Pulphead: Essays

by Sullivan, John Jeremiah

  There’s more to it, though. The reason the great Jamaican stuff deepens over time, over years, not with nostalgia but with meaning and nuance, is that it’s a spiritual music. That’s the anomaly underlying its power. It’s spiritual pop—not in a calculated way, like Christian rock, but in a way that comes from within. Rastafarianism, when it seized Kingston’s emerging record industry as a means for expressing its existence and point of view, made this possible. In the States, rock ’n’ roll is always on some level a move away from God into the devil’s music, but in Jamaica the cultural conditions were different. Pop grew toward Jah.

  Getting in touch with Bunny turned out not surprisingly to be hard (he’s known for his reclusiveness). E-mail addresses gave back replies from other people saying to e-mail different addresses, call different numbers. Finally, at one point, I got a message. Unexpectedly it came directly from him. It said, You may come. Actually, the language of the e-mail was “Greetings. You may continue with your travel arrangements. One Love, Jah B.” The name that came up on the in-box was Neville Livingston, Bunny’s real name (Neville O’Reilly Livingston).

  Since then there’d been absolute silence. For all I knew, the invitation had come from some stoned joker in Denmark. Also, I’d seen things saying that Bunny moves back and forth between Kingston and a farm in the mountains. What if I got there and he was somewhere in the interior, inaccessible?

  * * *

  Llewis (sic) picked me up at the airport. We’d spoken several times beforehand, via phone. Someone recommended him to me as a person who knew Kingston. For some reason, Llewis hadn’t wanted to hold a sign for me in baggage claim. Not that I requested it, but it would have been easiest. Instead, he instructed me to approach the dispatch girls, in yellow vests, and tell them I was looking for him; they’d show me where he was. I went up to them.

  “There he is,” they said, pointing outside to a tall guy who seemed younger than he’d sounded. White polo shirt, shades. Getting closer, I noticed he had a sign after all. Someone else’s name was on it.

  “Hi, Llewis?” I said.

  “John?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  He put down the sign. “I was just holding that for a friend,” he said, “doing him an honor.”

  Yet he carried the sign to the parking lot. Llewis never explained the no-sign/wrong-sign muddle in a way that made any sense, nor how he’d come to have two l’s at the front of his name, a question to which he simply refused to speak. I left Jamaica still curious about those things. They were the only two enigmas of that sort, however. At all other times he made conspicuous efforts at straightforwardness. I recommend his services to anyone visiting Kingston. (P.S. He later sent me a message saying his mother had seen it spelled that way in a book, though other people told him it was an error; “LOL, I love it even if it’s an error,” he wrote.)

  We climbed into a white box-van, for which he apologized, saying his good car had been in the shop but would be out tomorrow. I didn’t mind the van, though; it gave a clear vantage point from which to see Kingston, passing through jerking freeze-frames of brightly colored intersections. Llewis had been doing research and knew the locations of certain places that dealt in secondhand vinyl records. He introduced me to some stuff from the early eighties I’d never heard. We listened to Papa Michigan and General Smiley’s “Diseases” from 1982. It was lyrically disturbing and musically thrilling. It warned all those who would “worship vanities” that “these things unto Jah Jah not pleases.” If you’re intent on pursuing them anyway,

  Mind Jah lick you with diseases!

  I said the most dangerous diseases.

  I talkin’ like the elephantitis.

  The other one is the poliomyelitis.

  It was summer. The gas-and-garbage smell of the city, the starkness of Kingston’s industrial shoreline, made you alert. The humidity was so high it made the atmosphere sag, like the clouds were on your shoulders. The way General Smiley said “poliomyelitis” was beautiful somehow; he pronounced it like polya, polyamyelitis.

  Llewis hadn’t seemed fazed at all by the idea that a person would come to Jamaica looking for Bunny Wailer with no concept of where he lived and only the vaguest intimation of interest or consent on Bunny’s part. For all Llewis reacted, it was as if I’d told him I was there to look into import/export opportunities. He’d seen Bunny perform at a festival in the city two years before and found him still electrifying. Bunny looks more and more like a desert father onstage, with his robes and white beard. Llewis quoted a talk-poem he had delivered to the crowd, something about those who want to take the fruit of reggae but don’t want to water the root of reggae.

