Contents - Beth Lesser

established sounds, cause I know I have the ammunition, cause I used to
buy the records and just keep on buying records. I was buying records from
everybody. It’s an expensive thing running a sound system. So, eventually we
started having some clashes with me and with Big Youth on Tippertone * .”
When Mikey headed for a clash, he was thinking about the music, not the
deejays. “I started out with [deejay] Jah Mike and then after a while I used to
change my deejays regularly. As a matter of fact, sometimes, I don’t have any
deejays. When I’m going to play out, I have to pick up two deejays. I didn’t
have a resident deejay. There was a guy named Trevor, we used to call him
Higher [?]. He used to be with Coxsone number two sound - cause King Stitt
was on number one them time - and he came over to me for a while. I think
he was the first one.”
By the mid ‘70s, many of the older sets had shut down. But, Mr. Dodd
was still producing records and needed to get them played on sound systems
for exposure. Sugar Minott, who was recording for Mr. Dodd, recalled, “Emperor
Faith was the only sound that Coxsone used to give all the unreleased
tracks.” Mikey’s intense search for good music led him to a productive, cooperative
arrangement with Coxsone Dodd’s studio where Faith had access to
all the newly recorded material before it was released. “I used to go down to
Coxsone, at the Downbeat studio. We had Miss Enid ** and Larry Marshall –
those were the two people that were in the studio. And then you had Sylvan
Morris [The engineer]. And eventually, between Larry Marshall and Enid
and Sylvan Morris, they used to just tell me, ‘Take this tune’. Some of them,
they didn’t even know the name if it, so I used to go up there and give it my
own name. I used to kick up a storm out there with those tune! We push off
a lot of Downbeat [Coxsone Dodd] tunes. When we go up to the studio and
select the tunes and start to play it on the sound system, he could release those
tunes, cause he know we sort of hot it up for him.”
Although the sound had many selectors over the years, Mikey remained
the main man at the helm. “I used to just seek out the music. I wanted to have
every tune. I used to seek out the one-away tunes there, and after a while, I
get to know the tunes that the people want and the tune that would make a
hit. Selection is the whole thing to this music thing. You could have 10,000
records in front of you and a man come with a handful of musics and him
just play nicer than you. Cause it’s just the selection, the way you play the music
– what music you play now and what music going to follow it. When you
put on this tune, the next one must be just as nice, or nicer, and the next one
nicer and nicer, and on like that. You build up a crescendo. You have to play
in a sequence. You can’t just hopscotch - you play this tune and then you play
the next tune, you play a rubbish tune and then you play a nice tune. It’s the
* Big Youth eventually started his own sound, Negusa Negast and in the early ‘80s.
** Enid Cumberland was a gospel singer who recorded for Dodd and was working in the studio and
record shop
44 | RUB A DUB STYLE – The Roots of Modern Dancehall