Free Senor Nice by Howard Marks Page B

Jamaican muisc and dance. During the early 1900s, calypso, whose greatest star was Jamaican Harry Belafonte, combined with tango and samba to produce mento, a purely Jamaican sound. American rhythm and blues then melded with calypso to produce another uniquely Jamaican rhythm, soca, and with mento to originate the far more popular ska, referred to in the UK as bluebeat. ‘My Boy Lollipop’, sung by Jamaican Millie Small, arranged by Ernest Ranglin and produced by Chris Blackwell, went to the top of the UK charts in 1964.
    Sound systems on wheels began in the 1950s and spawnedthe cult of the DJs, known then as toasters. During the 1960s, the ska beat slowed down and a dominant bass line emerged to produce rocksteady, a sound pioneered by Leroy Sibbles and the Heptones and brought to international fame by Desmond Dekker and Jimmy Cliff.
    Rastafarian influence resulted in song lyrics expressing black pride and protest. The Jamaican establishment saw this as subversive and the new music was banned from radio stations. However it could still be heard in rum bars and on juke boxes. Reggae emerged, the name derived from rex, the music of Kingston’s lion kings. Then came the Jamaican equivalent to the Beatles, the Wailers, a vocal trio comprising Neville ‘Bunny’ Livingston, Peter ‘Tosh’ MacIntosh and Robert Nesta Marley. At first they dressed as gangsters, or rude boys, wearing sharp suits and shades, but then found their true style with producer Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry. To the world, Bob Marley is reggae, but the word was first used by Toots Hibbert, a direct descendant of an anti-slavery activist, in ‘Do the Reggay’ in 1968. Chris Blackwell’s Island Records produced a series of Wailers albums, introducing reggae to a worldwide audience and making Bob Marley the Third World’s first superstar. B-sides of popular discs were released with the vocals removed, leaving the heavy bass and drum tracks for toasters to add further instrumentation and their own lyrics, giving birth to the culture of dub poetry.
    One of ganja’s many marvellous properties is to heighten one’s appreciation of tonal resonance and change one’s perception of time. This encouraged reggae record producers such as Lee Perry and King Tubby to twiddle their knobs, reverberate, echo, cut up the vocal track, and add snatches of dogs barking, roosters crowing and gunshots. The title track on Peter Tosh’s first solo LP
Legalise It
includes a litany of ganja’s medicinal uses and a list of those who use it: doctors, nurses, judges and lawyers as well as singers and musicians. The song has become the anthem of pot smokers everywhere.
    In Jamaica but dopeless, I listened to a selection of the CDs, thoroughly enjoying my auditory history lesson and reading the biographies of the artists. For the first time I learned that Bob Marley was of mixed race. Feeling slightly ashamed of my ignorance, I read on. According to Jamaica’s
Daily Post
, Marley’s mother was a Jamaican woman named Ciddy Brooker who married Captain Marley, a British army officer and British West Indian Regiment quartermaster, whose brief was to assist in the colonisation and cultivation of the island. The marriage was a scandal and Marley’s family disinherited him. He resigned his commission and took a job in Kingston. Captain Marley’s first name was Norval, and he was born in Prestatyn, North Wales. I found it hard to believe what I was reading. Accepting that Elvis was Welsh had been hard enough. I longed to go back to the Royal Oak and catch out Eddie Evans with that snippet of information.
    Deeply regretting that I would probably have to leave Jamaica before witnessing a live concert, I fell asleep.
    The dawn chorus catapulted me out of bed, but Jake’s was still dead. Looking for a telephone outside the hotel, I passed the closed International Communication Centre. Due to either sharp business practice or rural frustration, vandals had disabled all the phone boxes within