Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright (12 page)

In a few minutes a space was found for us inside and we were led around to the front of this seeming chapel, through a door and down to the very front, where Gonzo and I were seated amongst a bevy of little black kids who stared at us with a mixture of shyness, fear and laughter. I made a face at one staring at me and she dissolved in giggles. I was not so sure that the same thing would be a wise course of action for me to take, so whenever Gonzo said something funny to me I would stifle my laughter, which naturally had the effect of stifling laughter at the dinner table when you are a child—all those repressed chuckles just kept bubbling ferociously inside, burning to get out in howls while I kept translating them into stoned, beatific smiles as I swayed to the music. It was not that there was anything funny about the situation; I was merely nervous. Or rather,
these
people and this music was not funny—we were funny, our presence here was funny, or was something else more easily accepted as funny, and by the time Gonzo got around to screaming in my ear that “This is better than Thelonious Monk at the Five Spot! I see the light, Lester, I’ve got religion! And don’t ever forget that we could lose our lives at any minute!” I just had to laugh out loud.

Luckily, it was swallowed by the music, which was amazing, or seemed so under the circumstances. Ras Michael sang songs like “None a Jah Jah Children No Cry,” “In Zion,” and “Glory Dawn,” alternating cooking reggae with gospel chants as the drummers smoked spliff after spliff, some of them sitting there in total trance never removing the things from their mouths, sucking the smoke like air, cooking up an enormously complex rhythm conversation which was pure Africa. Killy had sat down at one of the congas, lit up two spliffs, and handed them to me and Gonzo. I smoked and tried to lose myself in the rhythm, as Ras Michael sang of flying away home to Zion and Gonzo screamed in my ear “Right! Right! Fly away home tomorrow!” One particularly driving chant-like number (number?) which sounded like a basal link between African reggae roots and Elvin Jones caught the whole room up and in that moment alone, perhaps, we all were united, flying through the rhythm. The end of each song was signaled by Ras Michael, who would intone loudly into the mike “Jah Rastafari!” to which the little children, women and men present would shout back “Rastafari!” I remember particularly one tot behind me, screaming “Migh-ty God!” It was like a cross between a Wednesday Night Prayer Meet-ing and a very local garage gig by a band which was itself the link between the tribal fires of prehistory, American black Revivalist Christianity, and rock ‘n’ roll electricity. The guitarist would get into riffs that occasionally suggested that he had been listening to Keith Richards, Duane Allman, maybe even Jerry Garcia, but this was a religious service and nobody clapped. Except Peter Simon, who kept leaning over and cooing in my ear, “Isn’t this
great?
I just
love
it, don’t you?” He had begun dancing in a manner that I can only compare to Joan Baez doing the Funky Chicken at the Big Sur Folk Festival, and little kids in front of him, shifting out of awesomely intricate boogaloos of their own, began laughingly to imitate him. He thought they were all getting together in One World brotherhood, laughed back and did what he was doing with more fervor; what he didn’t see was that they were having a laugh over his performance with other children behind him. At the end of the set (set?) I saw him in the center aisle, palms together and head bowed in prayerful attitude. Meanwhile, the grass was wearing off, the bench was hard, and, as at many concerts, I was ready to go home before the music was over.

I don’t mean to sound jaded. It had been intense, both musically and situationally; it was a capital-E experience, and, as Gonzo said, “Take a good look, Lester—this is as close as we’re ever gonna get to Africa.” But there was a pervasive irony to the Experience, which could not be escaped. It was in seeing Peter Simon, after Ras Michael and the band had left the room as the hand-drummers and congregation kept shouting and chanting, mount the stage and stand there behind the table with the Bible and candle, smiling and clapping his hands as if leading the faithful.

