Author: Stephanie Janssen

WHAT DO BOB MARLEY, PAUL MCCARTNEY AND THE CLASH HAVE IN COMMON? THE ANSWER IS LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY.

I first unknowingly encountered the musical genius of Lee Perry on my first trip to Kingston early in 1973. In Jamaica music was everywhere—blaring from innumerable tiny record shops out into the streets, from car radios stopped at red lights, from small transistors of commuters waiting at bus stops or people just randomly singing a cappella as they walked through the city’s hot bustle. At night there were sound systems anchoring giant outdoor mobile dances going into the wee hours—celebrations resounding without borders. Bob [Marley] was my guide through this mystical musical universe so intrinsically bound to a struggle for freedom—political, economic and spiritual.

In Jamaica more records were being released per capita than in any place in the world, and “dub” music was dominating. I was amazed that radio play and the dance halls—pushed by popular demand—had made stars of people who simply talked over rhythm tracks. They were liberating poetry from the printed page and simultaneously chatting over music that was as sophisticated and innovative in its use of electronic effects as any being produced by European or North American composers, such as Karlheinz Stockhausen or Terry Riley—but with the distinction that this music was penetrating the popular consciousness.

My first weeks in Jamaica I was trying to absorb as much as I could. Bob and his partners in the Wailers—Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston—were introducing me to the ways of Rasta culture, and I was becoming aware of the names of some of the artists dominating the airwaves: Big Youth, U-Roy, Dennis Alcapone, Alton Ellis, Prince Jazzbo.

I would ride with Bob every sunrise in his bronze Mercury Capri to run on the beach at Bull Bay, 20 minutes from Kingston, where Bunny lived among a small Rasta community. Then we would run up a nearby mountain to a canyon holding a 50-foot waterfall at Cane River. In the afternoon nearly every day I would go with Bob to West Kingston, where poor people—the “suffaras”—lived and where Bob grew up, and to Trenchtown, where the Wailers were formed.

I would goad Bob into taking me on trips to the interior of the island, its mountainous beauty a striking dichotomy with the slums of Trenchtown, Back-o-Wall, Firehouse and Concrete Jungle. It seemed incredible to me how all the country people knew him like a son or brother or nephew, and I could never tell for Bob’s actions if they really knew him or were related or just loved him for the joy and hope his music would always bring. We stopped on these small winding country roads in the mountains of St. Ann’s Parish on my first trips to Nine Mile, the tiny village where Bob was born. And I loved to stop at the little roadside shops of zinc and wood, because there would often be an ancient jukebox where I’d look for Wailers music and so began discovering their early ska songs like “Simmer Down,” “Caution” and “Let Him Go.”

I can remember so distinctly hearing the quite different sound of Lee “Scratch” Perry’s Wailers productions for the first time at one of those tiny shacks. It was a lazy golden afternoon; we had stopped to drink a jelly coconut and Bob went around back to check if there was a good draw of herb. Handwritten on one of the jukebox selections in fading ink was the title of one of their collaborations, “Duppy Conqueror.” What a wild name for a tune! It’s Jamaican patois for “ghostbuster.” I loved the way Bob’s voice was recorded as he sang:

Yes, me friend, me friend / Dem set me free again / Yes, me friend, me good friend / We deh ‘pon street again / The bars could not hold me / Force could not control me …

It sounded so solitary—desperate and piercing yet smooth raw honey all at once, with pristine background vocals, original harmonies and a rhythm section that locked the spaces between the bass notes sweet as a ripe mango. The flip sides of the 7” vinyl were vocal-stripped rhythm tracks brilliantly reconstructed, the various overlapping echoes reverberating again through the lush green otherworldly Jamaican mountains.

Our leisurely drive to Bob’s village became a journey into the man’s artistry for me. The afternoon was wearing down to a soft dusk as Bob and I made our last stop before reaching his childhood home. I walked into the shady bar and found myself at the jukebox, pressing the fat square button to hear “Trenchtown Rock.” Losing myself in the song, I understood Bob’s radical affirmation of his impoverished Kingston area as a place of resilient citizens always ready to dance in the face of pain. Its opening line is etched permanently in my being:

One good thing about music, when it hits you fell no pain / So hit me with music, hit me with music now … / Trench town rock, big fish or sprat / Trench town rock, you reap what you sow / Trench town rock, and everyone know now / Trench town rock, give the slum a try … / You’re groovin’, in Kingston 12 …

No recording had ever awakened me quite like that. I was so blown away, and I needed to hear the scratchy vinyl through the ancient machine again and again. It was one of their first discs after leaving Scratch’s stewardship, and they had learned his lessons well.

