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Blood and Fire Sound System
An Interview with Steve Barrow
by Lem Oppenheimer
Originally ran in Musictoday.com
Musictoday: When did the Blood & Fire Sound System first get started?Steve Barrow: About two and a half years ago.
MT: It's traveled mainly through Europe so far?
SB: Yeah, we've done sixty odd shows, going well up towards seventy shows in Europe.
MT: What inspired you to put it together? Was it mainly a way to market the records or just a desire to get a sound system out to show people what it was like?
SB: Well, both really. Getting it out to show people what it was really like showcases the records as well. It certainly has done that when we've toured before. It's definitely had an impact on sales. In the French magazine, Groove Ragga, we got voted Best Sound System by the readerswe beat Stone Love and Kilimanjaro! Jah knows were doing His work here, the music we play, when we get out with [Ranking] Joe, Trinity, U Brown, Joseph Cotton. All that work that we were doing might bring people together and make them forget all their troubles and dance, as Bob [Marley] said. It's a refreshing process; it's an energizing, refreshing, and necessary process in this plastic world. And that's all we're trying to do, really, bring a little niceness into it, in an informal way. It's not a big presentationit's a sound system. We can go around with our record box, and our mixer, and our space echo, and we can nice up the place in the fashion that was laid down by the Jamaicans who carved this music out from nothing. And we want to honor that. We respect that to the max. Cause there's a whole lot of intelligence and goodness behind it that mustn't be allowed to dissipate and go nowhere. It must be focused, because it can earn money, it can make lives better, for the people who make the music and the people who receive it. We need that and that's why reggae music is still here. Because it always does that, in spite of all the bullshit and pressure, people backing you up against the wall and saying "Gimme my money!" In spite of all that. All the old timers when you talk to them they will tell you that they didn't do this to make money. If you were to tell them that they could buy a shirt off of being a deejay, they would have laughed at you. Thirty years ago. Leroy Sibbles said, "We were like a family." Ken Boothe said, "We used to be all down Studio One, one man playing, one man listening, contributing, those kinds of things, without thinking about the money, to do something good." Those are the best things in the world. The money comes if the thing gets through. Now, what Blood & Fire does, and what I try to do, is that process of getting through. I see myself as a bridge, you know, someone who can articulate some of the messages of reggae music, maybe not to the same depth as a true born Jamaican, but I've been around the music long enough to know what's going on with iteven though I don't buy so many records any more.
MT: A lot of people may not be familiar with what a sound system is like. Can you explain what people will find when they come into that show?
SB: Well, what they'll get is, you know, what they know as DJs that is, me and Dom as selector and operator, spinning records for the first part, for an hour or so. Then we'll bring on the first deejay, then the second and third, then we'll bring on all three for the finale. The deejay portion of the show lasts around two hours.
MT: Is it split that you do the selecting and Dom does the operating, or do you guys share duties on that?
SB: I do the selecting; I pick out the music because, basically, I know the music better than Dom, because I'm twice his age. He does the decks; I do the decks if he wants to go take a piss, you know? I work the sampler. I do some of the mixing, but most of that is done by Dom. We've got about a hundred different samples that we use, like percussive effects, that kind of thing.
MT: Have you done any work with a sound system before? I know you've done a lot in reggae but I've never seen you mentioned as doing this before.
SB: I've done P.A.'s from the late '80s with [Dennis] Alcapone, doing club dates with him, preparing the records for him. And I played at WOMAD with Alcapone. Before that, I've done it intermittently when nothing else was around. I did it in Spain in the '60s, working in clubs playing soul music. I did it again in the late '70s, playing '60s soul and funk and ska, and I did it when I was working freelance for Trojan [Records]. But what happened when Dominic came into the company three years ago, he said why don't I come up to Manchester and play records with him once a month, you know? I did a couple of those and a couple of radio shows. I had spoken about this idea with Ranking Joe in '96 when we were in Austria together. I was playing records behind him, selecting over there at another reggae festival they had over there. That was when it really started for me. I said to Joe, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could do this all the time?" Or, at least, some of the time. This kind of thingthe old riddims, the old style. Because a lot of people haven't heard it, they haven't been exposed to it outside of Jamaica or the Jamaican communities worldwide. Unless you're an American who made a habit of going down to Brooklyn or the Bronx in the '70s or '80s, you wouldn't really know what a sound system was.
