PARENTAL ADVISORY: If you’re a young person, don’t let your parents catch you reading these reviews, because there are occasional references to the illicit use of cannabis, LSD, PCP, quaaludes, meth, cocaine and/or vast quantities of alcohol. The other warning is this: If you consume these things, you will forget a great deal of the fun you had, and that’s no fun.

Reggae Sunsplash ‘81 was the reason for and culmination of my first “exotic” holiday abroad, and this little tale is as much about the latter as it is about the former. Having fully embraced Jamaican music from afar, my buddy Rick and I now wanted to see where it lived. We got a massive dose of it at Montego Bay’s Jarrett Park, the football and cricket ground that had hosted the annual reggae gathering event since its founding in 1978, and where Bob Marley was the headliner in ‘79. With Bob having died just three months prior, the ‘81 festival was officially, and by natural default, a tribute to the shaman of the natural mystic.

Jarrett Park is now home to the Bob Marley Centre for the Performing Arts, which gets some pretty good foreign acts in, though Sunsplash long ago found other Jamaican haunts and in fact went on tour around the world.

Our Montego Bay hotel, the Sunblinded or something like that, doesn’t appear to exist anymore, which is probably a good thing. Only the German tourists seemed to appreciate its regimented daily games and activities, and even they found out quick enough that each and every one of the interlocking plastic bananas that you wore in long strings around your neck to use at the resort in place of money wreaked havoc on a sunburn.

Cautioned by hotel staff to never leave the grounds due to the criminal element out there in society, Rick and I made our escape at the first opportunity, strolling meaningfully past the security guards at the hotel checkpoint and grabbing a cab. Where to? Downtown, anywhere.

The place was utter chaos and we were totally lost, and we loved every pixel of it. A vendor with a machete hatcheted up some sugar cane for us and we got busy being the only white people within many square miles. The clerk in a cheeky little record store that was blasting out Dancehall was highly amused to hear me ask about the Mighty Diamonds, my picture of whom at Sunsplash is at the top of this post, but quickly dealt out a slew of singles still hot off the vinyl press. I got me a genuine Jamaican 45 of “Pass the Kouchie” with a charmingly no-nonsense label and we carried on, focused on the bigger prize: genuine Jamaican ganja.

A bag of dope had been offered to us as soon as we got through customs at Sangster Airport — by the driver of the hotel van who picked us up, in fact. He wanted, and got, $10 for a half-ounce that proved to be nothing impressive and, as we soon discovered without surprise, highly overpriced.

Dusk found us being led by a young bloke in dreads through a slum labyrinth, down leagues of rickety boardwalks, out into a chopped-up field strewn with construction debris and into a roomy wigwam of corrugated sheet metal and cardboard, where an exceedingly older Rasta perched by an oil lamp. Any passing fears of becoming the Third World’s latest white casualties of gormless curiosity were forgotten with the first puff of a fat bomber, tautly rolled in a cone of coarse paper, that made our hotel driver’s weed seem like steam. It was righteously hallucinogenic, so we emerged from the teepee into an entirely different dimension. I have no idea how we got back to the Sunblinded, assuming that we did.

The hotel had already become superfluous anyway. It was as self-contained, hermetically sealed and trasparently vapid as the jellyfish that bobbed lasciviously in the waves beyond the cheerless calypso at poolside. It was not part of the real world, just a Babylonian mirage.

We hired a taxi driver for a day to take us on a Red Stripe-intensive odyssey far down the north coast, during which we saw all the things that amaze newcomers to the Indies, including the horrific, high-speed overtaking of cane-laden trucks on narrow hilly double-lanes, zipping past makeshift roadside shrines to those who had previously tried the same thing and failed; telephone poles whose only actual purpose is to prevent ganja-heavy Cessnas from using the road as a landing strip; and tire blowouts necessitating a stop in a garage so the flat can be replaced by an even worse-looking spare and the tank topped up with crude petrol poured from whisky bottles.

Rick, the taxi and the taxi driver — hey, wait a second — should he be drinking?!

At the cabbie’s insistence, we agreed to detour through a subdivision of impressive mansions that had just been built. No doubt he got a fee for bringing in potential customers of the sort that, sadly, we weren’t ever close to being. We had a quick gawk at the straw market in Ocho Rios, which was all tourist glue (selling terrific carvings but at prices five times what I found elsewhere), and then proceeded with the outing’s ultimate mission, visiting Bob Marley in St Ann.

