Lee Scratch Perry's Black Ark Studio - Kingston, Jamaica 1978. Photo / Supplied
Lee Scratch Perry's Black Ark Studio - Kingston, Jamaica 1978. Photo / Supplied
Jamaican reggae producer Lee 'Scratch' Perry was profoundly influential on Bob Marley's sound and global success. On the eve of Marley's birthday, February 6, Garth Cartwright talks with journalist David Katz about a new biography on the enigmatic creator.
Lee "Scratch" Perry was a character like no other. The visionaryJamaican singer/producer/eccentric died suddenly in 2021 aged 85 and the tributes were fulsome. Understandably, as Perry played a major role in shaping reggae and dub (alongside helping Bob Marley), his approach to recording sound being more akin to how a visual artist – say Dali or Picasso – approached their work: cutting and pasting, manipulating elements, playful yet disorientating, following his wild imagination rather than commercial convention. By emphasising the recording studio as another musical instrument, Perry's legacy can be heard everywhere from Massive Attack to Fat Freddy's Drop. But who was he? This man who stuck splintered CDs and shattered glass to his cap and boots, used oil paints instead of hair dye and, on occasion, balanced a large electric heater on his head when in the recording studio? Who planted records in his garden and would talk in riddles when addressing audiences and interviewers?
Jamaican reggae 'king' Bob Marley in Amsterdam, in 1976. Lee Perry had a profound impact on Marley's sound and global success. Photo / Getty Images
A restless creator, from the early 1960s through to 2021, Perry never stopped chasing the sounds he heard in his head. He was also a seasoned performer – regularly touring the world (visiting New Zealand three times between 1999 and 2005) – playing up the image of himself as a psychedelic Jamaican shaman. Perry could be lazy, both on stage and in the studio: among his huge output of recordings there are plenty of uninspired albums; one of these, Jamaican E.T., won the Grammy for Best Reggae Album in 2003! Yet Perry's best work continues to influence new generations of listeners.
Which is why People Funny Boy: The Genius Of Lee 'Scratch' Perry is essential reading for anyone interested in a true musical maverick. Written by London-based American journalist, David Katz, this is an insightful biography. Just published, it's not a cash-in on Perry's death – Katz was working on its final chapters when Perry died of unspecified causes on August 29. This is the third edition of a biography first published in 2000, then again in 2006. Each time Katz has taken his book to a different publisher and considerably updated it – for the new edition he's entirely rewritten the text, his closeness to Perry meaning he brings his own understanding of a man few could truly say they knew well. I met the author in London after he returned from a winter sun holiday in the Caribbean and wondered how this odd couple – Jamaican/American, black/white, young/old, eccentric/rational – came to be.
"As a student in San Francisco in 1983, I started writing about music in a magazine called Wiring Department," says Katz. "After Lee Perry released an album titled Battle of Armagideon - Millionaire Liquidator, I wrote an article about the album, emphasising the song Introducing Myself, where he rails against the Queen and Margaret Thatcher. In January 1987 I had just landed to London and, when I found out that Perry was living in London, I arranged to interview him for Wiring Department. We met but never got around to the interview that night, because Perry was too busy doing his rituals – these included standing on alternate legs while blowing marijuana smoke through a wooden flute he placed in the corresponding nostril.
Jamaican reggae musician, singer and producer Lee 'Scratch' Perry performs at Poppodium De Flux, Zaandam, Netherlands, 2018. (Photo / Getty Images/Redferns
"He took away a copy of the magazine with my article about the Battle of Armagideon LP in it. The next day I received a telephone call and was summoned to the studio he was working at, where I was put through an obscure initiation ritual. With that, Lee Perry appointed me his 'ghost writer'. He had apparently been searching for a writer to help him with his autobiography and, after reading my article, decided I was the one to write his book. It did not matter how much I protested that there were surely other writers better suited to the task; Perry understood I was the ghost writer. I later understood that he lived in a whimsical universe where everything is preordained, where there are no accidents and everything happens for a reason."
At the time, Katz was intent on finishing his degree in English literature then returning to San Francisco. Perry – whose many nicknames include "the Upsetter" - upset his plans and the young American found himself playing Sancho Panza to Perry's Don Quixote.
