Post by Fuggle on Oct 4, 2004 17:01:42 GMT -5
Reggae revolutionary makes a comeback
BY EVELYN McDONNELL
emcdonnell@herald.com
Mikey Dread is sitting in June's, a Jamaican restaurant in North Miami, digging into his favorite plate of brown stew red snapper and talking about the past. The tall man with the gray-flecked dreads is remembering when, in the late '70s, he revolutionized Jamaican radio by breaking records by local reggae artists and mixing them with electronic effects and found sounds.
Dread recalls how he began cutting his own records. His pioneering dub caught the ears of punk avatars the Clash, who invited him away from his unsafe Jamaican home and launched him on an odyssey from London to Boston to L.A. to his current home, Coconut Creek. Theirs became a dynamite collaboration, fraught with potential and disappointment: a parable for postmodern creativity amid postcolonial economics. No one knows the lessons of that parable better than Dread.
''I learned the hard way,'' says the man born Michael Campbell. After years of disillusionment, Dread is making music again. Two months after playing in front of tens of thousands at England's legendary Glastonbury Festival, the 50-year-old father of six is promoting and performing Sunday at a reggae festival at the Bayside Hut on Key Biscayne.
''I want to tell the reggae story from my native point of view,'' Dread says.
`AFRICAN ANTHEM'
And who better to tell it than the man whose mix of promotional ''jingles,'' fresh-from-the-studio dub plates and sound squiggles served as a bridge between reggae and hip-hop. Like his peers Lee ''Scratch'' Perry and King Tubby, Dread used studio technology to create nothing less than a new way of making music. CDs like the classic African Anthem still make many of today's electronic artists sound like riddim-challenged amateurs. Two decades since that album was released, Dread now has the industry experience and academic expertise to finally make good on his early artistic promise.
A sharp intellect has guided Dread since he was a child who aced his O-level school tests in Port Antonio on Jamaica's east coast. Engineering brought him to Kingston and the Jamaican Broadcasting Company. At the time, Jamaican artists and labels had to pay to get played.
''Contrary to what was expected, when you went to Jamaica you didn't really hear reggae on the radio,'' says Chris Salewicz, an author of several books on reggae who is writing the authorized biography of late Clash leader Joe Strummer. ``Reggae was looked down on. Mikey went up against it to get that show on. It was quite important to say the least.''
It was the legendary King Tubby who first told Dread he should make his own records. Working with Tubby and Perry, Dread soon became a leading artist as well as a producer of others' hits.
''He was very, very influential,'' Salewicz says. ``He was ahead of the zeitgeist; he was very cutting edge. All those effects he did became part of the reggae mainstream.''
Dread's music took him to London. He says he didn't know who the Clash was when the band asked him to produce their single Bankrobber. When he was done with the song, the Clash's label didn't want to release it. Then an import became an underground hit. Eventually, despite lack of label support, Bankrobber reached No. 12 in the UK.
''It was unquestionably a reggae song; that really put the record company off,'' Salewicz says. ``But that is one of their best ever songs; it's a fantastic record.''
Dread was set to work on the band's next album, Sandinista!. He even brought the Clash to Kingston to record. But that session fell apart when curious locals crowded the studio and demanded payoffs for various tasks. The Clash was unprepared for this level of cultural exchange.
Dread says he contributed to a half-dozen Sandinista! tracks; his mark on such songs as One More Time and If Music Could Talk is clear. His credit for it is not so clear. He says he should get songwriting and mechanical royalties, and that he has received none.
Dread, who has also collaborated with UB40, Izzy Stradlin (Guns N' Roses) and Seal, speaks warmly of the Clash: ``Of all the groups I worked with outside Jamaica, I think the Clash was the most honorable. We get along as people from different cultures and races. At no time did I feel different among them.''
But Dread also says the Clash's management did not treat him with equal respect, and he blames them for ``owing me millions and millions.''
Dread says he has contacted bassist Paul Simonon and the Clash's American label to resolve the issue but has gotten nowhere. ''I don't blame the guys in the band, but they should have stood up for me,'' says Dread. ``Those kind of behaviors help to propagate the hatred between black and white.''
