Big nonsense, of course, to now claim that Lee Perry has died. Ghosts don’t die. If they leave this world at all, they take on an even more volatile aggregate state, atomize and finally disperse into the last pores of this world. Lee Perry, called “Scratch”, reggae pioneer, dub inventor, ghostly apparition of anyone who has taken the spiritual a bit too seriously, and superlative whatever music that ever comes near one Off-Beats has finally spread out into the world. You tell yourself.
One should be careful with the stories. There has always been so much talk about the man who was probably born sometime at the end of March 1936, or more precisely, of course, not when Rainford Hugh Perry was born. The wildest myths, of which only half are guaranteed to be true, because the truth is even more wacky than you can imagine with a brain from this material world, have always surrounded him. Many are of course his own. Lee Perry, god of thunder, rainmaker, sun king, great storyteller.
First he shaped the sound of Bob Marley, Max Romeo, Junior Murvin – then he finally blew the sound into space
The stones should have communicated with him right at the beginning of his career. He says. The stones had suggested to him to move from the Jamaican Kendal to Kingston (pronounced “King’s Stone, pronounced the son of the king – this altitude, even then). There he hired” Sir Coxsone “Dodd in Studio One from Clement Seymour. Big man On the island then. Formative producer. So Perry heard, saw, felt and absorbed what the teacher was doing, created more than 30 songs with him, surpassed him and fell out with him. Cursed him, literally, moved on, briefly to Joe Gibbs, with that the game repeated itself.
In 1973 Perry finally founded his own studio, you won’t keep a ghost in someone else’s house forever. Black Ark, in the garden of his house. Shrouded in legend, of course. A few years earlier, Rocksteady, also directed by Perrys, had been slowed down to the significantly slower and therefore much harder, more threatening reggae. Perry had shaped the sound of Bob Marley classics like “My Cup” or “Keep on Moving”. Max Romeo’s “I Chase The Devil” and Junior Murvin’s “Police And Thieves” were written shortly afterwards. All genre classics. And now he was preparing to finally blow the music into space.
Since then he has understood his mixer as a musical instrument, and the reverb effects, with which he created dub and shaped it forever, as a spiritual form of expression. Transcendence through music. The Prodigy, the Beastie Boys, oh, actually everyone with taste sampled pieces of him. This wonderfully twisted, crow-sung, infinitely grooving madness sound, played for a long time by the Upsetters, his crazy good studio band. Something like reggae. But whoever imagines Caribbean Bacardi-Breezer-Sonnen-Ticki-Tacka underneath is about as close as Perry was on the ground at that time.
In the late 1970s, Perry worshiped banana trees in his garden and devoured coins
Anyway, he left his mind behind somewhere up there in space. He started blowing the smoke from his joints into the studio equipment to get a dirtier sound. At times he is said to have become addicted to voodoo. At the end of the seventies, at least that’s what contemporaries say, the once busy man worshiped banana trees in his garden, drank the cleaning fluid on his tapes and consumed coins.
In the late 1970s, the Black Ark studio finally burned down. Perry maintained to the last that he set it on fire himself, either to cast out Satan or in some kind of frenzy against himself – which was probably about the same at the time. Officially, a short circuit is considered the cause, which is of course possible. On the other hand: In 2015, Perry now lived married, calmer and reunited with larger parts of his mind, in Switzerland, his “Secret Laboratory” built there also burned down.
Until then, it was used steadily, by the way. He never stopped producing and performing music. A new album should be released in a few months: “Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s Guide to the Universe”. You can already hear a song from it. “Life Is An Experiment” is its name. Lee Perry is said to have finished the experiment called Life at the age of 85 on Sunday. Contemporaries claim again.