Duff Review: RSD Drop #1/Two of Two Releases from Jump Up Records: Skanking Lizard "Original Chicago Reggae, 1978-1996"

(Review by Steve Shafer)

In the fall of 1985, I was a freshman at a small, liberal arts college about an hour south of Cleveland, in a town surrounded by cornfields in all directions. I ended up there because just about everyone I was related to on both sides of my family had attended that school (some also went on to teach there) and I was at a point in my life when I had no idea what I wanted to do. So, it was simply the path of least resistance. Fortunately, I became good friends with some kids from Rochester and Cleveland who were into many of the same new wave, punk, and post punk bands as I was, like The Cure, Yaz, Cocteau Twins, Simple Minds (Sons and Fascination/Sister Feelings Call through Sparkle in the Rain), Killing Joke, Roxy Music, Bauhaus, Husker Dü, and Black Flag--and everyone seemed to have a copy of Bob Marley's Legend.

One warm Saturday in October, there was a music festival in a field just outside of town that was sponsored by one of the hippie pseudo-frat/off-campus houses as part of their pledge week. Since one of our friends was pledging, a bunch of us tagged along and the beer truck kept us entertained while we endured a series of endlessly noodly Grateful Dead-inspired bands (one of my friends decided to trip on 'shrooms and when I asked him how he was doing, he replied that everything was "spherical"; I mention this, as there's more on mushrooms below). Then, seemingly out of nowhere--and we really were in the middle of nowhere--a reggae band from Cleveland called First Light started playing. And they were really good, performing a mix of their own originals and covers. I was so thrilled by their set that I practically bum rushed the stage at the end of their set to tell them how much I enjoyed their show and to buy a shirt. They told me about their new 12" EP Musical Uprising, which I ended up buying on a trip up to Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights (their abridged version of NYC's West Village)--I still have it (check out "Musical Uprising" and "Holdback Syndrome"/"Movin' On"). And my friend C.H.U.D. (a cruel nickname given to him by some football players in our dorm that he wore like a badge of honor) and I wanted more, so we caught First Light again at Peabody's Down Under in The Flats in Cleveland later that semester. 

In high school, I had seen Peter Tosh, Black Uhuru, and UB40 (multiple times) at the Pier 84 concerts in Manhattan on the Hudson River. But I was hearing fantastic, original, American reggae in the middle of a cornfield in conservative, white bread (and very white) OHIO. My belabored point here is that the first generation of American reggae bands sometimes sprouted in unlikely places far from the Coasts, like Cleveland, Chicago, and Kansas City. If you were paying attention, you could find them (just like the first US ska bands that cropped up in the wake of 2 Tone). Inspired by The Harder They Come film and soundtrack, Bob Marley's Catch a Fire and subsequent LPs and US tours (First Light's Carlos Jones saw Marley in Cleveland in '78), United Artist Records' Anthology of Reggae Collectors Series, and whatever Trojan and Virgin Front Line UK imports they could get their hands on, a slew of American reggae acts formed in the mid-to-late '70s, including Berkeley's The Shakers, Kansas City's Blue Riddim Band, NYC's Terrorists, and Chicago's Skanking Lizard. 

As part of their series of releases devoted to Chicago-area ska and reggae pioneers (Heavy Manners, Rude Guest), Jump Up Records has issued a fine new compilation of rare and unreleased recordings from Chicago's first live reggae act Skanking Lizard--who opened for Toots and the Maytals, Mighty Diamonds, Steel Pulse, and The B-52's back in the day--titled Original Chicago Reggae, 1978-1996. Up until now, Skanking Lizard's sole release was their excellent 1983 "Jesse James" b/w "Mushroom" single on their own Reptile Records (which made it into the top 40 in JA). Side A is not a Laurel Aitken cover, but the band's original tune on the same topic, while the flip is a great version of Johnny Osbourne's slightly odd anti-psychedelics/pro-ganja cut ("The only thing the dawtas asking for all night/Was a stalk of mushroom--what is that, my gosh/Don’t want no mushroom to go to my head/Gimme the good sinsemilla instead/Don’t pee in my garden/'Cause mushroom will grow/Don’t pee in my garden/I don’t want your mushroom to grow/Sensimilla--that's I want to grow!"). The other two tracks to see light of day on the comp are from singer Alan "Blood" Lery's 1984 solo EP Heart Full of Soul (which hit it big on the Canadian charts): Lery's great original "It Happened" and a terrific cover of The Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul." Of note, the instrumental tracks were produced by Jimmy Becker (of Blue Riddim Band, who had been in the earliest version of Skanking Lizard) and recorded in JA at Channel One with local musicians including Ansell Collins, Carlton "Santa" Davis, Noel "Scully" Sims, as well as Blue Riddim Band's guitarist Howard Yukon--and Lery added his vocals in a studio in Chicago. 

