Contents - Beth Lesser

deejay.”
Puddy began by following Crutches’ model. “Crutches come from Brace
Street, from Paradise Street down Windward Road. He’s a good deejay. I used
to idolize him work, and it’s through him why I was taking set in the deejay
world. Coming like he’s the manager for me, like showing me how to ride
certain rhythms.”
The Linton brothers and the two deejays took turns in a selector and deejay
tag team fashion. “So, it’s like, Crutches and Phillip usually team up, and the
one who wear the glasses, Sonny, it was me and him team up. So it’s like a
segment. Me and Sonny play a segment, and Bill [Phillip] and Crutches play
[the next] segment. They select the music and we do the talking. So we [each]
have a partner working together.”
arrowS 1980
After seeing the sound through its development in the ‘70s, Sonny took
himself out of the picture temporarily. In 1980, Sonny left for Miami to
continue his studies and Phillip (Bill) remained in Jamaica in charge of the
sound. Philip decided to bring in someone new to handle the selecting. His
choice was a youth named Zaggaloo who had been stringing up the set and
playing the music in the early part of the dance.
Zaggaloo remembers how he first came to fall under the spell of Arrows
Hifi. “I [was] with a few friends out by Newton Square. We used to play soccer
– football we call it – on the road, and we got to know everybody, cause
they would pick up sides, or this road played that road, and we all become
one big friend. One day we were there playing and we heard some music and I
said, ‘What’s that?’ And they said, its Arrows [Hifi] playing a ‘serenade’. And
I said, ‘Arrows? I didn’t know they lived in the area’. So, I stopped playing
soccer right away and I asked if I could go I there where they were playing.
The Serenade was an impromptu session played in the home base to test out
equipment or the listen to new dubplates. “They do it just to make sure, like if
they have a dance in a week, or within a couple of days, they would just take
out the boxes, clean up the amps. They get the tunes organized. They don’t
have a specific time when they do it. They [the Linton brothers] would come
home [from school] and they would say, ‘Arrows serenade is this evening.’”
From that day on, Zaggaloo never missed a Serenade. “Until eventually,
one day, we were playing and I was there in the music room, just looking
around – I started to know the songs cause I started to go to one and two
dance – and he [Bill] ask me if I wanted to play while he go in the house and
do something. That’s how I started to get involved with Arrows. I started at
serenade, playing a couple of musics there.”
Selecting was clearly in his blood. “My father was a big music fan, mostly
of jazz and ska music and he used to play every Sunday – a home component
set – just in the home and sometimes he had a few friends come over. As a
small kid I grew up at 13 North Street, that’s where they call it Progressive
268 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall