Photo by Daniel Caudeiron
Reggae on ice
Canada serves up a rare piece of musical history in a classic reissue.
By Naila Francis
Published: May 13th, 2008 | 1:10pm
Talk of the Great White North’s musical legacy and the inevitable roster comes to mind: Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, k.d. lang, and Neil Young. “When they think reggae, they don’t really think reggae from Canada,” says Adrian “Homer” Miller.
Yet in the 1970s, in a smoky Malton, Ontario, basement studio opened by Jamaican expat Jerry Brown, homegrown reggae band Earth, Roots, and Water was laying down rhythms and backing tracks for the reggae heavyweights — Jackie Mittoo, Johnny Osbourne, Leroy Sibbles, and Sugar Minott among them — who routinely passed through the doors. The band released its first and only album, Innocent Youths, in 1977. Considered a rare piece of Canadian music history, it was reissued on CD and vinyl by Seattle-based indie label Light in the Attic on May 6, 2008, the last in the label’s six-album Jamaica to Toronto series.
“The way I look at it personally, the history of Canadian reggae music has been sort of a secret,” says the 50-year-old Miller, the Jamaica-born singer who served as lead vocalist and percussionist for ER&W. “Books have dealt with reggae in the United Kingdom and in America, but nobody ever talked about the extensive and rich history of people of Caribbean heritage who have played reggae in Canada in the last 35 years … I’ve lived here for quite a long, long time, and it took an American label to find a needle in the haystack.”
Innocent Youths, like all the albums in the Jamaica to Toronto series, comes courtesy of producer Kevin “Sipreano” Howes, a longtime record collector with an affinity for Jamaican music. “In Canada, people like their rock ‘n’ roll and this was new music,” Howes says. “When you pick something like this up in a store, you can’t even believe you found it. It’s really righteous music.”
Back in the ’70s, Brown’s Summer Sound studio, wired by none other than engineering wizard King Jammy, was the gathering place for many local musicians, like Miller, who had been performing at hotel bars, and his buddies Colin “Zuba” Suban, an English native and drummer long entrenched in Toronto’s West Indian community, and Tony “KB” Moore, a multi-instrumentalist originally from Kingston, Jamaica. “We had this music thing together before we actually went to Jerry’s,” Miller says. “But hanging out there, it was a lot of fun. We were young and innocent, full of life, enthusiastic. While everybody was out playing basketball or hanging out at the gym swimming, we were all playing music.” Bass player Anthony “Base” Hibbert, another Kingston son brought to the studio by his musician uncle, and guitarist Matt Shelley, an Ontario native led to Brown’s door on the strength of his mellow Rasta-like vibe, rounded out the group’s primary lineup.
“We turned imagination into reality and Jerry allowed us to play whatever we wanted,” says Miller of ER&W’s transition from house band to artist on Brown’s Summer Records label. “He allowed us to evolve the way we envisioned. The vision was just to be ourselves, to sit down, write songs and turn them out the way we see them coming from inside of us.”
With more than half of its seven tracks edging past the six-minute mark, Innocent Youths is an eclectic sampling of bass-heavy instrumentals and lyrical musings cloaked in a haze of dub reverb. The conscious vibe is evident on tracks like the roots-driven “Tribulations,” which speaks to Rastafarian strife, and the soulful “Lou Sent Me,” a mandate for universal love. Elsewhere, the album surprises with the skanking girl pop of “Love the Same Old Way,” while tracks like the spacey “Jah Les’ Lament,” with its grainy vocals imposed over a funky beat, recall the innovative excursions of dub pioneer Lee “Scratch” Perry.
“When you listen to this album, it gives you a different vibe,” says Brown, attesting to its power from his home in the hills of Jamaica, where he returned after shutting down the studio in the late ’80s. “We tried to develop a Canadian-Jamaican vibe, an uplifted vibe, to make something new and never copy a rhythm too much. The album teaches you to be calm, to not be in a rushing mode, to relax and be humble and free your spirit.”
It may not have been a big seller, but ER&W did have a perhaps unexpected ally in Toronto’s punk movement — and in concert promoters Gary Topp and Gary Cormier, who landed the band opening gigs at the legendary Horseshoe Tavern for none other than the Police and New Wave rockers the Stranglers in the fall of ’78. “Back in England, reggae was the soundtrack for a lot of New Wave punkers,” says Miller. “A lot of punkers identify with reggae because of the actual message, the social commentary. “When we played with [the Police], it was a good gig. We had a lot of fun and excitement. If you told me tomorrow they were going to be big, I’d probably laugh at you.”
The Police actually tapped ER&W as a supporting act for its first North American tour, but by then, financial struggles shifted priorities as some players starting families had already led to the band’s dissolution. “I really loved the band and I had a lot of hopes. But when you’re that young, it’s kind of hard to hold something like that together,” says Miller, a two-time Juno nominee, who continues to perform today with his own reggae band, 20th Century Rebels, in Toronto. “It was an uphill battle because back in the ’70s, reggae didn’t really have a face. It was still looked upon as some kind of novelty music.”
Despite the mushrooming of a live reggae scene in the ’80s, immigrants were still more apt to buy Jamaican albums over their Canadian-grown counterparts. Still, Miller is optimistic about the Innocent Youths reissue. “If people can pick up this album and enjoy it for what it is and know we’ve made immense contributions over the years toward Canadian reggae,” he says, “then I’ve done my job.”
Issue #35
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