The unreleased Skanking Lizard tracks on the album were recorded at various points throughout the '80s and include good covers of Mighty Diamonds' "I Don't Mind" and Keith and Tex's perennial "Tonight"; the interesting Lery-penned cuts "Strange Cargo" (I think it's about coming across a drug smuggler's errant load, but it feels like Cold War dread: "A strange cargo fell out of the sky last night/Don't worry child, no reason for you to cry") and "Wear a Smile" (which encourages the listener to enjoy life while you can, as tears won't get you into heaven); and fun versions of Beat and Selecter classics ("Tears of a Clown" and "Too Much Pressure").

Skanking Lizard's Original Chicago Reggae, 1978-1996 will be prized by fans who caught the band in the '70s and '80s--and is essential for anyone interested in nascent days of the American reggae scene.

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"I Don't Have a Say in the War Games That They Play"

The cover of Bonzo Goes to Washington's
"Five Minutes"

Today marks the 70th anniversary of the first use of an atomic weapon, when the U.S. detonated an atomic bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, killing 200,000 people--the vast majority of them civilians. (For a harrowing glimpse into what several of the survivors experienced on the ground, read John Hersey's extraordinary August 31, 1946 piece in The New Yorker here.) As a teenager in the Cold War 80s, I was haunted by the very real and terrifying prospect of dying in a nuclear exchange between America and the Soviet Union (movies like "The Day After" didn't help), particularly during the first years of Ronald Reagan's presidency, when he was very belligerent and aggressive towards the Russians, both in foreign/military policy and rhetoric.

I've written a bit about many of the 2 Tone ska bands' expression of fear of nuclear armageddon here on The Duff Guide to Ska before and, given today's terrible anniversary, think it appropriate to revisit this passage below from my review of Blue Riddim Band's re-issue of their "Nancy Reagan" single in 2011.

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"While we're on the subject of the Reagans and pop music, I can't help but mention the significant number of songs about the fear of nuclear war that were written during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan's hard-line rhetoric and stance against the Soviets (several neo-cons in his administration--including Dick Cheney--who were disdainful of detente, increased defense spending to such a degree and implemented provocative polices that ended up re-igniting the arms race with the Soviets, since they were convinced that America was preparing for a nuclear first strike against them), his use of end-of-days evangelical language (Reagan told now-disgraced TV preacher Jim Bakker in 1980, "We may be the generation that sees Armageddon"), and itchy-trigger gunslinger image exacerbated Cold War relations between the nuclear superpowers to such a degree that millions of people throughout Western Europe and the U.S. (and one had to imagine the Soviet Union) were very worried that they might die in a nuclear war (I certainly was one of them).

Within this context, according to Dorian Lynskey's terrific book about popular protest music, "33 Revolutions Per Minute," an additional reason that bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Specials (as well as a slew of British New Wave acts) wrote about nuclear war was the May 1980 publication and distribution of the Home Office booklet (and release of accompanying short films) titled "Protect and Survive" (read a copy of the booklet here; see one of the films here), which grimly detailed the steps the public should take to attempt to survive a nuclear attack and (if they lived through the initial blast) the radioactive fallout afterward. Lynskey notes that even though "Protect and Survive" was "designed to reassure, it proceeded to scare the daylights out of anyone who read it." This and the very real placement of U.S. cruise missiles in the UK (as part of a NATO counter-move against a new medium-range Soviet nuclear missile) convinced many Britons that they would high on the list of targets should all-out war break out between the superpowers.

Some of the songs expressing the terrible nuclear war anxiety and dread of the early 1980s included: Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes," Time Zone's "World Destruction," The Fixx's "Red Skies" and "Stand or Fall," The English Beat's "Dream Home in NZ," "Two Swords," and "Psychedelic Rockers," U2's "Seconds," Fishbone's "Party at Ground Zero," XTC's "Living Through Another Cuba," The Selecter’s “Their Dream Goes On,” The Ruts' "It Was Cold," Nena's “99 Red Balloons,” The Toasters' "Radiation Skank," Prince's "1999," The Clash's “London Calling” and "Stop the World," Alphaville’s "Forever Young," Men at Work's “It’s a Mistake,” The Specials’ "Man at C and A," Elvis Costello's "Peace in Our Time," Billy Bragg's "Help Save the Youth of America," Depeche Mode's "Two Minute Warning," Ian Dury's "Ban the Bomb," The Police's "Walking in Your Footsteps," Aku Aku's "Ground Zero," The Untouchables' "Sudden Attack," and Bonzo Goes to Washington's “5 Minutes."

