Lee "Scratch" Perry

Where to begin? Where to end? Not necessarily in that order. Empire is all about knowing where you begin and end. Euro-Christian notions of progress, of historical development: Alpha to Omega. Yet so few of us live this way. We stumble from pillar to post, from post- to pre- without plan or premonition. Sometimes the means justifies the means. So Lee “Scratch” Perry – the Upsetter – brings the horns back again. He sets the hum that wasn’t supposed to be there against the skanking upbeat that was, justifying nothing but having done it. Mean means. Means mean.

Every form is a philosophy. European music insists on rational permutations of an initial theme; on compositional complexity and resolution. Such music lords over its listeners and its musical others, driven by its need to express superiority. It recognizes that superiority is a fiction like any other and exerts it in form: political form, cultural form, legal form, economic form.

In Kingston, in the late-1960s, Lee Perry and King Tubby and a handful of others began to strip the vocal tracks from popular reggae records, pumping up the rhythms and taking liberties with delay effects. They called these new mixes “versions.” The style that emerged – treating the fundaments of a song as a tabula rasa – became known as “dub.” (For a definitive account, see Michael Veal’s Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae.) The blank canvas became, not a space for adding new materials, but a space of subtraction. What is already there is the material and carving it away reveals eddies and ripples hidden beneath the vocal melodies or the organ chords. Something altogether new is discovered in the tangles of the strands of canvas, in the muck of the gesso. Such music has no need for any notion of superiority. It is but a version, a derivative of another thing, equally strong, equally meaningful, equal.

In the ruptures and corruptions of the smooth surface of the steady rhythm new things grow and glow like lichens in a sun-deprived crevasse. One accepts as rule of law that nothing rises to perfection, but that flaws are points of departure, new possibilities hiding in the folds of the canvas. As one pearl of Kingston wisdom puts it: “Every spoil a style.”

No one understood this better than Lee Perry. In his hands, a bad electrical line buzz could become the basis of a new song. When he felt burnt out, he burned his studio – the Black Ark – to the ground – presumably to find something new in the absence he was creating. He produced many of Jamaican music’s most important sessions, including early recordings of Bob Marley and the Wailers and sent those recordings – without the band’s knowledge or consent to Chris Blackwell at Island Records in London, thereby launching Reggae’s biggest star. He also produced the Congos’ great Heart of the Congos, possibly the highpoint of Rastafarian-influenced vocal group reggae – a record of recurrent epiphanies and lasting effects. Perry’s music launched a thousand ships. His use of the studio as a musical instrument in its own right, not merely a capturer, but a creator of sounds, is now taken for granted. But it wasn’t when he started fucking around and fucking shit up.

One of my favorite Lee “Scratch” Perry tracks is “Corn Fish Dub,” as it appears on the album Super Ape. The song seems to emerge out of a fog that is half-physical, half-mental. A distant guitar echoes into itself like a dream that can’t decide to get started. Against that, vocals drift in absentmindedly. Then a muted bell is struck, its attack truncated. Sometimes, it rings out on the one, resonating and echoing: raindrops on the trembling surface of a pond. Other times, the bell swallows itself at its inception and disappears into the space it has engineered for its own pulse. A recurring descending chromatic guitar line gives the song the faintest of shapes. But mostly it is an atmosphere, the bell a firing-synapse across the expanse of mental space and time. Into that flexing envelope everything is swallowed and from it everything is regurgitated, both beginning and end. All revealed as equally origin, equally destination, equally contingent, equal.

Perry’s brand of magic realism was heavy on the magic and light on the realism. His own music lives on a surreal plane with spaghetti westerns and Japanese b-monster flicks: worlds in which the mundane bends around Morricone twang and warbling theremins. These worlds are unheimlich – unhomely, uncanny – doubles of our world with a few of the screws removed, ropeless pulleys, unkiltered pistons chafing against time, yardarms fallen to the dust amid sheltering puffs. Everything could be true. But no more true than what we – on a daily basis – take to be true. The rules of music and manners are not much use here. And Scratch ignored them both with equal insouciance. He was a mischief-maker extraordinaire; a true trickster. The kind who realizes that only the trick is true. We rarely honor our debt to the trickster, the holy fool. He’s dismissable. We can take what we need from him, but leave him safely behind, obscured by madness, smoke, magic. Scratch won’t go away that easily. His music is his remains and in it multitudes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Charlie Watts