MT: What do you think the U.S. response will be, compared to the Europeans? Especially since, in the U.S., the sound system evolved into hip-hop and rap and has been a part of the culture even though people don't really recognize it as such?
SB: Yeah, yeah, I think it will be interesting because of that. I think people will be able to make a much more solid connection with the roots of hip-hop. Kool Herc, obviously, was a Jamaican soundman. Not in Jamaica, but in New York. The thing about sound system selectors and operators is that they're all trying to be different, to build up the crowd on the basis of their being different from the next guy, and obviously, maybe Herc found it difficult to compete with the more established sounds, so he started looking for different records and doing different things with those records. But it was a Jamaican thing to find that novelty, that new thing, and finding that new thing within an old thing as well. Taking breaks out of records and scratching, mixing them up, right, it's a very reggae thing to do.
MT: To recycle and reuse what you can, since it's cheaper that way.
SB: So that's the inspiration. Obviously the music that's played on Jamaican sound systems is different, although the modern hardcore dancehall is not so different from the modern hip-hop beats.
MT: So let's switch up for a minute and talk about Blood & Fire itself. What year did you get Blood & Fire started?
SB: We put the first record out in early '94, and we got the company started the year before, in early '93.
MT: I know that it came about because the Simply Red people had come to you and said let's put out some records.
SB: That's right.
MT: Was that Mick Hucknall [the lead singer of Simply Red] or his management?
SB: Both. That was Mick and his management at the time. They were all sitting around saying there's a lot of good reggae that isn't on CD. Like Pick A Dub and Heart Of The Congos were two. And they also noticed, like I had noticed independently, that Burning Spear's Social Living wasn't out on CD. So those were some of the records they came with. And I said, "Yeah, I can probably license some of these, but really, what I'm interested in doing is starting a company with you."
MT: How involved are they these days? I think there's a perception that you run it and they're just the money behind it all. Do they still stay involved with suggesting projects they want to do?
SB: No, no, they don't really. We got a completely free hand. They don't back it financially anymore, though they backed it for the first five years significantly.
MT: Did it come to a point where you were able to buy them out?
SB: No, they're still directors of the company. There are still five directors, which are Mick, Andy, Elliot, Bob, and Me. And there are three people working it day to day, which are Bob, Dominic, and I.
MT: What's been your best selling release so far?
SB: Heart of the Congos.
MT: That's what I figured. What reason do you think that one took off with the public?
SB: I think it's a brilliant record on its own terms. It also has a quality to it that grabs people. The Lee Perry production, principally that sound is something that gets people.
MT: As with all your releases, it has beautiful packaging, and you obviously made a decision somewhere along the way that you wanted to package these nicely, and I know that must cost a fortune to put together.
SB: Yeah, it does.
MT: Is it worth the balance there? What goes into that decision?
SB: We think it is. First and foremost, the customer, the people who shell out their hard earned dollars and pounds and francs, and what have you, for CDs, you know, they get reasonably good value within the current marketplace. There are very few CDs in the modern market that have 16-page bookletsall of ours have 16 page booklets, and some have more. So they're getting a good deal, a good quality product. We don't want people to say the sound quality on here is not too good, or the design looks cheap and nasty, like it cost us 10 pence or something, you know? We want people to, you know, feel like they're getting nearer their money's worth. And also, what it does, that packaging, those values, they make the product last longer. It lasts longer in the marketplace; it sells consistently. The Congos we still sell one hundred, two hundred Congos CDs a month. You know, we've done 55,000 in three and a half years.
