![]() The Upsetters – Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle ![]() The source material is among Perry’s best productions as it is, but add in the clangs of cowbell, rattles, echoes and plenty of Perry’s own vocal overdubs, and it becomes a dense piece of dub mastery, a moment where the remix, the mashup, and a legendary roots reggae anthem all intertwine. “Disco Devil” is, essentially, three songs in one-a dub of Max Romeo’s “Chase the Devil” layered with The Upsetters’ own take, “Croaking Lizard,” and Perry’s own adlibs layered on top. We’re starting not with an album, but with a single that encapsulates Lee “Scratch” Perry’s dub innovations, songwriting strength and tendency toward experimental soundscapes all in one eight-minute duration. Photo by DONOSTIA KULTURA, Creative Commons And there are many worthy points of entry, so here’s my attempt to trim it to a strong first five of the best Lee “Scratch” Perry albums and singles, encapsulating Perry the producer, songwriter, studio mastermind and bandleader. A catalog that big can be intimidating to dive into it would take years to catch up. Having just turned 84, Perry now has literally hundreds of recording credits to his name, from his own solo releases, those of The Upsetters, other artists he’s produced and written songs for, and various collaborators over the years, which include The Clash, The Beastie Boys and The Slits’ Ari Up. There are various version of why the studio went up in flames, but Perry has taken credit for lighting the spark. That Black Ark burned down in 1979, after being covered in cryptic magic marker scrawl from Perry himself, only adds to the strange legend and mystique of the studio. And then there were moments like having a singer “moo” into a cardboard tube wrapped in foil. At other times, there was an ineffable, spiritual quality to his approach, like blowing smoke into microphones, or burying mics beneath the sand at the base of a tree in order to capture an otherworldly bass drum effect. He employed multi-track recording in a way that few other dub producers didn’t, creating layers upon layers that gave his recordings a frequently impenetrable density. The Black Ark takes on a kind of mythical quality when viewed through the lens of history-the site of a long list of legendary recordings, given an added dose of magic through Perry’s unconventional and sometimes mystical techniques. And in 1973, when he built his home studio, The Black Ark, Perry entered a new phase of innovation and high-profile production that yielded both many of his best known albums and his most radical creations. His earliest recordings were mostly ska tracks, as later collected in the 1989 reissue Chicken Scratch-the title of which is how he earned his nickname “Scratch.” Yet it wasn’t until he formed his own label, Upsetter Records, and formed The Upsetters that Perry began to flourish as a creative force in Jamaican music, releasing on average two or more albums per year credited to either himself or The Upsetters. ![]() Rainford Hugh Perry was born in 1936 in Kendal, Jamaica, and began recording tracks at Studio One in Kingston in the ’50s, where he also laid down his first recordings of his own. Whether in his early innovations on some of dub’s earliest recordings, or through his production work for the likes of Bob Marley, Max Romeo, Junior Murvin or The Congos, Lee Perry changed the shape of both Jamaican music and popular music at large. If you’ve listened to a reggae album, a dubplate, even much of the vast world of electronic music in the past 40-50 years, you’ve heard music that’s been touched, influenced or shaped in some way by Perry. ![]() These words in particular, spoken to The Guardian on his 80th birthday four years ago, summarize well the kind of accessible mysticism that the reggae icon and dub wizard has wielded over his 50-plus-year career. Lee “Scratch” Perry has a way with words. “If you have good music, you have good magic.”
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