Should you be in a reggae band?

I was lucky enough to catch a screening of a new documentary ‘The Upsetter: The life and music of Lee Scratch Perry’ the other day, at the Downtown Independent. Now, this guy was an absolute genius and really changed the face of music, essentially creating Reggae and Dub as we know it. When you see people like that, it becomes clear real quick that they have something we don’t. They’ve got something ‘inside’ that makes them unique. Granted, he was (or became) completely bat-shit crazy, but what a force. What drive this man had. Just hearing (and watching) him speak makes it clear that there’s something going on in there that we’ll never understand. That most of us

More gear than talent

I’ve always been a gear person. At 10, i was finding ways to hook up more speakers to my stereo than the one ‘recommended’ pair: “There must be a way to twist the wires together, splice it in the back, or something” or I’d be hooking up an external mic to my Radio Shack cassette deck to record the US top 40 broadcasts from the US Military Base in Keflavik (with the mic jammed up against the speaker on my AM transistor radio). In fact, some of those songs would become forever altered in my memory, since these were the only recordings i had of them, and inevitably my mom would come in, mid-recording, to fetch me for dinner;