To say that Lee Perry is a living legend is surely out of the realm of hyperbole. As one of the most influential producers in the history of recorded music his importance is reflected not only in the hundreds of millions that have been touched by the music he has created—as a producer, writer, vocalist and live performer—but also by the incredible range of artists who have been profoundly inspired by his body of work extending through five decades. Beginning in the early ’60s he collaborated with legendary Jamaican artists of the ska and rocksteady era, including the Skatalites, Alton Ellis, Tommy McCook and Prince Buster. In the late ’60s and early ’70s he was a foundational creator of reggae and was a profound influence on the careers of the Wailers. He took what was then a vocal trio (Marley, Tosh and Livingston) and brought them together with his studio rhythm section, known as the Upsetters, and in so doing lifted them out of the age of ska and rocksteady and into the realm of a new music whose profound global impact continues to this day. He produced hits with dozens of singers, including seminal tracks like “One Step Forward” with Max Romeo, “Cherry Oh Baby” with Eric Donaldson (later covered by UB40) and “Police and Thieves” with Junior Murvin. He is one of the inventors of dub, which combined radical experiments in electronic music (panoramic delay, extensive use of echo and inventive collaging techniques), deconstructing and reconstructing current popular recordings, and produced in 1973 Blackboard Jungle Dub, the first purely dub album. His dub experiments coincided with his work with toasters U-Roy, Prince Jazzbo, Big Youth and others, creating some of the first recordings of people talking on top of music and foreshadowing the birth of rap and hip-hop in New York nearly a decade later.

As his legend grew, artists outside of Jamaica gravitated to him, looking to share in his magical gifts. The list of artists who have worked with him crosses genres and geographical boundaries, everyone from George Clinton and Keith Richards to the Slits, the Orb, Dub Syndicate, Bill Laswell and more recently Dubblestandart and Subatomic Sound System. Scratch produced the Clash’s “Complete Control,” widely acknowledged as one of punk rock’s greatest singles, a fiery diatribe against corporate control of the music business. As an artist, Rolling Stone has rated him  among one of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time.

Scratch’s bold personality and talent is well documented. The genre he helped to invent, dub, has gone on to rule dance floors everywhere, filtered through sounds like grime and EDM. But for me, his greatest triumph will always be the sonic kick of hearing Bob Marley’s voice of liberation on “Duppy Conqueror,” proudly riding a radical rhythm that could only have been made by “the Upsetter,” Lee “Scratch” Perry.

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Afrika Bambaataa may not be a household name, but he’s the fellow who etched in stone the nine elements of the global language known as hip-hop: graffiti art, breaking, MC rhyming, DJing, beatboxing and all other things “street”—its wisdom, fashion, language and even its own unique articulation of entrepreneurialism. During the late 1970s, the real hip-hop formed as a consciousness, and if Afrika Bambaataa is responsible for bringing the culture to hip-hop, it could be said that the sagacious Fab 5 Freddy is responsible for bringing hip-hop, the most significant cultural movement in modern times, to the mainstream.

Born Fred Brathwaite to politically aware parents in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, the pioneering Freddy has always been down to recognize the profusion of communal cues around him. A fan of music early on and a self-proclaimed young collector of jazz-lore photographs by his father’s close friend, musician Jimmy Morton, Freddy became energized by an expanded notion of “conversation” and the types of creative discourse born from talented minds coming together. This respect for artistic exchange would quickly position the eloquent and culturally resourceful Freddy as a major player in hip-hop’s history, given his acuity to connect the late ’70s and early ’80s uptown graffiti and early rap scenes with the downtown art and punk music scenes.

Freddy found himself at the center of it all. He first made his mark as a graffiti writer (earning his name for consistently “bombing” the number 5 train on the IRT as a member of the Brooklyn-based graffiti group the Fabulous 5), until he gave it up in 1980 to pursue a gallery-art career alongside his cosmopolitan cronies who’d come to the same decision, namely Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf.

He went on to experiment with music and language, leading to his 1982 single “Change the Beat,” the B-side of which, according to the BBC, is the world’s most sampled song to date. Then another link in the F5F chain: the making of the film Wild Style alongside director Charlie Ahearn (also in 1982), born out of Freddy’s desire to educate the naysayers who saw this emergent culture as destructive and irrelevant. The film was and still is regarded as a poignant document of the time and has influenced countless worldwide. All this momentum led to another epic boom when Freddy became the host of a new cable show called Yo! MTV Raps. Between 1988 and 1995, his camera time brought massive recognition to the hip-hop conversation and to a plethora of multi-ethnic artists with dominant voices for social change.

With the scene flourishing in every imaginable direction, Freddy and his contemporaries found themselves live, loud and clear on the cognoscenti’s radar. Freddy’s impact on our contemporary culture is solid gold, solidified in essay after essay. Through Freddy, we’ve witnessed street energies translate into art. He’s an “all city” vehicle who has successfully crossed over all sorts of territories with unrestrained spirit. Nothing’s been off-limits or impossible.

Freddy currently lives in Harlem and is the creative consultant to Manhattan’s new Africa Center, a space that will focus on arts from the continent and diaspora. His dedication to the cultural vanguard has benefited us all, regardless if we’re even aware. He’s spearheaded new genres in music, broadcast, film and art. He’s brilliant, remarkably thoughtful, downright engaging and, as far as people go whose relevance remains completely legit, t-a-g, the man is still it.

Freddy is actively creating and exhibiting art, and you can find news about his work on his website, www.fab5freddy.com.