The surviving members of the Clash could not be reached for this article. But Salewicz says Dread's bad experience probably had nothing to do with race or colonialism and everything to do with an idealistic band whose business matters were a mess. ''The finances were in hell for years and years with the Clash,'' Salewicz says. ``Rightly or wrongly Mikey isn't the only person who's pissed off.''
Dread continued to work in music for several years, but too many bad business deals eventually soured him. After stints in Boston and California, a TV gig brought him to South Florida in '93.
PURSUING KNOWLEDGE
He studied music, video and business at the Fort Lauderdale Art Institute, then earned a B.A. in communications from Lynn University.
''I'm trying to see this business not just as a talented artist but as someone with the knowledge and the academics that can help further it,'' he says.
After suing two labels to get the rights back to most of his life recordings, Dread has begun to rerelease them on his own label, Dread at the Controls. But he's not just getting his own career back on track. He's trying to resteer the music he loves, and that he says has gotten lost in the ''slackness'' of dancehall.
``I'm trying to bring back around the music I grew up on, music that kids can listen to and sing along without the parents slap them in the mouth for what they're saying.''
Dread says the current flap over dancehall's homophobic lyrics is dragging reggae's reputation down. Artists like Beenie Man, whose recent Miami appearance during MTV's Video Music Awards was canceled over the controversy, should clean up their act, he says. ``Of course you can have your own opinion about what is right and wrong, but you don't have to influence the world as to what they should think. You have to be tolerant if you want to work in this industry.''
Ironically, Salewicz credits Dread's studio innovations with paving the way for Beenie Man's crossover success. ''A lot of the effects he used came to be used in early dancehall,'' the author says.
Dread sees his experience with the Clash as part of a pattern repeated throughout the history of Jamaican music, not to mention of empires and their colonies. ``That's what's been plaguing reggae music over and over and over: big companies, big foreigners who you look up to and respect, they just treat you like they want to get your intellectual property for nothing. So I stay away from them. Now I do my own thing.''
BY EVELYN McDONNELL
emcdonnell@herald.com
Mikey Dread is sitting in June's, a Jamaican restaurant in North Miami, digging into his favorite plate of brown stew red snapper and talking about the past. The tall man with the gray-flecked dreads is remembering when, in the late '70s, he revolutionized Jamaican radio by breaking records by local reggae artists and mixing them with electronic effects and found sounds.
Dread recalls how he began cutting his own records. His pioneering dub caught the ears of punk avatars the Clash, who invited him away from his unsafe Jamaican home and launched him on an odyssey from London to Boston to L.A. to his current home, Coconut Creek. Theirs became a dynamite collaboration, fraught with potential and disappointment: a parable for postmodern creativity amid postcolonial economics. No one knows the lessons of that parable better than Dread.
''I learned the hard way,'' says the man born Michael Campbell. After years of disillusionment, Dread is making music again. Two months after playing in front of tens of thousands at England's legendary Glastonbury Festival, the 50-year-old father of six is promoting and performing Sunday at a reggae festival at the Bayside Hut on Key Biscayne.
''I want to tell the reggae story from my native point of view,'' Dread says.
`AFRICAN ANTHEM'
And who better to tell it than the man whose mix of promotional ''jingles,'' fresh-from-the-studio dub plates and sound squiggles served as a bridge between reggae and hip-hop. Like his peers Lee ''Scratch'' Perry and King Tubby, Dread used studio technology to create nothing less than a new way of making music. CDs like the classic African Anthem still make many of today's electronic artists sound like riddim-challenged amateurs. Two decades since that album was released, Dread now has the industry experience and academic expertise to finally make good on his early artistic promise.
A sharp intellect has guided Dread since he was a child who aced his O-level school tests in Port Antonio on Jamaica's east coast. Engineering brought him to Kingston and the Jamaican Broadcasting Company. At the time, Jamaican artists and labels had to pay to get played.
