Contents - Beth Lesser

“At that time they call them [12 inch 45s] ‘discos’ – like the singing and the
dub or the singing and the rapping. So, when he came back to America and he
came to me and we went in the studio to play it, I said, ‘No, this don’t make
no sense. To promote a song, you have to put out one each time’. So, instead
of putting out the ‘discos’, we just put out an album.”
At the time, reggae was very much a single release format. Albums sold
a portion overseas, but in Jamaica, people bought 45s and in the U.S. they
bought the 12 inch singles. Their decision to put the songs together and market
Bounty Hunter as an LP was counterintuitive but provident because the
material, in the LP format, appealed to a new sub-cultural cross-over market
and helped the new style of reggae reach a broader audience. Non-Jamaican
reggae fans abroad, especially in the U.S. and Canada, still weren’t comfortable
buying 45s in Jamaican shops. But, the alternative/import record stores
that carried punk and new wave releases from the UK also stocked reggae.
And that is where North American kids first became aware of the new sounds
coming from Jamaica, records by artists like Gregory Issaccs, Augustus Pablo,
and now Barrington Levy and Jah Thomas.
hC&f
Building on the success of the first Barrington/ Jah Thomas/ Scientist releases,
Percy and Jah Life began seriously working to create new rhythms
in New York, in Phillip Smart’s HC&F studio on Long Island. One of the
frequent criticisms of “foreign” produced reggae music was that non-Jamaican
engineers couldn’t get the “yard” sound. Having Smart, with his “Tubby’s
pedigree”, as part of the team, overcame this obstacle. As artists began to
migrate north, Jah Life and Percy put them down on vinyl with the help of
engineer Phillip Smart at his HC&F studio in Long Island. Phillip mixed
rhythms that passed the test. No one in Jamaica suspected that they were anything
but the genuine article, and the songs became competitive hits, like the
Scion Success songs – ‘Can’t Leave Jah Alone’, ‘Pain a Back’, ‘Put it On’, ‘It a
Go Done’, Sister Carol’s ‘Black Cinderella’, Carlton Livingston’s ‘100 Weight
of Collie Weed’, not to mention the Barrington Levy tracks ‘Murderer’ and
‘Black Rose’. Phillip also had the hippest New York City radio show going, in
which he played oldies he couldn’t even name because the labels were blank.
But he knew the songs because he had mixed them himself in Tubby’s studio
in Waterhouse and could provide anecdotes that connected his listeners with
the music in a way that other radio DJs could not.
“I was the first actual assistant Tubby had. How I actually got to Tubbs
was, I used to be a partner with Augustus Pablo. We used to do productions
together, from when we were in high school. We used to record the tracks at
Randy’s Studio 17 and we would take the tape and go round to Tubbs and
make the dub to play on the sound. (We had our own sound systems, too.) I
started going there more and more, and when I left high school, that’s where
I went.”
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