White dust to Garrick's backdrops

Richard Lowe, Contributor

Today, The Sunday Gleaner begins a series of articles by Richard Lowe, who looks back at his hands-on experiences in the famed Reggae Sunsplash Festival. Throughout the series, he gives fascinating insight into the landmark event.

It was late on a hot Wednesday afternoon in early August 1987, and the Reggae Sunsplash festival in the resort town of Montego Bay, Jamaica, was getting ready for its first full night of music at the Bob Marley Performing Centre. This was the festival's second time at this venue, which had been dedicated by Prime Minister Edward Seaga to the memory of Bob Marley who died in 1981.

The centre was really nothing more than a finger of raw land jutting out into the sea. To call it land might also be inaccurate since that evokes dirt and, when the centre was dedicated to Marley, it was pure white marl with an occasional small patch of struggling grass here and there. Ten years later, as if to acknowledge the tremendous impact Reggae Sunsplash had on the country's tourism-dependent economy, P.J. Patterson would become the only prime minister to visit the festival.

We were told that he would be at the festival for only two hours; however, he stayed for a solid five hours. He would have seen the peaceful excitement of the crowd on the grounds as they danced to the reggae music and shared their spiffs; the quality and class of performers like Freddie McGregor on stage; behind the stage, the satellite uplink for live pay-per-view broadcast to America and state-of-the-art audio and video recording equipment.

Another missed opportunity

Shortly after the prime minister's attendance at the festival, his administration would reach out to Synergy Productions, the company that put on the festival each year, and offer to sell the centre for what can only be described as a very reasonable price. Synergy, in what had become a habit by now, would miss another opportunity. Management would fiddle for over a year until the offer was finally withdrawn. Eventually, it would be bought by a group of private developers who would remove all sign of Marley's and the festival's memory and turn it into a housing development.

In 1983, the festival's first venture into this venue, the breeze from the sea caused the white dust off the marl to cover everything in sight. During the day, water trucks would spray the grounds in an effort to keep down the swirling white dust but this would only be successful for a short time. I spent five days in the swirling white dust convinced that I would probably end up with some kind of lung disease from breathing in this stuff.

Now, the festival was back at the centre and, under the total control of Charles Campbell on whose back the festival rode each year, the centre had actually begun to resemble an entertainment complex, even if only slightly. Our appreciation for the transformation of the centre by Charlie would cause those of us in the know to rename it 'Fort Charles' in recognition of its true ruler.

The MCs would catch a few winks while the musicians were on stage, for their jobs were truly the hardest of all the performers. My favourite was Tommy Cowan, the man who would become known worldwide as 'The Voice of Reggae Sunsplash'. But there were others also who were just as good, including Bagga Brown and Barry G.

The organisers of the festival would advertise 100 acts over four nights and, no matter how long it took, every one of those acts would be delivered on the stage. For the reggae music lovers who attended the annual festival, tourist as well as locals, staying to the end was a must and the statement 'I survived Reggae Sunsplash' was a badge of honour.

I had left my law office on Friday and flown to Montego Bay with my son Daniel and Tony Johnson, one of the organisers of the festival. Sunsplash was celebrating its 10th anniversary and I was returning for the first time since 1983.

We arrived on the Saturday morning, the week before the festival and over the five days, I had watched the stage scaffolding trucked in and assembled with much noise and confusion. Neville Garrick, the artiste who had created the artwork for all of Marley's album jackets, had taken up residence under the stage and was creating incredible backdrops for the stage. He literally lived under the stage, toiling non-stop during the heat of the day to have them done on time.

Multiple anniversaries

It was not only the 10th anniversary of the festival; it was also the 25th anniversary of Jamaica's political Independence from Britain and the 100th anniversary of the birth of Marcus Mosiah Garvey.

Neville's backdrops would encompass all of these anniversaries and honour all of these persons and events. There was a different backdrop for each of the four nights in the centre and each was unique and magnificent. On Saturday night, the last night of the festival, the backdrop depicted Marley with his hand raised and his finger pointing towards some distant vision which turned out to be His Imperial Majesty Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia. The Emperor appeared at the top left side of the canvas in a small circle. On the right, Garvey, in full regalia, was portrayed in another circle. At the very top, at either end of the canvas were the numbers 100 and 25, representing the anniversaries of Garvey's birthday and Jamaica's Independence. The lower section of the canvas depicted a ship, one of the Black Star Line fleet that Garvey had hoped to use to ferry black people out of the hell of the New World and back to Africa.

It was a truly stunning work of epic proportions. When I returned to the 1988 festival, the backdrop was the first thing I wanted to see again. When I asked for it, the response abruptly brought me back to the reality of life on my little island. It turned out that during a rainstorm in Montego Bay, some equipment in the centre needed to be covered and these canvasses were available and perfect for that purpose. They were immediately cut up and put to good use.