Toots Hibbert
On the pressure he feels to relaunch his career
“This is my last chance. Every
day I get older. But I still have my
strength.”
It took two years of phone calls and confusing negotiations to get myself invited to visit Toots Hibbert at his fortress-like pink stucco compound in the Red Hills section of Kingston, Jamaica. When I finally arrived, he wasn’t home. No one around seemed to know the whereabouts of the world’s greatest living reggae singer. His grandson, an aspiring reggae artist who calls himself King Trevi, was perched on some concrete steps and suggested that maybe Toots went to the gym. A woman hanging laundry on a rope strung across the dirt yard thought he’d gone to the country. Someone said he might be napping. ¶ I was directed to wait in the yard, near a dusty fence painted the colors of the Jamaican flag. A dreadlocked old-timer in a mesh shirt sat on a wooden barstool under the shade of a mango tree. He advised me to stay away from the Rottweilers, which he whispered can be “dangerous.” Fortunately, I didn’t see any Rottweilers, just a hobbled orange mutt panting in the shade. Nearby, Toots’ driver and bodyguard, Courtney, who also goes by the name Wesley, was eating a to-go plate of chicken off the
hood of his Toyota Corolla. I asked if he’d seen the boss. His response was garrulous but inconclusive. “Nyah, he come and he go,” Courtney said, using the name Toots’ family and close friends call him. “Every day is different, different mood and feelings. So much on his mind. Never enough time for a man like this man. He follow his own riddim. He the leader, we the follower.” Then he set the box of chicken bones on the ground for the orange dog or maybe the Rottweilers to finish.
Somewhere, not far off, I could hear music, muffled as if it were coming from behind walls: a heavy reggae bass line, clacking rhythm guitar, keyboards skidding across the top. It was a short, repeating section, booming through the hot, still air. After a while, vocals filled in the mix, rhythmic, intense:
You are taking our rights from us!
You don’t care
We didn’t get nothing! Nothing! Nothing!
The voice sounded bruised but defiant, growling and also somehow joyous. It was unmistakably the voice of Frederick “Toots” Hibbert, one of the creators of reggae music, and one of the greatest soul singers of all time, in a lineage with Sam, Ray, and Otis. With few of modern music’s pioneering voices still around or vital — his good friend Willie Nelson might be the closest comparison — Toots is a living treasure, a star whose light originates long ago and far away, but still shines brightly on us now.
Suddenly, the music stopped. In the quiet, I could hear parrots arguing in the palm trees and kids playing outside somewhere. When I looked up, out of nowhere, there was Toots, emerging from a metal door at the back of his property. He wore baggy black sweatpants and a black sleeveless undershirt, with sunglasses propped on top of his short, tightly-curled jet-black hair. Deep into his seventies, he is compact, solid, and strong, with muscled arms and the quick, efficient movements of a boxer (which Toots was as a teenager). In one hand he held a plastic cup of clear liquid, and in the other a dirty dish towel, which he used to wipe the sweat from his face, then stuffed into the neckline of his shirt.
He broke into a wide smile and waved his hands in the air. “Fireball!” he announced in greeting. “Welcome to the Reggae Center.”
this was 2016, and Toots had been off the road and at home, grounded after a fan threw a 1.75-liter vodka bottle onstage that accidentally hit him in the head during a May 2013 performance in Richmond, Virginia. He played two more shows before a doctor told him he’d suffered a serious concussion and he needed to cancel all remaining dates. Touring has been Toots’ lifeblood since the early 1970s, when his landmark album Funky Kingston (one of the greatest reggae albums of all time) made him a global superstar opening for the Who and the Eagles and helped him build a four-decade international touring machine. In the 2000s, with his James Brown-like dance moves and singularly powerful voice (even now, he rarely lifts the microphone closer than chest-high), Toots was everywhere: headlining festivals and jamband cruises, opening the Rolling Stones’ Bigger Bang tour, showing up on New Year’s Eve in St. Barth’s with the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Then it all just stopped. He didn’t play another show until June 2016. (In retrospect, Toots says he should have canceled the tour immediately after the accident for both health and legal reasons, but “that’s not my principle. A boxer never falls unless he’s hit hard.”) Two cases dragged on in the courts: a criminal trial against the 19-year-old who threw the bottle (Toots asked that he be spared jail time, but he was sentenced to six months) and a civil suit against the organizers of the event, which went on for three years before being settled out of court. The situation sent Toots into a spiral of anxiety and depression. “I’m getting better and better now,” he said. “I have headaches, and I have fears. I need to take some medications. I’ve been through a lot, but by grace of the almighty God, I keep going, man. They call me Fireball! As long as I am strong, I am young.”
