Your one or two favorite Reggae songs (Ska, Blue Beat, Rocksteady, Reggae)..

Wonderful World, Beautiful People - Jimmy Cliff
The Israelites - Desmond Dekker & The Aces

 

Bunny Wailer - I stand predominate (off of "sings the Wailers")
Max Romeo & the Upsetters - One Step Forward (off of War Ina Babylon)

 

Toots and The Maytals - "Rasta Man" and "Funky Kingston"

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMPEsa8oa0U

 

Could you just remaster and re-issue the entire "The Harder They Come" soundtrack album?


1. You Can Get It If You Really Want - Jimmy Cliff
2. Draw Your Breaks - Scotty
3. Rivers of Babylon - The Melodians
4. Many Rivers to Cross - Jimmy Cliff
5. Sweet and Dandy - The Maytals
6. Harder They Come - Jimmy Cliff
7. Johnny Too Bad - The Slickers
8. Shanty Town - Desmond Dekker
9. Pressure Drop - The Maytals
10. Sitting in Limbo - Jimmy Cliff
11. You Can Get It If You Really Want - Jimmy Cliff
12. Harder They Come - Jimmy Cliff

 

Steve, I hope you're up to something in asking us this question. I'm a huge fan of Desmond Dekker's "Israelites". I'm also a huge fan of Dave & Ansel Collins' "Double Barrel".

 

This thread got me digging...

Chris C

 

Built and kitted out by our once forum member Graham Goodhall. I was in contact with him for a while. He's got some great stories about the set-up at Federal, he had to customise a lot of the gear and there were some 'challenging' circumstances recording in Jamaica in the late 50s-early 60s. It's a surprising facet of the story of reggae that a young bloke from Australia was so crucial in the sound of the music.

 

Here's some of Mr Goodys stories...

"Dear Chris, I will be only too happy to describe to you my reasoning/experimenting with recording early Jamaican music. Firstly, I, and the "core' of The Caribs, were all displaced Aussies living in Jamaica. The Caribs were Dennis Sindrey/guitar-vocals from Camberwell; Peter Stoddart/piano from South Australia & Lowell Morris/drums from South Melbourne. I was born in Caulfield and started off at 3KZ Melbourne.
The web site was forwarded to me by a great friend, Lloyd Dewar alias "Mohair Slim" who has a radio show "Blue Juice" on Melbourne 3PBS on Sundays. June 2004 Dennis & I were visiting Melbourne (co-incidentally at the same time-but that's another story) and we both did a 1 hour broadcast. Slim expertly dragged out our life stories.
The early pop music of Jamaica, Owen Grey, Laurel Aitken, Keith & Enid, Wilfred Edwards, were produced by Chris Blackwell and backed by the Caribs. We used the studios of Radio Jamaica, where I was ACE, after hours....the Caribs were working @ the Myrtle Bank Hotel 'til midnight. I borrowed a lot of extra equipment from Radio Jamaicas' remote van and used the mens' dunnee as a live echo chamber.
When it comes to the history of Federal Records, you have to divide it into stages. The small studio was the center for the " ska" era. I took a primitive Ampex tube 4 channel mixer and upgraded it with another 3 channels with an echo feed on each. I had built a live chamber (Jamaican masons could not understand why this skinny white man insisted that none of the walls or ceiling could be parallel...they wanted to build them vertical/horizontal). This gave me 3 channels straight, 3 channels with echo and one channel for echo return. The bass, played by Lloyd Brevitt was a "stand-up" and I used a R.C.A. 44 bx ribbon on it. But any fool can put stuff on tape. The trick was to put it down onto acetate and make it sound the way the public wanted to hear it at the sound system dances. Thats why I went out to these dances so that I could "capture" the sound the way they wanted to hear it. The disc cutter was a fixed pitch Neumann lathe with a Grampian MQY mono cutter driven by a Gotham amp. I happened to meet George Piros, the master cutter at Fine Recording Studios in NYC. He advised me to warm up the cutting head by feeding straight tone into it for about 5 minutes...."Get them coils and armature loosened up, man"...and purge the damping fluid that Grampian supplied, replace it with high quality brake fluid, administered with a special hypodermic needle cut to size so that the fluid would actually get down to the armature instead of bopping around the magnets. Did you ever wonder why all these 45's were faded out at 2 minutes and 50 seconds? That was all that I could squeeze onto the disc at 112 lines per inch and still get the bottom end that they wanted!
Chris, thats about all that this 73 yo can take for today. Next time I will get into the Federal "big" studio and the morf into rock-steady. Keep in touch....go kiss a Maori.
Graeme.

