Contents - Beth Lesser

The music was really grooving.”
As Clevie’s career grew, so did his knowledge of the business side of music.
“When we started out, it was more about being famous. You hear your song
on the radio. You’re not even thinking about the money, the business aspect of
it. But, I recall hearing conversations out in the hallway and into the waiting
room. Sometimes you would hear them talking about publishing, copyright
– all those things were new to me.”
After he left high school, Clevie had been invited to tour England as part
of the In Crowd band. While on the tour, an odd thing happened. “I had a
visitor – I don’t recall the name. But this person I had never known before
came to visit me one day at the hotel and handed me two books - one on the
business of music in the USA and one on the UK. To this day, I often wonder,
sometimes, if it was an angel. Because this person handed me the books, he
said he was following my career (which wasn’t much of a career at that time).
And said, ‘One day you will be an industry leader’. And then he left.”
One thing he learned was that although the producers in that period operated
under a work-for-hire system in which the ‘apprentice’ is paid a salary
and the producer who hired him retains the rights to his creative output, this
wasn’t legal in Jamaica. As Clevie contends, “The Jamaican copyright law
does not have ‘works for hire’. All intellectual property coming from the musicians
belongs to them.” This realization led Clevie and Steely to dig a little
deeper into the laws regarding the remuneration of their creative endeavors.
Once they realized that they were not being granted what they were entitled
to, Steely and Clevie started demanding their publishing rights. “We
were blacklisted by some producers. Some producers say they would not work
with us because we want more than what we should be getting.” To finally
get what they knew was theirs, Clevie and Steely started their own company.
The pair created their own Steely and Clevie label and quickly earned a spot
on the Billboard Top 100 Black Singles with their do-over of the Tracy Chapman
hit, ‘Sorry (Baby, Can I Hold You)’, with Foxy Brown. They also scored
big with Tiger, Dillinger and Johnny P and went on to issue a series of one
rhythm LPs. Their production facility in New Kingston was voted ‘Studio of
the Year’ twice. Then EMI called. “EMI called us and said that they actually
did some research and found that our name kept coming up. And they asked
us to sign a publishing deal in 1990.”
The two were still signed to EMI when Steely passed away suddenly on
September 1, 2009, after a long series of medical problems. He was undergoing
treatment for kidney failure when the doctors found a benign brain tumor.
Following the removal of the tumor in New York, he caught pneumonia
and, ultimately, died from heart failure.
In an impassioned letter to the Jamaican Observer, a dedicated music fan
addressed Steely’s legacy: “Dancehall used to be a place where we went and
danced, listened to sound systems and popular DJs. Steely, when all is said
and done you made the biggest paradigm shift in reggae music history, period.
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