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Unmissable, cornerstone Wackies, back in.
Horace Andy’s greatest artistic achievement, surpassing even his Skylarking set for Studio One. With definitive reworks of songs he first recorded for Bunny Lee and Derrick Harriott (Money Money and Lonely Woman); a deadly version of Lloyd Robinson’s Cuss Cuss; and a first outing for Spying Glass, later versioned by Massive Attack. Musicians include Wackies regulars like Owen Stewart and Oral Cooke from Itopia, and Ras Menilik and Jah T; also Sleepy’s multi-instrumentalist spar Myrie Dread from the In The Light sessions for Hungry Town. At the desk, Lloyd Barnes, Junior Delahaye and Douglas Levy coax unequalled vocal performances from the singer, bejewelling ineffable extended mixes.
Crucial.
Vintage Wackies, and — spun out of Horace’s all-time greatest album — unmissable.
Appearing originally on the Solid Groove label out of Croydon in South London, Exclusively is sometimes misconstrued as the UK issue of Dance Hall Style. The tracks from both were recorded at the same sessions - with Bullwackie joined at the controls by Junior Delahaye and Prince Douglas - and issued close together in 1982-83, Croydon first.
Half of Exclusively non-exclusively versions four tracks from the Stateside release - three are re-titled - and also Eating Mess, which appeared on the first pressing of Dance Hall Style, though unlisted on the sleeve. The mixes are all different (and without dubs). Five further specials include the funky Musical Episode, a superior Bob Marley tribute, and a version of Rougher Yet.
Four songs and their dubs — lovers, bubblers, rockers, and well-charge dub, with great playing and Sugar brilliantly focussed throughout — originally a 1983 picture-sleeved ten-inch on his own Black Roots imprint.
Two knockout Wackie’s 12” sides, paired together for maximum pressure. Each originally appeared on separate twelves, around ‘85 and ‘80. The A-side is another deadly Sugar shot, one of so many for Wackie’s. Backed here with the more obscure Zion Land, a stunning, shimmering roots chant. Both sides extended mixes.
Leading with trumps, this was first in Rhythm And Sound’s crucial Wackies reissue programme. Consummate lovers rock by cousins Sonia Abel and Claudette Brown, originally from Brixton. Stone classic Bullwackies.
The Love Joys’ first album, initially released in 1981 on the Florida-based Top Ranking label. Ten tunes produced and recorded at Wackies NY, ranging from lovers rock and uptempo dance vibes to roots and reality.
Recorded at Bullwackies just weeks apart from Horace Andy’s Dance Hall Style: two of the very greatest vocal reggae LPs of all time.
Between stints in JA for legends like Glen Brown and Junjo Lawes, WJ commuted to the Bronx from Connecticut. With Clive Hunt in full effect, Showcase follows the six-track dubwise format of Dance Hall Style (Wayne never sounding more like Horace), including four utterly lethal Studio One versions — Azul’s killer Rockfort Rock, Sleepy’s Every Tongue (with outrageous Isleys fuzz), yet another Wackies’ Heptones via Leroy Sibbles, and a murderous Drum Song.
Hotly recommended.
Magnificent dub album out originally on the Senrab label in 1976, drawing on a series of brilliant sevens and twelves on labels like City Line and Wackies, and sister imprints like Upton, Versatile, and Munchie Jackson’s Earth label. Core rhythm tracks from Jamaica — Treasure Isle mostly, with Tubbys mixes — worked over at the Sounds Unlimited studio on E 24th Street in Manhattan, given the full treatment by Lloyd Barnes alongside Prince Douglas and Jah Upton, in the first months of the White Plains Road headquarters.
A graduate of soundsystems like Gemini and Volcano Hi Power, Little John was twelve years old when he voiced this tune, shifting its sights from snitches and stoolies, straight to the head of all party-poopers. It appeared in 1983 during Sugar’s stay in London after Good Thing Going was a national pop hit in 1980, coming on the Stoke Newington label M And M - presumably named after Minott and his then-partner, Coxsone Dodd’s niece Maxine Stowe. Appearing first with Wackies’ pink-to-orange labels, Batta’s cut is a different mix again to the version on his album. He bows to U-Roy at the start, before switching to a more contemporary delivery. Sugar is in attendance throughout, almost as if the pair were taking turns at the mic, before the dub takes over.
Two versions, different dubwise mixes of Sugar Minott’s massive Informer rhythm — both choca with living dancehall vibes and Channel One-style deadliness.
Warehouse find; last box.
Taking its name from Jezreel, the Biblical city founded by the tribe of Issachar, where God is said to have cursed Ahab for his greed, this singing duo’s debut Wackies album is steeped in rasta spirituality.
All Depends is an intimate, spare do-over of the Spiderman rhythm which Yellowman smashed with Operation Eradication: eight minutes of yearning and pleading, dosed with the stylings of the original Night Nurse himself.
I Put My Trust swaps religious for amorous devotion: musically it is more characteristically Wackies, reverberating but crisp as a biscuit, stepping but spaced-out. Neither track appears on the LP, Great Jah Jah.
Warehouse find; last box.
Visions Of John Clarke was a little thrown together for its original release in 1979. Still, its sleeve carried a ringing endorsement from Bullwackies himself — ‘President of the John Clarke Fan Club’.