MT: And the Congos booklet is like a piece of art to have on your shelf, regardless of the music.
SB: Yeah, that came out from Matt Cook and myself. I had this image, I thought it should have something to do with, like, there's a song on there about the feast, "The Feast Of The Passover," which Cedric sings. I got to thinking about the Passover and the Passover plate, and I was thinking if we could do the symbolic Passover plate, a festive feast plate, and Matt Cook came up with the idea to use this F-11 engine housing, which is a circular thing which is divided into segments, and in each metal segment, in the frame of it, when we stood it up, we could put in different things that kind of related to the overall impression of the sound. Like there was peppers and weed, you know, fish and pictures of the original jackets and pictures of Selassie and those kinds of things, and when you put it together it made a strong kind of image. I really enjoyed doing it, so I said it would be nice to do it for each song. And he said, "Oh yeah, not many!" I said to Bob, look, Matt wants to do one for every song, he's really into this, blah blah blah. So I gave Matt the lyrics, a couplet from each song, that kind of summed up the song, and he then worked off of those visually, with suggestions from me. The "Ark Of The Covenant," with that one, I said you can go with Noah's Ark, and the Ark of the Covenant, you can go with those. Then he made them out of tin. The one with the fisherman, [he used] an old rusty wok with some red snapper in it; we bought [the red snapper] that day at market, and it stunk up the studio and all of that. You know, it paid off in the aesthetic sense, because when I showed it to Cedric, I came to New York, and Roy independently, they both said, Cedric in particular, "These things were kind of in my mind when I was singing them." So when you get that, it gives you a certain coherence, a certain satisfaction, and it kind of commits you to it even more, because everyone's with you, the artist is with you. Scratch had released the rights to them in 1980, so there was no producer to sort out in that respect, it had reverted to the artist, right, so with that we decided to do the job, because this is the great lost album of the '70s, in a sense. You know, everyone knows Natty Dread, everyone knows Marcus Garvey, and everyone knows Right Time by the Mighty Diamonds. And they all represent various facets of Jamaican vocal groups' styles. Obviously, the Wailers are the Wailers, the international crossover sound. And then there's the chant-based call and response vocals Burning Spear was famous for when he had Rupert Weelington and Delroy Hines in Burning Spear. When they were still a group. And the Diamonds did an updated rock steady. And the Congos had gone to a more futuristic style of singing more jazzy with very fluid backing tracks, not really generic dancehall rhythms.
MT: Kind of an unearthly vocal style, with the falsettos coming in.
SB: That's it! It still sounded, like all those other albums they still sound good today. And this is the album that Island [Records] had turned down, because they didn't like the sound.
MT: I didn't realize they had turned that down.
SB: That's what freaked Scratch out, one of the things.
MT: When he burned down the Ark?
SB: Well, it was one of the things along that road. One of the nails in the coffin of the first Black Ark.
MT: Cause he had known he had recorded an incredible album and it got turned down, so it pushed him over the edge?
SB: Yeah, and he did different mixes of it at the time. There were four different mixes that came out of it between '78-'80.
MT: So far Blood & Fire has only put 'ut '70s material. Any plans to broaden that and put out some of the '60s material or the Œ80s things?
SB: No, I'm Blood & FireBlood & Fire will always be '70s things. Roots & Culture and deejay. We want to start a deejay only label, which would be a subsidiary of Blood & Fire. And any other periods that we venture into, we'd start different label identities for them, under the aegis of Blood & Fire, and with the same production values. We were going to move into the new field, record a new artist. We were talking to Luciano before Christmas, and we had backing from someone there in America, but he signed for one album with Palm Pictures instead. Which is a pity, but there you go. We'd never shut the door on him, though.
MT: How did you first get exposed to reggae? Do you remember the first song you heard that perked your ears up and made you ask, "What is this stuff?"