  If you had been to Kingston, it would have seemed changed. “I’ve never seen it like this,” Llewis said. “It was never like this.” People had their heads down; you could see that the city’s psychic burden had been increased by the violence of what they already called “Bloody May.”

  What happened is this: A wave of violent gun battles overtook inner-city Kingston, creating a state of internal siege. The U.S. Department of Justice had filed an extradition request asking Jamaica’s prime minister, Bruce Golding, to hand over the island’s biggest and most powerful drug boss, Christopher Coke (real name). They call him Dudus, which I’d been hearing on the news as Dude-us, but Llewis informed me it’s pronounced Dud-us. “Dude-us would be the fancy version,” he said. “Too fancy.”

  A short, thick, somewhat pan-faced man who keeps a low profile and always seems to be smiling at an inward joke, Dudus is loved by thousands for his Santa Claus qualities when it comes to helping cover the rent or making sure soccer teams get jerseys. According to the FBI, his gang, the Shower Posse, has fourteen hundred (known) murders attached to it.

  The Jamaicans felt no great desire to go after Dudus. Jamaican politics is fantastically corrupt, and plenty of ministers had ties to him. Golding tried wishing it away, even hiring an American law firm to lobby against the request, but eventually Washington applied pressure.

  Coke gathered his forces, calling in fighters from all over Jamaica, small-time mercenaries from the country who were good with guns. Finally the police and security forces went in to extract him. He had snipers on the rooftops. He had CCTV cameras everywhere, spies among the police and in the ministry. The battle lasted a month. Scores of people were killed, including many civilians—we don’t know how many, since the government in all likelihood significantly downplayed the total, desperately trying to save the shreds of the year’s all-important tourist economy.

  It ended in farce. Dudus got stopped at a roadblock on a highway outside Kingston. The man driving was his spiritual adviser. They claimed they were on their way to the U.S. embassy so Dudus could turn himself in, but to the Americans, not the Jamaicans. Dudus had a black, curly woman’s wig on his head and a soft black Gucci cap on top of that and wore old lady’s wire-rim glasses. Some said the police dressed him up this way for the mug shot, to make him look weak and to discourage his still-loyal fighters, but it’s likely he was using the disguise to get around. One of the soldiers present said later that Dudus had seemed strangely happy when they were cuffing him. He’d been so certain they’d kill him that when he realized it would go down legit, he experienced a rush of relief. Now he was in New York, having pleaded not guilty.

  One of the most cryptic things that happened during the buildup to the Dudus war was that Bunny Wailer put out a pro-Dudus dancehall record titled “Don’t Touch the President.” (President, or Pressy, is one of Dudus’s many nicknames.)

  Don’t touch the president, inna di residen’.

  We confident, we say him innocent.

  Don’t touch the Robin Hood, up inna neighborhood

  Because him take the bad, and turn it into good.

  Why would an elder statesman of Jamaican culture take the side of these crowds they were showing on TV, in the streets of Kingston, screaming and putting themselves in the way of justice? (The international news cameras had zer
oed in on a nuts-seeming woman with a handwritten cardboard sign comparing Dudus to Jesus Christ, and this was rebroadcast in a hundred countries for weeks as a typical expression of Caribbean chaos.)

  Traffic was thick now. Llewis turned up the crappy radio in the van as we moved toward the hotel. The DJ played a song called “Slow Motion” by Vybz Kartel, probably the hottest dancehall singer in Jamaica right now. At that moment, Vybz was in jail, suspected (in the vaguest terms) of having gotten involved in Dudus-related violence. “But we’re hoping he’ll get out soon,” said Llewis as he drove. “Maybe this Friday.” This was the music Llewis loved best, not the old stuff (which he knew and respected). If the Wailers were playing now, this is what they’d be into. A young couple in a car next to us grinned and bobbed their heads to it as we rolled by. I’d never been wild about dancehall, but now I realized it was because I’d never really heard dancehall. You can’t just “listen” to dancehall. It happens; you have to be there for it. The DJ was mixing together three or four different songs. Kartel’s hypnotic voice floated over the top of beats that would suddenly vanish, leaving only spacey bass-throbs, as the words kept running. “So this is now?” I asked. “Right?” “This is right now,” Llewis said, stabbing his finger at the radio. “This is Right. Now.”