These anti-nuke songs helped a lot of people cope with the stress of living with the very real possibility of doomsday--and made you feel like you weren't the only freak up late at night wondering if a Soviet ICBM was going to erase all of your tomorrows in an instant. (Around this time, I remember going to an anti-nuke event at our church and actually being able to touch a ceramic roof tile from Hiroshima that had become so hot in that atomic blast that it had formed bubbles on its surface--which were frozen in time after it cooled. I also saw photos of people who had horrific radiation burns that kept me up late at night for years. It may seem far-fetched now, but back then a lot of us really did worry about dying in a nuclear holocaust; and we were under no illusions that "duck and cover" was going to save our asses.) It also made it seem like something could be done to take some small measure of control of a completely out-of-our-control situation ("Forever Young" lyric: "Heaven can wait/we're only watching the skies/Hoping for the best/but expecting the worst/Are you going to drop the bomb or not?"), as musicians banded together for concerts supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and CND anti-nuke benefit albums like Life in the European Theatre (featuring tracks by The Clash, The Jam, The Beat, The Specials, Echo and the Bunnymen, XTC, and more). By giving voice to our collective fears and setting it to music you could dance to, these New Wave groups helped make it possible to live and even enjoy life at a time when world's leaders were unbelievably close (see Able Archer 83) to wiping us out forever."

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While the threat of nuclear war has greatly diminished since the end of the Cold War, there are approximately 10,000 nuclear weapons in various government's arsenals around the globe--and still very much to be worried about.

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Duff Review: Blue Riddim Band & Big Youth "Nancy Reagan" b/w "Nancy Reagan Remix 2011 - Voice of the People"

Rougher Records
1981/2011
7" vinyl single

(Reviewed by Steve Shafer)

Despite my burgeoning interest in reggae and ska (UB40, Peter Tosh, and all things 2 Tone) during my high school years in first half of the 1980s, I somehow missed Blue Riddim Band in their heyday (of note, they were first American reggae band to play Reggae Sunsplash in 1982--and the live recording from this event, Alive in Jamaica, was nominated for a Grammy in 1986; to this day, they remain the only American reggae band ever nominated for a "best reggae album of the year" Grammy).

Hard as it is to imagine now, back in the primitive pre-internet times, unless they played their record on WLIR (the Long Island-based alternative radio station that served as my lifeline to New Wave music), or I heard about the band through word-of-mouth, or I happened to read about them in Trouser Press (hell, even MTV was airing some pretty left-of-the-dial music videos back then), you could completely miss some incredible acts like this all-white reggae band from Kansas City, Missouri. I have to fess up to not encountering Blue Riddim Band until reading several recent posts on the band by Marco on the Bass, including one regarding their work with Ranking Roger and a more recent entry about their excellent new collaboration with Big Youth, the subject of this review.

The B side of this single is the original (and now remastered) 1981 version of "Nancy Reagan." Over an amazingly catchy roots reggae rhythm (laid down at Channel One in JA), the lyrics lampoon Mrs. Reagan, who was seen as frivolous, materialistic, detached, and aloof (her detractors mocked her as "Queen Nancy") during her first year as First Lady for renovating the White House, purchasing new White House china, and outfitting herself in very expensive designer clothing--all of this during a deep economic recession that was hurting many Americans.

Indeed, contrasted with the austere, humble, and introspective Carters, the formal and glamorous Reagans (both ex-Hollywood B movie stars) coupled with his administration's right-wing policies (which promoted "trickle-down economics," the disproved theory posited that if you focused solely on creating an environment where the rich and corporations could flourish through business deregulation and low taxes, the wealth created would somehow "trickle down" to the lower classes and take care of them as well--hmmm...taxes have been super low on the rich and corporations for the past decade and things are worse than ever for the non-rich) that decimated the social safety net at a time when unemployment was at a record high, gave their critics the strong impression that they didn't give a damn about poor and working class Americans.

In this context, the vapid, "Stepford Wives"-like depiction of Mrs. Reagan was a powerful political statement--and still has some sting left in it after all these years:

"My name is Nancy Reagan/My husband's name is Ron/He rules this nation/All my clothes come from the best designers/All my china is a perfect match."



