The short version (radio edit):

I’ve got a new digital single out. It’s a 12-string acoustic version of the Melodians classic, “Rivers Of Babylon.” You can buy it here, and some other places, supposedly including iTunes. It’s my first solo release in thirty-five years. No pyrotechnics, no harmonic squeals, no bent notes. That stuff you can get on the Island Head CD. Here, I just play the tune.

The long, 12″ disco mix version, including the history of my solo career to date:

As many of you know, I’ve played on countless recording sessions since my career began, back in the days when the Riddim Twins were Pebbles and Bam-Bam. Some of these records have been, blessedly, both popular and enduring. Most, frankly, have not. I never planned on a career as a session musician. It just happened when I went to Jamaican and discovered that the people I really wanted to play with primarily made records instead of playing gigs. So I had to go where they were and do what they did to play with them. To my complete surprise, it turned out that I had a knack for playing on sessions and people have continued to ask me to do it ever since.

Along the way, a number of people asked me when I was going to record my own album as a guitarist. Several people actually went further than that and tried to make it happen. Derrick Harriott was the first. After I started doing sessions for him, he asked me about doing a cover of “Sleep Walk,” the great Santo and Johnny instrumental. I could never play it well enough on slide to be happy recording it, so I ducked him until he forgot about it.

Larry Carlton did the same tune without slide a couple of years later and got a lot of airplay with it. When I heard it, I kicked myself repeatedly. I could have done a fine job on it if I hadn’t insisted on playing slide…regrets, I’ve had a few. Derrick is one sharp dude and an excellent producer; if I’d done even an adequate version for him, Jamaican radio would probably still be playing it.

Next I did two guitar instrumentals for Harry J, covers of “The Bed’s Too Big Without You” and “Love Don’t Live Here Any More,” which to my knowledge were not released. I couldn’t do much with the first one but “Love Don’t Live Here Any More” came out pretty well, considering how little time Harry gave me to do it and how new I was to recording. I wasn’t really happy with either one of them (sense a pattern here?) so I never asked him to put them out.

Then I did a cover of “Ticket To Ride” for Joe Gibbs that ended up on the Sly and Robbie album “Syncopation,” without any mention of me. This lack of credit was typical of the JG labels; the same thing happened with Tappa Zukie. I did an improvised instrumental for him as part of a long session otherwise devoted to singers. Along with horn lines from Dean Fraser, Nambo, and Chico of We The People, it ended up as a 45 called “Falkland Crisis,” credited to the Tappa Zukie All-Stars, again with no AB name-check. It also ended up as “Leaders of Black Countries” on the Mighty Diamonds album of the same name. Oh, he also shorted us a bit on the original session if memory serves. Great days. (I got Tappa back somewhat for this escapade, but I’m saving the story for my book.)

A year or so later at Channel One, Niney approached me about doing an album. He had ten rhythm tracks and wanted me to play melodies over them. The up-front money he offered wasn’t much. Nor was he very forthcoming about how the publishing and writing was to be distributed. However, in spite of the obvious difficulties, I was considering the idea when the great singer Hugh Griffiths turned up and wanted to speak to Niney, concerning the matter of royalties due from a previous project. Within moments, the meeting rapidly degenerated into what diplomats call a “a full and frank discussion of the issues.” It concluded with Hugh drawing his machete and chasing Niney down the lane. This put my solo project on hold for the time being, as it’s difficult even for a Jamaican record producer to screw you out of your publishing while running for his life through Whitfield Town.

I did see Niney again a week or so later and he was still interested in recording me. But I’d already decided that a solo record for Niney was going to be more trouble than it was worth. So I told him I would have to think about it some more. In the meantime, did he have any session work?

As you can imagine, this incident dampened whatever enthusiasm I might have had for a solo career for quite a while. However, something that my friend Bubbler Waul, the great reggae keyboardist and my former We The People bandmate, once said had always stayed with me. Once we had been talking about the fact that Jamaican radio was somewhat open to instrumental reggae, but never played records with guitar as the lead instrument. I found this situation discouraging, but then Bubbler said something I’ll never forget. “Andy, don’t say to yourself that they won’t play a guitar instrumental. Say to yourself that you are going to make the first guitar instrumental that will get played on the radio.”