SB: Yeah! The first song I can tell you was in the winter of '62-'63, it must have been around November '62. It was "Sea Wave" by Derrick and Patsy. Derrick Morgan. "They Got To Go" by Prince Buster. "30 Pieces of Silver" by Prince Buster. Boogie tunes and those kinds of things. "Oh Carolina."
MT: Was that on the radio?
SB: In a club in London. That was a club called the Roaring Twenties. About four years after that, Coxsone UK, Sir Coxsone had a residency there. And it continued into the Œ70s when it was called Columbo. I Roy talks about it on one of his albums, you know, "Planet called the roaring twenties/Man called sir coxsone/The biggest sound in London town," etc., you know?
MT: You ran some record stores in the '70s were you doing anything involving reggae before that?
SB: No, the first professional so-called involvement was when I opened the shop called Daddy Kool Records.
MT: That was '75?
SB: That was October '75 we opened the doors there. And I left my partner at the time dissolved the partnership about 11 months later, he had the controlling share, he financed it all, and that's it. [There were] considerable bad feelings when we parted a year later. I'd been doing journalism. I was writing for Black Echoes at the same time. I was their singles reviewer.
MT: And you went on to compile the Intensified Ska album?
SB: Yeah, when the 2-Tone thing started kicking off in England around that time, Trevor Wyatt at Island Records asked, "Do [you] want to do that ska compilation I had suggested to him a couple years before?" I said yeah! I put together that one. Chris [Blackwell] phoned me up and told me he really liked the package. So right from the offing I was kind of successful with that, in terms of putting together a coherent package. And that moved 60,000 in the first year.
MT: Were you a 2-Tone fan? Of the British style? Or were you a purist, only liking the Jamaican style?
SB: I like "Ghost Town" by The Specials. I think it's a great record. It's a great reggae-influenced record--it's got a nice Rico solo, the lyrics of it. That was the high point of it. The rest of it, I was never really happy with how they played the rhythm. Too rocky, you know? I mean, I like rock, don't get me wrong, but to me, most of it was unsatisfactory, a hybrid, but with some good records in amongst it.
MT: What do you think of the current state of reggae, as to how it compares to five or ten years ago? Are you optimistic?
SB: Yeah, I'm optimistic. Reggae music is never going to die out, Jamaican music is never going to die out. There's always going to be that kind of dance music made in Jamaica. And according to the need to express certain things by the people of Jamaica, those rhythms and those songs will carry the full range that they've been carrying up until now. Obviously, the emphasis of certain periods [of music] changes. You know, like in the '80s, the emphasis was on carnality, materialistic preoccupations. That was because there was another false boom in the economy and certain people were able to do quite well. But the majority of people didn't do so well, and traditional politics failed them, so Rasta themes began to make a comeback at the beginning of the '90s. People like Tony Rebel, Yami Bolo, Luciano, and all those people.
MT: We always seem to credit Buju Banton's 'Til Shiloh as being a turning point for bringing roots back into the dance.
SB: I'd really say it's people like Tony Rebel. Tony Rebel, Garnett Silk, Panhead getting killed and Buju coming out with "Murderer." Then 'Til Shiloh in its wake. Really, he came under such a strong attack from the gay lobby that it did a good thing for him. He looked inside himself much more and came out with what is one of the classic albums of the '90s. Even if the mixes of the album are not the ones you might prefer, but you know, if you don't know the original 7" or 12" mixes, it's no loss.
MT: What labels do you think are in Blood &Fire's league right now? There are a bunch that have come out, not necessarily copying your style, but places like Pressure Sounds or Patate Records in France.
SB: Easy Star.
MT: Thanks very much.
SB: No, I mean, that Sugar Minott compilation is a wicked compilation. In fact, I want a vinyl copy of that because I want to kick off the Sound System show with it.
MT: Having been in this business for a long time, what factors do you think keep reggae from breaking out or crossing over? Obviously, Bob Marley is one of the five biggest icons in music in the 20th century, but for everyone else to follow, do you think there are language barriers, racism, etc.
