Saturday, March 12, 2016
For reasons that don't bear going into (but which are probably not the reasons you might assume) I found myself on a bit of a reggae jag over the past week or so. Most of my reggae sides are on vinyl, and I have a collection that is pretty diverse for a white guy, I'd say. Generally I acquired it by following the black guys with dreads at J&R, picking up artists that they'd flip through, although my brothers' influence as a scholar of the African diaspora is also pretty evident. One of the things that I discovered that I remembered is that English reggae bands tend to be not quite what I am looking for-- Steel Pulse, to take one example, is okay, but a half bubble away from the Burning Spear stuff that hits exactly the right spot. I am reminded of this because at the moment I am listening to the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and thinking that Butterfield is to John Mayall as The Heptones are to UB40. And none of them are Howlin' Wolf or Lee "Scratch" Perry.
// posted by Bill @ 8:01 PM 
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