So, several years later, I took up Bubbler’s challenge. In early 1985, with my career in Jamaica at its peak, I had some extra money, some of which I spent recording a double-sided 45, “Skateland Rock/Too Sweet For Words. ” I wrote both songs and put down the artist information on the label as Andy Bassford with We The People. The full band at the time, including our leader Lloyd Parks, played on both songs along with contributions from Gits Willis and Winston Wright. We recorded it live to two-track in the studio, with the great Sylvan Morris engineering. The original idea had been to record an album, but I only had enough money to record three songs at the time.

After the session, my wife Elizabeth, who worked as Harry J’s administrative assistant and was there while we were recording,  said to me, “Did you notice that Bigga and the other guys in the pressing plant came in to watch while you were recording the Skateland song?”

“I did notice, but I wasn’t paying much attention. What’s special about that?”

“Those guys hear people recording all day, all the time. It’s nothing to them. They never stop the machines to listen. And they never, ever, come in the studio while people are recording. Think about it. As long as you’ve been playing at Harry J, did you ever see Bigga come inside the studio unless he needed to talk to Harry?”

“You’re right. That’s the only time I’ve ever seen him or any of the others from the factory in the control room.”

“I think that tune has something. Those guys don’t stop working for anything and they stopped to listen to you. I know you were thinking about an album, but I think you should put that song out as a single. It’s got something.”

Elizabeth is not a musician but she has a great feel for music, and a great feel for people. The more I thought about it, the more sense her idea made. I wasn’t happy with the third track we recorded, but “Skateland Rock” and “Too Sweet For Words” had come out pretty well. Morris went with me to Dynamic to master it; the songs were a bit long for a 45 but he coached the mastering engineer through a live fade when he cut the master and managed to make them fit. (This came back to bite me later, another story for the book.)

I issued it on my own label, Registered Alien, but picked Harry J to manufacture and distribute it, as Elizabeth worked there and could keep an eye on things. Plus she was on very good terms with the factory guys. I hoped these factors would help keep the possibility of thievery to a tolerable minimum.  Bagga Case of Home-T 4 designed the label using a little drawing she had done that I thought looked like a registered alien (which in fact I was; I had to renew my RA card every year).

We spent a little extra money on a black and white photo sleeve for the first 50 copies, which were to go to the DJs. This was something that people weren’t doing in Jamaica then and I thought it might help the record stand out among the hundreds of songs they auditioned each week.

We also wrote up a little press release pointing out that the record, unlike every other reggae 45 of the day, had two full songs instead of one song and a dub remix. There wasn’t really any choice, as I’d recorded the songs to two-track because the tape and studio costs were much lower. A lot of great records were cut live, and I knew the band could handle it. Plus recording on two-track allowed me to pay the musicians regular session fees instead of asking them to play for free. (At that time, everybody in the Kingston  session clique regularly played on each other’s projects for free, so it wouldn’t have been a big deal, but I didn’t feel comfortable asking them. We were hopeful but I didn’t really know what to expect.

The record went out on a Monday along with all the other Sunset Records releases. Within half an hour, RJR, one of the two stations that Jamaica had at the time, called the Harry J office. My wife answered the phone. It was the program director at RJR, whose name escapes me now. “We’re throwing away all the other records you sent us, but we added Andy’s record to the playlist. If you turn the radio on now, you’ll hear it.” She screamed, jumped up and down, and ran to the office radio. There it was. “Skateland Rock,” playing on the Allan Magnus morning show. RJR immediately started playing my record six or seven times a day.

For a while they played both songs about equally, and apparently there was quite an internal debate about which side was better. This is not a bad problem to have for your first single! Finally they settled on “Skateland Rock” as the side they liked most and began playing the living daylights out of it. Once they played “Skateland Rock” three times in a show and the flip side, “Too Sweet For Words,” once.  I had hoped that I might get some radio play but this was beyond comprehension.

