I had no idea of what to do next. There was no road map, and no one to ask. I knew that I had to budget carefully. Who knew when I would get any work? Or even if there was any work to get? The music business in Kingston operated according to its own set of rules that related only tangentially to what I knew about the business in America.

As far as I understood things, if you wanted to be a working musician, you got in a band with other people you knew, based on liking somewhat compatible types of music. Then you decided whether you wanted to play in bars, play hotel lounges, or do weddings. Once you made up your mind, you rehearsed a night’s worth of music, found an agency that could book you the kind of gigs you wanted, and went to work. If you wanted to do anything more creative, you wrote your own songs, tried to sneak them into sets during your regular gigs, and eventually recorded a demo of them somewhere to send to people in the business to get a record deal. I had never been in a band that had gotten that far. The closest I had come to a record deal was sitting with Horace Andy in Island’s offices talking to Lister Hewan-Lowe about doing a record for Lister’s label, which is how I had gotten there in the first place.

Although I hadn’t really figured out how the business in Jamaica worked, it was obviously nothing like what I had grown up with. I was meeting lots of people whose names I recognized from album covers. And yet they were hanging out in the same alley I was, for the most part. Every so often, some would disappear for a morning, an afternoon, or a day or two. But they always came back.

So I summed up what I knew, and began to develop a plan of action, based on what Jimmy had told me. The musicians I wanted to meet, and hopefully play with, rarely played live in Kingston, contrary to my expectations. There were plenty of bars and nightclubs, but hardly any of them featured live bands. My heroes were playing in the studios, doing recording sessions for different producers and artists. So—if I wanted to play with them, I had to play sessions too.

This realization presented a number of difficulties, but also the outlines of a plan of attack. Although I had already played on several recording sessions, I had pretty much bluffed my way through them, without knowing what worked or why. I was terrified by the very idea of recording. I had never liked my playing and nothing about hearing it played back through the studio monitors made me like it any better. When recording, I operated on a level of consciousness well below that of the verbal—the part of the brain that enables a fighter to continue to stand up and look menacing while out on his feet. (I would grow much more familiar with this part of the brain as time went on.)

But there really didn’t seem to be any choice. I’d tried playing the hotel circuit, which had its charms. I liked being near the water, playing six nights a week, having a steady paycheck with lots of time to practice, eating good food, and not having to lift any equipment. But it wasn’t what I wanted to do musically. The hotel bands played more top 40 American R&B and soca than they did reggae, as the managers, who were middle class, considered it disreputable and unsophisticated music. They only allowed it because a lot of the tourists asked for it. More important, Sly and Robbie and the Barrett brothers weren’t doing hotel gigs.