Can't Stop Won't Stop by Jeff Chang Page A

stoke each other.
    On the title track, a version of Jacob Miller’s “Baby I Love You So,” Tubby left Pablo’s melodica, Carly Barrett’s drums, and Chinna Smith’s guitar in shards. Miller had sung, “Night and day, I pray that love will come my way.” But Tubby clipped his lines—”Baby I-I-I-I,” “night and day,” “that love,” “And I-I-I-I”—transforming Miller’s longing into a prison. On the original, Miller had scatted loosely, then chuckled, perhaps at having missed an essential cue. Tubby added a ghostly echo, leaving the laugh to hang like a haunting, the smoke of Rhygin’s trail. At the end, Miller’s cry dissolved in a barrage of oscillations, a plunge through a trapdoor.
    The last track, inexplicably left unannounced on the original album sleeve and label, was a dub of the Abyssinians’ 1969 single, “Satta Massa Gana,” colloquially known as the Rastafarian national anthem. In mistranslated Amharic, its title meant to “give thanks and praise” to Haile Selassie, while its harmonies yearned for “a land far far away.” 18 Tubby gutted the song to a bass pulse and drum accent. The song’s basic chords were twisted out of shape and pitch. Drums dropped like thunderclaps. Tubby’s mirror world was the sound of the dreamland alliance of Rastas and democratic socialists disintegrating, its utopia looted by thugs and left to the whipping hurricane winds of global change.
    It was music of the crossfire lifted out of the progression of time, politics, and meaning. Dub embraced contingency. Everything was up for grabs. Dub declaimed, distorted, or dropped out at the razor’s edge of a moment. It gave a clipped, fragmented voice to horrors the nation could not yet adequately articulate.
    One Love Peace Music
    When 1978 arrived, another round of election-year violence seemed imminent. But then the unexpected happened. Somehow in early January, Bucky Marshall, a gunman from the PNP-backed Spanglers Posse, ended up in the same General Penitentiary cell as some JLP gangsters and they got to talking.
    They spoke of the event that had ended 1977. Renegade soldiers from the Jamaican Defense Force had set up and ambushed an unarmed posse of JLP roughnecks, killing five. But five more got away, and they told the story of the extra-legal set-up to
The Gleaner
. The resulting scandal potentially incriminated both PNP and JLP politicians, and many felt that a coup or a civil war was imminent. Certainly, the rival gunmen in that jail-cell reasoned, no political affiliations could save anyone from the army if something that serious was afoot.
    When Marshall stepped out of jail, he went to meet with Claudie Massop, Seaga’s man in Tivoli Gardens, who had come up through The Phoenix and was now the area don. The next morning, at a spot straddling the border of JLP and PNP territories in central Kingston, they announced a peace treaty. Marshall and Massop took photos together, and spoke to the press. “This is not political,” said Marshall. “This is from we who have felt the pangs of jail.” 19 Massop added, “The youths have been fighting among themselves for too long and is only them get dead. Everybody I grow up with is dead.” 20 Amidst the spreading truce, elated youths left their yards and began to gather in parks and dances that had formerly been in enemy territory.
    With the help of the Rasta sect, the Twelve Tribes of Israel, Marshall, Massop, and the ranking PNP don from Concrete Jungle, “Red Tony” Welch, went to London to see the man who had first brought them together, Bob Marley. Welch and Massop had been frequent guests when Marley was holding court on Hope Road. Now they asked him to return to Jamaica and headline a “One Love Peace Concert.” The benefit would raise money for the most suffering PNP and JLP ghettos, to be distributed by the newly