St Ann is well up in the hills, far from the Caribbean shore, and down roads so meandering that even the driver got repeatedly lost. Stopping for directions was always fascinating, though. Clearly few foreigners had been this route. We knew we were getting close when a statue of Marcus Garvey loomed in a town square. The celebrated rights champion was also a St Ann native.

The Marley compound at Nine Miles, where Bob had lived as a child and had just been entombed in May, was encircled by a high link fence, compound-like, and we rolled through the immense gate as the day’s only visitors. This was good news to Uncle Lloyd, who may or may not have been Bob’s actual uncle and who may or may not have been telling the truth when, having pocketed his tour guide’s fee, he pointed to a bevelled rock on the ground that someone had painted in the hues of Rastafari and explained that this is where young Bob had slept and dreamed of a hopefully better future for I and I: “Cold ground was my bed last night, and rock was my pillow, too.” Dis da pillow, seen? Irie.

More paint in primary colours lit up a tiny stone house where an even younger Bob had supposedly come to fruition, and the larger concrete building next to it, angled like a chapel, where his coffin was entombed. After the funeral in Kingston, the casket bearing Marley and his guitar, and apparently a supply of potent joints as well, was chauffeured at the head of a long procession all across the island, tens of thousands lining the route, and here in Nine Miles was hoisted on shoulders up the then-trackless hill to the waiting tomb. I believe that one of the interchangeable prime ministers of the day, Manley and Seaga, or Seaga and Manley, or perhaps both, made the climb too to watch the coffin placed in a sarcophogus and sealed away. Farewell the Pharoah.

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It would be nice to imagine that, if not three days, then three months later the great stone portal swung open and Bob Marley set off to watch the show with us in Mo Bay. Certainly a lot of his earthly circle would be there, from his wife and kids and band to foreigners like Steel Pulse, whom he’d known in England.

Bob’s Canadian fan club — Rick and I — arrived by cab, having earlier established that walking up the city’s hills to get to Jarrett Park was too arduous and full of distractions, not just beer and bongs and the tempting scents of frying plantain and patties, offerings of curried goat and rice and peas and other ital treats, but lovely young girls willing to negotiate amorous transactions. There had already been one sweaty session in a poolhall’s curtained backroom. Now we had other music to make.

At Jarrett Park the fans funnelled through a single door frame onto a vast field ringed by booths selling food and beer and T-shirts. Police with sub-machineguns, some with riot helmets as well, strolled about in anticipation of un-Marley-like trouble. If there was seating for the ticket-holders I don’t remember it. We stood around freely puffing ganja for three nights, and when ultimately tired we lay down on the cold ground with no rock for a pillow.

Sunsplash that year in fact extended over four nights, but the last was our headin’-home day. Fortunately we caught all the main acts while we were there except for a couple that escaped through a hole in our stamina. Dennis Brown was the headliner on the last evening, August 8, in a finale built around a “Tuff Gong Uprising” — a medley of performances under Bob Marley’s nickname that included the Wailers, I-Threes and Melody Makers.

The music at Sunsplash began daily around sundown and kept going till dawn, with the light at the bookends illuminating the low hills and low-rise buildings around the park, buildings whose tenants must have got little sleep, for better or worse. With a three-day pass the concert-goers came and went as inebriation and fatigue would allow. The police were never needed. The music rarely paused.

Steel Pulse was indeed the highlight of Night 1, even though Black Uhuru, who played a couple of hours later, enjoyed greater popularity on the airwaves outside Jamaica. On an evening that also featured Rod Taylor, Ronnie Davis & the Itals, Tony Tuff, Jimmy Riley, the Tamlins, a comedian named Prince Edwards and veteran local outfit Culture (headlining as a replacement for Toots & the Maytals). There was also Marcia Griffiths, pictured here, of Marley’s backup singers, the I-Threes, and popular toaster Errol Scorcher, who would die a few years later in a “vigilante” killing, these two British bands offered an interesting look at what was happening to roots music beyond these shores.

In another decade Steel Pulse would become the first reggae band to perform for a US presidential inauguration (Clinton evidently a non-inhaling fan), but for now they were enjoying their first “homecoming”. Though all of Jamaican descent, none had ever before performed in Jamaica. The crowd knew this and welcomed them with immense enthusiasm, spurred on by the wicked songs they played, crackling with social commentary and ferocious dynamics.

Singer-guitarist David Hinds quite literally got things off to a hair-raising start when, during the first tune, he removed his towering cap to reveal a towering hairdo in exactly the same shape. It was cartoonish, and hilarious, but from there he and the Pulse’s other co-founder, singer-keyboardist Selwyn “Bumbo” Brown, got very intense. The whole first side of the four-disc Elektra album “Reggae Sunsplash ‘81″ is given over to “Sound System”, “Ku Klux Klan”, “Handsworth Revolution” and “Smile Jamaica”.