And there was irony a few minutes later, as we were led out of the chapel into a space behind the house next door, where we were given herb soup (“As an offering,” I was informed) and tokes off the chalice,a ceremonial, elaborately carved pipe. Ras Michael stood outside; I shook hands with him and told him, “I really dig your music, and I’m going to buy your album tomorrow.” We both laughed, there may have been a moment of mutual recognition, and then he launched into the gospel of Rastafari, quoting extensively from the Bible and prophesying Armageddon. It was boring, and after a few minutes I edged politely away, after which it seemed each of our party took his turn at the same course, until Ras Michael got to Peter Simon, whose name he delighted in transposing into Simon Peter, laughing and shaking Simon’s hand vigorously. (Upon this rock I will build my church in . . .
Martha’s Vineyard?)
We all laughed at this, and a few minutes later I saw Peter Simon inside the house where the Rastas stood smoking herb and testifying to Jah. I could see him, through the smoke, first in the main room, then later coming out of another room in the back. I assumed at the time that that was the john and he had to use it, later realized that was ridiculous since it was almost certain that the only toilet anywhere around here was the ground. The rest of us stood around just inside the door of the house; it was a while before I realized that behind me, in the darkness, all the Rasta women were sitting in chairs or hammocks along the fence, silently watching as their children hopped around them and the men declaimed inside. The only woman I saw inside the house was one young brown-skinned girl about 20, sitting in a chair in a corner with a spliff in her hand upon which she occasionally took another hit; she was beautiful, as yet unbrutalized at least to the eye, but as she stared vacantly into space all the herb in the world could not have been cosmetic for the utter desolation that, in her silence, in her stillness, was radiated by her very youth and beauty.

Older Rastas from the neighborhood came wandering up to the house, some of them ragged, and I looked at them and then at Tom Hayes, who was wearing a pair of pants that probably cost $50, a Billy Preston T-shirt (I was in my Grand Funk) and a razor cut, and the irony turned to an absurdity so extreme it became a kind of obscenity. It was, at the very least, embarrassing, for me and for these people, and I seriously doubt if for all the talk of brotherhood of Rastafari there is anything beyond that embarrassment which they and I will ever be able to share. What I mean to say is I’ve been on lots of press junkets before, but this was the first one into Darkest Africa. What I meant to say is that a whole bunch of people were flown, all expenses paid, to Jamaica, so that we could look at these people, and go back and write stories which would help sell albums to white middle-class American kids who think it’s romantic to be black and dirt-poor and hungry and illiterate and sick with things you can’t name because you’ve never been to a doctor and sit around all day smoking ganja and beating on bongo drums because you have no other options in life. I know, because I am one of those kids, caught in the contradiction—hell, man, my current favorite group is Burning Spear. But I wouldn’t want to organize a press party in that village they come from in those hills they sing about. And not because I don’t want to pollute the “purity” of their culture with Babylon, either—because there is something intrinsically insulting about it.

At length we were able to leave. Gonzo had been edgily hunching around the doorway of the house, prodding Wooly and Tom Hayes, who as an upright drinking Englishman was much more amenable, to “get the fuck back to the hotel before the bar closes, man!” We trooped out into the street, and some of the Rastas followed us. A curious thing happened then: they had smoked only herb inside, but as soon as we hit the lane where the cars were parked they started asking for cigarettes, which we of course gave them. As Gonzo put it later: “I felt like we should have had Hershey Bars to distribute.” They told us that in the middle of the band’s performance (which was not in fact a Grounation at all but rather a religious concert for children—they would never let us come to the adults’ affair) the police and soldiers had driven up to the place, looked in the door, and then split. I told them that the same thing happened when a rock ‘n’ roll band tried to practice in my neighborhood, but somehow it didn’t ring quite the same. (Kingston police, I have been told, are not averse to such practices as walking into a house unannounced and for no reason in the middle of the night, interrupting a couple while they are fucking, pulling the man out of bed and hauling him in for interrogation and other sports that can be easily imagined.) I looked up and saw, at the top of a pole on the corner, two strips of black, battered metal, upon which had been crudely written in white paint instructions to go to certain addresses in the neighborhood for the mending of clothes, or to buy fish. “Look,” I said to Gonzo and Tom Hayes, “advertisements.” The three of us stared up, just stared, and said nothing.