After a week or so, JBC started playing it too. For a long time, they used “Skateland Rock” as the musical lead-in to the 8 a.m. BBC World News broadcast every morning. Both stations continued to play “Skateland Rock” regularly for four or five months, and even after they backed off on it somewhat I continued to hear it almost daily until I left Jamaica for good that October.

At the time we lived in a room in a large house with an extended Jamaican family of twenty or so people, many of whom were children. Whenever they heard the record, they started yelling. “Mr. Andy! Mr. Andy! Your song a play again pon JBC! Wake up! Dem a play de song!” At that time my regular bedtime was between three and four hours earlier than the BBC World News, but if you have to be awakened at the uncivilized hour of 8 a.m., having little kids yelling that they hear your song on the radio is the way to go.

It turned out that without knowing much at all, we’d done a lot of things right. First of all, I’d given We The People credit on the record label itself. To me, this was simple courtesy. They were my friends, my comrades in arms, and they’d played brilliantly. (I credited Gits and Winston Wright on the black and white cover too, along with everyone else involved.) I knew what it felt like to have your name left off a record you were proud of, and it wasn’t going to happen on my watch. I didn’t think it would hurt to have the name on the record but I wasn’t trying to ride anybody’s coattails. The only reason I didn’t put down “Andy Bassford with Lloyd Parks and We The People” was that it would have been hard to fit all that in legible type on a 45!

What I hadn’t realized was that Jamaican radio was very open to anything with the We The People name on it. We were the most popular band in Jamaica, though largely unknown outside the island. (A band of young upstarts named Sagittarius led by my friend, the legendary bassist Derrick Barnett, was coming up fast though, and would ultimately supplant us.) We played shows regularly at Skateland (the venue that inspired “Skateland Rock”), which was almost next door to the JBC building, the other radio station in Jamaica at the time. Everyone in the music and the radio business knew the band, and they even knew who I was. Due to a variety of internal conflicts, the band hadn’t made a record as a band in a long time, though Lloyd, Dean Fraser, Ruddy Thomas, and Nambo Robinson had all released at least one solo album apiece since I’d joined in 1981.  So there had been no Lloyd Parks and We The People record for Jamaican radio to play. They were more than ready for a We The People record, and by hiring the band and crediting them on the label, I had inadvertently given them one.

In addition to that, Allan Magnus, the RJR DJ who first played my record (a great radio man and a charter member of the Nice Guy Hall Of Fame) was a big Lloyd Parks fan. Allan was the first DJ to play Lloyd’s breakthrough release, “Officially,” which was the real start of Lloyd’s solo career, and always played Lloyd’s records. Lloyd always made a point of giving Allan credit for his big break and had introduced me to him almost as soon as I’d joined the band. Allan was a fan of mine too; he loved my guitar playing and maybe liked the idea that he might have jump-started a second musician’s solo career by putting “Skateland Rock” on his playlist.

Another thing that might have helped back in the analog days was that “Skateland Rock” was well over the four minute time limit that we normally aimed for when recording for radio. This gave the DJ an extra twenty seconds to go to the bathroom! It also worked well as background music for long announcements and segues, as there was no vocal for the DJ to interrupt. They had no problems talking over my solo!

Although payola was a fact of life at the time, I never paid anybody a dime to play my record. No one asked for it either. Jamaican radio heard the record, liked it, and played it. Often. This is how life should be, but so rarely is. Thirty-five years later I’m still amazed.

There is a lot more to the “Skateland Rock” story, which I will tell in my book. The short version is that I had a big radio hit and didn’t make any money to speak of. I then moved to the States, where it made no sense to release a followup record for which I would only stand to be paid in Jamaican dollars. At the time, the Jamaican dollar was not legally exportable, and, as now, they devalued regularly. I had no illusions that I could charm US radio the same way I had RJR and JBC into playing reggae guitar instrumentals. So I spent my time doing lots of other things.