SB: Well, it's a combination of all those things. I mean, I think it's unrealistic to expect reggae to take over the world. But, I think it's realistic to expect that reggae can get a bigger share of the market. But if it wants a bigger share of the market, then it's going to have to clean up its act in a number of ways. You know? What it still lacks, really, for lack of a better word, is a business class in Jamaica, who are experienced in current business music practice, vis a vis management, publishing, etc. Obviously, a lot of people cut deals, but there seems to be no "long term-ism." People take big advances and sell records and still get dropped. Artists also have to make themselves more available, people aren't going to come to Jamaica to check out the new artists. It's got to come to them. This was another thing behind the sound system is how do we promote 25 year old reggae music? If we are going around telling everyone that this music hasn't dated, it still sounds fresh, still sounds good, is classic, then it ought to be able to draw a crowd. So we did do that with the Sound System, with the essential help of genuine deejays who had been big contributors in establishing the Jamaican '70s dancehall deejay style which has gone on to be so influential in Jamaica and elsewhere. So we had that kind of thing. That's what needs to happen in Jamaica. It needs investment, like any ex-colonial industry, it needs investment and it needs sympathetic investment. I've had several emails with one of your guys, E-ski, talking about taking artists on tour and all of that; problems you face on the road and what appears to be a kind of rudeness. "Me nah go eat that food!" and that kind of thing. People have to open up a bit more in Jamaica. Jamaica is a small island, and people aren't sophisticated, or worldly, in generalso when they come out of Jamaica for the first time, everything is strange to them. You need people who aren't going to abandon them to that strangeness, who are going to guide them, who are going to mentor them through. At the same time, emphasizing that if they don't do this work, really, they can't expect a lot of return, if they just want to sit in Jamaica and watch the royalties roll in. An artist from the '70s or a nowadays artist; it's not enough to ask for $10,000 for some stage show and go do 5 songs with 30 other people on the bill. You've got to go out there and do the crap for like $1,000 a night and $500 for the band.
MT: And hope it goes well and you can come back a year later and get some more gigs.
SB: Exactly, it's got to go well. You've got to have a set together, you've got to do encores, you've got to have things worked out.
MT: It seems like sometimes artists have visions of Bob Marley doing Babylon By Bus, doing huge stadium tours in the U.S. and it's just not going to happen that way.
SB: People shouldn't forget that to get Bob Marley to that stage[Chris] Blackwell spent a hell of a lot of money the first two years without getting anything back. One and a half to two million pounds is the figure I've heard.
MT: And it broke up the Wailers, with Bunny Wailer not wanting to tour.
SB: Yeah, and Bunny Wailer's career has suffered in that respect. Artistically, he suffered, because he has been treading water for years, in my opinion. Everyone's got their classic style that people want to see of these artists, and if they don't come, people forget them. When we first started going out with U Brown on the Blood & Fire Sound System, nobody really knew who U Brown was. The Jamaican core audience knew, but no one else really knew. We did the work, then U Brown had a CD on Blood & Fire, and he had a CD on Tabou.1, and he had just done a CD with [Ranking] Joe and Trinity for Jah Warrior, he had done bits, he put himself about, he's capitalized on that exposure we've been able to give him, and, you know, he's looking forward to working with us again in Europe in the summer. Alongside Trinity and Dillinger, because [Ranking] Joe sounds like he wants to focus more on America right now.
MT: As a British white man, what sort of reaction have you had from Jamaicans? At this point, people know your name, people know they are going to get someone they can deal with on an honest level, but have you had any problems along the way? Especially with as bad a reputation as Chris Blackwell seems to have around Jamaican artists.
