DISCO DEVIL [Lee Perry]

Matt's already posted about Lee Perry a couple of times, once to show him hanging out in the studio with Andrew W.K., and again to run down a live show.

Lee Perry was in San Francisco about a month or so ago, and the show was great. Matt said it before, but at 72 years old he's still full of energy. At some points he was literally trying to lead the crowd in group exercise: "Hop! Hop! Hop! Now jog!"

This song "Disco Devil" is one of Lee Perry's older jams. It's seriously great, super dubbed out with great backup singing.

Lee Perry & Full Experience - Disco Devil

I'm gonna gun you down

Two minutes of brilliance from Jamaica, 1969.

The Ethiopians - Gun Man

How to enjoy your summer [Jackie Mittoo]

The "keyboard king"

This weekend I made myself feel like a functional member of society by walking into a record store and buying a bunch of CDs. Now I can be more OK with distributing mp3s on my blogspot. (SEO yall!!)

Here are two songs off of the Jackie Mittoo album "Featuring Winston Wright at King Tubbys." Honestly I've picked them randomly, they all pretty much sound the same, i.e. great. I recommend this for summer, if you have that, i.e. if you live somewhere in this hemisphere outside of San Francisco. Jackie Mittoo is a great keyboard player, and although King Tubby didn't actually produce this album, it was recorded at his famous dub studio. This is all instrumental, so just put it on at your BBQ or something and enjoy. We'll have those in October out here.

Jackie Mittoo - MPLA Rock [Featuring Winston Wright at King Tubbys, 1970X]

Jackie Mittoo - King Girls [Featuring Winston Wright at King Tubbys, 1970X]

Indie Rock Suckfest - Jamaican show

Desmond Dekker, 1985. I love this photo

Before my life as a globetrotting mp3 blogger I was a humble student at Northwestern University. I fell in with a group of vagabond DJs at the campus station, WNUR, who had a show called the "Indie Rock Suckfest." The name was not exactly of our choosing, as I shall presently explain. WNUR definitely had some good people, like Will Butler of Arcade Fire fame and Justin, but as I imagine happens with a good many college radio stations, there's a glut of people who were not just pretentious but mean. When one of my friends first signed up for the show, it was left unnamed on a master sheet in the station's office. As the story goes, a malicious WNURite scrawled the epithet "Indie Rock Suckfest" next to his name, and he kept it as a mark of insurgency against the WNUR power structure.

I promised one of the Hey! Student faithful a mix of Jamaican music, so I'm posting a selection from one of the best shows I was part of, an all-Jamaican show that aired October 13, 2004. Our slot was from 2-3:30am, so when we got three or so phone calls for this show, we were pretty stoked. (This was an improvement, by the way, from the decidedly unglamorous 3:30-5am slot.) The chunk I'm posting has some of the all-time greats represented, namely Desmond Dekker (leading off), Lee 'Scratch' Perry (second) and Jimmy Cliff (at the end).

Indie Rock Suckfest - Jamaican show (excerpt)

This is a musical connection (King Tubby)

"The threads of life, they are robust!" Thus quoth a friend. Peter's recent comment on Justin's inaugural Hey! Student post made reference to King Tubby. As fate would have it, Justin once gifted me a King Tubby compilation for my birthday. So there you have it: empirical evidence that the threads of life are robust.

As Peter suggests, dub producers were ahead of the game at taking a track and twisting it into something entirely new. King Tubby made his name making b-sides to popular tracks, called "versions," in which he would strip out the vocals and throw everything else into an echo chamber of sound. The material conditions under which this music was made are impressive; here's a well-written history of dub, on a Geocities page no less!

The first two tracks here are "versions" that Tubby did for The Upsetters, Lee Perry's group. The last one is a track off of Tubby's most famous recording, Augustus Pablo's King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown. Pablo is the one rocking the melodica - clearly, Interpol have done their homework.

The Upsetters - Chapter 2 (French Connection) [King Tubby's In Fine Style Comp, 2004]

The Upsetters - Dub Organiser featuring Dillinger [King Tubby's In Fine Style Comp, 2004]

Augustus Pablo - King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown [King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, 1976]