Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [126]
“And none of what you hear.” I finished.
He nodded and smiled. “Right.”
We go back to the session, which is taking place in Randy's Studio, which naturally enough is right over Randy's Record Shop, which may be the best store in Jamaica and is the first place you should go if you have a shopping list—Randy stocks records by everybody, not just the output of his studio and star producer, Jack Ruby, who is himself a bit of a legend. Ruby, who has also worked as a hotel waiter, started producing two and a half years ago and his biggest success to date has been with Burning Spear, a vocal trio straight out of the hills whose U.S.-released album, Marcus Garvey, epitomizes the more purely African wing of reggae. There is something almost aboriginal about Burning Spear—Winston Rodney walks up to the mike and begins to sing a new song about living in the hills, Rupert Willington and Delroy Hines harmonizing behind him, and there is a haunting plaintiveness in his voice as he sings of his brother going to the river to get the water for his family. As he tells this seemingly simple story, the dozen or so black youths milling about in the control room, friends of the producer and band, laugh and comment to each other approvingly. The reason they are doing this is that many of them have probably experienced what Rodney is singing about—spending a whole day going back and forth to the nearest river, which may be a distance of miles, with a bucket on your head, until the drum or barrel which is the family's only water supply is full. In the middle of the song Rodney sings “These are the sounds of the hills,” and begins making bird calls and animal sounds. Martin Denny it isn’t. Later Martyn, who has been warming up with some obviously overbusy Eric Clapton runs, will add a few spare, sustained-note and wah wah lines which fill out the track perfectly, especially when he plays an intentionally “wrong” note which in its strange offness somehow is exactly right for Burning Spear, whose sound always remains primal no matter how arranged.
Perhaps most fascinating is that all this goes on with seemingly little direction from producer Ruby. He watches Spear sing awhile, then, in the middle of a take, leaves the control board to chat with the visitors and other musicians hanging around the studio, lounging later across the board to read a copy of Newsweek I’d brought; then, intermittently, he would unexpectedly snap up from reading or conversation, shout “Spear!” stop the take and bolt into the studio to tell them to bring this up, take that down, change the thing around till the sound is right and tight. All this is in such contrast to conditions in American studios, where not a pin can drop in the control room during a take and there is a red light outside the door barring visitors (who come and go freely in Randy's) when the tape is rolling, that it is mind-blowing. In the midst of such seeming casualness, people talking, joking and rolling endless spliffs everywhere, there is enormous interior discipline; Ruby, while reading Newsweek with seeming indifference, is listening intently and in iron control all the way. I mentioned this to him, and he replied “Of course. I always know the sound I want, and I always get it.” He also got two completed takes in one afternoon, which racks up pretty well against the output of any New York producer or studio, for all their comparative uptightness.
Toward the end of the session, the writer and photographer from Time arrive to interview Ruby, and later Martyn and I catch a ride back to the Sheraton with them. By now it is nine o’clock at night, not at all a safe time for whites, even in numbers, to be on the streets of Kingston. It is never safe for whites to go into Trenchtown. But now the Time