What's really bugging Lee "Scratch" Perry?

By Jeff Chang

WHEN LEE "Scratch" Perry biographer David Katz met his subject for the first time, it had only been a week since the twentysomething disembarked the plane from San Francisco into "the grey chaos of London." He was focused on one thing: seeking out his idol for an interview.

It was January 1987, and the seminal London club Dingwalls had seen better days. So, too, had Perry. The little giant – who was there at the birth of reggae, who had been one of Bob Marley's most influential mentors, who virtually defined the sound of Jamaican roots and dub reggae in the 1970s, who used a crying kid as a percussive hook on "People Funny Boy" before Timbaland was even conceived – was suffering incompetent management. "He was supposed to play in February, and they had put the date as January. So he thought, 'Well just in case all my adoring fans turn up, I better be there to apologize,' " Katz said in a recent conversation. "But at this point, Scratch was kind of at a low point in his career – not a lot of people were there anyway."

The night would only get weirder. "He spent most of the evening grabbing electric light bulbs with his bare hands. He was doing these rituals where he'd take a hit off the spliff. He had a whistle, and he'd grab the light bulb with his right hand and blow smoke through the whistle. Then he'd take another hit, change hands, grab the light bulb with his left hand, blow the whistle, stand on one leg," Katz said.

"He had this little wooden recorder flute. So he'd take a hit on the spliff, stick it in one nostril, blow the smoke through his nostril through the recorder, playing the recorder through his nose with all this weed smoke coming out of it. He'd play a few notes with his left nostril, take another hit of the spliff, play a few notes with his right nostril. He barely said a word to me the whole evening, and he didn't really talk to anyone else. But he took a copy of [a magazine in which Katz had written an article on Perry] away and read it." Days later, Perry summoned Katz to his studio and, putting a silver ring with a winged death's head on the finger of his writing hand, officially made him his "ghost writer."

Madness or mirth, sickness or savvy – these are the contradictions that undergird the ever expanding cult of Perry. The now famous Beastie Boys salute to Perry in the summer 1995 issue of Grand Royal featured Katz's careful contextualizations of Perry's music and Bob Mack's patois-ignorant, borderline racist claim that 1984's "Bed Jamming" spurred rumors of incest around Kingston, because of Perry's lyrics about popping a "dawta's water."

The issue also spurred Island Records to assemble Arkology, a three-CD document of Perry's mid-'70s peak at his Black Ark studios. And in the first four months of 2001 alone the Perry reissue cottage industry saw Trojan Records release volume three of its double-CD Complete UK Upsetter Singles Collection, Katz's compilation for Motion Records entitled Born in the Sky: Upsetter at the Controls 1969-1975, and Adrian Sherwoord's Divine Madness...Definitely from Pressure Sounds. On the Web, in addition to browsing the usual discography and lyrics sites, you can trade Perry MP3s (home.wanadoo.nl/upsetter.exchange/p1.htm), buy Perry records from like-minded fanatics (www.eight4eight.com), and stay ahead of the ongoing reissue flood at Mick Sleeper's definitive Upsetter Web site (www.upsetter.net).

Katz's extensive new biography, People Funny Boy: The Genius of Lee 'Scratch' Perry (Grove/Atlantic, May 2001), may only fuel the fascination. In a copiously detailed history, Katz lets many of the hundreds who have worked with the Upsetter in his 35-year career speak for themselves, making the book as much reggae reference as definitive biography. His notes on Perry's singers, DJs, and family members often come with birth dates and generous anecdotes. Perry himself lingers like a ghost over the proceedings, seems to float in and out of the narrative like the vocals on one of his dubs. The biography itself, Katz admits, is yet another Perry production.

Writing in the Wire last year, Simon Reynolds tied the Perry cult to Perry's "fertility as a text for exegesis: Perry's syncretic cosmology of superstitions, science fiction, and pulp movies, his 'is it schizophrenia or performance art that never stops' eccentricity; his Sun Ra-like wordgames and encryptions will support a micro-industry of dissertations and seminars for decades to come." On the other hand, as Denver Post writer G. Brown once put it: "There are those who think the notoriously eccentric Perry is a few fries short of a Happy Meal."