Conflicted is the only way to feel about the Rolling Stones. They’ve now spent forty years as a satire of their first fifteen. It would be easy to write them off. But those first fifteen years produced so many moments in which their workaday methods produced little fission miracles. It’s no more and no less than honest to scratch one’s head and ask “why?” about everything from Tattoo You onwards. The tours especially are exercises in embarrassment. Not just Mick’s tights or Keef’s pirate cosplay, but the spectacle, the rehashing, the nostalgia trip(-up). The real crime is that all they had to produce was fumes and that they obliged. They became a multi-national corporation whose product was a knock-off of the product they used to make. They plagiarized themselves on a conveyor belt of plug n’ play records and misdirection theatrics.

Charlie Watts sat behind it all, gazing down like the chief executive whose fashion he adopted. He avoided the rough and tumble of the factory floor, choosing to frame the fray within the boundaries of his modest kit. On some level, Charlie was the only thing that allowed the Stones to retain some small room legitimacy. You could still imagine him on the bandstand at the Checkerboard Lounge or even perched on a corner stool at the bar. The same imagining could never apply to Keith or Mick.

But, truth is, Charlie was a jobber. He just wanted to play. When he joined the Stones he was also a member of numerous other bands. As Ben Sisario reported yesterday in the New York Times,

“I used to play with loads of bands, and the Stones were just another one,” he told The Observer, a British newspaper, in 2000. “I thought they’d last three months, then a year, then three years, then I stopped counting.”

Charlie could have been just as happy (but a lot less wealthy) playing in a jazz trio at Ronnie Scott’s. He bred prizewinning Arabian horses. This fact says a lot about who Charlie was: He collected vintage cars even though he never learned to drive. Even though Mick and Keith courted him like starstruck suitors, he was lucky to catch on with two such manic, motivated drivers. He wasn’t so much their motor as their mechanic, keeping the machine musically and emotionally humming.

So I feel honest acknowledging that I’m conflicted too about Charlie. I admire the commitment to the cause, even if his commitment always seemed easier than Mick’s or Keith’s who each could have managed without the others. I appreciate the simple core that Charlie insisted on maintaining at the eye of the musical and theatrical storm, while also feeling that he was rather dull as a drummer. Sure, there’s that slightly behind the beat thing that everybody mentions. But he certainly didn’t invent that and one feels that a whole bunch of other drummers could have done what he did and most of us would never have noticed. He has, in fact, missed out on a healthy handful of sessions over the years and most are unaware or unsure if what they’re hearing is Charlie. (E.g. Is it Charlie on “Gimme Shelter?”)

Still, he rolled with the Stones and that is no small feat. Putting up not only with two boundless egos, but also shifting with his bandmates’ whims from blues to riffs to psychedelia and eventually a stilted, percolating disco. My favorite Stones’ stuff is the bootleg compilation known as Sympathy for the Disco, outtakes from the late-70s. Only one track is harvested from the 80s, 1981s “Come On Sugar.” It’s the last thing the Stones did that still suggests searching and yearning for something new – or more precisely, some new configuration of the parts they pilfered from Black music. What makes Sympathy for the Disco so good is how wrong they get it. If it’s the disco they’re aiming at, they land curled up in a shopping cart outside in the parking lot, having been thrown out by the bouncer after six too many Wild Rose shots. These tracks are disco-adjacent and skewed by the Stones’ obscenely rich, British, princes-of-perversity sensibilities. The misfire makes this music utterly unique, unlike any funky White weirdness being produced by post punk kids in New York’s No Wave at the same time.

Charlie’s playing is great throughout but never more so then on “Come On Sugar” where his contribution is primarily a heavy kick drum shadowed ever-so-slightly-later by an enveloping hi-hat closing around the beat like an oyster shell around a pearl. The snare drum intervenes like a curse, damning the unreachable trapped within. It’s inspired even if it’s just the work of a guy who’d play whatever you put in front of him.

In the 1989 film 25x5, Charlie is asked about the previous 25 years touring with the Rolling Stones. “Work five years, and twenty years hanging around.” It was the work that mattered to him. But he was willing to hang around waiting for someone else to count off. It’s telling that the Stones will now tour without him. They’re still counting off, even if Charlie’s done working.