The Rastas stood around or sat on the back bumper of Killy’s Volks, polite and friendly conversation was made; they invited us to come back and see them sometime. Right. Eventually, without any true goodbyes, there was kind of a mutual semi-embarrassed separation, as they went back inside and we prepared to get in our cars. It was at this point that we discovered one of our party was missing. Peter Simon was still in the house. Nobody seemed particularly inclined to go in after him, so we just sort of stood around until some of them brought him out, stoned and beaming and holding hands with them like a brother to the world. Killy then told us that he had to take some members of the band home in his car, and we would all have to ride back in Stephen Davis’ Toyota, plus we could drive home Chinna, the lead guitarist. Killy also said that he needed gas, produced a hose, and siphoned an indeterminate quantity out of the Toyota and into the Volks. He left us with instructions on how to get out of this neighborhood, said that in any case we had Chinna to guide us, and drove off. Now we had to squeeze seven people into the Toyota—Gonzo, Hayes, Wooly, and myself, three of whom are around six feet tall and in other respects large, into the backseat; in the front seat Stephen Davis driving, Peter Simon straddling the two front seats with his arm around the back of the seat where Chinna rode shotgun. No one spoke to Chinna; in fact, once out on a main road several of us began laughing like maniacs, and I still wonder what he must have been thinking. But some sort of pressure was off, and also the only way four of us could fit in the backseat was for one of Wooly’s legs to hang out the window. Stephen Davis almost ran off the road the first time he saw a human foot bobbing up by his window. We drove for miles, followed Chinna’s instructions until we arrived at what looked like a suburban 1950s American tract home, except that there were fields around it. It wasn’t bad for Jamaica. As Chinna took his guitar through the front door, Gonzo cracked: “I’ll bet he’s saying, ‘Hi, honey, I’m home!’” We wondered if Ras Michael and the rest had left in Killy’s Volks for equally middle-class abodes, and Gonzo also revealed that Killy had burned him for the four dollars worth of dope he’d copped for him on the way to the Grounation. He had rolled part of it up into about four joints which he’d passed to us while the band was playing, but when Gonzo asked him for the rest of it at the end he said that we (I and I, Ethiopians and ofays) had smoked it all up. Proving, declared Gonzo, that the Rastas were not Righteous, after all.

Back at the hotel, Tom Hayes, Gonzo and I closed the bar. I had Courvoisier with Heineken chasers. Gonzo said, “Yes, tonight we have been where few white men have dared venture!” Hayes remarked that Peter Simon did not know how lucky he was to be alive.

Stephen Davis, Peter Simon, Wooly and I are driving to Harry J.’s studio. Harry (Johnson) is another prolific island (and Island) pro-ducer; Marley has recorded at his studio a lot, and in fact when we get there Wooly sees a car that looks like Marley’s BMW and for some reason gets nervous. It seems implicit that if Bob is there visiting Harry J. for any reason, we will have to turn around and go back to the hotel, and it occurs to me that it’s a wonder Marley keeps any perspective at all with everybody treating him like this. But it’s not his car, after all; we go inside.

In the car all morning Wooly has been saying “Jah Rastafari” and singing Ras Michael’s “None a Jah Jah Children No Cry”; the night before, as we stood beside the door, I had asked him if Island was thinking of signing Ras Michael, and he had said no, but that after what we had just seen it might be a good idea. Now he has offered to make me a copy (a dub!) of his tape of Ras Michael’s performance, and I tell him I’ve gotta have a cassette, and that if he can’t make one easily not to go through the hassle, because I feel that Ras Michael’s show is one of those things where you just would have had to have been there, and I probably won’t play it much, especially if it’s on reel-to-reel which I don’t have equipment for. He insists, though: “Don’t you want a tape to play for your friends and turn ’em on?”

It seems to me that the next logical step is home movies. Why didn’t somebody give Peter Simon a Portapak?

Inside Harry J.’s studio, Wooly gives him the English edition, on the Island label, of his Jamaican hit with the Heptones, “Mama Say.” Harry explodes. “What kinda crap is this? I produced this fucking record, and on this label it credit Danny Holloway [an English producer]. All he did was mix it! This’s a fucking bummaclot.” I ask him if this kind of thing happens often. “Never before with Chris Blackwell. Always I’ve trusted him.” Something else occurs to me, very belatedly in fact, something so basic I had missed it all through my stay on the island: I ask him if very many Jamaican artists have managers. He looks at me as if I were the most pathetic ignoramus alive. “Not many,” he says.