Ras I Ray had a grin plastered on his face for the entire show and now, as the bassist and leader of the band known as the Easy Star All Stars, he loomed above me, his visibly ancient dreadlocks reaching down to his waist and barely below my eye level, still grinning to all hell. “Its about the love—if that’s the word ya wanna use,” he tells me. My heart was attacking my chest cavity with a certain amount of vigor at this point. It had only taken ten minutes spent outside the back of the concert hall bullshitting and chain smoking cigarettes with the saxophonist-- just enough for me to sufficiently convince the doughy brass in charge of security that I was an eager music journalist from a respectful publication... so obviously not the case that I was left mute for a moment as I double-checked in my head that I was actually about to be given permission to go back stage. It was cold that night in Poole but I seemed to be sweating harder than Mike Tyson would if asked to spell the words 'professional boxer'. “But more than that, more than getting that love” the Rasta continued, “it’s about giving that love back. Giving that feeling back.”
My notes from that evening in Poole are rather garbled and illegible, growing increasingly nonsensical as I continued through the evening an opponent-less bout of competitive drinking – “Krma Plice! Arrt THAT man!” – and the shorthand transcriptions of the several interviews I conducted were completely unintelligible, no matter how much rum I drank in an effort to somehow understand them. Luckily, I had recognized my complete lack of motor skills before I interviewed Ras I Ray and a journalism friend had agreed to transcribe our conversation.
I had been riding on a double-edged high the entire night – that legal, wish-washy “high-on-life” sort of feeling you get when watching a band you love perform and a certain herbal, less legal, high, facilitated by a freakish Jew from Scotland in the grips of a mid-life crisis that made him say things like "Wuddup bruv, my homies call me Shultz."
I had been riding on a double-edged high the entire night – that legal, wish-washy “high-on-life” sort of feeling you get when watching a band you love perform and a certain herbal, less legal, high, facilitated by a freakish Jew from Scotland in the grips of a mid-life crisis that made him say things like "Wuddup bruv, my homies call me Shultz."
In my tangled state, the final words the indomitable Rasta left me with looped through my head as I searched for a spectral meaning behind them. “Its about the love…” I repeated it in my head, tapping my pen anxiously on my notepad as I walked valiantly from the backstage accommodations at Mr. Kyps – Poole’s poor answer for the Fillmore East. But what kind of love? Bob – Marley, not Dylan – sang incessantly about love. Not the kind you might hear come from the heaving chest of whatever lollipop songstress MTV has chosen to molest at the time, but a transcendent love, a worldly love. I'm reminded of a piece of wisdom Desmond Tutu once imparted on the world, “Giving is more blessed than receiving… Because in giving, although it doesn’t seem so, you receive.” Ras I Ray was obviously privy to this concept when he took the stage that Friday night in Poole.
Despite financial difficulties, getting into Mr. Kyps was the easy part. A week before, I phoned the offices and, in a highly professional tone, informed the squeaky receptionist that I was a music journalist, a concert reviewer for a magazine in the good ol’ Yew Ess’uf Ay, and I would be covering the Easy Star gig. I made sure to get all the information out in one breath, it being imperative that I come across as someone who has done this before and expects expedient service, and she politely forwarded me on to somebody that could actually help me.
“Ya? Ben Grange here.”
“Is this Mister Kyps?” I asked, tongue in cheek.
“Yes. May I ask who this is?”
“Wait... you just said that you are Ben. Is Mr. Kyps around?” Abbott and Costello would have been proud of the following exchange.
“This is Mr. Kyps. This is—“
“No, you just said you were Ben Grange.”
“I am Ben Grange—“
“Are you?”
“—and this is Mr. Kyps – yes I am! WHO is this?”
“Stevenson!” I told him. The military teaches you many things, but the ability to announce yourself with authority and gusto was far better utilized than any half-baked survival technique. “I’m a journalist – music mostly – forget about that crazy ol’ Kypsie for now, you can help me.” I paused and the line went silent. I went on, satisfied I had confused and annoyed him enough to give me free entry in exchange for no longer having to entertain to my ADD fueled whimsy. “I will be needing press access to the Easy Star gig on Friday. Two, actually. My photographer will be with me, but don’t worry about him, he’s harmless in comparison to the rest of em. You two would get on, I imagine.”
