Main Lines, Blood Feasts, and Bad Taste - Lester Bangs [136]
It seems to me that the next logical step is home movies. Why didn’t somebody give Peter Simon a Portapak?
Inside Harry J.'s studio, Wooly gives him the English edition, on the Island label, of his Jamaican hit with the Heptones, “Mama Say.” Harry explodes. “What kinda crap is this? I produced this fucking record, and on this label it credit Danny Holloway [an English producer]. All he did was mix it! This's a fucking bummaclot.” I ask him if this kind of thing happens often. “Never before with Chris Blackwell. Always I’ve trusted him.” Something else occurs to me, very belatedly in fact, something so basic I had missed it all through my stay on the island: I ask him if very many Jamaican artists have managers. He looks at me as if I were the most pathetic ignoramous alive. “Not many,” he says.
When we get back to the hotel, who do we run into in the lobby but Chris Blackwell himself. He has been in England over the weekend, and is just returning. Wooly is very agitated about Harry's complaint, and tells Blackwell the story. Chris is not perturbed at all. “It's a very simple problem, really. Harry J. has a big ego and so does Danny Holloway.” He smiles. “And between the two of them, the Heptones haven’t got a chance.”
Two hours later. I’ve checked out of the Sheraton, and am in a cab on my way to the airport. I ask the driver to go by way of the Gun Court, an island attraction I’d heard about and wanted to see before I ever got here, a legend that preceded my tourism. The Gun Court was set up by the Manley regime as a way of dealing with all the berserk pistoleros and violent political agitators. What it means is that anybody caught by the police with even a bullet, even a shell casing, or any type of explosives in his possession, is whisked before a tribunal which asks him why he has these illegal and dangerous items. If he doesn’t have the right answer, he is thrown in the stockade behind the Gun Court for life. Sic. 99.9 percent of Jamaicans who appear before the Gun Court have the wrong answer. And now here it is: high fences with enormous rolls of barbed wire at the top, guard towers, a yard where you can see young blacks milling around. The front of the place painted a garish red. It looks like a concentration camp, and that's what it is. I ask the cab driver what he thinks of it.
“I don’ mind Gun Court so much,” he says. “Other things bother me much more. On this island there is little real freedom, and now Manley is dealing with the Cubans, and we fear Jamaica will become like Cuba, where there is no freedom. No freedom under Communism, and already I don’t feel free here anymore.” He pointed to a pile of giant rocks left at some roadside excavation site. “You see those rocks, that's how we feel in Jamaica, like being crushed down by all those, underneath them. Manley is a dictator, of course. Under him today, the people are unhappy, and sometimes driving in the cab I don’t say what I think if the rider asks me a question about politics, because I don’t know who he is. He might go and tell the police, and I might not be here later. The Rastas are something else—they don’ matter at all. I want to always live in Jamaica, but now I am not so sure. All I want now is my freedom.”
Creem, June-July 1976
Death May Be Your
Santa Claus: An Exclusive,
Up-to-Date Interview
with Jimi Hendrix
(Needless to say, it took a lot of legwork, both on and off the astroturf, to track Jimi down; he's been a pretty reclusive dude for about five years now. But finally, using every means and pulling every string at my disposal, I managed not only to locate Jimi, but rap with him for several light-years. What follows is a direct, verbatim transcription of a very spacey rap, recorded in his plush and exceedingly