Birmingham’s Steel Pulse, who had been part of what Marley called the English “punky-reggae party”, often warming up for the Stranglers and Generation X, stayed close to the music’s core, but Black Uhuru, sadly for me, represented its future, when reggae would flail about stylistically, fretting over fans lost to American hip-hop.

Despite having Sly Dunbar and Robbie Shakespeare, two of the great stalwarts of Jamaican reggae, as their rhythm section, Black Uhuru raised little interest at Sunsplash. “Plastic Smile” and “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner”, which are on the Elektra album, and “Shine Eye Gal” and “Sinsemilla” have their share of hooks, but they’re more about quirks than hooks and, biggest sin of all, they’re not designed for dancing.

Derrick “Duckie” Simpson, Michael Rose and Sandra “Puma” Jones — not even the original membership, though the most successful Uhuru lineup — went on to win a Grammy (it was that kind of music) and bob and weave through more personnel rearrangements. Puma left in 1987 and died of cancer three years later. The others bickered over who owned the band’s name, an argument that seems as pointless to me as their million-selling singles. Black Uhuru, or someone like them, is still touring.

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I don’t know why Night 2, August 6, was such a lackadaisical day at Sunsplash. It’s possible that they planned it that way, knowing there’d be a lot of burn-out cases from the previous show. Boy did they read us right! We only made it halfway through, cashing in our chips well before both of the day’s big draws appeared — Mutabaruka, seen here, and Jimmy Cliff — doing a “Night of African Oneness” with someone called Jah Zulu. Roberta Flack was supposed to perform but got crossed off the bill.

For us anyway, Night 2 was memorable mostly for a sweet set by another of the I-Threes, Judy Mowatt, who can never be bad. Early illumination was shed by opening bands Light of Saba and Light of Love, the Lone Ranger did another of those interminable and largely unintelligible DJ acts, and veteran Freddie McGregor was well appreciated. Wrapping the day up for us was the justifiably popular Jamaican crooner Gregory Isaacs, pictured here, the only artist on the August 6 roster to make it onto the Elektra album, singing “Soon Forward”.

Which is exactly what we did, to Night 3, the bags under our eyes swelling even as our bags of dope diminished. (This in line with a necessary slowing-down of the ganja intake. The stuff had proved so ubiquitous and so absurdly cheap that we’d accumulated an amount far beyond our capacity, and our use was limited further by the fact that smoking more of this impossibly potent weed was just plain redundant: We couldn’t get any higher and still be able to walk. By the eve of our flight home, we were in a dire quandary about what to do with the remaining bushel or so. Various postal and layaway plans were considered before we boarded the plane carrying dope only in our bloodstreams, and with the sound of repeated toilet flushings still ringing regrettably in our ears.)

Sunsplash on August 7 was everything that August 6 had not been and, figuratively speaking, blew August 5 off the stage.

The show opened — opened, mind you — with my favourites at the time, the Mighty Diamonds. Donald “Tabby” Shaw, Fitzroy “Bunny” Simpson and Lloyd “Judge” Ferguson are responsible for what I (alone, perhaps) consider to be the best reggae album of all time, their 1976 debut, “Right Time”. This song is on the Sunsplash album, though it’s not their best by a long shot.

The Diamonds are still treating people to their gorgeous three-part harmony to this day, almost 40 years after they first tried it out on a Kingston street corner. The single I bought in Mo Bay, “Pass the Kouchie”, was a novelty hit that became an even bigger novelty hit when Musical Youth recorded it as “Pass the Dutchie”. Whatever it was they were passing from the left-hand side made millions of dollars, but the Diamonds were more spiritual than that, with Rasta laments like “Weeping and Wailing and Moaning and Gnashing of Teeth” and “Why Me Black Brother Why?”

The night got darker and louder as artists old and new paraded past — Lloyd Parkes, Michigan & Smiley, I-Maw, the fiery Tapper Zuki, the poet Mike Smith and Sheila Hylton, whose rather noisy version of the Police’s “The Bed’s Too Big Without You” is on the live album. Then, stirring a sense of false pride in me, Leroy Sibbles was onstage, the exile I’d interviewed for NOW magazine at last back in his homeland and putting on a fine show with the Soul Defenders. That’s him in the pic.

