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DC Soundclash: Carl Gayle

How Carl Gayle Hooked Me on Rude Sounds
By Richard Byrne

It’s 1978. I’m in the eighth grade at a Catholic grade school in suburban Philadelphia. I just transferred into this school as a result of my family’s move about 20 minutes away – but to a different county and a different parish. I have one year left ‘til high school and, man, these kids at this new school are taxing me.

The escape? I am so into music. It consumes my life. The 7-11 in my new neighborhood stocks Creem and Circus. I have leapt from America and the Bay City Rollers to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young and Joni Mitchell to Bowie and Elvis Costello at warp speed. I’m on the cusp of being swept headlong into a passionate involvement with mod and punk.

But mostly I want to soak up everything. I’m buying anything that Creem  says I should buy. And when a critic pans a record in Creem, I want to hear that record too. Because I want to write about music too someday. I want to know precisely why someone hates Boston so much to write about them with such vituperative glee.

The other thing I want to know about is history. How did X get to Y and then to Z? Which is where Rock Almanac comes in.

Published by Anchor Books in 1978, Rock Almanac was a goldmine for the budding rock writer. The nearly 500 page book (edited by Charlie Gillett and Stephen Nugent) was a compendium of British and American singles and album chart action from 1955 to 1973. But it was so much more. The five essays that kicked off the volume were an expressway to coolness. Gillett and Simon Frith picked their 100 greatest singles of all time. Dave Marsh created a list of the 100 Essential Albums. (My scribbled emendations to Marsh’s list are still there.)

Plus there were more narrative pieces. Paul Gambaccini’s essay on American radio caught that institution at the very beginning of its swift descent into consultant-drive banality. (And it also fired my interest in media criticism.) Mark Sten’s essay “The In-Between Years: 1958-1963” clued me in to the amazing music made between Elvis and the Beatles. And Frith’s “Playing Records in Britain” – and his essay’s excerpted slice of Tony Cumming’s article on “The Northern Discos” – fueled my nascent Mod with its frenetic account of Northern soul.

But the essay in Rock Almanac that sent me on a quest that did not end until 25 years later in 2003 was Carl Gayle’s “Are You Ready for Rude and Rough Reggae?”

Gayle’s essay was 13 pages long – a field report from the burgeoning London sound system scene of the early 1970s. But what set a 13-year-old budding music critic on fire was the lurid and boisterous world of rude reggae and talk-over. The lyrics quoted in the piece were filthy and perfect for inciting a teenaged imagination, and Gayle’s description of the milieu in which they were created was compelling, especially since he compared it so favorably with the scant reggae that I was able to hear as a barely-teen in suburban Philadelphia.

Indeed, that was what made Gayle’s essay so tantalizing. The only song that I’d heard of the almost 100 songs he namedrops in the piece was Paul Simon’s “Mother & Child Reunion.” Allow me to quote Gayle’s tart assessment:

“When I hear DJs call Paul Simon’s ‘Mother and Child Reunion’ a good reggae record I have to disagree. It can’t be considered a reggae record just because the backing was done by reggae musicians, and like many white blues copyists, Simon falls down because of his voice… The real enthusiasts are fed up with this type of commercial reggae which is popular and gets exposure on the radio….”

This was catnip for me. Aside from giving me an early insight into rhymin’ Simon that informed my attitude toward records like Graceland, Gayle’s insights created something deeper in me: a certainty that there was authentic music to be discovered outside the mainstream. It was something I was already starting to discern in my rock listening, but Gayle cemented it for me.

The problem was getting my hands on the records that he was talking about. They literally were not available anywhere that I could find. There was Marley. There was Peter Tosh. Very little else. Where the hell was I going to get my hands on “Fatty Fatty” by the Heptones, or U. Roy’s“Flashing My Whip?” And my desire to hear this Judge Dread that Gayle so cruelly dismissed was also frustrated. Gayle’s putdown of Dread is a mini-classic in a brilliant essay, and I’ll quote it at length. To put into proper context, it follows directly upon a section assessing U. Roy, Dennis Alcapone and Big Youth in which Gayle hypes I. Roy – citing “Black Man Time” as the next great thing in reggae:

 “How do you make a hit without trying? Simple. Just overdub some half-sung, half-spoken, suggestive nursery rhyme lyrics onto a reggae backing track (preferably an old instrumental). Judge Dread’s ‘Big Six'  was a poor effort by any standard, yet it has sold over three hundred thousand copies. ‘Big Seven’ was an even bigger seller, and the only change was a slightly better backing track.

