1. Crass + Nuclear War + Me at 14yrs old = @ an early age Crass made me realize that the powers that be were fucking up the world with their practice of WAR for profit…They were ruling the world with nuclear WAR threats…They were forcing the world to drink from the well of fear (does this sound familiar?)…
2. Crass + the D.I.Y. mantra + Kids ready to Rebel = By the summer of ‘83 I moved to SF, the West Coast breeding ground for PEACE PUNX…Nothing held us back…We put on our own shows and heads would pay with cans of food that we would later donate to the nearby homeless shelters…The effect that Crass had on us could be found in the names of the bands from the area: ATROCITY, TRIAL, DIVERSE&EFFECTIVE, SOCIAL UNREST, CRUCIFIX, & PLH (PEACE LOVE & HAPPINESS)…
3. Crass + the Power of Demonstration = We made the Right Wing pay when they came to our town! We demonstrated and let them know we were not happy with their racism (Apartheid was still a monster to fight against) and their sexism…In the world of the peace punk movement the voice of the woman is equal to that of the man!
4. Crass + Music + Disregard for the Music Industry = Their outlook was way beyond just hardcore…They mixed post-punk, dub, spoken word and even straight-ahead rock ‘n roll…They were some of the first musicians I ever heard sampling before the term was even coined! Crass has influenced way too many groups to mention.
5. Crass + Anti-fashion + Deconstruction = On the real…I can’t front…Peace punks were a stylish bunch…The color of the day was Black…Tight black jeans with rad patchwork, all done by hand, could be found on all us all…Before Margela ever did it we were painting on our jeans! You can see the peace punk aesthetic in lines like NUMBER(9), UNDERCOVER, K.V.K. (KNIGHTS OF THE VAMPIRE KILLERS)…
The fact that Marcus & I respect Crass and what they stand for is part of the reason why we are willing to take a stand against the ills of our modern world…WAR PIGS DIE & SMASH RACISM NOW!!!…
When, in 1976, punk first spewed itself across the nation’s headlines with the message ‘do it yourself’, we, who in various ways and for many years had been doing just that, naively believed that Messrs. Rotten, Strummer etc. etc. meant it. At last we weren’t alone.
The idea of becoming a band had never seriously occurred to us, it simply happened. Basically anyone was free to join in and rehearsals were rowdy affairs that invariably degraded into little more than drunken parties. Steve and Penny had been writing and playing together since early ‘77, but it wasn’t until Summer of that year that we had begged, borrowed and stolen enough equipment to actually call ourselver a band….CRASS.
Having finally managed to rehearse five songs, we set out on the road to fame and fortune armed with our instruments and huge amounts of booze to help us see it through. We did gigs and benefits, chaotic demonstrations of inadequacy and independence. We got turned off here, turned down there and banned from the now legendary Roxy Club. ‘They said they only wanted well behaved boys, do they think guitars and microphones are just fucking toys?’
By now we had realised that our fellow punks, The Pistols, The Clash and all the other muso-puppets weren’t doing it at all. They may like to think that they ripped off the majors, but it was Joe Public who’d been ripped. They helped no one but themselves, started another facile fashion, brought a new lease of life to London’s trendy Kings Road and claimed they’d started a revolution. Same old story. We were on our own again.
Through the alchoholic haze we determined to make it our mission to create a real alternative to musie biz exploitation, we wanted to offer something that gave rather than took and, above all, we wanted to make it survive. Too many promises have been made from stages only to be forgotten on the streets.
Throughout the long, lonely winter of 77/78 we played regular gigs at The White Lion, Putney with the UK Subs. The audience consisted mostly of us when the Subs played and the Subs when we played. Sometimes it was disheartening, but usually it was fun. Charley Harper’s indefatigable enthusiasm was always an inspiration when times got bleak, his absolute belief in punk as a peoples’ music had more to do with revolution than McClaren and his cronies could ever have dreamt of. Through sheer tenacity we were exposing the punk charlatans for what they really were, a music-biz hype.
Our gigs remained wild and disorderly, we were still too scared to play without a belly full of booze and invariably we were in such a state that we’d realise half way through a song that each of us was playing a different one. For all the chaos it was immense fun, no one bitched about leather boots or moaned about milk in tea, no one wanted to know how anarchy and peace could be reconciled, no one bored our arses off with protracted monologues on Bakunin, who at that time we probably would have thought was a brand of vodka. Ideas were open, we were creating our own lives together. These were the glorious years before the free alternatives that we were creating became just another set of bigoted rules, before what we were defining as real punk became yet another squalid ghetto. We even played a Rock Against Racism gig, the only gig that we’d ever been paid for. When we told the man to keep the money for the cause, he informed us that ‘this was the cause’. We never played for RAR again.