SB: Well, I'm not so sure Chris Blackwell does have that bad a reputation. Certain artists have said to me over the years that were signed to Island, "Chris Blackwell is the man who kicked it all off." Justin Hines said that when I interviewed him in '95. Bob would have said that. Yes, Peter Tosh may have called Chris Blackwell "Chris Whiteworst," but that didn't stop him from signing with the Rolling Stones a couple of years later. Without Chris Blackwell, without his intervention, we wouldn't be talking about reggae music as an international success. Millie's "My Boy Lollipop" sold millions worldwide. OK, it might not be the best ska record you ever heard, but it was very commercial, and it put Jamaican music on the map. He did it again three years later with Desmond Dekker, and all of those people, [all of] which was released on the label owned by him, distributed by him, published by him. Then Bob. And a lot of music came out on Island, Island Records internationalized reggae and everyone else followed them.
MT: Virgin and all those other labels.
SB: Virgin, EMI, CBS, Sony when they signed Yellowman in '83. You know what I mean? Chris's operations beat a path to Jamaica's door. He brought it in to the rest of the world outside, I give him credit for that. Him and people like Prince Buster. Prince Buster did it by linking up with Emil Shallit, who's dead now, but Shallit didn't have the astute brain, Shallit was an amateur as far as marketing the music went. Chris developed into a professional, Chris learned how to market music and build it up. He built up Island records as a rock label.
MT: I always found that interesting that he had had success with that and he applied that [rock] model to Marley and it broke him all over the world.
SB: And it worked. It worked. He took Marley out of the ghetto, but he didn't take too much of the ghetto out of Marley. And Bob wouldn't have allowed him to either. In that sense. Bob knew what he wanted to do, but one thing Bob knew is that he wanted to work, unlike the other two, who had their reasons, you know, [like they] didn't want to fly on the Iron Bird, or they didn't want to work with a white man, all of that. You hear about Scratch saying he saw Chris Blackwell drinking the blood of a chicken and all that. This is the same Scratch who went to Island New York and walked out with $25,000 one day and $25,000 the next day, that he was supposed to buy studio equipment with, and went and spent it at Tiffany's. And then cussed his people out.
MT: You were working on that video project where you were interviewing some of the older artists to preserve their histories. Is that still going on?
SB: No, I did that in '94, '95, did 77 interviews.
MT: What stopped it?
SB: The need to get a commercial film out there, which Don Letts did. He went on to do Dancehall Queen, and he has Third World Cop coming out. That's the direction that they wanted to go in. Chris [Blackwell] wanted to do it just for archive purposes.
MT: I didn't realize it was for a movie, I thought you were doing it to preserve the memories.
SB: It was, but then we did the first one, in '94, we interviewed Scratch at the Black Ark, and that night we went up to Strawberry Hill with Chris, and I said, "You know, we could make a film." Originally, the idea was to promote Tougher Than Tough. So in a sense that came well after the CD came out. It arose out of Songs of Freedom really. I contributed a Derrick Morgan interview where Derrick told how he first heard about BM. And I gave that to Trevor and Trevor showed that to Chris Blackwell, and he said this is incredible, no one ever knew this.
MT: It just seems like such an important thing to do, especially because so much of reggae is a spoken history, an oral history, and these guys are getting older and dying.
SB: Well, that's just it. Already, two guys have died who I interviewed. Count Machuki and Delroy Wilson. I Roy.
MT: So all that stuff is sitting in an archive somewhere?
SB: Yeah, I've got VHS copies at home. I've got a verbal agreement with Chris, on a handshake, that I can transcribe anything and reproduce it in text form, by myself, because I did all the interviews, I was the researcher/interview.
MT: Do you have any plans to do any more writing after The Rough Guide to Reggae? To follow that up?
