Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright by Hank Bordowitz Page A

musicians might feel who play on one session for a flat rate, only to find it turn up on one or more other hit records. The key with dub is spontaneity, the enormously creative sculpting and grafting of whole new counterpoints on records already in existence. And this sense of the guy who plays the record as performer extends down into the record shops, where the clerks shift speakers, tracks and volume levels with deft magicianly fingers as part of a highly intricate dance, creating sonic riot in the store and new productions of their own in their minds: I control the dials.
    Wednesday. Waiting around the Sheraton pool for Marley. There is a mood of exasperation with the celebrated Jamaican tempo, which many business-minded visitors seem to view with disgust so extreme it turns to amusement. An English musician, here to do sessions, laughed when I asked him if the state of the Jamaican music industry had undergone any significant alteration since The Harder They Come. “Things haven’t really changed that much. Before Chris Blackwell set up Island, musicians got six dollars a session. Blackwell revolutionized things by giving them twelve dollars a session, and I think by now it’s up to fifteen. But I’ll say this—Blackwell may be the only person I’ve ever met in the music business, especially in Jamaica, with any integrity at all. I mean, all these guys like I Roy, making these hits—do you think any of them have any money?” He laughs again. “Maybe got nice car, mon. Of course we’re all still involved in fucking colonialism and exploitation of the people here, with all these record companies. It’s inevitable, there’s no way around it. But I suppose there’s a certain price we pay too, you see. I hate this fucking place, and can’t wait to get out, because I can barely get a session started, much less done, because everybody’s so fucking laid back you can’t depend on anyone to be at a certain place at a certain time or get any work done. Drives me fuckin’ crazy. It’s all ‘Soon come, mon. Soon come.’”
    I also have a revealing conversation with a New York music biz veteran who used to manage Mountain. Now he manages one of the top reggae acts in the world, one with records out in the USA, and he is down here trying to sign Peter Tosh, one of Bob Marley’s ex-Wailers and writer-singer of the currently big, banned Jamaican hit “Legalize It (And I’ll Advertise It).” My New York vet laughs and says: “This is the only fuckin’ place I know where the rooster crows while I’m eating lunch. It’s the only place I’ve been where you can buy a 14-karat gold bracelet for ten bucks off a guy in the hotel parking lot, and when you look inside ‘karat’ is misspelled. I’ve been here a fuckin’ week, waitin’ for one tape from Peter Tosh.”
    “Why didn’t you just go get it from him?”
    “He never got around to making a copy yet.”
    “You mean he has it? Then why don’t you borrow it from him and make a copy yourself?”
    “Well, you see, when you go to the studios, the engineers may or may not be there, and if they are there they may or may not get around to doing this or that. . . . Also Tosh wouldn’t talk to the guy from Time magazine who wanted to interview him. Too establishment.” He laughs again. (I later found out that Tosh did, eventually, speak to the Time writer.) As the subject turns to the reggae artist my friend already manages, he says that his charge “can’t write very well. When he has to sign his name, he does it so slowly that it’s embarrassing.”
    “Why don’t you just tell him to get a rubber stamp?”
    “I thought of that. He just tries to avoid having to sign autographs. As far as all the business stuff, of course, it’s totally left to me.”
    “That must be quite a responsibility.”
    “You’re not kidding. He can’t sign a contract, but I imagine he gets around to signing the royalty checks when they come.”
    I believe I just saw, in the