PULPHEAD NOTES

The Music of Right Now

Traffic was thick now. Llewis turned up the crappy radio in the van as we moved toward the hotel. The DJ played a song called “Slow Motion” by Vybz Kartel, probably the hottest dancehall singer in Jamaica right now. At that moment, Vybz was in jail, suspected (in the vaguest terms) of having gotten involved in Dudus-related violence. “But we’re hoping he’ll get out soon,” said Llewis as he drove. “Maybe this Friday.” This was the music Llewis loved best, not the old stuff (which he knew and respected). If the Wailers were playing now, this is what they’d be into. A young couple in a car next to us grinned and bobbed their heads to it as we rolled by. I’d never been wild about dancehall, but now I the last wailer realized it was because I’d never really heard dancehall. You can’t just “listen” to dancehall. It happens; you have to be there for it. The DJ was mixing together three or four different songs. Kartel’s hypnotic voice floated over the top of beats that would suddenly vanish, leaving only spacey bass-throbs, as the words kept running. “So this is now?” I asked. “Right?” “This is right now,” Llewis said, stabbing his finger at the radio. “This is Right. Now.”

At the hotel, I downloaded “Slow Motion.” It was somewhat limp, in this version. It sounded like a karaoke mix of what we’d heard in the car. Vybz did not live on the computer. He was in the air over Kingston.

-“The Last Wailer”

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Members of the Adolphus male chorus (a male gospel choir from Holly Springs, Mississippi) bustin folks’ BRAINS out during the Thacker Mountain Radio broadcast, at Off Square Books, in Oxford, Mississippi, last Thursday night. The rest of the music was also electrifying—Anna Kline and The Grits & Soul Band (newgrass excellence); Tyler Keith and his rocking group (they did a KILLER song called “Don’t Look on My Dark Side” that I woke up singing this morning, three days later). John T. Edge read a really funny piece about Kool-Aid pickles (Koolickles!). I read from my Bunny Wailer thing, which came off weird but, I hope, entertaining. Thacker Mountain is the only book-tour stop where you don’t really care how your reading went, ‘cause you just want to sit back down and hear more music. Plus hilarious and deceptively quick-on-his-feet host, Jim Dees. The whole night reminded me how much I miss Oxford and its rare hospitality. Thank you, Richard & Lisa, for taking me in, putting me up, and sending me off at 6 the next morn with some ultra-tasty bacon.

-JJ

P.S. The beautifully smiling girl on the left is Sarah Jennings, one of the show’s producers. When some technical issues cropped up with the piano, she jumped up, grabbed Jim Dees’s speaking mic, and held it over the keys. Talk about professionalism. As you can see, she’s still totally digging the music, that’s how good they were.

Buying Weed for Bunny

It was late afternoon now. We were heat-drunk and fatigued and still hadn’t really even begun. We discussed some more and agreed that we should take the opportunity to smoke some of the weed I’d bought, to make absolutely sure that it wasn’t shit, that we wouldn’t be inadvertently insulting Bunny with it. We would be like the king’s tasters, I suppose. Where could this be done safely, though? Contrary to what you might think, Jamaica is not a place where you can just lie around in a park and smoke ganja all day.

-“The Last Wailer”

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It had long been a dream of mine to meet Bunny Wailer—a pipe dream, sometimes a literal one in the sense that I dreamed it while holding a pipe. I don’t know what it is about Jamaican music, but creatively it just seems to take place at a higher amperage. It may be an island effect. Isolation does seem to produce these intensities sometimes. 

-“The Last Wailer”

Bob Marley, still the captain

Bunny started talking about the young Bob Marley, what he was like when they attended the Stepney All Age School in St. Ann together. Back then they had called Bob Nesta, his first name at birth.

“A lot of people don’t know the nature of the individual,” Bunny said. “From a childhood state, Bob was cut out to be this icon, this saint.” The pain of being biracial had deepened his sensitivity early on. His father was a white man, a captain in the British military, Norval Sinclair Marley. The influence of this side of Bob’s childhood had been underemphasized, Bunny felt. Bob had grown up “in the condition of a nobody.” In the Jamaica of that time, “the biracial child was like a reproach, because he brings shame on the family of the white man and shame on the family of the black woman.

“Bob would look at you and say, ‘You think God white? God BLACK!’ Ah- haa!” Bunny raised his finger. “And his father is a white person, Captain Marley, and his genes is also in Bob.” Bunny had clearly worked through this. He laughed darkly, shaking his head. “Aha, still the captain,” he said.

-“The Last Wailer”