As the charlatans increasingly headed Stateside, to get a sniff of that which refreshed them best, we became hardened by the isolation. We determined to stop fucking about with booze and to start taking ourselves that much more seriously. We adopted black clothing as a protest against the narcissistic peacockery of fashion punks. We started incorporating film and-video into our set. We went into production of handout sheets to explain our ideas and a newspaper, International Anthem. We designed the banner that hung behind us to the end, and we committed ourselves to see it through at least until the end of the then mythical 1984.
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Later in the Summer of ‘78, Pete Stennet, owner of the much missed Small Wonder Records, heard one of our demo tapes and loved it. He wanted to put out a single but couldn’t decide on which track, so we recorded all the songs we’d written and made the first ever multitracked 45. We named the album The Feeding Of The Five Thousand because 5000 was the minimum number that we could get pressed and some 4900 more than we thought we’d sell. Feeding is now only a few hundred short of going golden, though I don’t suppose we’ll hear too much about that in the music press.
So, with our entire stage set on record, wrapped in what was then highly innovative black and white, the music press were able to commence on the barrage of attack that has followed us throughout the years. They hated it and us and their loathing positively overflowed. It is not grandiose to claim that we have been one of the most influential bands in the history of British rock, true we have not greatly influenced music itself, but our effect on broader social issues has been enormous. From the start the media has attempted to ignore us and only when its hand has been forced by circumstances has it grudgingly given us credence. It’s all fairly simple, if you don’t play their game, that is commercial exploitation, they won’t play yours. The music bit doesn’t just buy its groups, it pays for the music press as well. The charlatans were spread thicker and deeper than we could ever have imagined.
Nonetheless, realising that we were a threat to its control, the first offers started coming in from the enemy. Mr. Big tried to buy us with cheap wine and an offer of 50000 pounds if; we’d join ‘Pursey’s Package’. He also informed us that he could ‘market revolution’ and that we’d never succeed without his help. It was the first of many offers that we refused, we never looked back and, incidentally, we didn’t hear too much more of Jimmy Pursey.
When Feeding came out in the Spring of ‘79, the first track had been silent and named The Sound Of Free Speech. The pressing plant had decided that the track that had been there, Asylum, was too blasphemous for their, and your, tastes. Such is the true face of censorship in the ‘Free World’.
Eventually we found a pressing plant willing to deal with Asylum, so we re-recorded it along with Shaved Women, printed the covers at home, sold it for 45p, and totally broke ourselves.
On its release, the Reality Asylum single ran into immediate troubles. Complaints from the ‘general public’ led to police raids on shops throughout the country and a visit to us from Scotland Yard’s vice-squad. After a pleasant afternoon sharing tea with our guardians of public morality, we were left with the threat of prosecution that hung over us for the next year. Eventually we received a note informing us that we were free, but that we’d better not try it again. The nature of our ‘freedom’ made doing it again inevitable and so the endless roundabout of police harassment set itself in motion; it has continued to this day.
It was around this time that we did our one and only radio session for John Peel. From then on our growing reputation as foul mouthed yobs precluded us from being given airplay, although we did appear on several chat-shows which led to us being temporarily blacklisted by the BBC. Apparently, expressing dissident views on the Falklands is not acceptable to the listening public who jammed the BBC switchboard with complaints.
To offset claims in the press that we were nothing but leftist/rightist thugs, they never could quite make us out, we started to hang an anarchist banner alongside our own. At that time the circled-A was rarely seen outside the confines of established and generally tedious, small-time anarchist literature. Within months the symbol was to be seen decorating leather jackets, badges, and walls throughout the country, within a few years it spread worldwide. Rotten may have proclaimed himself an anarchist, but it was us who almost single-handedly created anarchy as a popular movement for millions of people.
At the same time, having discovered that CND did actually still exist, albeit in a downtrodden, self-effacing manner, we decided to promote its cause, something that at the time CND seemed to be incapable of doing for itself. From then on, despite screams of derision in the music press, we also displayed the peace symbol at gigs.
Our efforts on the road slowly brought CND back to life. We introduced it to the thousands of people who would become the backbone of its revival. A new and hitherto uninformed sector of society was being exposed to a form of radical thought that culminated in the great rallies, demos and actions that continue today.
Love, peace and freedom,
what was CRASS, but now knows better.
(www.southern.net/southern/label/CRC/)
THE.END.OF.PART.ONE.
THE.STRUGGLE.CONTINUES.
As any business person will tell you, the way to success is through the discovery of a niche or a previously unexploited market. Still, few business people, and even fewer musicians, would have believed that there was a market for the sound of the melodica. What next, they would have sniggered, a yazoo? Yet Augustus Pablo would take this child’s toy and launch a revolution in Jamaican music. Not only was Pablo’s melodica unique, it would sweep the entire island’s scene and become an integral part of the music of the era. But Pablo was no one-trick pony, he was also a virtuoso keyboardist and his playing permeated the island across myriad of his own releases and as a session man for others. He was equally talented on the other side of the recording desk and his production work was as inspired as his playing.