Perry invites disbelief. He is fond of saying he is an alien "born in the sky." He has been known to sleep in a coffin, has exposed himself onstage more times than Jim Morrison ever did, and his sartorial sixth sense – personally graffitied Zion lion T-shirts and jackets, glittering hats with mirror sequins and hand-cut glass – is certainly way off Madison Avenue. Shortly after meeting Katz, he dictated eight pages for inclusion in the book, stuffed with prose like this: "Live and direct: rain check, air check, breeze check, lightning check, thunder check, brimstone check, and fire check, and blood and fire. Confidence of Rastafari: burning fire in the bush. Coosh, coosh, push, push. The Jungle Book, the Jungle King, the Jungle Lion, the Jungle lord, the jungle yard; the graveyard, the cemetery, the grave, the box and the ghost in it. The death angels sing, angels flap their wings; the death angel sing the sweetest song I ever heard: Lee 'Scratch' Perry on the wire, Lee 'Scratch' Perry ball of fire."

But the madness line fits too comfortably into the hahaha-look-at-the-funny-monkey school of racist criticism that plagues all too many discussions about black musicians from Little Richard to Wesley Willis to Kool Keith. As Sasha Frere-Jones wrote in a 1997 review of Arkology, "Monk knew how to fake a straitjacket, and it wasn't because people on Saturn wear leopardskin that Sun Ra did – lunacy is a pill that non-black America sometimes needs to ease the pain of admitting that almost all of the formal innovations in popular music have been made by black musicians."

"There tends to be two sides of looking at Scratch: one that says, 'Oh he's jolly, madcap Scratch the mad black man,' " Katz said. "Then there's the other one that says, 'Oh no, it's Scratch the trickster, like Anansi. He's pretending to be mad.'

"Well, in my personal experience of being around Scratch, yes, he does have a public persona, and he does behave very differently in public when people are around him. But there were other times when he did not seem to be in control of this game."

Most of the speculation about Perry's madness centers on what Katz terms "the excessive apex and sudden fall of the Ark." After Black Ark opened in December of 1973, Perry entered his most prolific, aesthetically arresting period, resulting in works such as the sizzling future soul of Susan Cadogan's "Do It Baby" and "Hurts So Good," the spirit-infused dub of Super Ape and Augustus Pablo's "Vibrate On," and the defiant sufferah laments of the Congos, the Heptones, Junior Byles, Junior Murvin, and Max Romeo. Perry's sonic innovations were made on outdated, cheap equipment. "Even in the later days of the Ark, the amplifier he was using was this little Marantz home stereo amp. It is astounding what he got out of so little," Katz said. Later Perry added a Mutron Superphaser and the Roland Space Echo, but he left an eight-track TEAC that Island founder Chris Blackwell gave him completely unused, eventually destroying it and burying it in the yard behind the studio.

By 1978 the Ark would also become a center for the Boboshanti Rasta sect and increasingly was drawn into the election-year political warfare raging in the streets outside. Ghetto dons and Rastas used Perry to help promote the famous gang peace treaty through music. When Bob Marley returned from the United States to play the One Love Peace Concert, he immediately went to the Ark to write and record "Blackman Redemption" and "Rastaman Live Up" as a who's who of Kingston's street bosses watched. But at the end of the year Perry's refusal to take a break led to arguments with some of his closest collaborators. He ejected the Bobos, shaved his budding dreads, and refused to deal with Rasta groups such as the Congos. By 1979 Perry had chased away all his visitors and covered the Ark with brown paint and Magic Marker tags, crossing out words and pictures with Xs (just as Basquiat would begin doing a few years later). Four years later the Ark burned down. Katz's interviews with Perry's children point toward an electrical fire, but Perry himself claims that he did it. What drove Perry mad?

There is a clue in Reynolds's critique of the Perry cult: "The other reason for the Perry cult is, I reckon, because the tomfoolery and quirked-out levity of much of his output offers a blessed reprieve from the sheer earnestness of roots reggae, which is often literally sermonising, all parables and chapter-and-verse." Reynolds figures many first-world critics prefer a daffy Rasta to a duppy conqueror, and he may be right. It's quite possible that, amid the dread winds blowing outside the doors of the Ark at the end of the '70s, Perry thought the same thing.

The Black Ark studio emerged in a different period than Coxsone Dodd's Studio One and Duke Reid's Treasure Isle, which were both built from sound-system profits during the heady independence years of the '60s. The Ark was financed by Perry's profits from the globalizing of the reggae industry, primarily through the patronage of the Island and Trojan labels in Britain. As Michael Manley's socialist government began to encounter resistance from U.S. business interests and cold-war foreign policy had the CIA beginning to run guns into the hands of opposition gangs, Jamaica's economy took a nosedive. Reggae production – as Rastafarians had duly noted during the '60s and Manley came to recognize during the 1974 elections – was not only a socially stabilizing force, it was on its way to becoming an economic engine.

