cannabis fun club

Lee Scratch Perry did not invent scratches. They called him "Scratch" because forty years ago he wrote a song about a chicken that scratched the ground with its paw while looking for a worm. But Lee Scratch Perry was, and maybe still is, the best and most inventive producer of reggae and ska, is considered one of the daddies of dub and is listed as the hundredth artist in the world hierarchy invented by Rolling Stone magazine. He will come to Moscow for the first time: four years ago, a concert was announced with the participation of Scratch and his former partner Mad Professor. Scratch did not come, allegedly running out of space for visas in his passport. Now he claims in an interview with the Moscow Times that it was the Professor who deceived everyone. In any case, now Scratch should come and create a number of new myths about himself. We will discuss some of the old ones.

Lee Perry probably didn't burn down his famous Black Ark studio in 1978 (where a young Marley once recorded and where the best reggae record of all time, The Heart of the Congos, was made).

Scratch always claimed that in a fit of rage he had set his own red rooster on fire and destroyed everything he had lovingly collected over the years, and then in a state of stress and drug intoxication he had brought it to ruin. Alas, various researchers, citing Lee Perry's relatives, believe that electricity is a science about contacts, and if the wires were to hang twisted together live, then sooner or later there would be nothing left to set on fire. However, Scratch himself always insisted that he was the one who did it, since there were evil spirits in the studio - he was obviously referring to all those aliens from outer space that begin to surround a person after just a few years of regular use of marijuana and cocaine.

It's a pity, of course. A terribly pity.

In this studio, for example, there was a palm tree growing, into the roots of which Perry stuck a microphone: he wanted to achieve a particularly deep, mysterious, mystical bass drum, and so he hit the trunk of this palm tree with a stick.

By that time, Scratch was already a great, one of the most famous producers in the world. Although it would be wrong to call him the inventor of dub, he was the best of the producers of this viscous music. He had primitive equipment and great ingenuity. He used a four-track tape recorder, broken glass, chain-link fencing, an alarm clock, baby whistles, and his records were far ahead of everything that his competitors - the evil spirits - were doing on 16-track state-of-the-art consoles.

At some point, after he had burned down the studio, lived in America and worked with the Island label, when he became a Swiss Rastaman married to a local millionaire, he had a question: who makes this music? Scratch or the smoke inside Scratch?

It's a dangerous dilemma. For example, shock rocker and rat eater Alice Cooper asked a similar question when he gave up alcohol and his work became boring and predictable.

So, that was it. It was Scratch. He proved it when he stopped smoking for a while and was able to continue recording powerful albums and playing concerts. The official version is that he is now sober. This, of course, makes life easier for promoters: we all remember how, during the first visit of one of the legendary ska bands, the organizers had a hard time convincing the musicians not to bring a bag of buds across the ocean with them.

But the point, of course, is not the smoke and other Rastafarian props. The festival in honor of Bob Marley's birthday will include a man who started by selling homemade singles to traveling discos, who knew Marley as a boy and recorded this pioneer in his studio. And having earned money (Scratch released his first number in the English hit parade in 1968), he began to experiment and influenced the development of modern music - hip-hop, in particular, this is also largely his fault. And unlike Alice, he didn’t give up: being a man born in 1936, he recorded, say, the luxurious album From the Secret Laboratory in 1990.

With visible pleasure, he still confuses the peace of quiet Switzerland with his wild appearance and has not allowed anyone to find the answer to the question: is Lee Scratch Perry insane or has he simply been mocking the whole world for many years.

In general, it’s impossible not to go to his performance.

But here we must take into account two unfortunate facts.

Firstly, Perry will be crowning a huge festival of circumpolar reggae: a number of self-made performers will play as the opening act, including Karibasov, VPR and the Festival of Everything, the rap gang Dabats and a whole list that can be found on the website club "B1 Maximum".

The second sad fact is that the B1 club has the best program in the city and the worst sound. This means that we will continue to go there wincing, as at the recent Gogol Bordello concert, when all the instruments were piled up and not a single word could be heard, and experiencing almost physical pain when the guitars will hum like Chuck Berry's. But we can hope that the police will not irritate the public in the hall and in the toilets, looking for prohibited substances with German shepherds, as they did at the reggae festival in Luzhniki, where that same legendary man was announced.