Augustus Pablo was born Horace Swaby on June 21, 1954, in St. Andrew, Jamaica. He attended Kingston College (not a college in the American sense, but a high school), sneaking into the school’s chapel with other musically inclined friends to practice on the organ. It was here at Kingston College where Swaby also made the connections that would help launch him into the music industry. Amongst his classmates was Clive Chin, whose family ran Randy’s, Kingston’s premier record store. The Chin clan included Herman Chin Loy, a cousin of Leslie Kong, and who started his own career in the music industry by working for his famous cousin. Like many small ethnic enclaves around the world, Jamaica’s vibrant Chinese community often intermarried and thus businesses and families often intertwined. Chin Loy had struck out on his own in 1969, setting up his own record store and label, both called Aquarius. Thus in 1970, when the 15- year-old Swaby decided the time was ripe to begin his own musical career, Aquarius was his first stop. The fact that the teen was a friend of Clive Chin insured that he was given an audition, but it was his keyboard work that convinced Chin Loy to take him into the studio. The upbeat “Iggy Iggy” was the result of their first session and was credited to Augustus Pablo, a moniker Chin Loy frequently employed on his studio’s instrumentals.
YES YES PABLO.
Over the next year, Pablo (the teen soon took the name as his own), cut several more singles for Chin Loy, “Still Yet,” “The Mood,” and “Snowball & Pudding,” amongst them. But it was “East of the River Nile” that had the most startling impact. The instrumental featured a duet between Pablo’s melodica and Glen Adam’s organ, set to a seething rhythm the producer had bought from Lee Perry. Its haunting Oriental-esque melody ignited a fire on the island and launched the Far Eastern style. Minor key melodies surged from the grooves and the exotic now found a home in the Caribbean. Pablo briefly joined Mikey Chung’s band, Now Generation, as keyboardist. Meanwhile, his old schoolmate Clive Chin was now working for the family business as a producer. (He had big shoes to fill, his older brother Vincent had made his mark producing such superstars as Alton Ellis and the Skatalites). Now that Clive was set up, Pablo left Now Generation and joined his friend in the studio. Their first fruits, in a round about way, was the seminal “Java.” Chin was already at work with another one of their schoolfriends Dennis Wright, the song’s rhythm tracks were done but Wright was having trouble with the vocals and Chin decided to leave if for the day. Then Pablo entered the studio. While waiting in the hall, he’d come up with a melody line and suggested trying it out. Chin turned the tape recorder back on, Pablo picked up his melodica, and the rest is history. “Java” was a smash and the rhythm was one of the most influential of the day, versioned almost into oblivion. It was the beginning of an incredibly successful partnership, as Chin and Pablo recorded a stream of hits. It was a busy time as aside from recording with Chin, Pablo was also cutting singles for a number of other producers. He helped another member of the Chin clan, Clive’s uncle, Leonard Chin, launch his Santic label with “Pablo in Dub.” Santic provided Pablo with his first opportunity to have a go at production, and he debuted with Paul Whiteman/Blackman’s single “Say So.” Pablo continued recording for other producers, joining Lee Perry for “Hot and Cold,” linking with Gussie Clarke for “No Entry” and “Born to Dub You,” cuttinh “Fat Baby” and “the Killer” for Keith Hudson, and hooking up with Bunny Lee for “The Great Pablo” and “Pablo’s Desire.” The latter track, a version of John Holt’s “My Desire,” was another smash hit.
Pablo’s partnership with Lee was particularly fruitful and he cut numerous instrumental B-side version for the producer, nine of which are featured alongside their vocal or DJ A-sides, on the Ras compilation Pablo & Friends. Pablo had already come to the conclusion that no matter how big the hit nor how many sessions he played on, he would see little of the actual returns. Thus, he and his brother set up their own label, Rockers. The name was taken from the siblings sound system, which was already up and running. Over time, other imprints followed, Hot Stuff, Pablo International, Rockers International, and Message. Initially, Pablo’s singles for his own label were instrumental versions of Studio One classics. “Skanking Easy,” “Frozen Dub,” “Don Drummond,” “Pablo’s Theme Song,” and many more followed in re-creating songs of yore. And there’s no doubt about the influence the studio’s superb musicians had had on the young Swaby. Many of these song were less versions than tributes to these talented men. The U.K. label Greensleeves would bundle up many of the best self-productions from these early days for the Original Rockers compilation. Yet some of Pablo’s best work was still being done with Clive Chin. In 1974, Chin and another family member, Pat Chin, oversaw Pablo’s classic album Rebel Rock Reggae — This Is Augustus Pablo. A masterpiece of mood and atmosphere, the instrumentals swing across the musical spectrum from Hollywood musicals to classic Jamaican hits. The album is actually a compilation and rounded up much of the artist’s recent work for the Chin family, including his two earlier singles for Leonard. The following year, Pablo began collaborating with King Tubby, who had begun supplying Rockers with some of the label’s most sublime mixes. The pair christened their partnership with Ital Dub, which was produced by Tommy Cowan and Warwick Lyn (another former employee of Leslie Kong). This album remains one of the most innovative of the decade. Fifteen years later, the U.K. label Pressure Drop gathered up alternative versions and outtakes from the Ital sessions for El Rockers, an album that sounds nearly as formidable as Ital Dub itself.
