Bad Moog Rising
This month’s restless phantom limb from music obscuria’s cut-out bin: original mystery synth dub.
King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller In A Tenement Yard
MOTION, 2006
KING TUBBY Meets Jacob Miller In A Tenement Yard is one of reggae’s true oddities, being the sole synthesizer dub album entirely created in Jamaica. Featuring the experimental overdubs of keyboardist Bernard ‘Touter’ Harvey, a mainstay of Kingston group Inner Circle and part-time member of The Wailers, the disc grafted harsh, against-the-grain synthesizer melodies to rhythms taken from reggae vocal great Jacob Miller’s breakthrough LP of 1975, Tenement Yard. With other material produced by Ian and Roger Lewis of Inner Circle, the tracks were later stripped down to their ominous, echo-laden core in a mixing session at King Tubby’s fabled Waterhouse studio. “If I remember right, by that time I had an Arp Odyssey,” says Touter, on the phone from his Miami home base. “Eventually I had two Fender Rhodes, two clavinets, a Mini Moog and an Arp Omni – I had a whole slew of crap.” Given dub’s capacity for evoking colossal spaces, depths and elevations, the use of synthesizers seems a natural choice, yet the instrument was used sparingly in Jamaican reggae. Touter says he bought his first while on tour with Burning Spear in 1975, after hearing Stevie Wonder’s Living For The City and West Berlin ambient voyagers Tangerine Dream, but even Bob Marley was war y of using them. “If you brought a synthesizer into the studio, he’s the first man to cr y it down,” Touter recalls. “He really didn’t like synthesizers. I tried to bring the Arp Odyssey into the studio, he was not down with that at all.” Touter remembers cutting the odd synth overdub for producers such as Bunny Lee at Channel One studio, but Lee and fellow producers Niney The Obser ver and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry made far greater use of Moog specialist Ken Elliott for overdubs at Chalk Farm studios in London; Elliott would also record the cult classic Star Trek synth dub LP for Trojan, which feels a touch two-dimensional compared to In A Tenement Yard, whose organic core of the Fatman Riddim Section and King Tubby’s unsurpassed dub mixing gives the set the stamp of Jamaican authenticity. Like Touter, Jacob Miller hailed from a rough west Kingston ghetto. He began working with the strictly uptown Inner Circle band in the mid-1970s, recording the material for the Tenement Yard and Killer Miller albums shortly after his ground-breaking work with Augustus Pablo in 1974-75. Miller’s arrival, and Touter’s defection from Burning Spear’s band, shifted the group away from the schmaltzy cover tunes of their earlier repertoire towards a distinctly harder roots reggae sound. Hits such as Tired Fi Lick Weed In A Bush and Tenement Yard decried the hardship of Kingston ghetto life, while Roman Soldiers Of Babylon presented a vision of determined endurance from a Rastafari perspective. By contrast, Suzie Wong riffed amorously on the theme to the 1960 romance/soft-porn movie The World Of Suzie Wong. In synth dub form, the material is totally transformed: opening number Dreada Dread becomes a drum-andbass workout with startling treble electronic bleeps; City Of The Weakheart focuses on tension-filled hi-hats while the synth hits at upper and lower frequencies. The dub of Miller’s Ghetto On Fire is here led by a ghostly xylophone, credited to melodica master Augustus Pablo. In keeping with the best dub LPs, the set draws in the listener, the sparseness of the arrangements and the tripped-out synthesizers pulling the mind into manifold unconsidered zones. Yet for years the album was heard by only the most warped dub freaks. The initial release came in a blank sleeve on the E-E Saw label (a misspelled reference to the biblical Esau), mislabelled as Earl Zero’s original 12-inch version of City Of The Weakheart, in minuscule quantities. After three decades of twilit semi-existence, it was finally reissued in 2006 by Motion Records under the King Tubby Meets… title with sympatico bonus tracks. Regardless of edition, the collection has the enduring appeal of a truly great dub album, even if the synth player himself refutes the idea. “Let me put it this way: it’s not my proudest work,” suggests Touter. “At the time, we had all these tracks available and I guess somebody suggested to me, why don’t I do an album? So I basically just did it.” Following the international success of Tenement Yard, Inner Circle scored a contract with Capitol, taking Miller into the big league; the group would later continue their ascent on Island Records before Miller’s tragic death in a car crash in March 1980. King Tubby’s senseless murder in February 1989 robbed Jamaican music of a truly unique talent. Inner Circle, who went US Top 10 with their Cops TV theme Bad Boys in 1993, remain deeply involved with music production at their Circle House studio in Miami and still tour widely. The synthesizer dub LP never caught on in Jamaica, leaving King Tubby Meets Jacob Miller’s In A Tenement Yard as a tantalising glimpse of a sub-genre that might have been. “The Moog synthesizer was the talk of the century, at that time,” says Touter. “It makes me laugh when I think about it now.”
“I had an Arp Odyssey, an Arp Omni – a whole slew of crap.” BERNARD ‘TOUTER’ HARVEY