The Songs
Lazer Beam - Don Carlos - Lazer Beam came out of a 1983 session produced by Bunny Lee with the Aggrovators and Sly and Robbie playing the riddim track. Don Carlos founded the stellar reggae group Black Uhuru in 1974 and left the band after one single to perform with a band called Gold. The 12 tracks recorded from the Bunny Lee sessions were the best work Don Carlos recorded in his post Black Uhuru years primarily because of Bunny Lee's minimalist dubwise production values.
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War - Wailing Souls- War was the Wailing Souls' 1976 epistle against violence in the Jamaican national elections. "War in the East, war in the West, rumors of war." Rumors swirled through the streets insisting the guns were supplied by the CIA, a charge later confirmed by numerous witnesses. As the carnage rose, fears grew of a U.S.-sponsored coup. That was untrue, but with the fall of the Allende's government in Chile still fresh in people's minds, the fear was real, and the violence seemingly unstoppable.
"War only bring destruction," the trio insisted, and so it proved. By the time the PNP swept the elections in December, over 100 Jamaicans lay dead, and much of the inner city ghetto had turned to ashes. Beyond the island, too, havoc reigned. 1976 was a blood strewn year, and the Souls also refer specifically to the terror raging in Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe).
This is the original 12" single of War with dub. The toaster sounds uncannily like U-Roy but in reality it was a 16 year old protege of U-Roy's named Ranking Trevor (Trevor Grant). Trevor was was a major force in the sound systems on both sides of the Atlantic during the roots age. Most of his recordings remain infuriatingly out of print, and his singles and albums, now with hefty price tags attached, are much sought after by collectors.
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Police in Helicopter- John Holt- Police in Helicopter was a militant anthem in response to the crackdown on herbs cultivation by the Jamaican police and the CIA in the early Eighties.
In 1983 the Reagan CIA used crop dusters to spray a defoliant called paraquat with crop dusters to kill the marijuana crop. Later Jamaican drug agents showed up to burn the remains of the defoliated marijuana crop.
The paraquat defoliation of the herbs crop caused a great deal of hardship on the island. The spraying was not only killing herbs crop, but also killed the bread fruit, banana and coconut harvest which are staples of a poor person's diet in Jamaica. I was in St. Ann's parish that year and personally witnessed the damage the paraquat spraying did to the food supply in the hills. You never heard about the epidemic of starvation in the bush and the hills of Jamaica because of the Reagan era paraquat spraying policy.
Back in the 80s when Jamaicans were complaining about the paraquat spraying by the CIA, the Reagan State Department officials ridiculed those claims, insinuating that the complainers were a bunch of paranoid Rastafarians who were high on marijuana. By 1990, Freedom of Information Act requests by journalists actually proved that the Reagan CIA actually did underwrite paraquat spraying of the herbs crop in the Eighties...Jah know know.
Police In Helicopter was the ubiquitous song of the moment in 1983 in all the Jamaican dancehalls. Holt's defiant tone, threatening toward the herbs burning agents with militant retaliation, "If you continue to burn up the herbs, we're going to burn down the cane fields." It was an invocation of the Maroon rebellions in the days of slavery. Runaway outlaw slaves often hid out in the mountains but returned under the cover of darkness to burn the fields of their former British masters just before the sugar cane harvest during the Maroon rebellion.
It was produced by Henry Junjo Laws and the Roots Radics are the session band.
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There are two types of music: the first type is the blues and the second type is all the other stuff.
Townes Van Zandt
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