1975 also saw Pablo make an equally big splash as a producer, when Fred Locks’ “Black Star Liner” became an instant hit in Jamaica and also made significant inroads in the U.K. With the single’s success, Pablo now became a much sought-after producer, and worked with many of the island’s greatest names. He sat behind the desk on sessions with Horace Andy, Freddie McKay, Jacob Miller, and I-Roy, amongst many others. An album’s worth of his productions were showcased on 1976’s King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown album, one of the era’s most legendary dub albums. Many of Rockers’ releases featured phenomenal dub companions, including Africa Must Be Free by 1983 (Hugh Mandel), One Step Dub (Junior Delgado), and Eastman Dub (the companion to Tetrack’s Let’s Get Started). Pablo returned the favor by recording exclusive cuts for King Tubby’s sound system. Over the years, both Rockers itself, as well as other labels, have released excellent compilations of the label’s greatest moments. The U.K. label Greensleeves’ Classic Rockers is of particular note. For rarities, check out Golden Memories, released by Rockers. Of course, Pablo was equally in demand as a session player and he appears on scores of albums from this period, playing keyboard, melodica, or both. As a musical force, he was unstoppable.
PABLO.
JAVA.
1978 brought the fabulous East of the River Nile album, which was recorded at Lee Perry’s Black Ark studio. Meanwhile, Pablo took his place on the other side of the board for a trio of singles with the young singer Hugh Mandell (aka Jah Levi). This partnership then expanded and Pablo joined his young protégé on record for both the Africa Must Be Free by 1983 and Time and Place albums. However, the shift in musical tastes in the early ’80s saw Pablo’s flame begin to flicker. He continued recording prodigiously both behind and in front of the recording deck and released numerous singles and a number of albums. 1982 saw the appearance of Earth’s Rightful Ruler; in the States, Shanachie released Rockers Meets King Tubby in a Fire House, a fine album which paired Pablo, Tubby, and Prince Jammy for a wild ride through classic rocker and cultural offerings. By 1986, the artist’s star was in the ascendant again, helped by the release of his own Rising Sun album, and his production of Junior Delgado’s Raggamuffin Year album and its attendant smash-hit title-track single. A phenomenal dub album of the set appeared four years later. These successes prompted Island Records to strike a deal with Rockers to distribute a number of the label’s 12″ singles. Although the arrangement didn’t last long, it did see an international release for singles from Junior Delgado, Delroy Wilson, Carlton Hones, and a pair of Pablo’s own — “Eastern Promise” and “Sukiyaki.” This inevitably led to an international tour the next year for his debut appearances outside the island, which was captured for posterity on the Live in Tokyo album. Back in Jamaica, 1987 had also seen the release of Rockers Comes East, a stunning set that created quite a stir at the time as Pablo took his own sound squarely into the digital age.
1990 brought Blowing With the Wind, which found the artist shifting direction yet again with the addition of nyahbingi drum beats and Johnny Moore’s trumpet. As the decade deepened, Pablo remained a stalwart of the scene by producing a number of hit records, including such classics as Dawn Penn’s “Night and Day” and Yami Bolo’s sublime “Jah Made Them All” album. He also continued to release his own music, guest star on other’s records, and oversee his back catalog, which remained in demand. What’s truly miraculous was that Pablo managed to keep up this pace for so long. His health had always been very delicate due to a nerve disorder he suffered for much of his life. On May 18, 1999, his body finally gave out; he was only 40. However, although the artist may be gone, his legacy is in no danger of fading away. Compilations of both his own work and his productions appear with astonishing regularity, and it’s difficult to find an album from the late ’70s that he did not guest star on. His importance to Jamaica’s music scene can be seen by the numerous stars who appeared at a tribute concert held a year after his death that included some of the island’s greatest DJs, singers, and musicians.
(Jo-Anne Green at http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=11:zneb97yjkrdt~T1)
YES YES PABLO…GIVE THANX!
YOU WERE A FRIEND, MENTOR, SMOKING IDREN NOT JUST TO ME BUT EVERYONE IN OUR CREW. YOUR TUNES LIVE FOR IVER & IVER!!!…DODGER aka SEAN .R.
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