Contents - Beth Lesser

had all but maintained them for those years. The Jamaican Gleaner reported,
“According to Coxsone, ‘It’s been kicked out of the court…The court people
inspected my agreement and saw that I have the right to lease the music to
whomever I choose. The Wailers operated as work-for-hire. They got paid every
week and I provided them with boarding for over four years. Things were
so bad that every minute they got a money out of my hand. When we got a
little bit from Island, I made sure they got a little something from it. I found
a nice place for them and provided them with guitar and piano so they could
practice in the evenings,’ said Coxsone.” * The practice continued well into the
‘80s with producers like Kenneth Hookim who took in Frankie Paul and gave
him room and board while he voiced him at Channel One.
exeCuTive produCer
The producer was the big boss, the man who made the recording happen,
but not necessarily the source of creative input. The producer had the money.
He could rent the studio and book the band, but after that, he often left the
musicians and the engineers together with the artist and retuned after a time
to see what they had come up with.
“The majority of those producers in the ‘80s, they wasn’t the real producers,”
Explains session drummer and engineer Barnabas. “They was just executive
producers. Cause it was the musicians that was putting the arrangement
together, and musicians would decide the song structure and everything. If
it’s an original song, they would just let the singer go in the studio, sing the
song and then the musicians would do all the rest. These producers didn’t tell
us what to play. They didn’t give us any kind of direction.”
Cleveland “Clevie” Brownie describes the real role of the producer in reggae,
“They went to the studio with the tapes and [said], ‘Put this on eight
tracks for me and voice such and such an artist’. And in fact, it was the musicians
and the engineers who actually produced the songs, with the producer
just being ‘executive’ and credited as producer, and the performing producers
were not credited at all.”
Sometimes the system backfired. “Some Jamaican producers thought they
knew how to produce, until some of them started getting production work
from the majors [record labels] and found that it wasn’t the same thing when
they worked with any musician outside of Jamaica,” Clevie recalled. “Those
musicians would sit and say, ‘What do you want me to play?’ A producer told
me that he went to California to overdub a guitar track, and the guitarist sat
there and said, ‘What do you want me to play?’ And he couldn’t tell him,
‘cause he was just an executive producer. So, the guy said, ‘If I play anything
out of this, it is my intellectual property. I want my publishing’. That producer
came back to Jamaica a changed man.”
* Wailer files writ against Dodd, Andrew Clunis, The Jamaican Gleaner, May 15, 2001
| 245