Tuesday, April 05, 2005  

Carl Dawkins
"Dr. Rodney"
"Pluggy Brown"
Mr. Satisfaction, 1966-1976
(Upstairs Music, 2002)

The incredible roots reggae / R&B soul-shouter Carl Dawkins had a big hit with "Satisfaction" in 1970, and it still gets cries of "Big tune!" at oldies sessions. But I think it pales next to the smokers "Pluggy Brown" and "Dr. Rodney."

Dr. Walter Rodney was a Marxist historian-activist from Guyana. In 1968 he was a lecturer at the University of West Indies Mona, in Kingston, and regularly mixed with Rastafarians and sufferers in addition to his professorial peers. Dr. Rodney was a hard-core lefty, and Jamaican politics was devisively split (now & then) between the pro-USA right of the then-ruling Jamaica Labour Party and the socialist-leaning People's National Party. Not liking the Commie tones bubbling up in the shantytowns, Prime Minister Hugh Shearer banned left-wing and black-power books (in Ja!?), and while Dr. Rodney was at a writers' conference in Montreal he was barred from returning to Jamaica in October of '68. This caused riots in Kingston, and in 1969 Carl Dawkins cut the protest jam "Dr. Rodney" with producer Clancy Eccles for the New Beat label; it too was banned. Unable to return to his post at U.W.I., Dr. Rodney went to Dar-es-Salaam to teach at the University of Tanzania, and in 1974 he returned to Guyana to fight against his country's corrupt government. Dr. Rodney died in 1980 when a walkie-talkie rigged with a bomb blew up in his hands.

Dawkins cut the cautionary "Pluggy Brown" in 1975, and like "Dr. Rodney" it's another boom-bapper that my officemate and wife (very nearly the same thing) probably want to kill me for singing all the time (as much for my pinched-nerve vox as for the utter repetition).

For a guy with so much talent Dawkin's hardly recorded at all; just a bunch of singles and not a single LP. Why? In a November 2002 interview with Colby Graham's essential Jamaican fanzine Vintage Boss, Ras Carl admits, "I'm a user but not an abuser of no substance that society tends to push people aside for, when they are users too." Yeah, I don't really know what he's saying either, but maybe he had a drug problem.

The Vintage Boss interview is cool because there's very little info about Carl Dawkins on the WWW. Here are some more quotes:

"My father [Joshua Dawkins] was a drummer with Sonny Bradshaw Big Band, and I used to go with him to help pack up the drum set when he played at Shady Grove and Glass Bucket. At that time he was based in Spanish Town. My Daddy eventually left for England and then to Germany..... I remember I was living in Allman Town when we had the 1951 storm [Hurricane Charlie], and my closet friends were the Sterling brothers [including the Skatalites' Lester]. I went to Allman Town Primary and then to Senior (Kingston) School where I would sing at school concerts along with the likes of Slim Smith, Marcia Griffiths, and Samuel Barton.

"I used to play football and cricket, and I was very close to Slim Smith [later of the Uniques], Fredrick Waite [the father of bassist Patrick and drummer Freddie Jr. of Musical Youth], Winston Riley [of "Stalag" riddim fame], and Franklyn White. That group eventually became the Techniques. I wasn't a member of the group, but we were all close and I helped to choreograph their stage act in the mid-'60s.... Slim Smith was my idol, and whenever the group finished doing their thing at the end of each day I would take the guitar and go off on my own and play. As boys we used to go down to Hunts Bay by the sea, and one evening when we were returning home the group went to audition for J.J. [producer Karl Johnson]. While there Slim Smith said to him that I have some 'hit songs.' He laughed at me like Santa Claus: ho ho ho! I sang my first songs, one called "Run Your Shoes Off," then "Baby I Love You' and 'Hard Times.' Man! J.J. loved the songs and they became hits."

But Ras Carl liked to huff boo, and bredren was tossed into the clink soon after he made his first recordings. Again from Vintage Boss:

"I went to Richmond Farm Prison, and lots of other artists were there, too, for smoking the weed. You had Lord Creator, Toots Hibbert, Bunny Wailer, and more. At Richmond we had celebrity status, and we wrote lots of songs while there."

Once out of the hoosegow, the ganja burning continued, which led to Dawkins writing his biggest-selling tune:

"One day we played some football and smoked weed, and I felt nice. I had a guitar and I started playing with my friend Milton. I said to him that my heart was beating fast and Milton started making a beating sound. So I said to the weed man, 'Boy, mi satisfy, tell you the truthfully, you weed good yu see.' I then put words to the event and came up with 'Satisfaction.'"

Sorry about the crappy vinyl MP3 rips. But you can buy a CD collection called Mr. Satisfaction, which has 22 tracks to the LP's 17, from Ernie B's. (You can get Vintage Boss back issues there, too.) Actually, on the back of the Mr. Satisfaction CD there's an address and phone number for Carl Dawkins Music: Abyssinia Court, 7 Miles Bull Bay, Jamaica, W.I.; tel. 876-387-0188. Tell him the Suburbs sends much love, much collie.

Here's Carl doing an a capella jingle of his 1966 single "Baby I Love You" (only seems to work in IE, not Firefox).

Posted by CP | Link |

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