Since the injury, Toots has retreated to the studio, which he calls the Reggae Center, often seven days a week, birthday and Christmas included. “If I’m not in my bed, check the studio!” he says.
Despite its official-sounding name, the Reggae Center is really just a dank, airless concrete apartment with sickly yellow walls and a trickle of A/C. A TV monitor above the recording console usually plays tennis; Toots is distracted by a Roger Federer match today. “Him a fireball,” Toots admires. The only place to sit is a makeshift couch made out of the bench seat from a van. All around the room are hard drives, teetering on the edges of the console, stacked in the hallways, and propping open a door. The drives are loaded with songs Toots has recorded over the past three years — hundreds of tracks, according to his engineer, Nigel Burrell. There are protest songs and party songs, Christmas tunes, and covers of Ray Charles and Otis Redding. Often, there are multiple versions of the same track cut in different styles. Toots plays almost all the instruments and sings every note.
Most of the songs on his new album, Got to Be Tough, out August 28th, started in this room. The album, co-produced by Zak Starkey for his Trojan
Jamaica label, plays like a burning plea for a world at the breaking point. The songs, showcasing Toots’ mellowed, grainy voice, and shot through with Starkey’s vintage guitar riffs (plus a few cameos on percussion from Starkey’s dad, Ringo Starr), call out the legacy of slavery and systemic racism in Jamaica, rising economic injustice, climate destruction, and Toots’ own grievances against a system that’s beaten him down. Toots never plays victim; he’s a fighter, a healer, the voice of reason.
“I’ve always thought Toots and the Maytals were the punk rock of reggae,” says Starkey. “We had a lot of reggae playing in my house as a kid, and the feeling I got from Toots was the same I got from the Who — a feeling of aggression and excitement, the songs were about something. The power in his voice is beyond anyone I’ve ever met. And he has lived through all the generations of Jamaican music. He was at the forefront at the start, and he’s at the forefront now. How incredible is that?”
“You can’t compare Toots to anybody else,” adds Ziggy Marley, Bob’s son. “Just like you can’t compare Bob to anybody. Toots is one of those unique figures. Toots is Toots. He stands alone.”
Today, Toots and Nigel are listening back to a rough mix of “Ten Shillings,” with its echoey, incantatory lyrics calling out the devious 1960s Jamaican producers who signed Toots and many other young, struggling artists to terrible contracts that handed over their songwriting and publishing rights for a few schillings, or a free lunch. This pattern of mistreatment has persisted — predatory producers and labels, inept or corrupt managers, and sometimes Toots’ own impulsive business decisions. “There are huge trust issues,” says his attorney and friend Roderick Gordon. “It’s gone wrong so many times.”
“Sometimes I think, ‘Who going to pay — how are they going to pay?’ ” Toots says, slouched over his guitar in the studio. “I’m not going to hurt anyone — I will make them pay musi-cally,” he says, stretching out the syllables. He moves in and out of Jamaican patois and, in certain moments, veers into a rhythmic, preaching cadence that calls on the Rastafarian teachings he lives by. “I feel angry. I want to hurt people. When I want to hurt people, I just tell them, ‘Pressure gonna drop on you,’ ” he says, quoting one of his most enduring hits, “Pressure Drop,” which, like many Toots songs, deals with karma and revenge. “I’m talking about if someone done you wrong, pressure gonna drop on them. You do something wrong, the coconut might drop on your head — that’s the pressure. You have to think, ‘Why that coconut fall on me?’
“These are natural feelings,” he continues. “Things that happen to me. That’s how I write. That’s why people can relate to it. The Lord is good, the Lord is great, but I’m getting fucked!”
On a recent winter morning, Toots squeezes into the back of Courtney’s silver Corolla for a drive into the farmlands outside Kingston. In the town of Portmore, we stop at a bar that’s really just a concrete foundation and three walls painted in hues of orange with a warped plywood counter. Toots says it’s too early to drink beer, so he orders rum instead: white, overproof Wray & Nephew Jamaican rum, which he asks for in a plastic cup, pours a few drops into his dry
MANY OF TOOTS’ SONGS DEAL WITH KARMA AND REVENGE: “I’M NOT GOING TO HURT ANYONE — I MAKE THEM PAY MUSI- CALLY.”
cupped hands, rubs them together, then knocks cups with Courtney. “Fireball!” he shouts, as he takes a slug. “Good Lord!”
