Before U Roy, a deejay was just an incidental figure, someone that told a few jokes between songs and made announcements about future dances. But U Roy’s fluid toasting, voiced over Duke Reid’s old rock steady rhythms, brought deejay music to the top-three Jamaican chart positions in 1970—a truly unprecedented feat. U Roy thus turned the deejay into a superstar whose toasts were as important as any singer’s lyrics, prefacing the rap craze in America by the better part of a decade.
Dub began its concerted evolutionary gestation shortly thereafter, once King Tubby, Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, and a handful of likeminded peers began exploring the limits of the form, with Perry being the first to delve in wholeheartedly. During the late 1960s, Perry had his greatest successes with instrumental versions, hitting spectacularly with ‘Return Of Django,’ which brought him and his Upsetters band to Britain in 1969. The following year, he began concentrating on Bob Marley and the Wailers, yielding the albums Soul Rebels and Soul Revolution, but continued his forays into the ‘version’ phenomenon through exquisite instrumental B-sides. In 1971, he took things a step further by issuing Soul Revolution II, an entirely instrumental edition of the Wailers’ Soul Revolution set, which allowed listeners to hear the material in an entirely different way; devoid of the singer’s voices, emphasis was now placed entirely on the rhythms of the backing musicians.
Dramatic changes were soon afoot, as mixing engineers began to emphasise drum and bass on the version B-sides, augmented by the application of echo and reverb, as notably heard on the opening lines to Glen Brown’s melodica-led hit ‘Merry Up.’ As Bunny Lee explains, “The drum and bass part, Tubby strike out now, and one of the first drum-and-bass tunes that come out was ‘Merry Up’ with Glen Brown. That reverb, that watery sound at the start, that ah one of the first.”
Tubby was able to make more initial forays into dub because he had his own space in which to work, unlike peers such as Perry, who had to rely on the facility of others, prior to the opening of the Black Ark in late 1973. Other producers heavily involved in dub, such as Niney the Observer, Keith Hudson and Augustus Pablo, never managed to get a studio of their own, which led them to rely on Tubby for the most part (though Niney later worked steadily out of both Joe Gibbs and Channel One). Tubby’s home set-up at 18 Dromilly Avenue was not a recording studio in the conventional sense, nor was Tubby an actual producer in his own right, until he expanded in the late 1980s. His bedroom studio was never large enough for rhythms to be created in full there, but the space was gradually converted into a sound manipulation unit complete with a machine to cut acetates.
“Tubbs is an innovator”, said the late Philip Smart, who was engineer at the studio for much of the mid-1970s. “He didn’t buy his first console, he built it, and that’s what he used until he bought the MCI console from Dynamics, their studio B. It was just that room he had at first. You have a carport, and then the carport is a bedroom and a bathroom, so him turn the bathroom into the voice room and the bedroom into the control room, and he had his repair shop in another little house in the back. His main income was building amplifiers and winding transformers; the music was an addition, because he had the sound and he always wanted to make his own dubs.”
“The home amplifiers like Pioneer, Marantz, it’s them amplifiers him started with”, says singer and producer Roy Cousins, who often recorded at Tubby’s. “He did have about three of them transistor amplifiers, one of them old cutter, and them likkle two-track reel-to-reel that come in a suitcase, him did have one like that him used to put on a stool. Then when Byron Lee decided him going cut stampers, him decided to sell [the equipment in] studio two, which was four-track. It’s through Bunny Lee that Tubby get the mixing desk: Byron wanted cash and everybody just want to leave a deposit, but Tubby go down there with the whole of it.”
Dub gained greater credibility in 1973, when a number of dub albums appeared all at once, each vying for the title of ‘first dub LP.’ Among the most noteworthy were Herman Chin-Loy’s minimalist Aquarius Dub; Lee Perry’s astounding Blackboard Jungle Dub (originally issued as Upsetters 14 Dub Blackboard Jungle), created in collaboration with Tubby; Prince Buster’s The Message Dubwise, mixed at Dynamics by Carlton Lee; Clive Chin’s exquisite Java Java Java Java, mixed by Errol Thompson at Randy’s; Joe Gibbs’ Dub Serial, also mixed by Thompson, and Studio One’s enthralling Dub Store Special, mixed by Clement Dodd.
When we survey the available evidence, Aquarius Dub is the strongest contender for actually being the first, and Chin-Loy says he assembled the disc as a way of giving deejays uninterrupted toasting time on sound systems. But Chin-Loy’s album has few of the effects that would give dub its outstanding difference, being more in the mode of an instrumental ‘version’ LP; Clive Chin points out that Java Java Java Java had more in the way of experimentation, which helped dub attain more solid footing. “Them time there, Tubby try and experiment more fi dub, but me and Errol start dub music”, Chin emphasises. “When I say start it, I’m not saying we going to take credit for any other man that put out a dub album, but we really experiment, because we had the time and the facility to do it. Another man like Phil Pratt or Niney, studio time was so important that you have to run in and run out.” Had Thompson not left Randy’s for Joe Gibbs, dub probably would have enjoyed a further flowering there, and even though Clement Dodd mixed a great series of dub albums at Studio One, the form remained somewhat peripheral to his general output.
As technology advanced, Jamaica’s creative dub mixers began attracting interest overseas: the dubs Lee Perry mixed at the Black Ark were dense tapestries of heavily manipulated rhythm, which brought a contract with Island Records; Errol Thompson left Randy’s to mix sound effects-laden dubs at Joe Gibbs, who landed a deal with WEA; Ernest Hoo-Kim crafted thunderous dubs at Channel One with Sly Dunbar and the Revolutionaries house band, some of which were handled by Virgin. But during the late 1970s, the most important evolutionary happenings continued to take place at King Tubby’s, as apprentice engineers such as Prince Jammy and Scientist mixed captivating masterworks, most notably with the Roots Radics band, as heard on the sublime series of dub albums handled overseas by Trojan and Greensleeves. Scientist had a way of isolating the bass that greatly appealed to overseas listeners, and his use of the electronic test-tone as a percussive instrument was truly exceptional.
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