Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
Jamaican music producer who influenced Bob Marley and was a driving force in reggae and dub
LEE “SCRATCH” PERRY, who has died aged 85, was the most innovative, eccentric and influential Jamaican record producer of his generation and was widely held to be the creator of both reggae and dub.
Perry, who also answered to the title “The Upsetter”, pioneered the slow, rhythmic, bass-heavy sound of the 1970s that proved one of its most enduring exports.
Reggae combined, in Perry’s phrase, “the rhythm of the ghetto and the words of the street”, creating songs of freedom that spoke of black consciousness and social empowerment. A lifelong rebel, the prolific and obsessive Perry worked with primitive four-track technology out of his tiny Black Ark studio that was little more than a wooden hut in a suburb of Kingston.
There, working with artists ranging from Bob Marley and the Wailers to vocalists such as Junior Murvin and Max Romeo, Perry created a dense, multilayered sound that soared above the limitations of his technology, spreading the reggae gospel around the world. “I had four tracks in the studio,” he recalled, “but 1,000 tracks in my head.”
Perry revelled in disorder, leaping around at his mixing desk in shorts and singlet, often barefooted, laying down drum and bass and, only when satisfied with the rhythm, adding the vocals.
Often he did not add any vocals, preferring to allow the rhythms to speak for themselves. This technique evolved into dub or “version”, when tunes were rerecorded using even slower, heavier bass lines with extensive use of reverb, phasing and sampled lyrics.
By the late 1970s, however, Perry’s heavy ingestion of alcohol and cannabis and the violence of Kingston brought on a nervous collapse. After his wife left him he burnt down Black Ark and, as Jamaican music moved on to ragga and dance hall, departed for Switzerland. If his later work never matched the originality of his Kingston days, he remained a seminal influence on bands ranging from the Clash to Massive Attack – and was the only man whom Bob Marley was on record as calling “a genius”.
He was born Rainford Hugh Perry at Kendal, Jamaica, on March 20 1936. After school he moved to Kingston and worked as an errand boy, talent scout, security guard and uncredited songwriter for the pioneering producer Clement “Coxsone” Dodd at Studio One.
His first record, Chicken Scratch, gained him his nickname, if few sales, and he learnt the producer’s trade at the feet of the master. But Perry was independent-minded – disagreements were a recurring motif throughout his career – and in 1966 he left Dodd to work with Joe Gibbs.
Perry produced a string of hits for Gibbs, including his own brooding signature tune, I Am the Upsetter, and records for the Maytals and Delroy Wilson, before falling out – again – over money and setting up on his own.
He hired a house band he named the Upsetters and recorded his compositions on his “Upsetter” label, renting space in the tiny studios dotted around Kingston. Set Them Free was an early example of “black consciousness” lyrics, and from the outset, Perry’s songs were as socially and politically engaged as his modus operandi was seemingly disengaged.
Musicians responded to the creative freedom he offered and Perry was soon in demand. He produced a huge body of work that evolved into a warm-sounding reggae which slowed down the lighter, faster ska and rejected notions of melody in favour of random rhythms from which the tunes emerged.
With no copyright laws in Jamaica, songs ranging from A Rainy Night in Georgia to Take Me Home, Country Roads were covered in reggae style and tempo.
Perry enjoyed a succession of domestic hits, and after Return of the Django reached the top five in Britain in 1969, the Upsetters became the first reggae band to tour the UK.
Flushed with success, Perry opened the Upsetter record shop at 36 Charles Street in Kingston, premises previously owned by the ska producer Prince Buster, a space that acted as “base, rehearsal room, bar and herb counter”. Although most of his releases were soul-inspired reggae, he would unsettle listeners with dense aural experiments, multidimensional arrangements or strange vocal effects that augmented the blurred, edgy feel of tracks recorded on primitive equipment.
Such effects informed his work for Bob Marley, with whom he drove around Kingston writing lyrics and summoning rhythms from the drama of the street. Both men were articulate, witty, risk-taking, revolutionary and obsessed, and the combination of Marley’s streetwise sensibility and Perry’s narcotic-flavoured mysticism changed the course of reggae.
Many consider tracks such as 400 Years, Concrete Jungle and Duppy Conqueror, which Marley laid down with Perry before their always stormy relationship splintered, as among the finest and most authentic of Marley’s career.
After the abrasive instrumentals of Cloak and Dagger (1972), Perry released one of the first dub records, Blackboard Jungle Dub (1973), featuring slowed-down drum and bass lines, alternative mixes and inchoate vocals.
In 1974 Perry opened the Black Ark studio in the garden of his house and his obsessions and creativity ran wild. Although a producer rather than a recording artist, Perry worked with his own material, arranging, layering and deconstructing tunes played by a fluid group of session musicians before adding vocals to the mix.
He worked barefoot, permanently stoned and forever dancing, his wayward imagination and encyclopaedic recording knowledge enabling him to transcend the restrictions of his humble studio.
Leroy Sibbles, the leader of the Heptones, observed: “Scratch could look deep, deep into a tune and reach into it to pull things up that most people hadn’t even noticed.”
Lloyd Bradley, whose Bass Culture remains the definitive history of reggae, reckoned that the Upsetters’ Super Ape was probably the best dub reggae album ever made: “It builds a jungle of soundscape so thick you need a machete.”
By the late 1970s Perry’s international recognition had escalated to the point where artists as diverse as Paul Mccartney, Robert Palmer and the Clash beat a path to his studio door. But his marathon alcohol and ganja-fuelled recording sessions took their toll, and after local gangsters began demanding protection money, Island Records deemed some of his recordings “unreleasable”, his common-law wife left him and the Black Ark – having been vandalised by its owner – was razed.
Although Perry maintained that he committed arson in a fit of rage, observers with a firmer grip on reality suspected faulty wiring. He later explained: “The Black Ark was too black and too dread. It want to eat me up.”
Having spent three days in jail for suspected arson, Perry moved to London, where his output was erratic as his relationship with Island crumbled. Through the 1980s he worked sporadically in the studio with a host of collaborators, but as rap and hip-hop gained global ascendancy demand for his work declined.
In 1989 he remarried, gave up alcohol and ganja and moved to Zurich. He mellowed, though his linguistic pyrotechnics meant that interviewers could never be quite sure of their footing.
When his Black Ark work was embraced by a new generation it led to the anthology,
Arkolog y (1997), David Katz’s vast biography,
People Funny Boy: The Genius Of Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, a series of sold-out tours and artistic directorship of the South Bank’s Meltdown Festival in 2003.
Whether Perry was genuinely mad or merely eccentric was a question that divided his devotees. In the absence of a definitive (or clinical) answer, the Upsetter offered the last word: “I am a magician,” he sang on African Hitchhiker. ‘Yes! A magician should do his magic and then disappear.”
Lee Perry married, first, Ruby Williams. That marriage was brief, and in 1989 he married Mireille Campbell-ruegg, a Swiss businesswoman who became his manager. She survives him along with their daughter and son, and several children by other relationships.