“Fireball,” says Courtney, slowly.
“Heeeey—ey—ey,” shouts Toots. “Me name is Nyah! Me eat fire! Dem haffa admire!” He drinks the rum. “Fireball!”
“Fire!” yells Courtney.
It is not clear why we landed in Portmore, or if it’s a stop on the way to someplace else. But it’s also hard to imagine anything more fun than roaming the Jamaican countryside with Toots on a Monday morning. Courtney, at the wheel, cranks up a CD of Toots singing a staggering, faithful version of the Otis Redding classic “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,” which he cut recently at the Reggae Center. The track rattles and distorts at top volume, with Toots singing along from the back seat. The song plays eight or nine times in a row; each time, near the end, Toots barrels into the last lines — “I can’t stop now/Please, please don’t make me stop now” — with a glorious, screeching falsetto, sounding less like he’s pleading for a lost love than the chance to carry on his career a little longer.
Courtney is a steady presence by Toots’ side, six feet of solid muscle, fiercely loyal to the boss. Whatever Toots needs, Courtney provides, from stage security (since the bottle incident, Courtney stands near Toots during every show, arms crossed, scanning the crowd) to building furniture for the studio or accompanying Toots as he carouses around the Kingston hotel bars, often spontaneously jumping onstage to sing a few songs. “You never know what come, moment to moment,” says Courtney, solemnly. “We must always be ready.”
I ask Courtney if drinking ever gets in the way of his duties. “I follow the boss’s lead,” he says. “I do what he does. Always been, always will be.”
Toots, who has been flirting with the skeptical female bar owner, chimes in: “We all drinking. And we all working. We always working. In our minds!”
Toots is a whirlwind of moods and motion. He’s joyous and unpredictable, a thrill to be with but also occasionally mystifying, navigating life by some bent logic invisible even to those close to him. Large quantities of ganja add to the haze. Time is meaningless in Toots’ world: If you have a meeting set for 6 p.m., he may show up at 4:30 or he may show up at 11. In public, he rolls up like a reggae superhero, in a matching Polo or Hugo Boss sweatsuit and Rasta skullcap, freshly trimmed black beard, laughing, yodeling, dancing, air-boxing, holding babies, and offering “wireless” fist-bumps to friends and strangers. (Toots is a germaphobe and doesn’t like touching people’s hands, which as it turns out is prescient for these times. So far, Jamaica has had minimal coronavirus cases, yet Toots — like all artists — was forced to postpone all of this year’s tour dates until 2021. In private he’s more pensive — a worrier, spinning theories, secondguessing himself, reinterpreting events. His reasoning seems to often be governed by emotional currents more than static facts, so his stories don’t always fit together, and the meanings change depending on how he feels.
This is especially true when he sits down for an interview. He laughs shyly, frequently deflects, doesn’t remember, and changes the subject. He seems uncomfortable being asked to make sense of his life. Even though he is proud of his achievements (he will often remind you that he invented the word “reggae,” which is arguably true, in the title of his 1968 song “Do the Reggay”), he is also extremely humble, focused on the work that still remains. “When people say I’m great,” he says, “I say I’m not great, but I will try to be great one day.”
In the car today, Toots’ ancient flip phone rings nonstop: He intercedes in a family squabble, conducts a live radio interview, checks in on his older sister Icilene (the last of his 14 siblings still living), and inquires with a friend about slaughtering two goats he plans to roast for a party. In between, he barks directions at Courtney, who at one point I notice has been driving in a giant square around the same plot of farmland, round and round.
That evening, after a nap and a few hours in the studio, Toots shows up at the Terra Nova Hotel, one of his favorite hangouts, looking fresh in a matching red-and-black sweatsuit. He announces he’s going on a five-day weight-loss program that dubiously consists of “biscuits and fruit juice,” but when the waitress comes, he orders fried shrimp, no salt.
“I’m not sick,” he tells her, “but I want to be healthy!”
“Fried shrimp is not really healthy,” she says, and persuades him to order steamed shrimp with broccoli instead.
He admits that he feels a lot of pressure to relaunch his career at a time he would prefer to slow down and that he carries a burden of responsibility to support his family, which includes his wife of 39 years, Miss D, seven kids (an eighth — another daughter — passed away), along with grandkids, nieces, nephews, and others he’s informally adopted or taken care of over the years.
