Crucial CD Collection
THE Heptones are widely held by those in the know — and few know more deeply or with more conviction than hardcore collectors of Jamaican music — to have been the finest of a number of outstanding vocal trios to have graced the brief but enduringly irresistible rocksteady movement that linked ska with reggae for just a few years during the late 1960s.
They were inextricably linked with producer Clement “Sir Coxsone” Dodd’s now legendary Studio One during this time, not just because of the string of superb tracks they released on the label under their own name but because their vocals so often provided the backing harmonies for the studio’s solo acts, and sometimes augmented those of other groups. In addition, as a regular Studio One session man, lead singer Leroy Sibbles was a highly influential figure in the development of reggae bass playing.
The trio was the critical vocal setup for rocksteady and early reggae — remember that the Wailers started out as a vocal trio — with arrangements strongly influenced by American rhythm and blues and particularly Curtis Mayfield’s Impressions. But many of them failed to make the transition to the music’s rootsier forms. The Heptones, initially smooth and sounding almost old-fashioned did, with Barry Llewellyn and Earl Morgan providing Sibbles with the perfect balance of sweetness and grain, increasingly as time went on.
They eventually left the Studio One fold, partly due to unhappiness at the lack of recognition, financial and otherwise, accorded to their contribution to the label’s success, and partly, according to some, because of a desire to move away from the hit-making pop subject matter favoured by Dodd. They wanted to embrace the harder, socially conscious end of the music, and recorded for a variety of producers, a veritable who’s who of the Kingston scene at the time.
Sibbles then relocated to Canada for a spell. On his return the reunited band was signed to an Island label busy introducing rock to reggae and vice versa, and released the fine Night Food in 1976. It featured a rerecorded and updated version of the fantastic Book Of Rules, sung by Llewellyn rather than Sibbles, which remains possibly the Heptones’ finest single moment, although the next album demonstrated more song-by-song consistency.
PARTY Time was recorded the following year with Lee “Scratch” Perry, part genius producer, part madman, in his legendary Black Ark studio. Sibbles had this to say about him: “Nothing not finished when Scratch catch hold of it. He was like an explorer going into the future of the music and he always want to push that little bit further. When you think a tune’s done you hear it play back the next day and there’s even more gone into it, yet it still sound like the tune. It still sound good.
“Scratch could look deep, deep into a tune the way other people would just look at the surface, and reach down into it to pull things up that most people hadn’t even really noticed.”
On Party Time, Perry applied his method to several songs the Heptones had recorded for Studio One — by no means an unusual practice in reggae circles — including the determinedly upbeat title track, the plaintive Why Must I and a well judged cover of Bob Dylan’s much loved I Shall Be Released, with a subtle change of lyric (“I see Jah light come shining …”), a memorable horn riff and a relentlessly chugging beat.
While Crying Over You confirmed that the group hadn’t lost its way with a good love song, the record’s lyrical concerns were generally more politically focused, with Mr President addressing a heartfelt plea to the very top while the superb Storm Cloud sounded a stern warning to politicians generally of troubled times to come.
Serious Time, which was written by Llewellyn, is broadly persuasive and musically redolent of Book Of Rules, but Sufferer’s Time, which closes the record, makes it clear that the time to pay attention to the concerns of Jamaica’s poorest people, its sufferers, was well and truly at hand.
Everything seemed in place for the Heptones to extend their hitherto stylistically constrained renown into the rock milieu, but somehow they failed to make the kind of impact that their ability and rock’s contemporary embrace of reggae might have suggested they would. Party Time was as close as they ever came. By the next album Sibbles had left for a solo career.