When he came to Kingston as a teenager, Scratch had quickly become a primo fixer and selecter for the mighty Coxsone Dodd’s sound system (whose Studio One label had also released many early Wailers’ hits.) Then, with his Upsetters band, Scratch invaded the UK with hit spaghetti Western themed ska instrumentals like “Return of Django,” launching an ocean of global ska waves that’s still rocking. Apart from those he actually worked with in the non-Jamaican community, artists as diverse as Paul McCartney, Beastie Boys and the Slits’ Ari Up – he pioneered and expanded the use of the studio as an instrument in itself, which forever changed the sound of music everywhere. There would be no reggaeton, no rave – or not as we know it – without his restless creativity. You can hear Scratch in Hank Shocklee’s production for Public Enemy. Featuring those infamous DJ/toasters on the mike, Scratch led his generation in enabling all of hip-hop. In finessing rhythms, isolating bits of a track, muting others, and stirring it all up with some chilling found sounds, Scratch was laying the foundation for the next four decades of popular dance and electronica. When I told him in 1980 that everybody was saying he’d completely lost it, he answered with a sly laugh, “They all think I’m mad, don’t they? But they’re gonna burn up, baby! It’s Scratch’s time to laugh.”īut everyone agreed that when it came to sound, he was spot-on. After being drenched in his meteor shower of trippy imagery and wordplay explaining how they contained everything necessary for both nutrition and shelter, one could only agree. “His dub productions’ space-bending textures, defying logic, would alter a listeners’ concept of sound for always.”Įqually, Scratch would spin a hallucinatory argument that both bananas and coconuts were god. Eventually, disillusioned beyond words with the industry and what he then saw as a phony Rasta paradigm for Jamaican music, he torched the place. At the same time, re-naming himself Pipecock Jackson, (one among a host of personae) he graffiti’d the entire studio with esoteric symbols, giving the compound the feel of an obeah shrine. Once past his own Rasta phase, Scratch called them deadlocks and banned them from the Black Ark. People always said Scratch was nuts, because he did things like stick a symbolic toaster up in a tree when he got sick of Rasta reggae DJs - called “toasters” - and dreadlocks in general. “Me like how dem feel it.” Next thing you know, Scratch was producing Bob on “Punky Reggae Party” and the Clash’s “Complete Control.” And till the last, Scratch dyed his hair a la punk. ![]() And the Clash? Startled at first, it only took a couple of bars for them both to dig it. Both men were elated, as if rediscovering a long-lost part of themselves. Clearly, the reggae master was thrilled to be reunited with his own early mentor. Once heard, his dub productions’ space-bending textures, defying logic, would alter a listeners’ concept of sound for always.īut though I had covered Marley for a while (and very briefly, done his PR), I had never found the two together, or seen Bob so gleeful to be with anyone. Brown,” the most edgy, eerie Wailers’ song. ![]() ![]() For it was the visionary Scratch - impish, zany, forever keeping you guessing - who really pushed their sound forward in the 1960s, when the Wailers were a hot local ska trio. ![]() I was surprised to find Bob Marley sitting with him Scratch was staying in an apartment over the studio where Marley, a fugitive after an attempt on his life in Kingston, was recording Exodus and everyone in the room knew that Bob might not be the international superstar he already was had it not been for Scratch. It was a sunny Saturday afternoon in 1977 London when I popped in to visit the already-legendary dub creator Lee “Scratch” Perry to get his reaction to a new version by the Clash of his song about corruption “Police and Thieves.” I was curious – Joe Strummer’s rasp was so different from the angelic falsetto of the original singer, a policeman from Port Antonio named Junior Murvin.
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