I did record a followup that was written around the same time as “Skateland Rock,” called “Chicken Foot,” on which I programmed drums and played all the instruments. This one had a dub so it could be a conventional reggae 45 release. I gave it to Earl Moodie to release in England. He gave me an appropriate advance but the record never came out. What he told me at the time was that they had liked the record but wanted a full album, which was economically out of the question. The master tape is somewhere, maybe in the basement of  Earl’s shop. I’ll have to ask the next time I see him. I actually made more money from “Chicken Foot,” which was never released, than “Skateland Rock,” which was played regularly on Jamaican radio for at least six months. You have to love the music business.

At one point shortly before his passing, Coxsone Dodd wanted me to write a couple of guitar instrumentals to a couple of his classic Burning Spear tracks. I still have the cassette, with his handwritten label. I worked for Sir D for almost twenty years as a session man and it would have been great to have a solo release on Studio One, but he died before we could go any further with the project. I figured that was it and again went on to do other things.

A while ago I bought a professional home recording setup so that I could enter the world of Internet session playing. Shortly thereafter, Bill Messinetti of Island Head and I went to WNTI-FM, the Centenary College radio station, to meet Cableman Dan, a great guy who has the Reggae and World Rhythms show. Dan played our record “Punky Reggae Party” a lot and he wanted to talk about it with us on the show, which we did.

After the interview, Dan asked me to perform a solo version of “Rivers Of Babylon,” one of his favorite songs. He likes to play a different version of the tune on each show. I wasn’t prepared and didn’t do a great job. Before we left, Dan asked if he could use my performance as a drop, which is what they call those short personalized show IDs that tell you who the DJ is. I told him I’d prefer to rerecord it at home and I’d send it to him to use.  The next day I fired up the software, worked out the tune, recorded it, sent it to him, and forgot about it entirely.

At my surprise birthday party last month, Steel Pulse keyboardist and ace producer Sidney Mills was in attendance, and he asked the question again. “Andy. When are you going to do something for yourself? I’m offering the studio. Just call me. None of us are getting younger.” I hemmed and hawed as I always do and the party continued. A few days later I listened to my son Liam’s five solo guitar EPs that he’s put up on Bandcamp. My kid has five records out with his name on it and I have one. His five records you can download and buy instantly. My one record you have to find on eBay, and then you have to find a turntable on which to play it, if you don’t own one already. My other son Ethan’s band Ava Luna has several albums out and a new one ready to drop in a month or two. So who in the family has his act together, the father, or the sons? Hint: It isn’t me. I thought some more.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. I was integrating my new computer into my home recording setup and needed a Cubase file to play to see if everything worked. I opened up the first one I found. I’d given it some weird name so I had no idea what it was, or what project it was for. Everything loaded into the computer as it should, and there it was: “Rivers Of Babylon.” It sounded good, better than I had remembered. For some reason I’d made a copy of the original stereo performance so there were four tracks instead of two. I fiddled with the copied tracks for a minute or two, balanced everything, listened again, winced, and said, “It’s OK. The parts I hate no one else will notice. My kids have the balls to put their stuff out. I don’t? This is embarrassing.” I exported the mix, did some digital distribution stuff, and now it’s here. “Rivers Of Babylon,” a solo performance on 12-string acoustic guitar. There will be more solo releases to come.  I’m tired of my kids showing me up.

 

It was mid-August 1980, a typically hot day in Kingston, Jamaica. I had just entered Channel One Studios for the first time, in the distinguished company of Freddie McKay and Bongo Herman. The week before, producer Henry “Junjo” Lawes had seen me backstage at the Carib Theatre for the Independence Day show. Upon hearing that I was a good guitarist, he told Freddie and Herman to bring me by the studio first thing Monday.