SB: I did another one with Peter Dalton called Reggae: 100 Essential CD's. That just came out. I'm doing, also with Peter Dalton, an updated edition of the Rough Guide, with 49 extra pages. We're gonna expand some of those sections, like on U.S.-based reggae. We still want to keep the focus on Jamaica and Jamaican artists. The other reggae, made by people other than Jamaicans, there's a lot of it, and we're not really qualified to cover it, to be honest. No one has yet, [but] it needs to be done. But we want to focus on the Jamaican, for a lot of the reasons you've been talking about, people are disappearing, the stories need to be preserved. It is a Jamaican thing. It's a valuable resource of modern day Jamaica that Jamaican powers that be need to pay a lot more attention to. In terms of a foreign currency earner. Bigger than bananas, bigger than bauxite, and probably bigger than ganja, you know. And music is infinitely renewable, unlike finite resources like bauxite, which in any case is everywhere on the fucking planet, you know? Tourism and all of these things have negative effects as well. So, really, music is an ideal thing for the Jamaican bourgeoisie to invest in. I don't think they can do it on their own any more than we can make reggae here in England exclusively. We have to work together.
MT: It also seems hard to attract investment into something that nine times out of ten is attacking the powers that be.
SB: Yeah, I don't have a problem with that.
MT: I'm just saying as an investor, someone might shy away from it.
SB: Some of them will. Other people won't. Like Karl Marx said, "There's a section of the bourgeoisie who is able to comprehend theoretically the break-up of capitalism and they help it." He was talking about himself and Engels, but I would say Blackwell is someone like that. It surprised me when I went by Blackwell's house here in London, at the beginning of the '90s, he had a life sized poster of Lenin on the wall. I must admit I was very impressed.
MT: Let me finish up with a question about Tougher Than Tough. It's a great compilation; it's probably in most people's collections as their foundation of reggae. But that must have been an excruciating process to select those songs.
SB: Well, yeah. I have to give credit to Blackwell again. I went to him with a project for the Island back catalog, and he said, "I know you can do compilations all day, but what I want to do is something to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of Jamaican independence. I want to do a 30 CD set." He said, "Polygram will probably go crazy, but we should go for it." We did, and so I did the compilation in list form, one CD for each year of independence. Twenty tracks on each CD, 600 all together. Well, we proposed that, and because Island didn't own a lot of the tracks, we devised a uniform non-exclusive license agreement with a flat fee advance, $500 per track, and I said it's still gonna cost you a lot of money. You're gonna have to write this at 400 tracks, at $500 a time, $200,000 in advances. So obviously, they said no. So we chopped it down to twenty CDs, each with twenty tracks. 400. Of which 350 would have to be licensed. So I went to Jamaica to suss out who was going to up for it, who was going to be cooperative. When I came back, I was gone for three months at that time, staying at Striker's place, and I got a pretty positive reaction from Jammy, and Mr. Riley, and Niney, and Striker, enough people were up for it. When I came back, they said this'll be the format: the 4 CD long box, 68 page book and all that. It means you got to chop it down to 4 CDs. I got it down to 102 tracks. But they wouldn't fit on 4 CDs, unless we chopped each song down to two minutes instead of three. Which I didn't want to do. So we cut down to 93 tracks. Then we had to throw on some hits, like "Double Barrel," where I had some alternatives. It came out and got a lot of attention. I think what it did, looking back on it, was that it presented Jamaican music as a continuum, whereas before Jamaican music had come in each year as a kind of novelty out of the blue, as a kind of one hit wonder sort of thing. And here it was all laid out for the first time. The evolution of the music.
MT: And then framing it with the two versions of "Oh Carolina."
SB: That was lucky that came out! That worked to bookend it perfectly, But that was because it got delayed a year because of logistics. As far as I know, people have been getting paid off that.
MT: Is there any one track you wish you could have included on that?
SB: Someone's work I didn't get was Derrick Harriot's, because he didn't want to cooperate. He said Island owed him money for "Draw Your Brakes" on the Harder They Come soundtrack, or something. Also, I was in a bad relationship with Trojan at the time, and I didn't want to do any licensing from Trojan, I wanted to go [directly] to the Jamaicans. Trojan does have the license to some of these tracks, no matter how dubious that might be, you know, on an antiquated contractual basis. Trojan had the Beverly stuff and all that.
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