Contents - Beth Lesser

deejay SpeCialS
In the very beginning, the deejays, rather than singers, were often the ones
making the specials, a practice that all but disappeared in the ‘80s, at least on
the rub-a-dub sounds * . But the soul sounds in the ‘70s often didn’t have live
deejays at their disposal and they could get caught short in a clash against an
all reggae set.
“What these guys are calling specials now, and acting as if it’s new, it come
from ina the ‘70s,” Deejay Welton Irie explains. “Gemini was a soul sound
and we used to play a lot against King Attorney which was a sound that had
deejays. So, [Papa] Gemini got it in his head to make Ranking Trevor deejay
some stuff about his sound. When King Attorney stop playing and Gemini
came on, just the music playing would be a drop from actually hearing a
deejay. So, Gemini had one or two dubplates with Ranking Trevor deejaying,
‘Gemini gonna kick you around’, calling out the name of Archie, the selector
and ‘great sounds called Gemini’ and all of that.”
Papa Jaro, from Kilimanjaro sound, had the same idea at the time. “Ranking
Trevor and U Brown used to work with Papa Roots sound on a full time
basis and they used to work with mine on a part-time basis. When I want
them to be at a dance and they couldn’t come, I would actually take them
in my house and voice them and make a dubplate deejaying about the sound
system. So, when we took those dubplate into the dancehall and started playing
them, at first people were very excited. This was something new in the
dancehall. And then, little by little, they began to realize that Ranking Trevor
and U Brown was not really in the dance. It’s a dub plate them playing with
those guys.”
General Echo had a unique method of getting specials for his Stereophonic
sound system back in the late ‘70s. “Stereophonic – that was my favorite
sound because I think that sound that really push up my music in the dance”,
singer Sammy Dread explains, “They used to play a lot of my dubplates. They
used to play, like, ‘In This Time’, ‘African Girl’. General Echo used to deejay,
‘African Girl a carry the swing’. I used to sing on Stereophonic… I used to
go to the dance and they used to play Studio One music – ca’ I up-rise off off
Studio One sound – that sound is really my type of sound. So, [when] I go in
the dance and sing on the rhythm, General Echo now, he tapes it. Then when
he go back, and listen it and hear me singing about the sound, he just take it
to the studio, to Channel One, and put it on dubplate and then he have that
to play.”
The problem is he forgot to tell Sammy what he was doing. “I used to hear
a lot of guys go to the dance and say, ‘I hear Stereophonic play a lot of tunes
with you’. I say ‘Tune with me?’ Them tell me, and I say ‘No’. And when I go
* Some recorded examples remain, such as Tapazukie’s ‘Viego’ on the LP Man a Warrier (MER
1973), Dennis Alcapone’s ‘El Paso’, Big Youth’s ‘Tippertone Rocking’ and Clint Eastwood’s ‘T Tone
Hifi’ (‘T Tone’ was Tippertone)
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