The session was already under way when we got there. As I peered through the glass of the control room, back behind the drum gobos I could see an energetic person in a plaid shirt and a brown knit hat, waving a pair of drumsticks wound with masking tape. “Ready, Style?” the engineer called over the talkback. He yelled back, “Ready, red light!” counted off the tune, rolled in the band, and the earth shook. Roots Radics at full blast through the enormous Channel One speakers was unlike anything I’d ever heard. It was thunderous, raw, powerful, and aggressive. What’s more, it was clearly very different from the straight four reggae grooves I’d been hearing in the States. What I thought I knew about this music was clearly outdated. Some serious recalibration was in order.

After one take, the band came into the control room, and listened to the playback, then went back out into the studio to work up the next song. I was stunned. Fifteen minutes later, they had another track done, then another, then another. I couldn’t believe how fast they worked and how great it sounded. Finally, Junjo sent me into the studio. Forty minutes later, I’d recorded two songs with Style, Flabba, and the Roots Radics crew. Then it was back to the regular players, and the session went on into the night.

Time was money in the Kingston studios, formalities were minimal, and talk was sparing while at work. The band had barely grunted at me, other than Flabba’s instructions to “pick with the bass,” and Style was for the most part hidden in the drum booth. However, the next day, on Idler’s Rest, I was introduced to Style more formally. He was crouched on the sidewalk, waiting for something to happen. We all were.

Idler’s Rest, whose formal name was Chancery Lane, was an alley that ran north from the Parade, between Joe Gibbs Record World and VP Records. On the right were, from south to north, VP’s western wall, Winston Riley’s Techniques Record Shop and Gregory Isaacs’ African Museum. On the left, oddly enough, was the Salvation Army headquarters. Scattered in and around this small area on any given day were some of the greatest Jamaican singers, musicians, and DJs who ever drew breath.

Idler’s Rest was the downtown clearinghouse, hiring hall, social club, networking and information center of the Jamaican music business. In a time and place where telephones were a luxury, a producer looking for artists or session musicians to record, or a promoter putting a show together, could come to Idler’s Rest, leave a message, and reach everyone he wanted.

It was also the place where any musician or artist who wasn’t working would hang out, hoping to be hired. In August 1980, the Roots Radics were at the very beginning of their run. Although they were starting to make a name for themselves, there were plenty of days where Style, Flabba Holt, Bingi Bunny, Steelie, Sowell, Bongo Herman, and many others (myself included) would lean against the walls of the Salvation Army or the stone wall of the North Parade and watch the day go by, trying not to spend money. In such circumstances, musicians will talk. Style and I did a fair amount of talking.

Style didn’t speak much about his early days other than to say that he had learned something about drums in the military. He had spent some time in England in the late Seventies and it had been an important experience for him. He had worked with Adrian Sherwood, a producer he held in very high regard, and had toured with Don Cherry and the Slits, among others. I got excited when he mentioned Don Cherry, and he beamed. “You know Don? A wicked jazz musician dat! Him was very interested in our music. A very inspiring person.”

I had to confess that I didn’t know Don personally (I was to find that many Jamaican musicians assumed that all good American musicians knew each other, as tended to be the case in Jamaica) but the fact that I knew who Don Cherry was and loved his playing was enough for Style. He’d been polite before, but now I was in. I got the impression that Style found it frustrating that an association he took so much pride in hadn’t registered much with his peers.

From that point on, we regularly shared a part of the sidewalk, talking about music, work, and our dreams. Style was quite blunt about the fact that he liked me and liked my playing. And he didn’t care much what anyone else thought. As a starving musician far from home, Style’s warmth and acceptance meant a lot to me. Many of the older musicians like Bobby Ellis were friendly too, but Style was my own age, and that was important.

Style burned with ambition. He was devoted to his band; he felt that Roots Radics was the future of the music, and he intended to prove it every time he got behind the drums. We were all pretty hungry at that point, but I got the impression that the desire for respect, not money, was Style’s primary motivation. There was clearly a back story there, but I never heard it. Style talked a lot less about the past than the present and the future.

