Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [125]
This, for Swank, was the last straw. “Of course I do—I’m Jewish!”
“Oh yah? What tribe you belong?”
“Well, uh, I’m not exactly sure—”
“Yah? Then how you know you member twelve tribes?”
“Because my father told me!”
“Your father???!!!” The Rasta thought, apparently, that Swank was referring to his Father in Heaven.
“Yeah, my father and my mother!”
“Oh, you parents!”
“Yeah!”
“You read tha ‘Oly Bible?”
“Of course!”
“All da way troo?” This guy was obviously not going to be easily convinced; from the beginning, several of those in attendance had been observably suspicious of the motives of these white foreigners with tape recorders. Marley just sat back smoking and laughing. Swank, who in his life had been known to take amphetamines for his weight and est for his personality, was getting frazzled, finally allowing himself to get truly combative after having to wait on Marley and suffer evasive answers. “Yeah, I read it all the way through!”
“How long it take you?” demanded the Rasta.
“Whattaya mean, how long—it was a long time ago!”
Triumph: “You read wan chapter a day you can read da whole Bible in tree an’ a half years!”
Swank backed off enough to see the discretion of not countering with a “So what?” In fact, he didn’t have much of anything to say at all, just now, and the Rasta leaped into the breach, accusing him of not really being a member of the twelve tribes of Israel, since he didn’t even know which one he belonged to. They argued a bit, and Swank eventually allowed as how it was quite probable that he belonged to the tribe of Levi. I think at that moment he would have practically sworn an affidavit to that effect. So now he could slip out of further wranglings, Bob could go in his house for supper, and the Second and Third Worlds could, for this one evening at least, part gracefully and with a nice buzz on.
Thursday. I am in a cab with John Martyn, bombing through the streets of Kingston on the way to Strawberry Hill. John is an English songwriter who is planning to record part of his next album in Jamaica, but right now we are on our way to a Burning Spear recording session where he is going to do some guitar overdubs. First, however, we have to drive up to Strawberry Hill to pick up the guitar at Chris Blackwell's hilltop estate. The road is long, narrow and whip-winding, with perilous curves and steep drops off the shoulder, but the country around it is beautiful, lavish with brilliant green and yellow. It's a welcome respite, and the only time I will see anything close to still-existing primal Jamaica during my stay. On the way up Martyn points out to me the palatial estate of Blackwell's parents, who made millions of dollars in decades of colonial enterprise in Jamaica. On the way back down we meet, pedaling uphill on a rusty bicycle as if floating, a friend of Martyn's named Country Man. Country Man is a Rasta with university education, gifted, articulate, and imbued with enough of the unimpeachably mystical that even a cynic like Martyn (who beats your reporter) believes the accounts of him levitating on occasion. Country Man lives by swimming or rowing far off the coast into the Caribbean, holding onto a rock among the Keys with one arm, and grabbing fish as they swim by. The best story about Country Man is that his wife complained once because he would go off on such expeditions for three days at a time leaving her alone; she wanted, she said, a radio for company. So Country Man sold their house, used the money to buy her a radio, and built a new house the same day.
When we arrive at the Spear session we discover, naturally enough, that we are the first people to show up even though we are over an hour late. So we take a walk around the corner, a risky proposition for whites in downtown Kingston at any time of the day, and have a couple of drinks in a black bar where sullen youth are playing billiards. I feel only minor drafts. An old