The 1974 song “King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown” showcases many of Jamaican dub music’s signature attributes. A collaboration between producer and melodica player Augustus Pablo (Horace Swaby) and legendary audio engineer King Tubby (Osbourne Ruddock), the 2:31 cut is a heavily modified version of Pablo and reggae vocalist Jacob Miller’s “Baby I Love You So”, the sentimental ballad presented on the B side of the 7-inch vinyl pictured above. Primarily instrumental, Pablo and Tubby’s mix features a disintegrated, underwatery soundspace, a throbbing electric bass groove and a crisp sixteenth-note snare and cymbal combination sitting high up in the mix. Shorn-off fragments of pop lyrics and “Eastern” melody surface every other measure, dodging elusively in and out of the listener’s peripheral awareness like phantoms.
Comparing the first forty-five seconds of the twin tracks on this record confirms that they do indeed share the same compositional DNA. Initially, the most striking “mutation” found in the dub version is simply that the chordal instruments, beginning with the three-note piano pickup that opens “Baby I Love You So”, as well as Miller’s vocalizations in the first four bars, have been “subtracted” from the dub mix to leave only the drum and bass and melodica tracks, until Miller’s voice is briefly brought back in in bars five through eight. But that is not all, of course. Tubby has also run the sounds through home-built signal processors to create a dense braid of reverb effects that impart a ghostly feeling to the track and give it a more intricate and agitated-sounding rhythm. By the third four-measure phrase, the original love song has been decomposed almost beyond recognition, transformed into something that can only be described as the musical equivalent of a photo negative.
The technological wizardry and musical virtuosity of artists like King Tubby has been a major theme of the scholarship dedicated to dub. Ethnomusicologist Michael Veal, for example, draws attention to the fundamentally spontaneous and improvisational character of the way that Jamaican sound engineers developed fresh mixes of the latest dance hits. In his important study Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae, Veal draws on interviews with pioneering Kingston producers King Jammy, Bunny Lee and Sylvan Morris to portray dub composition as an organic process that relied mostly upon intuition and trial-and-error as artists played with the mixing board controls, chopping up original vocals and experimenting with added echos and delays. “The unity of engineer, mixing desk, and music,” Veal observes, “is in the end no different than the unity of musician and instrument” (78).
Both the extemporized nature of dub production highlighted above and the close ties that Veal notes between dub and the dance party culture of postcolonial Jamaica have become ensconced in this music’s widely disseminated origin myth. According to a retelling by Bunny Lee (qtd. in Katz), the first dub version of a reggae song was, in a sense, invented accidentally. One day in 1968, recounted the record producer, an engineer at Kingston’s historic Treasure Isle studio had problems transferring the vocal track onto a record being pressed for Ruddy Redwood, proprietor of Supreme Ruler of Sound, a popular mobile sound system built for playing music at dances and street parties. Lee, who claimed to have been present at the time, went on to recall that this unintended instrumental version pleased Redwood so much that he played it at a Spanish Town dancehall event soon after, delighting the astonished crowd and giving birth to the genre of music that veteran reggae chronicler David Katz notes would subsequently contribute to the genesis of hip hop and numerous styles of electronic dance music.
Works Cited:
Katz, David. Solid Foundation: An Oral History of Reggae, 2nd ed. Jawbone Press, 2012.
Veal, Michael E. Dub: Soundscapes and Shattered Songs in Jamaican Reggae. Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
