Thank You Toots Hibbert for the Heavy Weather
The Reggae Lounge was a club on West Broadway just below Canal Street, and when we went there (mid-/late-’80s, high school) it had a spotty reputation. As the name implies, there was always a few Rastas about and the smell of weed wafted through the air, though less in a cinematic haze than as a constant creep in and out of nostrils. (Strangely, I wasn’t smoking pot by this point of high-school and wouldn’t start again until the summer after, though friends with whom I went there MUST have gone there to buy herb, since I don’t remember a hardcore reggae fan among them.) But there was something else about the Reggae Lounge’s confines; if one went out a lot in New York at the time, one could also sense a cloud of potential violence hanging over the spot, signs and innuendos that other, harder drugs of the day were part of this club’s culture. We never went there on weekend nights so I rarely saw it packed, which meant one could clearly notice folks you absolutely did not wanna fuck with, always present. The Reggae Lounge was where I began to understand that there was ruggish island men with JA patter who were a part the ‘80s NYC drug trade; that these men weren’t like the dreads and Jamaicans who sold us (i.e. ridiculous white kids) dirt-weed dime-bags around Washington Square, or that we’d meet in the Prospect Park fields, or run into at CB’s, but men you kinda knew you should stay away from. I thought a lot about those men at the Reggae Lounge when I was reading Marlon James’ A History of Seven Killings, and before that, Laurie Gunst’s excellent Born Fi Dead. It was my first experience being around them.
I thought about the Reggae Lounge again this past weekend, when I heard that Toots Hibbert died from COVID, because the club was where I first heard the Maytals’ version of “Pressure Drop.” (Strangely, I did not engage with The Harder They Come until discovering it at the American University library freshman year, by which point it seemed like a hits collection.) The Reggae Lounge must have been the first place I heard a few reggae and dub records that would become foundational to my musical life, as it was the only club I went with that kind of soundtrack. I saw no live bands there, only a DJ, mostly on Sunday night if memory serves; and while its soundsystem was not especially dramatic, I do specifically remember it as tuned to bottom-end frequencies in ways I’d not previously encountered at punk or dance clubs — enveloping is a word — the perfect atmosphere to hear such deep bass strains for the first time.
The memory of encountering “Pressure Drop” stands out because I was already familiar with the song from Black Market Clash. Yet where Strummer and his band’s version was a charging ska-pop-punk tune whose intent was easy to comprehend, there was something far less decisive in Toots & the Maytals’ original. And it grabbed me as I stood there in a corner, looking around a place I was not totally comfortable in, trying to understand the club’s internal rules, trying at once to be both aware and nondescript, forever the immigrant’s MO. Was “Pressure Drop” meant to be happy or sad? I couldn’t quite tell. I know that’s the case with a lot of rocksteady and early reggae, where the tightness of the skanking band, the clear melodies of the great songwriting, and the glorious background vocals regularly splash the dark vibes with some light. It was rich though, the song’s simple lyrical metaphor clearly spelling incoming heavy weather. I looked up the meaning of its few words again this weekend, and it seems that what Toots was singing about was “karma,” which is apropos for a velvet delivery of cold, hard judgement. And yet his humming, my favorite part of the song, counters that absoluteness; it seems all contemplation. I know that trying to disassociate Toots from hardness plays into his public image, that he was more a soul man than a preacher or a social magistrate. But here he was trying to be both. Maybe even cognizant of the fact that pressure was gonna drop on us all. Which it inevitably does.
Contemplating “Pressure Drop” made me think of another favorite Toots-related performance from Jamaica that conveyed a similar energy: guitarist Ernest Ranglin and Monty Alexander’s instrumental reggae-jazz reading of “54-46 (Was My Number).” In a Studio One-meets-NOLA setting, they and the band deliver Hibbert’s prison lament (but which was never a lament at all) as swinging skank. Forever grateful that such creative mixing of intentions could bless our ears and our lives. A drop that helps us keep rising.