  At the hotel, I downloaded “Slow Motion.” It was somewhat limp, in this version. It sounded like a karaoke mix of what we’d heard in the car. Vybz did not live on the computer. He was in the air over Kingston.

  * * *

  I called Bunny. “Yes,” the voice said. Not “Yes?” Yes. “Mr. Wailer?” (What else was one supposed to say? I wasn’t about to call him Jah B.) We talked for a bit. “We can do this,” he said. He gave me an address, a few blocks off one of the main boulevards, not a particularly upscale part of Kingston. We set a time. “Bless,” he said.

  I passed out listening to a song that had been on a loop in my head in the weeks leading up to that trip, “Let Him Go,” a song Bunny wrote in 1966, when Bob Marley was off in Delaware working as an assistant in a DuPont laboratory and going by the name Donald. It’s a Rude Boy number, one in a series of songs and answer-songs that took over the Jamaican sound systems between 1965 and ’67. Rudies, as the growing numbers of reckless youths who terrorized and fascinated middle-class Kingston were called, had become a national menace. Half the major ska stars weighed in with a message. There were pro–Rude Boy songs, anti–Rude Boy songs, and songs that weren’t clearly one thing or another. With the whole island paying attention, a focused competitiveness (never lacking in Jamaican music) elevated the songwriting. Many classic songs resulted.

  None of them is quite on a level with “Let Him Go,” the one Bunny Livingston wrote. The backing band included a few of the Skatalites, moonlighting. They laid down a buoyant, brassy rhythm that had just a little tug at the end, a little slur, a groove that, listening back, was transitional between ska and rocksteady. When I hear it start, I feel like a puck on an air-hockey table that’s been switched on. Ooo-ooo-ooo-ooo, the voices add to one another in layers, building a chord that becomes final right before they break into

  Rudie come from jail ’cause Rudie get bail.

  Rudie come from jail ’cause Rudie get bail.

  There’s a sound on that recording, a vocalized So! right between the ninety-ninth and one-hundredth seconds: the Wailers, defending Rudie as always, have just sung, Remember he is young, and he will live long. And then someone—you can’t tell who—makes this noise. Intones, rather. It doesn’t seem to come from inside the studio—doesn’t belong, that is, to the texture of the session; it emanates from miles away and has arrived through an open window. Somewhere in the interior of Jamaica a goat herder with a staff has leaned back and loosed this sound into a valley, intending it for no ears but Jah’s. Soooo!—the vowel fading quickly without an echo, pure life force. Was that Bunny doing that?

  Llewis arrived twenty minutes early the next morning, and he did have the nice car, a blue Toyota model you don’t often see in the States, somehow German-looking, which turned out to be appropriate, because one thing I’d learned about Llewis and would have occasion to learn better over coming days was that he passionately supported Germany’s national soccer team and, no matter what else he was doing, avidly followed their unimpeded progress in the World Cup with half his brain. He was perhaps the only person in Jamaica who felt like that. He talked all about them, about their teamwork, as we drove around.

  I asked him if he wanted to sit in on the interview with Bunny. “Sure,” he said. “It might loosen him up.”

  “You think I’ll make him uptight?” I said.

  “He’s pretty reclusive, right?” Llewis replied diplomatically.

  Bunny lived in an area with only every fourth or fifth road sign intact. I was keeping my finger on the map while Llewis counted lefts, U-turning around till we found the curving lane that had to be his. It looked like Cuba, but more drab. The roads were viciously rutted. The houses were miniature compounds; everybody who could had high walls with glass shards or wire on top. Inside, however, there might be civility, shade, nice colors. You didn’t want to show any of that.

