mondrian’s neon fantod

Dub. It’s reggae, but it’s more than that. It’s the grandaddy of remix & DJ culture. It’s the source of a lot of what The Clash wound up pursuing musically. It’s a damn good listen, too.

at the royal rack
Other than the dub influences on The Clash, I probably first heard “real” dub at the Royal Rack Club in back dear old Dallas. I don’t recall just who turned us on to the place, but I do know it was in 1989 – my senior year of high school. The Rack was* a pool hall run by (if I remember correctly) a couple of brothers who had immigrated to the US from the Ivory Coast**. It was a fantastic pool hall, really. They had at least a dozen tables and you paid by the hour, not by the game. Oh, and once upon a time they might have served me a drink when I was under age. But only once and only because I had a pretty good fake ID.

The Royal Rack played nothing but reggae (mostly dub) on their sound system. They even had live reggae bands, mostly roots and rocksteady, up on a little stage in the corner, on the weekends. So there I was, 18 and itching to escape Dallas, but stuck waiting my way through the last chunk of high school. And suddenly here was a place that was more than a little bit different from what I knew of my hometown. And they played this music that was really, really great. I’d like to think that I would have gotten more into reggae & dub at that point, but soon enough I was outta there and on my way to Austin, where blues & (proto) alt.country (we called it cowpunk) were king.

But still, the music left its mark on me. I was open to the possibilities. It would just take 12 years before Jah smiled upon me again…

grand theft auto
I was reintroduced to/reminded of dub in 2001 via the reggae station in Grand Theft Auto III, K-JAH. I settled on that station almost immediately and seldom changed it, because the music really seemed to fit the edginess and brooding feeling the game engendered in me. Almost by accident I was flipping though the game’s manual and came across the tiny little text near the end that identified the various sources for the music used by the different stations in the game. It was there that I discovered K-JAH was comprised entirely of tracks from The Scientist’s seminal dub album Scientist Rids The World Of The Curse Of Evil Vampires. So within a day or so I headed down to ye olde independent record store and searched for said album. I suppose it’s an advantage of living in Austin that I found Vampires easily. Anyway, I went home, slapped it on, and haven’t looked back.

more dub than you can shake a mixing board at
Of course, there’s more to dub than the one album by The Scientist. Anything by King Tubby, The Scientist’s mentor, is good for a listen. King Jammy, arch-rival of The Scientist, is also certainly worth checking out. There’s also Lee “Scratch” Perry, Keith Hudson, Ranking Dread and the Ja-Man All Stars. There are dub versions of “normal” reggae albums by folks like Black Uhuru (Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner? Natty Dreadlocks!). Hell, there’s even a dub version of/tribute to Pink Floyd’s Dark Side Of The Moon. And the good news is that much of this stuff has made it to CD, so even those of you who aren’t inclined to hunt down rare vinyl imports can still partake of the dubby goodness. And once you start digging, you’ll find even more dub for your ears and soul.

a note on dub, electronica and the remix culture
Dub is, essentially, remixing. And as such, it is the grandfather of today’s electronica/remix culture. So if you’re all about DJs, cutting edge bangara/hard bop mashup mix tapes and the latest word from Remix magazine then you owe it to yourself to listen to some dub an’ know your ‘istry, mon.

where to learn more
Pay a visit to dub.com and poke around to hear something you’ve probably never heard before. You can also just run down to your local record store and start hunting for any of the artists I’ve mentioned above. Or you can fire up that old copy of GTA3 and slide on over to K-JAH to hear Horace “The Pacifist” Walsh spinning some Scientist for your overly-violent yet amazingly fun amusement. Finally, a good sampling of classic dub can be found on the Trojan Records Dub Box Set

* or perhaps still is. I can’t quite tell from the web if it remains open, but it sure looked closed the last time I drove by, back in June ’04. Good lord, has it been that long since I’ve visited D?

** it might not have been the Ivory Coast. It might have been Nigeria. Or somewhere else. I really don’t recall. I blame the Mamba.