For the rest of the year, Style and I hung out on Idler’s Rest with Roots Radics and the other downtown singers and players of instruments, survived the 1980 election (no small feat), talked, drank an occasional beer when funds permitted, and worked sessions when we could get them.

At the beginning of 1981, I joined Lloyd Parks and We The People and Dwight Pinkney joined Roots Radics, replacing Sowell Bailey. With Dwight burning up the lead chair, I worked a lot less with Radics, and since I now lived in New Kingston, I was on Idler’s Rest less often. Things also got a bit more cliquish in the studio, though if Dwight wasn’t available for a session, the other Radics welcomed me warmly.

We all ended up playing together anyway at various times, cliques or not; that’s Style on Dennis Brown’s “I Can’t Stand It” with Allah from Chalice on piano, Lloyd Parks on bass, and Bo Pee and I on guitars. I tended to see Style more on stage shows, as Gregory Isaacs and Radics often shared the bill with us. From my vantage point, success didn’t change Style very much. He was the same person I knew from Idler’s Rest: warm, blunt, and passionate, though his wardrobe did diversify a bit after a couple of tours.

After I left Jamaica, I didn’t see Style for decades, until we ran into each other unexpectedly at breakfast in a French hotel on tour. Style could not have been happier to see me, or more excited. After we caught up, Style insisted on introducing me to everyone in his touring party who didn’t already know me. He told them all about how we struggled together on Idler’s Rest and how proud and happy he was that we had achieved so much. It was a great reunion; sadly, it was the last time I would ever see him. I can’t believe that he’s gone.

Like most drummers, Style’s playing was the way he was: militant, inexorable, determined, powerful, full of passion, and a bit rough around the edges. He had some idiosyncratic ways of doing things and he had no interest in technique for its own sake. Creating the most powerful groove possible was the point. For Style, the emotion created the expression, which is how it should be. The rap on Style was that he copied Sly Dunbar, but I never heard him that way. It’s easy to tell them apart. Style was such a strong personality that his individuality came through even on the simplest parts.

There are too many wonderful Style studio performances to list, but perhaps the most famous is Gregory Isaacs’ “Night Nurse.” I’m fond of the Scientist dub albums that he played on for Greensleeves, not least because I’m on some of them. His work with Adrian Sherwood and On-U Sound is great too. There would have been more to come; Style was by no means ready to ride off into the sunset when he was taken from us.

I have a lot of memories, but when today when I think of Style, I see him crouched in front of the Salvation Army wall, his brown knit cap with his short dreads peeking out from underneath, pulling on a spliff. “Hail, Andy. Come in nuh. Yeh mon, mi de yah. Nuttin naa gwaan fe now, yu no see it, but our time soon come. Hold tight. Dem cyaan stop we.” RIP, Style. You had a great run before they stopped you. Thanks for everything.

Musicians love to trade gig stories, the good, the bad, and the ugly. For whatever reason, when musicians, clients, audiences, and money collide, wacky things often happen. Very often, gig stories are about the bad and the ugly; for example, Toots and the Maytals doing a surprise guest set at 4 a.m. on the Vegas strip in order to get hotel rooms for what was left of the night. (You’ll have to wait for that one.)

However, sometimes there are great gig stories; here’s my favorite.

Probably about twelve years ago, I was doing a short tour with Toots in New England. At this point in his career, Toots had been without a record deal for at least that long and he was in a holding pattern.  As great and as hard-working as Toots is, at this point in his career his rewards were in no way equal to his talent.

Because he had a modest but loyal fan base that danced hard and drank a lot of beer, and because he consistently put on good shows no matter what the circumstances, Toots could always manage to patch together a tour somewhere to a few places he hadn’t been for a while and pay a few bills. But we were stuck in clubland with no visible means of escape, playing the same venues over and over and over. The music was always great. Toots is a tough boss, but a very fair person with a deep commitment to his audience and his band. I wasn’t thinking about leaving, but I was starting to wonder if things would ever get any better. I’m sure I was not the only one.