  I won’t say I was shocked to find that Bunny Wailer lived in a poor area. It wasn’t a slum, and he has always preferred to live humbly. (When he ditched the Wailers’ first world tour in 1973 over disagreements about the direction of the band, he famously went and lived in a ramshackle cabin by the beach, surviving on fish from the sea and writing songs.) Still, the degree of shabbiness surprised me, and Llewis remarked on it, too. How long has Bunny Wailer’s music—songs that he participated in making—been in every dorm room, every coffee shop, and he was driving an aged and dusty Japanese sedan? That was serious baldhead math.

  There were two tall corrugated-metal gates with giant Rastafarian lions on them that parted creakily to let you in. A tin sign hung on one. It read, JAH B WILL BE AWAY UNTIL MARCH 15TH. It was July 6. I was guessing he didn’t mind the overall message. He was standing there in the courtyard, small and every bit as wiry as he is in the well-known picture of him playing soccer, dreadlocked and shirtless. He had on an excellent brown collarless suit that looked like something Sammy Davis, Jr., would have worn to a hip party in 1970. His beard was long, wispy, and yellowish white. He wore his dreads swirled atop his head into a crown and kept in place with bands.

  He greeted us with great politeness but seemed not to want to waste time. He addressed Llewis as “Soldier”! He’d put out chairs for us under a lime tree. His wife, Jean Watt, a gracefully aged woman, brought out orange juice, saying, “Bless, bless.”

  “Well,” I began. “It’s an honor to meet you.”

  “Well, it’s an honor to be here, on the earth,” he said. “You know what I mean? So we at one. What’s up with you, now?”

  One was intimidated, but not in a way that felt inappropriate. That was Bunny Wailer, who taught Bob Marley what harmony was. When we’d come in, I had asked if we could maybe take him to lunch, anywhere he liked. Llewis had warned me to say specifically that it would be an “ital” restaurant, one that served food appropriate for Rastas. “Thanks,” Bunny answered, pausing, “but … the Blackheart Man is very skeptical. He’d rather eat from his own pot.”

  The notebook read, “No. 1, ask him about what’s happening now, the stuff with Dudus,” but we hadn’t even gotten through the turning-on-the-recorders part when Bunny embarked on an hour-long, historically footnoted breakdown of exactly how the Dudus crisis had come about, tracing it back to the birth of the garrisons in the sixties.

  In order to understand anything about Jamaica and why it’s statistically one of the most violent places on earth, you have to know something about garrisonism, the unique system by which the island’s government functions. Before you turn away in anticipation of boredom, let me say that you may find yourself intrigued by the sheer fact that something this twisted is occurring on a U.S.-friendly island five hundred miles from our coast. Garrisonism has been describe
d—in a Jamaican report put out by a specially convened panel—as “political tribalism.” (Bunny called it “a political tribal massacre” in his classic “Innocent Blood” thirty years ago.) The history of garrisonism can be supercrudely summarized as follows. In the 1960s, the island’s two rival parties—the liberal People’s National Party (PNP) and the conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP), Jamaica’s version of Democrats and Republicans—started putting up housing projects in Kingston’s poorest neighborhoods. Once the buildings were up, whichever party had built them moved in its own trustworthy supporters and kicked anybody who didn’t want to vote their way out of the neighborhood. Families and groups of friends were shattered. Children had to change schools because their old school’s party affiliation had shifted. Many of these displaced ended up in squatters’ camps.

  When it was all a question of local island politics, nobody much cared, just as nobody much cares today outside Jamaica about the situation there, or didn’t until Dudus went rogue. Things changed, however, in the seventies, when Michael Manley, the PNP leader, expressed sympathy with Castro. The CIA was terrified about Cuban communism spreading to the other Caribbean islands. It backed the Reaganite JLP leader, Edward Seaga. Now there were more, and more serious, guns flowing into the garrisons. It was Manley against Seaga, socialism against capitalism, PNP against JLP, with the garrisons pitted against one another, fighting on behalf of their parties for control of the island. Kingston emerged as a miniature front in the Cold War.

  Only in the eighties did drug running enrich certain dons to the point that they no longer needed the state as much. The garrisons were becoming quasi-states. The dons could afford their own guns; they could supply forces. They started dictating terms to the ministers. That is, if the ministers still wanted all the thousands of votes the dons controlled.