After Marley's Catch a Fire was released in 1973, Jamaica's informal reggae economy itself felt the pressure drop. Dub music was partly an answer to demands to create more, faster. And these pressures were placed squarely on the slender shoulders of recording artists. Uptown, Bob Marley's Hope Road residence was becoming a magnet for Twelve Tribes Rastas and poor, displaced sufferahs. Marley archivist Roger Steffens believes that by the late '70s, Marley was directly responsible for the economic fortunes of 6,000 people. Despite being diagnosed with cancer, he argues, Marley kept a hectic touring schedule through the end of 1980 because of these obligations. "It took its toll," Steffens said. "He really wanted out."

It may have been the same with Perry. Hundreds of people materially depended upon Perry's one-man assembly line, while the Bobos hoped the Ark could help disseminate their message. "When he comes into conflict with Rastafari is right around the same time where it could be interpreted he has some kind of breakdown," Katz said. According to Max Romeo, Perry began comic antics to discourage a group of Rastas from coming around: "He put a pound of pork on his [car] antennae, and rode around town until it rotted and maggots were falling from it, claiming that he don't want no Rasta round him because Rasta come give his kids lice. After he put the pork on the antennae, the dreads was still coming, so he wrote on his car back, 'I am a batty man.' That's when the dreads run in all different directions!"

"That period of his life, when I was speaking to him, that was the only time he got visibly upset, kind of angry with what people had said. And there seems to have been lapses in memory," Katz said. "So it does seem like something happened, like probably there was a breakdown." Part three of Perry's dictations to Katz, called "The Return of the God of Thunder," reveal a lingering bitterness. "Reggae music is a curse, the ultimate destruction," Perry wrote. "Logical Fox, solid-state logic."

"If you're gonna ask me do I think Scratch is mad – it's not really a word that I would use. I think it is a great shame that partly the way that Scratch has had this revival of interest in his career is because he's being portrayed as this kind of jolly nutter," Katz said. "To me, never mind about the peculiar behavior – OK, it's interesting to a degree – but just listen to the music and be amazed. That's where the real genius lies."

David Katz's essential Lee 'Scratch' Perry

Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Super Ape (Island, 1977) "My whole way into Scratch was through dub, and my whole way into dub was through Scratch, and it kind of went off from there. I would recommend an audiophile edition that's currently available on vinyl. It's like listening to it with new ears."

Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Blackboard Jungle Dub (RAS/Clocktower, 1973/1988) "Unfortunately, the most amazing version, which came in its original form – with 14 tracks instead of 12, a different track order, and with actual stereo mixing with channel separation like an Esquivel record – was reissued with a red cover from Coxsone, but the pressing is terrible. It's so noisy you kind of miss the whole point of what the record is."

Bob Marley and the Wailers, Soul Revolution 1 and 2 (Trojan, 1971) "The first one is all the vocals, and then Soul Revolution part two is like proto-dub. They're instrumentals, but they put the material in a totally different light."

Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Chicken Scratch (Heartbeat, 1990) "For anyone interested in his early work as a vocalist, this is a collection of ska sides he did at Studio One."

The Congos, Heart of the Congos (Blood and Fire, 1978/1996) "This is the real pinnacle of the Ark: great harmonies, amazing sound effects. And the Blood and Fire reissue is just such a beautiful package: wonderful gatefold sleeve and all these bonus tracks and all taken from original master tapes."

Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Arkology (Island, 1997) "Initially, Island [Records] just wanted to put out one CD, and they were trying to claim they didn't have any unreleased stuff. We knew that was a lie. So Trevor Wyatt [at Island] actually sent up for all the master tapes. And, of course, the first tape he put on was the Congos. And there was an extra track on the Congos album that hadn't been released before, and then the whole album mix itself was completely different."

The Upsetters, Clint Eastwood (Trojan, 1969) "This got reissued as Best of the Lee Perry and the Upsetters, Volume One on Jet Star. It's got a bunch of great organ instrumentals and DJ tunes from '69."

Junior Byles, Beat Down Babylon: The Upsetter Years (Trojan, 1972/1997)

Max Romeo, War inna Babylon (Island, 1976)

Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Time Boom X Devil Dead (On-U Sound, 1987)

Lee 'Scratch' Perry and Mad Professor, Experryments at the Grassroots of Dub (Ariwa, 1995)

Lee 'Scratch' Perry, Born in the Sky: Upsetter at the Controls (Motion, 2001)

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