Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [130]
Saturday. Gonzo and I spend the day getting drunk and smoking dope in his room, reading Rolling Stone and The Village Voice and listening to the reggae which, for some unaccountable reason, is coming out of the radio. Wooly calls up to see how we’re doing, and we tell him we’ve become Rastas and ask to borrow his cassette recorder so we can listen to Iggy tapes.
That night we are down at the bar when the photog from Time shows up and asks us if we want to go to some discos with him. I say sure; Gonzo stays at the bar. This shutterbug and I then drive up to Beverly Hills, the rich folks’ ghetto of Kingston, to pick up Clive, son of Randy, who is going to show us where the kids dance in this town. We pass blocks of beautiful houses with sculpted lawns, and the one where the owner of Randy's Records lives is no different from the rest. Clive tells us, in fact, that their next-door neighbor is the French ambassador to Jamaica. A comparison of this picture with Perry's and Tubby's homes seems to confirm Clinton Williams’ figures, and I begin to wonder what Burning Spear's house looks like. As for the discos, they look just like American discos: the floor lights up, couples dance to American soul records. The photographer keeps saying he wants more roots, and Clive just shrugs, so I translate: “What we’re looking for is one of these places with a deejay sitting up there playing dub records and hollering into the microphone while all the guys in the crowd stand around smoking herb and vibrating.”
“Oh, those,” says Clive. “Not so easy to find now. They never held those like, you know, regular thing. And every time they did, seem like a gunman would show up and start firing. So now they are not allowed.”
So much for discos. I suddenly notice that Clive has been taking swigs out of a half-pint bottle of his own. “What's that?” I ask him.
“Roots.” He hands it to me, emphasizing that it does not contain what the label says: no rum culture here. I take a swig—liquid can-nabis root extract, mixed with something else unmistakable. “There's wine in here!”
He smiles slightly. “Yes. A little.” And takes the bottle back and pours himself another drink.
After the Time man and I take him home, we are driving down a street in a residential district when suddenly we hear a sound like firecrackers; it's pistol shots, and we see people running out of a bar ahead of us on the left, scattering in every direction. The Time guy slows down, and I begin to freak. “C’mon, man, let's get the fuck out of here! C’mon, turn that corner!” He had almost stopped. I guess he hoped to get an exclusive shot of authentic Jamaican street violence, which I guess is good journalistic instincts. Me, I was more interested in my own skin.
Then again, it may be that the streets of Kingston are, actually, comparatively safe for a honky next to those of Harlem or inner-city Detroit. When we stopped a few minutes later at a MacDonald's (no relation to the American chain) for some curried goat, the steering wheel on my friend's car locked and he couldn’t get it started for about 20 minutes. Nobody hassled us; all we got were some black people in a minibus next to us who asked what was wrong and tried to help us get going again. Then again, the bus did say “UNICEF” on the driver's door.
Sunday. This is supposed to be a big day, because we have been told that there is going to be a Grounation, which I can only interpret from the rather vague explanations as some kind of Rasta raveup, which we have been invited to observe. It seems dubious to me that the Rastas would want a bunch of white folk from the United States and Britain sitting in the bleachers gawking at their annual convention, but I am anxious to check this out nevertheless. We are told that it will run from early in the evening until about 1 A.M.,and I am already wondering how we can gracefully excuse ourselves around, say, 9:30 if it gets boring. I mean, I’m all for Lowell Thomas, but seven or eight straight hours of the gospel of Rastafari, which the guys