By Howard Campbell, Gleaner Writer
Veteran record producer Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd (right) and his wife, Norma, attended a ceremony recently during which Brentford Road in Kingston was renamed Studio One Boulevard in honour of the producer's outstanding body of work and contribution to the development of Jamaican music. - File
IT'S DIFFICULT to imagine what reggae music would have been without Clement 'Sir Coxsone' Dodd.
Chris Blackwell and Island Records usually get the accolades for breaking Bob Marley, and Jamaican pop music internationally, but no Marley song got a dance jumping like a Studio One rhythm.
Dodd, who died at the Medical Associates Hospital on May 4 at the age of 72, after suffering a heart attack, was the heartbeat of Jamaican dancehall. Not many of the genre's current stars are aware of this, but most of the fame and fortune that they enjoy today is owed to Dodd and his musicians who created hundreds of classic songs at Studio One's Brentford Road base.
Most of the beats that have rocked the dancehall in the past 25 years have been copied or influenced by Dodd's funky, horn-driven sound. What would a dance be without the Real Rock, Full Up or Rockfort Rock rhythms? A 'soun' man's collection is worthless if it does not have a copy of the Heptones On Top album or hardcore rockers like Throw Mi Corn (Larry and Alvin), Burning Spear's Rocking Time or Bobby Babylon by Freddie McGregor. Dodd's productions also had a softer side; the jazzy tones of The Wailers' It Hurts To Be Alone come to mind, so too lovers rock gems by Alton Ellis (Breaking Up Is Hard To Do) and Horace Andy (Just Say Who). Bob Andy's Fire Burning is one of reggae's most provocative songs.
DIVERSITY
It's a diversity that made musicians like respected drummer/ musician, Sly Dunbar, a 'Studio One fanatic'.
"Mi use to tell him all the time. Me's yuh biggest fan an' yuh don't even know," Dunbar has said. Clement Dodd is the fourth pioneer of Jamaican music to die within one year. Sister Mary Ignatius, matriarch of the Alpha Boys School, Randy Chin and Ken Khouri, founders of Randy's Records and Federal Records respectively, passed away in 2003.
Born in Kingston, Dodd was a former farm worker who started the Downbeat sound system in the mid 1950s. It was at a time when Jamaica's popular music scene was taking shape and a new beat called ska was being played in Kingston's clubs. In October 1963 Dodd established Studio One which many regard as Jamaica's version of Berry Gordy's Motown. Most of the people who eventually became immortals recorded there: Don Drummond and the Skatalites, Toots and The Maytals, Alton Ellis, Delroy Wilson, Bob Andy, The Wailers, The Heptones, Ken Boothe, Marcia Griffiths and the boy wonder, Dennis Brown.
It's where musicians like keyboardist/arranger Jackie Mittoo, drummers Fil Callender and Leroy 'Horsemouth' Wallace, guitarist Eric Frater, and bass players Leroy Sibbles and Earl 'Bagga' Walker learned their chops. By the mid 1960s, Studio One and rival producer Arthur 'Duke' Reid's Treasure Isle, were fighting for control of local charts, both releasing a flurry of hit songs. Bass player, Jackie Jackson, who was a member of the Supersonics house band at Treasure Isle, said the competition between the two labels was fierce.
"It was like a silent cold war," Jackson said in a 2003 interview. Like Motown in Detroit, Studio One was more than music. It was owned by a black man competing with not only Reid, a former policeman, but powerhouse labels Federal and Beverley's which were owned by the middle-class Khouri family and Leslie Kong.
As seen in film-maker Perry Henzell's cult film classic, The Harder They Come, the monied class had a stranglehold on local radio but it was Dodd and Reid who called the tune in the dancehall. Studio One yielded some ground in the dancehall during the 1970s when the roots sound of Channel One emerged. Yet, that label borrowed heavily from the Studio One catalogue; that's no surprise, since the driving force behind The Revolutionaries, Channel One's house band, was a young Sly Dunbar and saxophonist Tommy McCook, formerly of The Skatalites.
Even though the equipment at Studio One was reportedly primitive compared to the hot Channel One and Joe Gibbs studios, its timeless rhythms saw Dodd making a comeback in the 1970s with a new slate of artistes that included singers Freddie McGregor, Sugar Minott, Johnny Osbourne and Earl Sixteen. Again, it was powerplay in the dancehall that made Minott, especially, a star with hits such as Vanity and Dodd packed his bags and headed for the United States in the early 1980s. Throughout that decade, the American company, Heartbeat Records began distributing Studio One music in the U.S. and Europe, introducing his productions to a new demographic. In the 1990s, the latest generation of dancehall producers led by Donovan Germaine at Penthouse Records scored with covers of Studio One classics, most notably Griffiths' Fire Burning and Superstar by Wayne Wonder and Buju Banton.
RESUMED RECORDING
In recent years, Dodd divided his time between his store in Brooklyn, New York, and the renovated building on Brentford Road where he resumed recording. On Thursdays, Studio One was abuzz with retail activity with sound system owners from as far as Japan stopping in to purchase vinyl records and CDs. Of course, there were also negatives. Dodd fell out with some of his former protégés including Leroy Sibbles of The Heptones and Bob Andy who claim that he cheated them of royalties. In his defence, Dodd maintained that he had binding contracts with all of his artistes.
Many have tried to analyse the Studio One sound over the years. Gary 'Dr. Dread' Himelfarb, founder of the RAS Records all-reggae label in Washington D.C., says Dodd best summed up his productions during a conversation they shared in Queens some years ago. "I asked him, 'Was it the treble, was it the engineer? His answer was quite simple. 'No', he said, 'I think it was just God'."