“It’s still hard, I’m trying, I’m pushing,” he says, speaking in staccato phrases, working the rhythm of the words as much as the meaning. “I work hard. I am not afraid to work. But time is running out, and I feel that. I don’t want to work so hard now. But it’s coming up fast, fast. Good times gone, good times still coming, by and by. I have to work, and it keeps me young. People look to me every day, every night, every minute, every hour, to take care of them, and I need to do that. I need to be the leader, everything else follows.
“This is my last chance, man,” he adds quietly. “I gotta do this now. Every day I’m getting older. But I still have my strength, so now it’s time.”
ANOTHER MORNING, we load into Courtney’s Corolla to drive to the countryside to visit Toots’ sister, Icilene, who still lives in the simple wooden cabin where Toots and his siblings were raised in the agricultural hub of May Pen, 55 kilometers and a world apart from Kingston.
Icilene, who goes by Birdy, isn’t feeling well, so Toots wants to bring her a bottle of noni juice, a Jamaican herbal cure-all derived from the noni fruit that smells like stinky cheese and tastes appalling but is used to alleviate infection and pain. He visits frequently, usually at night or in the early morning, and is reluctant to make the trip today. “I cannot show myself there,” he says. “People come down and trample me. I’m very famous down there. And famous all over the island! And all over the world! When you are famous, you have to give people a lot of motivation and direction. It’s like a prime minister, you know? If I came with 100,000 Jamaican dollars it won’t be enough.”
Everywhere we go, Toots gives. One afternoon during Christmas season we did the rounds in his black Lexus, distributing small bundles of cash to gas-station attendants and waiters and hotel staff, anyone he thought needed it. This is normal practice. “Sometimes my work, when I drive him, is just to give. We drive around and give money, or food, or medicine,” says Courtney. “Every day! Every time! Oh, my God! When the phone rings, it’s always somebody that wants something. He always help them. That’s Fireball,” he says, with a snap of his fingers. “He give it all away.”
Toots has always been motivated by generosity. At the May Pen Primary School, he gave away his lunch to kids who had nothing to eat. “The first time I did that my father beat me, because I come home hungry. He said, ‘Where’s your lunch money?’ ” Toots mimics a child crying. “‘I gave it away, Daddy.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Because some children’s mouths wide and hungry.’ My father don’t bother to beat me again. He say, ‘OK, I’m going to give you enough you can give some away.’ ”
Toots’ parents were both preachers in a strict Seventh-day Adventist church (his mother was also a nurse and a midwife), where he and his brothers and sisters would sing after school. “Everybody love me,” Toots remembers. “I learn that manners is the foundation of respect. I teach that to my grandchildren now. Too much anger, that’s not good. If you want to have a hunger, have a hunger to do good, not to do bad. That is the way to do it, I’m in a hurry to do good!”
He starts yodeling, then singing. “Hey-eyey-ey ey-ey-yeeee! Made up my mind, to do good all the time, all the time I pride myself walking on the line. When I was a little boy, my parents used to say, ‘Toots, a man must do good all the time.’ All the time, all the time . . . yay ey-ey-ey-yeeee.” Toots’ father was a local landowner who had several businesses: Toots points out the Butter Nut Bakery, where he learned to bake bread as a kid, and the fruit stand his parents operated. “My dad was a hard worker, and he used to take a drink also,” says Toots. “He was very strong. When he shake your hands, it burns you.”
We pass the church where his parents preached, which Toots says he’d like to buy and renovate. “I couldn’t dance because I grew up in this church,” he says, with a laugh, “but after I grow up and go to Kingston and saw what’s going on, that’s when I start to watch James Brown, Wilson Pickett. That’s when I start to move!”
We pull over by the open fields of Western Park, brown grass littered with trash. “I used to run up and down here all the time, it used to be so beautiful,” he remembers. “It used to be clean, rain would fall every day. It don’t fall every day now.”
Toots grew up in the hillside Treadlight district, where he still owns land on Hibbert Boulevard, named after his father. Toots’ extended family occupy the tin-roofed plywood cabins along the roadside, and his parents are buried behind Birdy’s place at the top of the hill. “My father own most of this and way back into the bush,” he says. “This is the real me.”
Toots’ mom died when he was eight, and his dad died when he was 11, so I ask if it was hard to lose his parents so young. “Yes, man,” he says. “But my father was old when he died. He was 114.”
I point out that this means his father was 103 when Toots was born. “Yes, man,” he affirms, as if it’s the most natural thing in the world. (In the same conversation, he said that his father [ Cont. on 76]
“I GOTTA DO
THIS NOW. EVERY DAY I’M GETTING OLDER. BUT I STILL HAVE MY STRENGTH, SO NOW IT’S TIME.”