''Contrary to what was expected, when you went to Jamaica you didn't really hear reggae on the radio,'' says Chris Salewicz, an author of several books on reggae who is writing the authorized biography of late Clash leader Joe Strummer. ``Reggae was looked down on. Mikey went up against it to get that show on. It was quite important to say the least.''
It was the legendary King Tubby who first told Dread he should make his own records. Working with Tubby and Perry, Dread soon became a leading artist as well as a producer of others' hits.
''He was very, very influential,'' Salewicz says. ``He was ahead of the zeitgeist; he was very cutting edge. All those effects he did became part of the reggae mainstream.''
Dread's music took him to London. He says he didn't know who the Clash was when the band asked him to produce their single Bankrobber. When he was done with the song, the Clash's label didn't want to release it. Then an import became an underground hit. Eventually, despite lack of label support, Bankrobber reached No. 12 in the UK.
''It was unquestionably a reggae song; that really put the record company off,'' Salewicz says. ``But that is one of their best ever songs; it's a fantastic record.''
Dread was set to work on the band's next album, Sandinista!. He even brought the Clash to Kingston to record. But that session fell apart when curious locals crowded the studio and demanded payoffs for various tasks. The Clash was unprepared for this level of cultural exchange.
Dread says he contributed to a half-dozen Sandinista! tracks; his mark on such songs as One More Time and If Music Could Talk is clear. His credit for it is not so clear. He says he should get songwriting and mechanical royalties, and that he has received none.
Dread, who has also collaborated with UB40, Izzy Stradlin (Guns N' Roses) and Seal, speaks warmly of the Clash: ``Of all the groups I worked with outside Jamaica, I think the Clash was the most honorable. We get along as people from different cultures and races. At no time did I feel different among them.''
But Dread also says the Clash's management did not treat him with equal respect, and he blames them for ``owing me millions and millions.''
Dread says he has contacted bassist Paul Simonon and the Clash's American label to resolve the issue but has gotten nowhere. ''I don't blame the guys in the band, but they should have stood up for me,'' says Dread. ``Those kind of behaviors help to propagate the hatred between black and white.''
The surviving members of the Clash could not be reached for this article. But Salewicz says Dread's bad experience probably had nothing to do with race or colonialism and everything to do with an idealistic band whose business matters were a mess. ''The finances were in hell for years and years with the Clash,'' Salewicz says. ``Rightly or wrongly Mikey isn't the only person who's pissed off.''
Dread continued to work in music for several years, but too many bad business deals eventually soured him. After stints in Boston and California, a TV gig brought him to South Florida in '93.
PURSUING KNOWLEDGE
He studied music, video and business at the Fort Lauderdale Art Institute, then earned a B.A. in communications from Lynn University.
''I'm trying to see this business not just as a talented artist but as someone with the knowledge and the academics that can help further it,'' he says.
After suing two labels to get the rights back to most of his life recordings, Dread has begun to rerelease them on his own label, Dread at the Controls. But he's not just getting his own career back on track. He's trying to resteer the music he loves, and that he says has gotten lost in the ''slackness'' of dancehall.
``I'm trying to bring back around the music I grew up on, music that kids can listen to and sing along without the parents slap them in the mouth for what they're saying.''
Dread says the current flap over dancehall's homophobic lyrics is dragging reggae's reputation down. Artists like Beenie Man, whose recent Miami appearance during MTV's Video Music Awards was canceled over the controversy, should clean up their act, he says. ``Of course you can have your own opinion about what is right and wrong, but you don't have to influence the world as to what they should think. You have to be tolerant if you want to work in this industry.''
Ironically, Salewicz credits Dread's studio innovations with paving the way for Beenie Man's crossover success. ''A lot of the effects he used came to be used in early dancehall,'' the author says.
Dread sees his experience with the Clash as part of a pattern repeated throughout the history of Jamaican music, not to mention of empires and their colonies. ``That's what's been plaguing reggae music over and over and over: big companies, big foreigners who you look up to and respect, they just treat you like they want to get your intellectual property for nothing. So I stay away from them. Now I do my own thing.''