Judge Dread (real name Alex Hughes) seems to like the Jamaican sound, which I can understand, but the one-time debt collector, bounder, DJ, etc., isn’t helping the music’s already misunderstood reputation (or his own) with these substandard rude reggae records.

 

The man Gayle himself

I went through high school and much of college hearing few of the rude records that Gayle mentions. Artists like U. Roy and I. Roy were largely unavailable. Prince Buster came down to us through the Two Tone scene of my late college years – and then it was “Too Hot" and not “Big Five.”

The latter song was one of the ones I most wanted to hear, simply because of the way that Gayle describes it and the lyrics he quotes:

“Prince Buster… took a reggae version of ‘Rainy Night in Georgia’ and changed the lyrics to produce the most influential rude reggae record yet. Prince Buster’s records usually have a boastful quality, this one had an additional abrasiveness:

Today I smoked an ounce of weed
Tonight I’m going to plant a seed
In her womb all right…”

Another song that became a Holy Grail of sorts for me was Laurel Aitken’s 1968 single “Pussy Price” – again because of Gayle’s uproarious description of it:

“This is one of the most directly offensive rude records ever, more offensive even than his others – “Fire in Your Wire”  and “The Rise and Fall of Laurel Aitken” — and as influential on rude reggae as Prince Buster’s 1967“Rough Rider.”Aitken’s  gruff voice is well suited to his subject, which is quickly made clear.

When I started to play Aitken’s record to refresh my memory, the lady of the house (not my mother) complained: ‘Don’t play that record again! Whatever you do, don’t play that record!’” 

Eventually the flood of ska re-releases in the late 1980s swept a few of the songs that Gayle wrote about into my clutches. (The famous Intensified!: Original Ska 1962-1966 has Justin Hines’ “Penny Reel-o,” for instance.)  But it was only when I moved to St. Louis in 1987 to go to graduate school that I started to find these records that I’d wanted to hear for so long.

St. Louis’ Vintage Vinyl has always boasted a stellar reggae section, largely through the efforts of Tom “Papa” Ray. Ray also ran a terrific reggae DJ night in the old Cicero’s Basement Bar in University City (where Uncle Tupelo got their start) as far back as 1987, when I became a mainstay at the club. Slowly I dived into the Heptones, I Roy and U Roy and Prince Buster. (I even heard Judge Dread at last.)

But it was only in 2003 that I finally tracked sown a copy of “Pussy Price” on a Laurel Aitken compilation CD. My quest to hear all of the songs in Gayle’s essay was thus completed.

Six years later, when I can google the titles of almost any record that Gayle mentions and come up with a YouTube link, my quest seems to be that of another age entirely. But as a result of my search to find the records mentioned by Gayle in his essay, I was immersed in the larger pools of reggae. I became an aficionado. But that love began with a longing  to dive into something very crude and libidinal – something crystallized so wonderfully by Carl Gayle.

* * * *

In preparing this essay, I did a little leg work to find out more about Gayle. Turns out he was the “Godfather of reggae journalism,” writing for the legendary Black Music magazine. There is a wide-ranging interview with him here. He also recently released an album as Carl I about 18 months ago called Keep My Fire Burnin’ and he even has a MySpace page.

Most interesting of all for you historical buffs is a documentary made by Gayle in collaboration with London Weekend Television in 1976, a few years after he wrote “Are You Ready for Rude and Rough Reggae?” It is in two parts on YouTube here and here – introduced by famed stage director Peter Hall. There are appearances by Sir Coxson, Delroy Washington and Roy Shirley – and the documentary sheds light on London right around the time of the 1976 Notting Hill riots.