Next up, Third World gave a master class in island-rock-R&B-funk crossover. They remain the slickest of Jamaica’s exports, and even if they’re a shadow of their former selves today, they still have the terrific “1865 (96 in the Shade)” to fall back on. It’s on the Elektra compilation, along with “Rock the World”.

Yes it was ninety-six degrees in the shade
Ten thousand soldiers on parade
You caught me on the loose
Fighting to be free
Now you show me a noose
On the cotton tree
Entertainment for you
Martyrdom for me.

With a tune like that and a scudding version of the O’Jays’ “Now That We’ve Found Love”, Third World is going to get a crowd moving every time. Keyboardist Michael “Ibo” Cooper and guitarist Steven “Cat” Coore, both formerly of Inner Circle, had been doing this since 1973, and they knew about crowd manipulation. Bassist Richard Daley, drummer Willie “Roots” Stewart, percussionist Irvin “Carrot” Jarrett and lead singer William “Bunny Rugs” Clarke helped them put on a show that eased effortlessly between breathless thundering and smooth soul, even if the fundamental reggae rhythm wasn’t always present.

The crowd was roaring cheerfully along, and they doubled that when Third World brought Stevie Wonder onstage with them. The last time the American superstar had performed on the island, it was alongside Bob Marley at a 1975 benefit for the blind in Kingston, and Bob had subsequently opened shows for him in New York. Now here he was, with a band that had often been Marley’s opening act, paying homage to the fallen hero with “Master Blaster (Jammin’)”.

Might as well bring on some Wailers, then. Bob’s backup band took the stage to tumultuous, heartfelt applause, the sentiment of the situation missing only a “one-man-missing” fighter-jet flyover. At first they stayed in backup mode, providing suitably funky accompaniment to Eek-A-Mouse, then the hottest and fastest-rising star in the Caribbean.

As if Ripton Hilton wasn’t already a wild enough moniker, Ripton Hilton adopted the name bestowed on him by jeering pals after he sunk a fortune into a perpetually losing racehorse of that name. It finally won — the day he stopped betting on it — but the investment did pay off for him in concert receipts and record sales, with the single “Wa Do Dem” absolutely inescapable anywhere you went in Jamaica that summer of ‘81.

A reformed DJ, as so many island singers started out, Eek-A-Mouse had a vocal style called “sing-jay” that mixed singing with toasting against a bizarre, yo-yo, ping-ping, Charlie-Chan-in-Shanghai see-saw, and he had all the eccentricity needed to get away with the ribald lyrics, something about the girl being far too young for what he had in mind. Happy to be out of mourning for a brief intermission at least, the Sunsplash crowd broke up at Eek’s every “biddy biddy beng”.

So Eek was u-neek, but the Splash was coming to an end and there was still tribute to be paid. Rita Marley and the other I-Threes joined the Wailers and sang a slew of Bob’s songs, of which “Them Belly Full” ended up on the Elektra recording, and, not to be outdone, the newly formed Melody Makers — Bob’s kids Ziggy, Steven and Sharon — came out and did the sweet little ska number “Sugar Pie”.

That’s how we said goodnight to Marley’s ghost, with a new generation bounding into a gleeful future.

Reggae Sunsplash returned annually with no one’s memory in particular to honour. Yellowman famously had his hour in the yellow sun in ‘82, taking reggae ever closer to what would soon be called rap, and two years later a quarter of a million Britons attended Sunsplash at the Crystal Palace football stadium in London. There were versions in America and Japan as well under the guidance of promoter Tony Johnson, and then when he died in ‘99 the show came to an end.

Johnson’s family and Kenny Benjamin revived it last year, though, in Ocho Rios, where the last Jamaican Sunsplash had taken place in ‘97. Steel Pulse, Freddie McGregor and Gregory Isaacs returned to play along with UB40, Maxi Priest, Toots & the Maytals and newcomers Beenie Man, Elephant Man and Bounty Killer.

And at the moment there are many, many people waiting to hear news of Sunsplash 2007.

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There are several videos on YouTube from the ‘81 Sunsplash, including Third World performing “96 Degrees in the Shade” and the Mighty Diamonds singing “When the Right Time Comes”. A lovely Diamonds studio video of “I Will Pray Unto Thee” is here.

* See #6: Neil Young
* See #7: David Bowie
* See #8: The Tubes
* See #9: Pink Floyd
* See #10: Bob Marley
* See #11: Bob Dylan
* See #12: Heatwave
* See #13: Watkins Glen
* See #14: The Who
* See #15: Crosby, Stills Nash & Young
* COMING SOON: The Compleat Dorseyland Concert Directory