Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [129]
But this guy was no Rasta, no matter what he or anybody else says. This was an uptown cat. A hipster. With his hair slicked straight back, his graying beard, strutting around cocky and amused, a diminutive lion in his kingdom, he at length danced over to the corner where I was trying to be inconspicuous, squeezed past me, grabbed a bottle and, straightening up, stopped a second to look me in the eyes close as the air, smiling knowingly, and I smiled back. A few minutes later he walked up to me and said, “You wine man,” and handed me a plastic cup and a bottle of something called Winecarnes, which is a local wine fortified with meat extracts that he seemingly drinks all day without ever losing his stride.
Now, dear reader, I know that this—one drunk recognizing another— is not the most profound or miraculous occurrence in the world, but here, in the middle of Herb Heaven, with every righteous Rasta and American hiplet in sight belittling the rum culture like it was 1967 all over again, it qualified as outright mind reading.
As we were leaving Perry's, walking down the driveway to the limousine, I heard a familiar sound and peeked for a moment inside the open door to the living room of his house. There, on the couch, his kids were watching a Road Runner cartoon on TV.
Back at the hotel, I made arrangements to meet Blackwell for dinner. By the pool I met my colleague from Rolling Stone, and over drinks Blackwell asked him what angle he was going to approach his story from. “Oh, I dunno, man,” he replied, with no idea who he was talking to, “I’m just gonna use the gonzo approach for this one pretty much. I intend to do my whole story from the poolside bar and go out of the hotel as little as possible. I mean, who gives a fuck, y’know? I’m just in this for the free drinks and to see if I can get laid.”
Blackwell looked a little green around the eyeballs, but went on to ask Gonzo what he thought of reggae.
“I can’t remember ever hearing any. The last album I really got into was The Allman Brothers Live at Fillmore East. Hell, man, I don’t even have a record player!”
Blackwell's jaw dropped.
Later at dinner, Blackwell is still staring sourly at Gonzo, who is raving at Michael Butler, a receding face behind a gray Van Dyke who was the producer of Hair and is down here getting ready to put together a reggae Hair with the projected title of Babylon. Don Taylor, Marley's manager, a thin, light-skinned black man in a Toots and the Maytals cap, is telling me and the man from Melody Maker that many American blacks resent Jamaican immigrants because, he says, the latter tend to hustle harder and achieve more. He cites his mother, who he says worked at menial jobs but wound up owning her own apartment house, then: “It's just like Bob. He is very dedicated to his music, but when it comes to his money, he is not going to let anyone cheat him out of any portion of his equal share.”
Right. No good businessman would. A phrase often used by Rastas and heard in many reggae songs is “I and I.” It can mean me, you, we, etc., all balled up in one great big cosmic loving mulch; the old “I am he as you are me as you are we as we are all together” routine. But when push comes to shove … well, as John Martyn laughingly put it, “I and I means me so fuck you!” Which may not be exactly what Burning Spear meant when they sang “Give me what is mine,” but what the hell—I mean,