Visions attracted the early interest of no less than Studio 1 boss Coxsone Dodd, whose bid for distribution-rights was thwarted when the Brooklyn label Makossa quickly put in for a full licence. Out soon afterwards, the new version - entitled Rootsy Reggae - duplicated five tracks, but with markedly different mixes, fresh edits, and sometimes new instrumentation. This CD presents both albums complete with the original track order.
The singer — not to be confused with Johnny Clark — had been running with the Wackies operation for the past six years, ever since moving from Jamaica to New York. He’d cut memorable sevens with co-founder Munchie Jackson for the Tafari label — like In Search of The Human Race and Recession — and with Lloyd Barnes for such Bullwackies imprints as Versatile and Wackies. Several are collected by these two albums, with another layer of modification: for example, on Wasn’t It You Lloyd Barnes and Prince Douglas give a new treatment — and adding guitar — to the Jumbo Caribbean Disco twelve; on Pollution they remove the horns from the Wackies seven (though generally Baba Leslie is in full effect here).
The tracklisting rounds out with a Johnny Osbourne cover; several New Breed jams, featuring the likes of Jah Scotty, Clive Hunt, Harold Sylvester, Jah Hitler, Jerry Johnson, the Love Joys, even Mickey Mouse apparently; and on a handful of done-over rhythms Clarke takes the mic from brethren like Joe Auxumite, K.C. White and Wayne Jarrett.
‘Double-sided murder Wackie’s from 1978. Originally released on the Jumbo Caribbean Disco label from Brooklyn. Big Leg Mary is on the same rhythm as Wayne Jarrett’s killer Come Let’s Go. Wasn’t It You is a different cut from the earlier one on the Senrab label, but equally lethal. Both sides fully smoked-out dubwise trademark Wackie’s style, and essential.’
Three front-rank reggae singers — with extensive credits for such producers as Coxsone Dodd, Augustus Pablo and Glen Brown — whose work at Wackie’s without question includes their very best. Originally two 10s.
Milton Henry’s handful of classics — like his version of Gypsy Woman, or This World and Follow Fashion over the Upsetter’s Fever rhythm (under the handle King Medious) — made him a natural Wackies’ recruit.
Soon after moving from JA to NYC in the late seventies, Milton was fully involved in the day to day business of the operation, supervising sales and promotion, making deliveries, even holding spare keys to the studio for whenever Bullwackies himself was away.
He appears in this activist role on the front-sleeve photograph, just up White Plains Road from the Bronx HQ: by its title, though, and first and last songs, this album also hints heavily at the past musical accomplishments of its mystery hero.
The record was released first in London, in 1984, during the first months of Wackies Dean Street office, in north Soho.
The band is basically Itopia. Sly Dunbar gets a credit — though neither he nor Robbie Shakespeare ever set foot in the studio — as acknowledgement for his rhythm recycled here as No Dreams. Jackie Mittoo and Bagga are pon the corner, from Studio One; Jerry Johnson and Neville Anderson on brass; also Sugar and Max Romeo; and Sonia from the Love Joys performs a duet.
No Dreams is the true story of Milton sleeping in the attic above the studio when the rough drum and bass track came on to the desk, waking him, pulling him to the mic; Them A Devil is aimed at certain producers passing off the singer’s property as their own; Good Old Days was written for a poorly Junior Byles, remembering times shared.
Out originally mid-70s on the Aires label, in a plain, stencilled sleeve, this is based around three cuts of the dreader than dread Free For All rhythm.
The music is Melvin ‘Munchie’ Jackson and Lloyd Barnes productions begun in Jamaica and finished at the Sounds Unlimited studio in New York. Several surfaced at different stages as sevens on Bullwackies’ Aires imprint, and in JA on the Tafari label which Munchie ran with his brother Maurice and Little Roy, in the Washington Gardens district of Kingston.
The title track was recorded at Randy’s, and came originally on The Heptones’ Hepic label, featuring Family Man Barrrett on keyboards, and - on the deejay cut here, Meditation Dub - sounds like Charlie Ace. There are dubs of Little Roy’s Tribal War and Black Bird; Stranger Cole’s My Application, later re-voiced by The Heptones, turns up as Dis Ya Dub; and if things weren’t smoke-filled enough, Roots is the rhythm of K.C. White’s All For Free.
Out originally in 1979, on the Wackies’ imprint Hardwax. (The original cover celebrated the first year of Honest Jon’s new reggae shop Maroons Tunes, Bullwackies’ UK distributor.)
Leroy Sibbles and Joe Auxumite, Drifter and Skylarking… Sibbles guides a tough selection, as well as sharing bass duties. There are versions of his classic composition Guiding Star and stylish Wackies heavyweight, This World; and Tribute To Studio One reworks Heptones Gonna Fight / Hail Don D. as modern steppers, with the kit-drums — as throughout this album — supplemented effectively by the in ting from Japan. Drifter and Skylarking put in appearances; and two full Joe Auxumite vocals from the solo album scheduled for release around this time, but abandoned when most of the tapes were lost. A dub version of Delroy Wilson’s Rain From The Skies rounds out proceedings.
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