The tour was in the summer, about two or three weeks of beach bar gigs and, I think, a casino gig in New Hampshire that probably paid for the plane tickets. At this time there was a House of Blues in Cambridge and we were booked for an early show on Sunday. Eric Burdon and the Animals were due to play a different show later in the evening.

A House of Blues gig is always a welcome sight on an itinerary. They have good gear, good crews, and good food, and they treat the bands well. Toots is a good fit for the HOB audience and we played all of them at one point or another. But nobody was expecting anything out of the ordinary.

The idea of an early show was attractive; a bit more rest and the chance to see another good act for free if you had the energy. We were pretty tired at that point. It was a hot summer and van tours are stressful even when everyone gets along, as the Maytals usually do. So we did a quick sound check and didn’t bother to go back to the hotel.

Boston has always been both a great reggae town and a great Toots town. But for whatever reason, we hadn’t played there for a while, which possibly explains what happened next. The place filled up quickly, both tables and standing room. We walked on stage and the announcer said, “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome, from Kingston, Jamaica, Toots and the Maytals.”

The audience started clapping and yelling. They didn’t stop. The applause got louder. Paul Douglas, who had been preparing to count off the first tune, stopped abruptly to look around and make sure we were all looking at him because the crowd noise was so loud he wasn’t sure we could hear the count. The applause got louder still. It kept building. Then the people at the tables began to stand up, applauding all the while. It sounded like we had just finished playing and they wanted an encore. Paul put his arms down.

Paul,  Jackie Jackson, and I looked at each other. I said to Paul, “What is this? What’s going on? We haven’t even played a song yet and Toots is still backstage.”

Paul leaned over his floor tom and said, “Andy I don’t know. In all the years I’ve been playing, I’ve never seen anything like this. I guess we just have to wait until they stop.” The people kept applauding. Finally everybody in the room was on their feet, clapping and cheering. Before Toots took the stage, before the band had even played a note, we got a standing ovation.

I will never forget what it felt like to have that sound wash over me. I thought of all the endless drives, the stale air in the bus, the half empty gigs, the bad food, the crummy hotels, the arguments, the tantrums, the fights, sending money home by mail to save the transfer fees and praying it would get there, the lousy house amps, the bad sound, the thousands and thousands of miles by land, sea, and air, the painful phone calls home, the weeks and months away from my children, the missed birthdays, the jet lag, the road weariness. I started crying. I cradled my Strat, looked at the audience, and felt the tears rolling down my cheeks. I didn’t really care if anyone saw them or not. My shoulders shook a bit. I looked at Paul and Jackie. They weren’t crying, but they were deeply moved. There were expressions on their faces I’d never seen before. I think they may have been replaying scenes from the past too.

Then I thought of something my father had said a long time ago to an old neighbor was questioning my decision to continue with music now that I was about to become a father for the first time. “I started working on my cousin’s farm at the age of thirteen when my father died. And I kept working until I retired a couple of years ago when I was sixty-five. And in all that time, nobody ever once stood up and clapped for me when I was finished at the end of day. When my son finishes work, a whole roomful of people stands up and claps for him. I don’t have any problem with Andy being a musician.” Now here I was, with a whole roomful of people applauding me before I’d started working. Dad would have been very pleased.

It was one of those moments where time seems suspended so I have no idea how long it lasted, but it must have been several minutes. It was as if everybody in the room understood some of what we had been through and was saying, “We recognize you guys. You’re the Maytals. Most of us don’t know your names, but we’ve seen you for years, every time Toots comes here. When we see you walk on, we know we can count on what’s going to happen next. We love you guys, and we know that you work hard. Your music means so much to us. We have loved it for years, and it’s become a part of our lives. Please take a few minutes before you start to allow us to thank you for coming here once more to play it for us.”

Finally the noise died down a bit. Paul counted it off, we launched into “Pressure Drop,” and Toots took the stage. The crowd roared even louder, and of course, it was a great show. But what will always stay with me was the moment when the crowd told us, once and for all, how they felt about us.

So thank you, Cambridge, and good night. We’ll see you soon.