Blue Riddim fan and boss DJ Big Youth does a wonderful job of versioning this track for the 21st century, with explicitly anti-war lyrics. On "Nancy Reagan Remix 2011 - Voice of the People," he chats:

"The voice of the people/is the voice of God/
War in the Middle East/war in the middle West/
War for the hopeless/war for the homeless/
War with the helpless/war with the needy/
War with the greedy/them a start the war/
War is not the answer/only love can conquer it/
War is not the answer/only love can conquer it..."

In particular, Big Youth connect the dots between the Reagan years and current day conflicts, particularly in the Middle East:

"It starts with Ron/and him give it to Bush/
war in the Middle East with them ancient Persians..."

If the voice of the people is the voice of God, as Big Youth toasts, then talking through the issues that divide us is the path to peace:

"Rise up people/let's have a conversation/
Rise up people/we don't want no bloody revolution."

Here's hoping that this single brings more attention to the legacy of this extraordinary American reggae band--and that Big Youth's message of love is taken to heart by all who hear it.

Duff Guide to Ska Grade: A

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While we're on the subject of the Reagans and pop music, I can't help but mention the significant number of songs about the fear of nuclear war that were written during Ronald Reagan's presidency. Reagan's hard-line rhetoric and stance against the Soviets (several neo-cons in his administration--including Dick Cheney--who were disdainful of detente, increased defense spending to such a degree and implemented provocative polices that ended up re-igniting the arms race with the Soviets, since they were convinced that America was preparing for a nuclear first strike against them), his use of end-of-days evangelical language (Reagan told now-disgraced TV preacher Jim Bakker in 1980, "We may be the generation that sees Armageddon"), and itchy-trigger gunslinger image exacerbated Cold War relations between the nuclear superpowers to such a degree that millions of people throughout Western Europe and the U.S. (and one had to imagine the Soviet Union) were very worried that they might die in a nuclear war (I certainly was one of them).

Within this context, according to Dorian Lynskey's terrific book about popular protest music, "33 Revolutions Per Minute," an additional reason that bands like Frankie Goes to Hollywood and The Specials (as well as a slew of British New Wave acts) wrote about nuclear war was the May 1980 publication and distribution of the Home Office booklet (and release of accompanying short films) titled "Protect and Survive" (read a copy of the booklet here; see one of the films here), which grimly detailed the steps the public should take to attempt to survive a nuclear attack and (if they lived through the initial blast) the radioactive fallout afterward. Lynskey notes that even though "Protect and Survive" was "designed to reassure, it proceeded to scare the daylights out of anyone who read it." This and the very real placement of U.S. cruise missiles in the UK (as part of a NATO counter-move against a new medium-range Soviet nuclear missile) convinced many Britons that they would high on the list of targets should all-out war break out between the superpowers.

Some of the songs expressing the terrible nuclear war anxiety and dread of the early 1980s included: Frankie Goes to Hollywood's "Two Tribes," Time Zone's "World Destruction," The Fixx's "Red Skies" and "Stand or Fall," The English Beat's "Dream Home in NZ," "Two Swords," The Ruts' "It Was Cold," and "Psychedelic Rockers," U2's "Seconds," Fishbone's "Party at Ground Zero," XTC's "Living Through Another Cuba," The Selecter’s “Their Dream Goes On,” Nena's “99 Red Balloons,” The Toasters' "Radiation Skank," Prince's "1999," The Clash's “London Calling” and "Stop the World," Alphaville’s "Forever Young," Men at Work's “It’s a Mistake,” The Specials’ "Man at C and A," Elvis Costello's "Peace in Our Time," Billy Bragg's "Help Save the Youth of America," Depeche Mode's "Two Minute Warning," Ian Dury's "Ban the Bomb," Aku Aku's "Ground Zero," The Police's "Walking in Your Footsteps," The Untouchables' "Sudden Attack," and Bonzo Goes to Washington's “5 Minutes."

These anti-nuke songs helped a lot of people cope with the stress of living with the very real possibility of doomsday--and made you feel like you weren't the only freak up late at night wondering if a Soviet ICBM was going to erase all of your tomorrows in an instant. It also made it seem like something could be done to take some small measure of control of a completely out-of-our-control situation ("Forever Young" lyric: "Heaven can wait/we're only watching the skies/Hoping for the best/but expecting the worst/Are you going to drop the bomb or not?"), as musicians banded together for concerts supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and CND anti-nuke benefit albums like Life in the European Theatre (featuring tracks by The Clash, The Jam, The Beat, The Specials, Echo and the Bunnymen, XTC, and more). By giving voice to our collective fears and setting it to music you could dance to, these New Wave groups helped make it possible to live and even enjoy life at a time when world's leaders were unbelievably close (see Able Archer 83) to wiping us out forever.