The year was 1973. "The Harder They Come" was a cult movie, and my friends and I spent our nights --- and, sometimes, days --- listening to the soundtrack. The Wailers (before Bob Marley become God and the group was relegated to back-up status) came to town, and I met them, and Toots and The Maytals came to town, and I met them too.
One afternoon, I went down to the Chelsea Hotel to suggest a movie to Marley. Before I could tell him my ideas, he put his spliff down long enough to draw a square on a piece of paper. "This one is us," he said. He drew another square. "This one is the bank." He drew a connecting line, looked up at me and grinned --- and our movie died right there.
Toots Hibbert was more fun. We zoomed around in my friend Steve's open-air Jeep one night like the college kids Steve and I almost were. Toots came from a very different background, to say the least, but it was his good mood that pushed us onward. But then Toots always seems to be in a good mood.
We wanted to believe that we were on the ground floor of reggae, and he let us. Much later, I did the research and discovered that Toots had helped pioneer the music about a decade before I happened upon it. The son of a Seventh Day Adventist minister who preached in the Jamaican hills, he grew up dreaming of Kingston. He migrated there in the early 1960s, got a job in a barbershop, and hooked up with two other country boys, Raleigh and Jerry.
From the start, Toots was the Jamaican blend of James Brown and Otis Redding. He had a voice like a rasp --- and he could shout all night. And he had energy. Short, barrel-chested, endless;y smiling, he loved to perform, loved that people liked his singing, loved the idea that music could bring people together in a way that fused spirituality and, well, sex.
Toots and The Maytals had some hits in Jamaica, and then, in 1966, he was convicted of what he calls "a trumped-up ganja charge." In his words:
I didn't have any ganja, I didn't even start smoking yet. They didn't have no cause to do that, but they found some cause. People try to do things to hold you back in life. So they put me in jail for about nine months or so, and that's where I wrote the song. They gave me the privilege of using my guitar. I didn't have to do other work, just play guitar.
The song was "54-46, That's My Number." Another big hit. And then, in 1968, Toots and The Maytals recorded "Do the Reggay," the song that named the music. As he recalls:
There was the beat in Jamaica, reggae was played long before I started singing. And there was a slang, like a nickname for someone who don't dress properly --- like if you are barefoot, people would call you "streggae." They say, "Hey, that guy is streggae, don't talk to him." If a girl don't dress properly, like don't have on any top, they call her streggae. So one morning, we just said, "Let's go along and do some reggae." Those days we'd just make stuff up, anything. A bird flies around the corner, you write a song about it. So we just say (singing): "Do the reggay, do the reggay," and that's it. A few words, y'know? And nobody paid it any mind until it started to go all over the world. I saw it in the Guinness Book of Records. So I thank God that I did something good, and I didn't even plan it .
By the time I met this modest, friendly guy, he was huge in Jamaica, having already recorded most of his 31 hits. I'd only seen "The Harder They Come," and I knew about two -- and was hooked on only one, the addictive "Pressure Drop." Now I know there's so much more, and the work is so much richer and more complex --- like his non-Rasta song in praise of ganja, "Pass the pipe on the right hand side."
This CD collects the Greater Hits. There are more to come --- recently Toots has recorded with the likes of Willie Nelson and Keith Richards. Clearly, he'll go to his grave singing. He should. "I try to give my audience the real everything," he says. By which he means: music that makes you get up and dance.
Many make this claim. But by mixing R&B and reggae and his own beautiful soul, Toots pulls it off. He'll never be as rich and famous as Bob Marley was, but he's plenty satisfied with what he's got. You will be too.
-- Jesse Kornbluth, for HeadButler.com
To buy " The Best of Toots & The Maytals" from Amazon.com, click here.
