Roots Rock Rebel

I started the morning today with the mellow sounds of Tapper Zukie's album, MPLA. This album is a great example of great 70's reggae that isn't Bob Marley, Jimmy Cliff, or Peter Tosh.
Tapper Zukie (also known as "Tappa"), was a reggae producer who was also a performer in his own right and was instrumental in the formation of what is now known as Dub Reggae. Along side his influence on reggae, he was also involved in the punk community, which was what helped reggae come to the forefront of pop music in the 70's, both state side as well as in the UK.
I first heard Zukie when I was doing my Friday morning radio show, "Wake Up Screaming," on WLUW here in Chicago. I was looking for something a bit more mellow to end my show with, which would normally lead into community affairs programming and while looking for a Deals Gone Bad CD, I stumbled across this. I read the review that was taped to the front of the CD and decided that I should give this a spin. I fell in love with the groove and horn hook on the title track so much that after my show, I locked myself in the production studio and listened to this album a couple times, before deciding I should run out to the record store and pick up this album. I spent a day looking for it with no luck and would spend a couple years casually looking for it in the reggae bins at various stores on my normal record shopping route. In the meantime, I was functioning on a burned copy of the album, which I've since replaced after making a stop in at Hard Boiled Records on Roscoe here in Chicago. Finding this records was one of those moments where you get that heart flutter and hear a chorus of angels sing. During that same trip, I found a copy of the Guitar Wolf movie, Wild Zero, but that's a story for another day.
Admittedly, my first exposure to reggae was Bob Marley back when I was six or seven, when I saw a performance video on channel 66 (in the early 80's, channel 66 in Chicago was all music videos). Later, I would hear Eric Clapton's version of "I Shot the Sheriff," at a friend of the family's house and thought it was bad ass. This friend of the family's son told me that Eric Clapton was punk rock, which I hesitantly accepted as truth (come on, I was like 8 years old at the time, cut me some slack). When I was 13, I heard the original Bob Marley version and decided that Bob Marley singing "I shot the sheriff, but I did not shoot he deputy" was significantly more punk rock than Eric Clapton singing it. Shortly after hearing Bob Marley, my cousin, who is four years older than me and at that time was heavily into the east Bay scene, played Operation Ivy for me and I was surprised to hear the off beat guitar picking and said "are these guys trying to play reggae?" She corrected me and said they were playing ska. I had no idea what ska was, so she played the Specials, Selector and Madness for me. I recognized Madness as the band that did that "Our House" song and she quickly told me that that's when they "sold out." Regardless of what my cousin's thoughts on sell outism were, ska did me well. Despite being a full blown metal head who appreciated Bob Marley, the Specials struck a certain chord with me. They played up beat dance music, but they were kind of angry about it. There was something very aggressive about the tracks "Do the Dog" and "Night Club," especially the line "I won't dance in a club like this, the girls are sluts and the beer tastes just like piss." It made want to dance, but with clentched fists.
As I got older, I started discovering more and more modern ska bands like Erector Set, the Toasters, Tom Collins and the Cocktail Shakers and a local band called the Blue Meanies. I saw the Blue Meanies at the first Winter Nationals in 1993 and they were one of the most insane live bands I'd ever seen. Seeing a room full of mohawks and shaved heads scream "pave pave pave the world" at the top of their lungs, almost drowning out the music being played, was extremely powerful and instrumental in my further pursuit of bands like this. The only other band that I was listening to at that time that was more fucked up than the Blue Meanies was Mr Bungle and I very quickly tied the two together in my mind. Usually they would follow each other on mix tapes and up until Bungle's album, Disco Volante came out, I was hoping to see a Bungle/Blue Meanies show. Of course, once Disco Volante came out, all bets were off and Mr Bungle officially became the most fucked up band my ears had ever heard. More fucked up than John Zorn, Frank Zappa and Merzbow put together.
Disco Volante was like theme music for a cartoon about serial killers. I could picture an animated Richard Spec or John Wayne Gacey doing horrible things to this music. I remember my friend Tim and I would drive around listening to this album on warm summer nights with the windows open scaring the shit out of other motorists. This record became the soundtrack to the summer 1995 for me.
I think what I'm getting at is that the way we perceive music is always changing and it all connects somehow. When you think you have something figured out, you peel back a layer and you find something completely different. Whether it's someone who's uninformed calling Eric Clapton punk rock that leads you down a road that leads you to Bob Marley and Peter Tosh or whether you find a connection between an semi-obscure reggae artist like Tapper Zukie and an art rock collective like Mr Bungle. Music, not just punk can take you down some weird winding roads, so it's always worth researching your favorite artists deeper than their favorite color of M&M's, because you don't know what you'll find.