This might just be the most significant 2 minutes 27 seconds of music that has been posted on ABON so far. Because…

Back in the late ’60′s Jamaican DJ’s fronting the enormous, and enormously loud, Sound Systems that toured the island started ‘toasting’. Which involved ad-libbing over the rhythm and in between the singing on the 7″ hit singles they were playing. U-Roy was one of these DJs.

At some point around 1968 he met the then unknown King Tubby who was a disc cutter and engineer at Duke Reid’s studio. Duke Reid ran the Treasure Isle label which was producing many of the hit singles U-Roy would have been playing at Sound System parties. King Tubby of course had access to the rhythm tracks that sat behind the vocals on these singles. And he started experimenting with these tracks – producing what would turn out to be the forerunners of Dub. He also started to give these tracks to DJs like U-Roy to toast over live.

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Dub of the late ’70′s variety. By when Dub had evolved in many different directions. Lee Perry and King Perry were still evolving dub (which they’d effectively invented earlier in the ’70′s) into what I suppose could be called ‘classic’ dub – percussion and bass-heavy with a focus on hypnotic grooves (see ABON 0014). Meanwhile producers like Joe Gibbs (with his engineer and mixer Errol Thompson) and Scientist were creating a different dub style. Maybe best described as Dub-with-everything-and-the-kitchen-sink-thrown-in.

With far less emphasis on the bass and rhythm it left room for a more tuneful sound with bucketfuls of sound effects and samples thrown in – from strange blips and burps to doorbells, phones and computer game soundtracks to cowbells, animals and toy instruments.

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There are two things that make this track special.

First of all, it was in the sessions that created ‘Don’t Rock My Boat’ that the Reggae Beat of the ’70′s was effectively created.
Although they had released many singles since their first in 1963, it wasn’t until 1969 that The Wailers first recorded with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry behind the controls of the mixing desk. The Perry-produced sessions were a revelation and a landmark. Rougher and less polished than the Wailers’ or Bob Marley’s later recordings for Island Record, they also have none of the Rock leanings (such as the lead guitar figures) of the later work. What they do have however is the first fully developed Reggae Beat. It feels like all the various, often wonderful, musical styles and experiments of Jamaican music in the ’60′s finally get distilled into the way forward that everyone been looking for all along. Delivered in beautifully pure unadulterated form. No need for superfluous effects or solos because they had discovered the rhythm. And in the first glow of discovery The Wailers (and even Lee Perry who would warp it to within an inch of its life over the next 10 years) decided to leave it in all its naked new-born glory.

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