Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [127]
We arrive back at the hotel in a driving rain, running past the pool-side bar where under the roof Canadian tourists are singing “Granada” to organ music almost as loud as the speakers in the record stores.
I could use a little bit of cross-cultural relaxation myself. I retire to my room where I watch Hawaii Five-O and an old Universal Grade D musical about singing soldiers from the late Thirties, on the TV I had to order when I first checked in. Jamaican TV is weird—there's only one TV network, JBC, which turns up on several channels with things like “An Evening with the Jay-Teens,” an hour of young black girls doing folk dances from various cultures against a blank backdrop. (There was no announcer, they looked like a high school dance recital, and moved as stiffly as one through all the corny choreography except when it came time to do African dances, which they performed, of course, fantastically.) The first thing I saw when I turned on my TV on Tuesday morning was a woman demonstrating the use of a steam iron with stilted delivery: “This we use to wash and iron clothes, to keep ourselves clean and our people healthy….” Commercials for condoms and birth control pills also run regularly. Every afternoon the station goes off for several hours, leaving a test pattern and radio station playing the usual American pap. The rest of the programming is equally weird and scattered, featuring things like Bachelor Father, The Six Million Dollar Man (8:45 on Friday night—some shows come on at times like 6:02, right after headline news) and Sesame Street, which seems to be a big favorite. I got to watch, since there was nothing else, the singing-soldiers movies for two nights in a row, leading me into dark speculations about propaganda which were probably paranoid.
Friday. After breakfast I go for a walk around the block immediately adjacent to the hotel, and look into faces radiating undisguised hatred. When I stop a youth and ask him for directions to a local record store, he answers grudgingly in a patois I can’t understand anyway. I have not stopped being uptight in the almost four days I have been here, and feel a strong yearning to get the hell out of the fucking place.
Back at the hotel, I run into Chris Blackwell by the pool, and he invites me to visit a couple of recording studios with him. Blackwell himself exudes an air at once sanguine and blasé—he came from money, now he's making more money, and everything about him indicates that the good life agrees with him. Sandy hair, brilliant tan that reminded me of many I’d seen in Hollywood, the kind of person who looks so healthy it's almost obscene, too healthy. Or maybe it is merely endemic to record industry people, this air of bland hedonism. In any case, Blackwell always looks as if he is either on his way to or from a tennis court. Now we are in a limousine, riding out to the home studios of Lee Perry and King Tubby, who live in relatively affluent sections of Kingston; these guys are two of the biggest producers on the island. Their houses look like American working-class homes circa 1954. At Tubby's I watch an engineer mastering a dub, and get to meet Vivian “Yabby” Jackson, leader (& producer) of a group called the Prophets, whose album, Conquering Lion, was recorded at Harry J.'s studio across town and mixed here; I have just bought a copy of the album at Micron Records (not coincidentally, the store and label bear the same name) for five bucks, and show it to him. Then I lean over and shout in his ear over the booming dub beat: “How much money did you get for making this?”
“Nothing yet,” he says.
Out in Tubby's back yard,