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Sunny Levine was born into music royalty. He’s the grandson of the legendary Quincy Jones, who’s worked with everyone from Ray Charles to Frank Sinatra, Miles Davis to Michael Jackson. Though Sunny has forged his own path as a producer and artist, the L.A. native has always known where to turn first for advice. In an unparalleled career spanning almost seven decades, Jones has left his mark on the music world not only as a producer, composer, musician and songwriter but as a trailblazer in transcending racial barriers, too. A dedicated humanitarian committed to social justice, Jones was the first African-American to become VP of a major music label and to write major motion-picture film scores—all while enduring criticism for his three interracial marriages, the first of which was to Sunny’s grandmother. But above all else, in Sunny’s eyes, Jones has just always been a grandfather—one with enormous shoes to fill…

My granddad’s a funny cat. He’s not your average grandfather. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a movie with him or the park or a ball game. Even when I was younger he told me to call him GP, short for grandpa. He still calls me GS, for grandson. Now that he’s a great-grandfather, he tells my niece, “Call me GG.”

My grandmother, Jeri Caldwell, was his high school sweetheart and first of three wives; they met in Seattle and then moved to New York together, so she was there from the beginning of everything, since he was a teenager. My mother, Jolie, is their only child. They divorced when she was about 8.

I was born in L.A. in 1979. We moved to upstate New York a few years later to sort of get away from disco and L.A. It was getting weird. My first real memory of my grandfather is of him visiting us in upstate New York, in the snow. It wasn’t of him being a superstar producer. Then we moved to England when I was 4 and we’d see my grandpa once in a while, but I really got to know him when we moved back to Los Angeles when I was about 7 or 8. He was getting divorced [from Peggy Lipton] and he was living at Hotel Bel-Air at the time. We’d go there and hang out or take walks.

My grandfather started making Michael Jackson’s Bad right after we got back from England. We lived right by the studio where they did it and would go by all the time after school. I was a huge Michael Jackson fan, and I remember they had really good food and candy at the studio. It was pretty wild. I wasn’t totally aware of just how famous he was.

Somewhere around that time he got a house and it became the epicenter of where we would all hang out, go swimming, play basketball. There was a lot of life and I felt like all the kids were kind of the same age. I am the second grandchild (my brother is the first). There were no other grandkids until I was 16, but my aunts [Rashida Jones and Kidada Jones] were around my age.

I vividly remember one night a crazy dinner party going on at his house when we stopped by. Lionel Richie and all these people that I actually knew were sitting there. Then there was this dirty, weird white guy. I asked my mom, “Who’s that dirty guy?” She said, “That’s Bob Dylan!” I didn’t even know who Bob Dylan was at the time.

I’ve been making records since I was 14 and I’m 37 now, but never along the way have all the floodgates been opened for me; he doesn’t believe in that. However, I do turn to him for different kinds of advice. I wish I had a little bit more of my grandfather’s ability to just put big things together and make them happen, and his confidence and bullish way where he’s just like, “We’re going to do this and it’s going to get done,” and then it happens. He is just so good at putting things together—putting people together, putting deals together, and seeing all sides of things. He just makes these grandiose records that are so dialed in and so worked out and perfect.

After everything my grandfather did as a big-band arranger and having big bands, making records, producing records and working with some of the biggest names in music in the early ’60s, he started doing film-score work. That was a big deal. There were no black people in that world. So I feel like that was the biggest jump, where he was like, “Alright. I’m doing this,” and got in that door and did big movies. He seemed almost defiant about it, like, “Why can’t I do that?” I think that’s a big part of his whole career and trajectory. People say, “You can’t do that, you can’t pull that off,” and he’s like, “Yeah, I can. Why not?”

Ten years ago he put on a concert in Rome that was called We Are the Future to raise money for charity to build schools in Africa. They were trying to write a song like a new “We Are the World,” which he produced in 1985.  My granddad was like, “Why don’t you try to write a song for this thing?” I was like, “Really?” He had heard what I’d done but I didn’t think he believed in me that much. So I went away and wrote these songs and I brought one back. He was like, “That’s cool. Go do another one.” Then I came back the next day with another song and he was like, “That’s it. That’s great.” He was like, “Go see Rod [Temperton] tomorrow and you guys work that up and get some new parts in it.” Rod wrote all the Michael Jackson songs, like “Always and Forever.” So we worked on the song and then we went to Rome and performed it and recorded it. It was really great. My grandfather is not a guy who does something like that just to be nice. That was a big notch on my confidence belt.

But the best piece of advice my grandfather gave me doesn’t relate to music. I was about 14 and we were at the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland. There was this pretty, young girl there. She was close to my age and he sort of looked at me and said, “These boys don’t know what they’re doing. All it’s about is humor. If you make a girl laugh, that’s it. That’s all they want is to laugh.” He was like, “You’re funny. Just go be funny.” That trip affected me big time because we spent so much time together. It was all about staying up all night, going to see music and hanging out. Maybe not the norm for a traditional grandfather, but he’s Quincy Jones.

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