recording songs by local artists specifically for use on their respective systems. The law of supply and demand showed itself to be inescapable, and out of this – as well as Coxsone’s realisation that American record companies such as Imperial and Modern didn’t seem to notice when he blatantly pirated their material – was born the Jamaican recording industry.

      The first two dances at which the Sir Coxsone Downbeat sound system played were in Trench Town; and the first of these was an event put on by Jimmy Tucker, a leading Jamaican vocalist.

      The cauldron of Trench Town epitomised one of the great cultural truths about Jamaica – and other impoverished countries in the Third World, come to that: how those who have nothing – and therefore nothing to lose – have no fear of expressing their God-given talents. People whose earning potential sometimes seems to be literally nil have a pride and confidence in their innate abilities in arts and crafts – a pride and confidence that western educational and employment systems appear to conspire to kick out of those who pass through them. The pace of life in Jamaica, moreover, often seems to accord with the God-given rhythms of nature: rising with the sun, people are active early in the day until the sun goes down. Such a harnessing of man’s soul to the day’s natural process seems to allow free rein and progress to the creative СКАЧАТЬ