Federal Records, Poppa Koo, Ken Khouri, was convinced to build a combo audio/video studio by Perry Henzell who had started Vista Films (The Harder They Come with Jimmy Cliff) basically to produce TV commercials for JBC-TV that had just gone on air. It had a full lighting grid and perfectly flat floor for tracking. However, the commercial market didn't develop as well as expected and the audio recording side took over.
I equipped it with a 10 channel Altec "green monster", still tube, backed with 2 smaller Altec mono mixers as echo send/returns. For echo I used a Fairchild spring unit with an interesting modification developed by Pepe Rush of Rush Electronics in the UK. We inserted a light dependent resistor between the output from the springs and the input to the output amplifier. (Sounds convoluted, but its the only way that I can describe it). The LDR was activated by a combo incandescant bulb and a neon tube fired by the input amp. In this way we could vary the attack time and the unit was virtually quiet when no signal was present. We also had tie lines to the original live chamber.
But I digress. I was extremely careful with the acoustics. It was basically a 3X4X5 dimension room but I used elliptical difusers and strategically placed bass absorption units developed by EMI. I designed gobos incorporating the same bass absorbers and faced on the reverse side with acoustic aluminum from Alcan....so I had a reflective/absorbtive depending on which side the instrument was facing. About this time elecronic guitar and bass amps were coming into use (Ampeg bass and Fender guitar0 so I went further into the use of DI which I had used from the old RJR recording days. I found that Ampex used a wonderful input transformer in their 350 series recorders. (I think they may have been designed by Dean Jensen, but I'm not sure). This gave me a Hi impedence/Lo impedence matching unit. But the secret was to use the DI in combination with a microphone feed. In this way I could get the attack/sustain sound that I wanted. The control room monitors were Altec 604D driven by H.H. Scott tube amps. I found that they were so mid-range deficient that when you actually put it down on disc they were so hot that they jumped out at you.
At the same time, the small studio was being handled by Byron "Smitty" Smith, an engineer I had trained at RJR. I have to admit that when it came to laying down Ska/Rockstedy tracks he beat me hands down. (Isn't that the way it should be....the student excels the teacher?). He was responsible for all the great Treasure Isle material. He eventually went on to work for Duke at Treasure Isle Studios down on Bond Street.
As an aside....until the mid 60's Jamaica's power was 110 volts, 40 hz. This meant that we had to use rotary convertors for all speed dependent devices...particularly US manufactured Ampex recorders. Then the marvellous government experts decided to convert the whole island to 110 volt 50 hz. Isn't that typical! So it was into the machine shop to make sleeves for all the capstan motors and install auto transformers so that the electronics would perform to spec. Remember, we were still esentially in the tube era.
I forgot to mention in my previous discussion that the disc cutter included a Pultec EQP 1 parametric equalizer and Fairchild limiter. We NEVER used EQ when putting it down on tape.
So much of my knowledge I gained from my mentor, the great Tommy Dowd of Atlantic Records. I would suggest that anyone interested in the times when great records were produced, not the noise that seems to be the norm today, get a copy (on DVD) of
"Tom Dowd and the Language of Music". It explains the success of Atlantic and the legacy left by Tommy.
More when my energy pills kick in!

When the early Ska records began to get recognition by markets outside Jamaica, mainly through the need of the massive numbers of Jamaican immigrants to the U.K who craved the sounds of their home country and Chris Blackwell releasing them on Island (which, incidentally stopped the pirating that had alredy started) ( Emil Shallitt who owned Melodisc created the Blue Beat label, a name that was eventually tagged onto ska records by the non-Jamaican population).
The Ertegun brothers thought that there maybe a market for ska in the U.S. At that time Atlantic was released in the Caribbean through West Indies Records Limited (WIRL) owned by Eddie Seaga, later to be elected Prime Minister of Jamaica. Unfortunately for him, Federal was the only recording studio of any quality available and he and Ken "Poppa Koo" Khouri were not exactly on the best of terms. Nothing daunted, Atlantic sent Tom Dowd down to explore the situation and record some tracks. This was a major turning point in my life as this was the start of my lifelong friendship with Tommy, my mentor. Tommy was mre of a producer with the artists and musicians corralled by Ken, Eddie and the staff at both record companies. Engineering was handled by myself & Byron Smith.....believe me, what we both learned from Tommy, who was, unlike most in the recording industry in those days, only too eager to share his knowledge and tricks with anyone who was eager to learn.
One idiosyncrasy that Tommy had (which I rejected as being excusable as part of genius), he reversed the straight line faders on his boards. The explanation that he gave was that if he wanted more of a particular channel/track/microphone he pulled it toward him, not away from him.
As for the sound on current re-releases I, personally, have no opinion one way or another. I do know that during the time of transition from analogue to digital recording, a lot of top ranked producers had trouble adjusting. In the mix they normally tended to compensate for the sonic difference that they knew, from experience, would occur in the transfer chain from multi track to final vinyl pressing. This is what made them great! With digital there was no difference. With all the wonderful computer based tools available to virtually anyone, who can blame them for adding a little of their own personalities? Unfortunately, they do not understand the "soul", for want of a better word, that actually created the sounds.

I have always believed that every country has a different "atmosphere" that affects how the human ear pecieves sound. This probably includes culture. When Jamaican records were released in the UK, they were mastered direct disc to disc. It was virtually impossible to get copy tapes from Jamaica. Doctor bird used John Hassel recording in Barnes, a suburb of London. I think that many of my competitors used Derek Strickland at Pye. It was difficult to get the UK mastering engineers to understand why we wanted a certain eq in the process. If you get the chance to compare a JA pressing , a Uk pressing and a US pressing of the same "tune" on 45's, you will notice the difference. I figured that the only way that I could cope with this was to escort John Hassel (who was, to all intents & puposes, blind, due to an incredible incident that he survived during W.W. ll) to NYC & Jamaica. His incredible Golden Ears quickly picked up on the differences.

"My Boy Lollipop" was recorded, 4 track, in Pye Studios Marble Arch ( as was all the Spencer Davis material). I was not present at the recording so I don't know if Rod Stewart played harmonica? I do know that one of the greatest Jamaican bass players, Phil Chen, did play with the Rod Stewart band and, in fact, co-wrote many of Rod's songs. By the way, Phil & I wrote "Herbie, the Love Bug" the theme used in the Disney movies.....but that's another story.

Mr Goody"

 

Thanks for the pictures, nice to see the studio that brought those songs to life!

Chris C

 

Here's the Jamaica Ska album that Tom Dowd did for Atlantic. My copy is the UK Decca pressing (London). A big album down in the clubs during the mod boom. The Blues Busters 'Soon You'll Be Gone' had them rockin' at the Roaring 20s and the Flamingo

 

I had contacted some local publishers about doing a book about Mr Goody. That sort of knowledge about such an incredibly important international music will disappear. Graham lives in Atlanta now, hung out with people like Ray Whitley (the Tams), Steve Alaimo et al. He's a legend, I wish his story was better known.

 

I love the Run for Cover version of Soul Rebel by Bob.

 

I have not checked but I thought Heartbeat in the 90s used some original Duke Reid tapes rather than disc-dubs. I remember thinking then that 'Tide' sounded a lot better. i could be wrong...

If it would be at all possible (and I suspect the tapes are available) I would HIGHLY recommend a mastering of Nash's 'Soul Folk' album. Not reggae I know but absolutely exquisite singing and playing. A perfect jewel of a record

 

They did some vinyl too, same story?

 

This is an impossible task to narrow down to two tracks but I'll just throw two more classics in for consideration which i don't believe have been mentioned :

Junior Byles "Curley Locks" and Wailing Souls "Firehouse Rock"

 

Jimmy Cliff-Many Rivers to Cross, I Can See Clearly Now-Johnny Nash (Ok, it's a mainstream tune but he sings the hell out of this version).

 

'Out of Phase Land', not a place I'd ever knowingly visit but sometimes you look out the taxi window and realize you're on the wrong side of the tracks.

 

Sounds like a Black Ark production ...

Perry loved the Mutron Bi-Phase and Roland Space Echo.

http://books.google.ca/books?id=rveYGxIUD4oC&pg=PA153&lpg=PA153