- the rest of conversation was lost in the rain -
- the rest of conversation was lost in the rain -
Originally formed in 1997 for Easy Star Records’ earliest recordings, the Easy Star All-Stars were an amalgam of the label’s artists thrown together, operating entirely as a studio entity until they released Dub Side of the Moon in 2003. The group, which operates as a collective with a rotating cast of musicians and singers, was put together by the unimportant and face-less co-founders of Easy Star Records. Their fame stems from a day in the studio when they foolhardily decided to do a “dub” on Pink Floyd’s iconic album “Dark Side of the Moon.” It was this album that would bring Easy Star All Stars to the attention of not only the reggae scene, but to fans of music in and of itself.
“We were just in the studio one day when someone suggested we play Dark Side” said Menny More after the show. “We didn’t know it was gonna be so good. When I heard the final cut I was amazed.”
After the success of Dub Side, East Star went on to cover equally historic albums, dubbing the Beetles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Dub Band as well as Radiohead’s piéce de résistance, OK, Computer. Ignoring record sales and fan hearsay, the entire band cites Dub Side as their biggest achievement, its immense popularity in turn justifying Easy Star’s cover of one of modern music’s greatest albums—a statement less hyperbolic than it may seem.
- - - -
The concert began with an air of suspicion. Easy Star started the set out with several tracks of their own, songs of which the audience was abundantly ignorant of as they forcibly swayed in anticipation of the band turning it up to the proverbial ‘Eleven’.
The kick in the ass the audience needed eventually came in the form of Sgt. Peppers. The thumping electric bass from Ras I Ray combined with the instantly recognizable, fully gained electric riff introduced the song. It seems useless to describe how the crowd reacted to this. For anyone that has been to any sort of concert, you know the feeling. Your heart constricts and the hairs on the back of your neck stand up as the crowd roars in acknowledgement of the song that has begun. The Caucasian Dreadlocks started swinging and with that the sweet smell of ganja permeates the room—your nostrils flare and your mouth waters. This is what we were waiting for: a real reggae concert.
The crescendo of the set came when Ras I Ray took the microphone for the first time, introducing the band and consequently the next song. “Me-a know ya gonna know dis heya song so it really don’t need no introduction” he said. With that he took to his bass and played the band in. Karma Police. Though I myself was not as familiar with Radiohead, the audience obviously was. They swayed and sang in unison as if Karma Police was the only song they were waiting to hear. They loved it. The band loved it. The band tightened and loosened at the same time, notes became crisper as musical rigidity gave way to the power of improvisation and everyone under the dark and hazy roof of Mr. Kyps that night lost themselves in the music as a singular sense, usurped of priority from all others as the haunting ska beat of Karma Police filled our ears.
And for a minute there, I lost myself, I lost myself.
I knew why Ras I Ray had described that feeling the way he did. It wasn’t a product of the affected ‘artist within’, nor was it an off the cuff comment to a pestering and posing journalist. The word itself is used far too carelessly these days –Love, that is – but coming from him it had meaning beyond the spectral and superficial definition we have given to the one emotion man-kind seems hell-bent on feeling/finding. It was the only word available in the English lexicon to describe the transcendent emotion that exists only as a bi-product from a series of tightened and tuned strings struck at different intervals to produce wavelengths that will vibrate off your eardrum pleasantly as the harmonious wavelengths streak through the Medulla Oblongata to play with your heart before the flood gates are opened and dopamine seeps steadily into the blood-stream.
And so, as I look back on the concert, the one thing that remains burned to my frontal lobe was the smile on that Dreadlock’s face. He knew it and now so did I. It was the perfect description. It was Love. And at the end of the day its just damn nice to know that one of the few people left tending the ever-fading flame of love/music is a dreadlock Rasta from Jamaica, using it to light his spliff.
