Contents - Beth Lesser

around with us, trying to book studio time, would be going to the Kentucky
[Fried Chicken], buy a couple of bucket of chicken and we all sit down and
eat, sit down and chat all the time. Bunny was one of us, one of the guys. Still
is. We still hang out.”
“We, as the youth now, we used to admire Bunny Lee,” remembers producer
Ossie Thomas, one of Lee’s biggest fans. “Bunny Lee was really a hero.
Cause Bunny Lee used to have a big Buick and he used to come pick up the
prettiest girl on the corner. Duke Reid and Coxsone was like the godfathers.
Bunny Lee become, now, a man whe’ upset the whole apple cart, blow the
whole thing apart. Cause Bunny Lee make the production thing look simple,
like it accessible to everybody now. All of the ghetto youth start aspire- realize,
well, we can do our own production, that we can set our own thing. You see,
everybody need heroes. Bunny Lee was a hero.”
What Bunny Lee did with music was revolutionary. He showed the youth
in the ghetto that it only took one rhythm track to go into business. From
there, you could create a vocal, a deejay track, a dub and then another vocal.
The possibilities were endless.
Bunny Lee wasn’t the first man to do-over older songs, but he was the most
prolific. He was attuned to the fact that you could take a popular rhythm, and
change the style to whatever was current- take a popular Rock Steady song
and give it the rockers treatment with Santa’s ‘flying symbol’ drum style, just
as many Mento songs had been successfully reworked as Ska numbers during
the ‘60s.
However, previously most producers would release only one vocal and one
deejay version of a rhythm. Bunny Lee took the next step of recording multiple
artists over each rhythm, vastly increasing the pace and quantity of his
output. In his aggressive pursuit of both songs to cover and rhythm tracks to
re-do, he institutionalized a new model for reggae production. Bunny Lee’s
way became the standard and the practice continued into the ‘80s where it
intensified with the demands of the dancehall for ever more variations of old
favorites.
Jamaica was a frugal society. In the ghetto, nothing went to waste. Old
crates were made into amplifiers and fishing line into guitar strings. So, the
idea of using a backing rhythm more than once made a world of sense. As producer
George Phang expressed it, “We can’t afford to make a rhythm [track]
and use it one time. If every time we go to the studio we have to make a new
rhythm, we would not be able to afford to make records. But we make some
changes every time we use the rhythm, like putting in a [synthesizer] or some
rhythm guitar.”
“We couldn’t afford to record, to pay so much musician every time,” Bunny
Lee agrees. “So, if we have one rhythm, we use it 10 or 20 times with a different
thing on it. What we used to do first time, when we gonna do a deejay
album, we used to do four deejay album in one night, you know, in about
four hours, cause as one deejay miss, you have another deejay to take his place.
252 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall