Reggae pioneer was mad scientist in the studio
“Scratch” Perry — a wildly inventive, unabashedly eccentric Jamaican producer and singer whose reggae and dub recordings opened up new avenues for popular music, transporting listeners to dreamlike soundscapes filled with buoyant rhythms, irresistible melodies and mysterious echoes — died Aug. 29 at a hospital in Lucea, Jamaica. He was 85.
Prime Minister Andrew Holness confirmed his death in a statement but did not give a cause.
Perry was among Jamaica’s most revered artists, known for collaborating with Bob Marley and the Wailers, Paul and Linda McCartney, the Clash, George Clinton, Brian Eno and the Beastie Boys. Beginning in the mid-1960s, he helped ska music evolve into the more laid-back genre known as reggae.
“You could never put your finger on Lee Perry — he’s the Salvador Dalí of music,” musician Keith Richards told Rolling Stone in 2010. “He’s a mystery. The world is his instrument. ... More than a producer, he knows how to inspire the artist’s soul.”
In the same article, DJ and rapper Afrika Bambaataa credited Perry with laying the groundwork for hip-hop, while honing a style in which he added or subtracted various instruments from a song — often recording multiple versions of the track — and sometimes talked over the beat, in a Jamaican rap style known as toasting: “It was
Lee Perry’s sound and the Jamaican toasters that inspired us to start hip-hop.”
Raised in rural western Jamaica, Perry apprenticed under producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd, whose record label Studio One became known as the Motown of Jamaica, before working as an independent singer and producer in Kingston. He started his own label, Upsetter Records, and in 1973 built a tiny backyard studio called the Black Ark.
Directing a backing band known as the Upsetters and wielding little more than a four-track tape recorder, he cut some of the decade’s most celebrated reggae albums, including Max Romeo’s “War Ina Babylon” (1976), the Heptones’ “Party Time” (1977), the Congos’ “Heart of the Congos” (1977) and Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves” (1977), which featured a title track that the Clash covered on their debut album.
He also worked closely with Marley and the Wailers, producing songs such as “Soul Rebel,” “Small Axe,” “Duppy Conqueror” and “Jah Live,” which was recorded in 1975 after the announcement that former Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie — revered by some Rastafari adherents as God incarnate — had died.
“Scratch helped my father look deeper into himself,” Bob’s son, Ziggy Marley, told Rolling Stone. “He put Bob in the forefront and was instrumental in my father’s career.”
Producer Clive Chin, who witnessed some of Perry’s early sessions with the Wailers, told New StatesLee man magazine in 2006:
“He would come in early and sprinkle white rum in the four corners of the studio for a good session. He wouldn’t sing to the musicians to describe the sound he wanted. He would do something outlandish, like jump his left knee towards his right ear, to explain how far out he wanted them to push the sound.”
To impart what he called “the breath of life,” Perry blew marijuana smoke into the microphone or tape machine; to develop a more organic sound for the rhythm tracks, he recorded the scratches, scrapes, clinks and booms of kitchen utensils, children’s toys and a garden rake. He “once put a microphone on a palm tree,” according to New York Times music critic Jon Pareles, “to capture what he considered the living African heartbeat.”
Perry “influenced, prophesied or offhandedly dreamed up strategies that would later show up all over rock, hip-hop and dance music,” Pareles wrote in 1997, reviewing his compilation album “Arkology.” “Reusing favorite rhythm tracks until they were encrusted with static, making echoes ricochet around inexorable bass lines, Perry shifted the earthiness of reggae toward wacked-out abstraction.”
His otherworldly music was matched by a madcap persona, captured on film in the 2008 documentary “The Upsetter.” Perry dyed his hair cherry red, glued shards of broken mirrors to his shoes, wore a ring on each finger and donned a crown or Native American headdress; in interviews, he variously called himself a mystic, a fish and a chicken, and likened the coconut to God incarnate.
While some observers questioned his sanity, friends said that some of his more outlandish behavior was an act intended to keep people at a distance. Perry suggested as much himself, recording the song “I Am a Madman” and telling Rolling Stone that “being a madman is a good thing.”
“It keeps people away,” he continued. “When they think you are crazy, they don’t come around and take your energy, making you weak. I am the Upsetter!”
Rainford Hugh Perry was born in Kendal, Jamaica, on March 20, 1936. “My father worked on the road, my mother in the fields,” he told the British magazine NME. “We were very poor. I went to school ... ’til fourth grade, around 15. I learned nothing at all. Everything I have learned has come from nature.”
Perry drove bulldozers before moving to Kingston in his early 20s. He landed a job running errands at Studio One and rose to become a talent scout for Dodd, the label’s founder, while singing and recording dance songs, such as “Chicken Scratch” (1965). The song gave him his nickname and became a hit, although Perry soon split from Dodd, whom he accused of cheating him out of credit and money.
He took his revenge through music, partnering with producer Joe Gibbs to record the single “I Am the Upsetter,” in which he dissed his old boss. “People Funny Boy” (1968), which sampled a crying infant, is considered one of the first reggae recordings.
He ultimately destroyed his own recording studio — burning it down, by his account, because of a “bad energy” surrounding the place. “Burning up the studio was a way of burning the demon, burning up the bad luck that had come to the people who lived in Jamaica,” he told the Guardian in 2016.
Perry, whose first marriage ended in divorce, married Mireille Ruegg, a Swiss native, and moved with her to Zurich, where he resurrected his music career in the 1990s, embarking on a world tour and singing on the Beastie Boys’ song “Dr. Lee, PhD.” His later albums included “Jamaican E.T.” (2002), which won the Grammy Award for best reggae album, and “Heavy Rain” (2019), which topped Billboard’s reggae chart.
Information on survivors was not immediately available.