"Considering that the Battle of Armagideon album had a track on it called I Am A Madman, where Perry proclaims himself mad," notes Katz, "and given all the stories of his breakdown in Jamaica in the late 1970s, which culminated in the burning of his Black Ark studio [in Kingston, Jamaica], I expected eccentricity. When we first met I was struck by his forceful personality - he was very enigmatic, not giving much away. It soon became apparent he was able to size someone up at an instance, to see whether they were friend or foe, useful or useless. He talked in riddles, but there was wisdom there. He was unpredictable, and his moods could change drastically: he had serious issues with alcohol and an overindulgence with weed - if he drank too much, another side of him would emerge, which was vindictive and self-destructive.
"During the first two years, every time there was a rehearsal, a recording session, a concert or anything else important, I would be there at his request. However, he didn't fully open up to me in certain ways until long after that. We met in January 1987 and the first edition of the book was not published until April 2000 - I endured 10 years of rejection letters because Perry's status to the world at large was not then as it later became."
What impression, I wondered, did Perry's music make on Katz that he was willing to set up in London as unpaid diarist to a musician many considered deranged?
"What struck me about Lee Perry's music was that broke all the rules, and this was especially true with his work in dub. And in his dubs, various musical elements of would drop in and out of the mix, and be subjected to extreme effects such as phasing, echo, and reverb. There was all kinds of playfulness in the dubs, giving the notion that all things are possible and that any given song has infinite possibilities in a dub version. Perry's own vocal work had all kinds of humour too, and a particular use of wordplay that really appealed to me."
Perry first gained an international audience when his instrumental Return Of Django went into the Top 5 in the UK pop charts in 1969. The Clash would cover his song Police & Thieves on their debut album and he slowly gained huge prominence as a creative force, with everyone from Brian Eno to The Beastie Boys paying homage. Katz notes, "Much of Perry's work has a timeless quality that appeals to a range of practitioners active in other genres and what he was doing at a tiny home studio in the 1970s has inspired a range of other producers, especially in electronic dance music, with Perry's pioneering use of early drum machines another piece of the puzzle that marks him out as ahead of his time."
Lee 'Scratch' Perry und Mireille Ruegg, 1991. Photo / Getty Images
Katz notes that marriage to Swiss national Mireille Campbell gave Perry stability. "Mireille got him to quit alcohol for a long period – Lee later admitted to me if it wasn't for her he believed he would have drank himself to death." Instead, this Jamaican trickster found himself entering his 60s living in the Swiss Alps and raising a new family. This might seem an absurd juxtaposition – Jamaica to Switzerland - considering how Kingston's music scene is literally cut-throat it provided a real sense of relief for Perry to be able to create without threat (over money supposedly owed singers and musicians, or by thugs intent on shakedown).
"Mireille had been promoting shows with Jamaican performers in Switzerland, so a working relationship became a personal relationship, and she became his manager too. When she took him to Switzerland he was grateful as he was experiencing a lot of trauma in Jamaica, and Switzerland was quiet, somewhere he could exercise his compulsions without interruption."
As New Zealanders love Marley, what was Perry's role in helping him?
"In the early 1960s, when The Wailers were just at the start of their careers Perry gave them guidance in the studio," explains Katz. "Then, in 1969, Marley returns to Jamaica after a period in the USA and sought out Perry, resulting in a series of incredible hits that really brought The Wailers back to prominence in Jamaica. Perry completely restructured The Wailers' sound, which paved the way for the group to be signed by Island Records. Marley and Perry maintained their bond as well as their friendship, and Marley was the person who brought up the strongest reactions from Perry during the time that I knew him; he made it clear that he upheld the utmost love and respect for Marley."
>DAVID KATZ'S TOP 5 LEE 'SCRATCH' PERRY PRODUCTIONS
1. Lee Perry: People Funny Boy - a great 'dissing' tune from 1968 which helped give birth to the new reggae style.
2. Bob Marley and the Wailers: Duppy Conqueror - a quiet, deceptively simple song of defiance that holds incredible power.
3. Junior Byles: Beat Down Babylon - an all-time Rastafari classic with whip-cracking sounds to underline the song's gravity.
4. Junior Murvin: Tedious - the dynamic rhythm and unusual use of heavy phasing, peppered by outlandish bursts of percussion, is classic Scratch.
5. Lee Perry: Introducing Myself - if not for this song, my life would be very different.
People Funny Boy: The Genius Of Lee 'Scratch' Perry is published by White Rabbit.
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