On one of my last days in Jamaica that spring, I walked by Emancipation Park, past the Herculean nudes of Redemption Song, and turned up New Kingston’s main road. I passed a building-sized Digicel billboard featuring Usain Bolt’s familiar torso (“Millions of Dreams,” read its flag-colored caption, “Need Strong Shoulders”), and stepped into an outlet of Tastee, the fast food restaurant whose morsels of fatty dough, air-fried around ground meat, are dispensed from franchises around the island and have become free Jamdown’s national dish. I took the bag my pattie came in. “Buy Jamaica,” it said on the greasy brown paper. “Brand We Love.” I continued up the road, to where the same flashy modeling agency that hosted the Global Reggae book launch in its bar was hosting a similar fete tonight. This one toasted the release of a book of photos of “reggae’s golden age,” published by the same outfit that put out Edward Seaga’s 100 Most Influential Songs box set. Word was that the Dark Lord Seaga, who’d had a hand in this project, too, might turn up.
At a table by the bar, I recognized Seaga’s partner in releasing many old records Pat Chin. Earl “Chinna” Smith, an eminent Rasta guitarist whose chicken-scratch tones graced all the greats, was accepting the adoration of a pair of Japanese girls in saddle shoes. On the bar’s walls, and in an adjacent room, hung large-format images of the late-’70s moment that Jamaica’s boosters can’t seem to leave behind. There was Marley in full flight; Toots in repose; a smiling Peter Tosh, skinny and locked, riding a unicycle on Martha’s Vineyard during a U.S. tour. At the bar I chatted with a tall young woman in a royal-blue dress and zebra-print heels, from whom I gathered that the duty-cum-perk of signing with the modeling agency she represented was that you had to adorn the bar at functions like these. She said she had a manager in Zurich; she’d spent last summer in Ibiza, “working.” She bore a striking resemblance to Rihanna. She asked if I’d like to pay her rent. I paid for her wine, instead (she frowned when the barkeep said he had no moscato; she settled for Chablis). This was a timely reminder that the only sure way Jamaica seems to have found for “monetizing” its “uniquely cultural people” in a new era that maybe wasn’t so new was to offer the more exceptional of their bodies, whether belonging to models or sprinters, for sale. I joined a tableful of culturati I’d grown used to seeing at these things.
Seaga, it seemed, wasn’t coming after all. At his name’s mention, though, someone at the table presented an intriguing theory about the Tivoli incursion. “You know it’ Seaga doing,” he said. Tivoli was Seaga’s garrison; what better way for the old CIA hand to tie up his loose ends, near his life’s end, than by taking out a don who’d outgrown his control and, in the same swoop, making the position of his loathed successor as PM untenable? (Golding and Seaga had a notorious falling-out.) “Where Seaga now?” We knew. “He’ back! And the people still love him!” True enough. “Politricks,” or the wary perception thereof, knew no bounds in this city where Vybz Kartel’s just-released book contained some sage conclusions. In The Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto, the dancehall king had argued that the nation’s first step to betterment was to ban its two ruling parties. “As a people,” he wrote, “we should insist that we will not vote for the PNP or JLP in the new Republic. Those two bodies are synonymous with too many deaths.”8 Perhaps there’d be a new constitutional convention. Now, though, the photographer being feted here had risen behind a microphone at the end of the patio to speak.
He wore a knit skully and a tie-dyed T-shirt. These weren’t the only traits, in this hunched sixtysomething white man with kind eyes, to scream “aging hippie.” He thanked us for coming to see the pictures that had made him the don of reggae photogs, and told us about how, after growing up in Westchester County as a scion of the family behind Simon & Schuster publishing (and the brother of Carly Simon), he fell in love with Jamaican music. “It all started when I went to see The Harder They Come,” Peter Simon recalled. “I’d been following American rock ’n’ roll for many years, but got bored with it; it became too commercial. So when I saw that film with Jimmy Cliff in ’73, it hit me like a wave. A wave of compassion, love, and reggae rhythm.” The film and its soundtrack inspired him. He won a book deal, he explained, to come down and start shooting the snaps we were toasting tonight. And then he introduced a special guest, by way of a story about how he’d met his wife, one fall night in 1975, just after the Red Sox, as usual, had lost the World Series. “I’ve got two tickets for Toots and the Maytals!” he’d said to a bar full of downcast friends in Boston. No one knew who he was talking about; one shy girl, though, raised her hand. By the time they reached the club, Toots had already played. “But it was Toots,” Simon said, “that brought on my romance with my wife. And I’m so grateful to Toots for playing that night, and we’ve been friends ever since, and he’s the best.” Applause. “And now, I’d like to welcome him to the stage.”
A small man I’d noticed before but not recognized—his head was cloaked in a do-rag and dark glasses—ambled onstage. The reason I’d noticed him, apart from his leather pants, was that he seemed to be attracting more than his share of well-wishers. Now, holding an acoustic guitar by his leather-pantsed leg, he gave Simon a hug, and I understood. The short man plugged in the guitar, and began to play.
Stick it up, mister!
Can you hear what I’m saying now, yeah
Get your hands in the air, sir!
It was Toots. The leather pants and round belly made it hard to tell. But the voice was all his.
I said yeah (I said yeah)
Listen what they say (listen what they say)
Can you hear me say, yeah? (yeah yeah)
Listen what they say (listen what they say)
He swayed like Stevie Wonder, he crooned the words to his great song about being locked up—everyone has one—in Kingston’s jail for badness (or, in Toots’s case, on weed charges that saw him spend a year there in ’66). His photographer pal, off to the side, swayed happily, too.
You give it to me, one time!
We knew how to reply. “Huh!”
You give it to me two times (huh-huh!)
You give it to me three times (huh-huh-huh!)
You give it to me four times (huh-huh-huh-huh!)
We gave it to him. And his familiar voice, floating over the heads of the Red Stripe-and Chablis-sipping crowd, shook the hot Kingston night.
54-46 was my number, was my number, man
Right now, someone else has that number
54-46 was my number,