Every Little Thing Gonna Be Alright Read Free Page B

artists hear themselves playing back, the more confident they become. And when they sing a certain way and it sounds good, they know to stick to that method. It just came naturally.”
    As one of the first people to record and release ska in Jamaica during the early ’60s, Coxsone Dodd was instrumental in establishing ska and the rock steady, blue beat, nyahbinghi, and other subcategories of reggae that followed. As opposed to the calypso sound produced at Federal Records, the only other studio in Jamaica when Dodd started recording, Dodd’s music emphasized a strong off-beat, an exaggeration of the strong “one” that characterized R&B, especially from New Orleans, a city close enough that the radio would waft over the Caribbean to Jamaica. “It goes with the way that the West Indians dance,” Dodd explains. “When Bob came up with the ‘one drop’ he really meant that off-beat. That’s the ‘one drop’ he was referring to.”
    In addition to recording their early music, he claims to have bought Marley and Tosh their first guitars. As with so many things Dodd did, the motivation was pragmatic rather than generous. “After a couple of months,” he says, “I realized that giving them a guitar would allow them to build their harmony and rehearse by themselves. Peter was more inclined to be a musician than even Bob was. He could play before Bob. He was able to strum on it.”
    While the Wailers, like most Studio One artists—and to be fair, most recording artists anywhere during the early ’60s—never saw much in the way of royalties, the studio helped hone their style and abilities. The house band at Studio One was the legendary ska band The Skatallites, featuring such revered players as Roland Alphonso, Tommy McCook, and Don Drummond. Dodd set up something of a mentoring program at Studio One, and as Heartbeat Records president Chris Wilson points out, “When Bob was first learning to sing in the studio, most of these horn players were like his daddy.”
    “He worked with people like Roland Alphonso,” Dodd concurs. “They helped him a lot.”
    The Wailers’ early repertoire, as heard on Studio One reissues and compilations (through Wilson’s Heartbeat Records in the U.S.), reflected a great deal of the music in Jamaica at the time. For years, they did covers of American and English pop and R&B hits. “American music had an influence on us all the way through,” Dodd remarks. “That’s why, in the early days, we recorded ‘Teenager In Love’ and songs like that. Even then, they didn’t have the right knack or approach to writing original lyrics. As time went by, they picked up on the approach to writing songs and stuff like that.”
    By this time, the band essentially lived in the studio. “They were at the back of the studio,” he recalls. “They occupied a three-bedroom flat back there, so near to the studio. It’s where the water tower is in back of the studio. I had a building behind it. Being that close to the studio all the time helps the artist. What really happened was the freedom that they had in the studio, hearing themselves over time, they got that confidence to say, ‘Well, this is working,’ and they stuck with it.”
    While Dodd may have been the first producer to approach making records like that, he certainly wasn’t the last. For example, one floor of the late, lamented Power Station studio in New York City was basically living space, including beds for musicians and engineers, along with owner Tony Bongiovi’s own office/apartment—complete with waterbed and hot tub.
    Still, the Wailers presented their own set of problems. Certainly one of the working names for the group, The Rudeboys, said a lot for both the nature of the group and their environment. “At one point the behavior of the youth,” he remembers, “we call it the rude boy era, it was hard to control them. That was during rock steady. It was a trip. What made it difficult with the Wailers was the company