Roger Steffens

The last of the pioneers is gone and with him, the end of an era.

"Dodd drop," as one of his oldest friends said. Not since the passing of Peter Tosh and Bob Marley has the death of a reggae figure garnered such instant and passionate reaction, filling the Internet with outpourings of shock and respect from all over the planet. That is fitting, because a living monument has written the last chapter of his story, dying with his boots on. And what better way to go?

"Bread" McDonald of the Wailing Souls called with the news, moments after Dodd had passed on, his voice hoarse with emotion. "We were just with him at Studio One, 10 minutes ago. Him seh, 'See ya tomorrow, Jackson,' and he was all smiles, surrounded by people, the studio up and running like the old days, fulla people. I can't believe it."

I had the pleasure of numerous encounters with him, beginning in the mid-'80s, when I began work with Chris Wilson and Leroy Jodie Pierson on the Heartbeat reissue series of all the Wailers' Coxsone catalogue. We had frequent phone conversations regarding the various liner notes, and though I found his memory often at odds with others, he nevertheless made for colourful, if controversial, copy. The last time we spoke, it was about Studio One as Motown, a hit factory, with a staff of writers of the quality of Bob Andy at his prime, a ready supply of back-up singers imbued with the feelings of a family affair where each one teach one, and a stream of top rankin' over-achievers, eager for a break. It was also compared to a college, where the training was rigorous and precise, and gave everyone a chance to work up to the level of his or her own creativity.

Dodd had a genius for recognising talent. He assembled all-star studio bands, beginning with the bulk of the line-up that became the Skatalites, and moving through Roland Al's Soul Brothers, and the Soul Defenders, whose number included studio royalty like Jackie Mittoo and Leroy Sibbles and Don Drummond.

Imagine the world without Don Drummond. Or Peter Tosh. Or Albert Griffiths. Or Burning Spear. Or Sugar Minott. Or Alton Ellis, Toots Hibbert, Johnny Osbourne, Freddie McGregor, Jackie Opel, Delroy Wilson, Joe Higgs, Marcia Griffiths, Winston Jarrett, Slim Smith, Larry Marshall, or the Silvertones, the Heptones, the Maytals, the Gaylads, the Paragons and unnumbered hundreds more, the famous and the fleeting, all of them having major affiliations with Dodd.
Dodd was also famous for the confusion regarding the spelling of his name. "It's Coxson, when it's me, the man," he told me in his studio in Brooklyn, a decade ago. "And when it's my label or sound, it's Coxsone."

Although Coxson had reached his peak some years earlier, with years of major successes behind him, in the beginning of the '90s his Brooklyn lair, under an elevated train track like some 1930's socialist realist painting, was as funky as a mosquito's tweeter. From the shop, which sold a melange of beauty supplies, records, magazines and clothing, one passed through a narrow hallway, containing a tall and slender shelf on which, bereft of climate control, sat original master tapes of Bob Marley and the Skatalites and others, unprotected, right out there in the open! For an aficionado such as myself, it was like touching the Ten Commandments.

A small studio sat at the end of this cramped passage, and leaning against the back wall, Coxson was supervising Roland Alphonso this Saturday night, as he cut instrumental versions of Hypocrites, one after another, under black velvet paintings of Bob Marley and Stevie Wonder. The sense of metaphor was overwhelming. "Do a next one now, Jackson," insisted Dodd after each take, "I t'ink you could do one better." Like the reputed series of unreleased albums by the Skatalites, squirreled away all these years in Dodd's caverns, Roland's spirited takes on Hypocrites remain, to the best of my knowledge, sadly unreleased as well.

In October of 2001, Colin Leslie, the business director of Marley's Tuff Gong, took my wife Mary and me late one Sunday afternoon to Dodd's Brentford Road headquarters, where he was basically alone, save for the omnipresent King Stitt and an assistant, a battle-scarred veteran of Chicago's music wars. Rumours of a slight stroke explained why his speech was somewhat slower and his memory not what it had been. He initially confused me with Steve Barrow, the English writer/producer.

"No," I assured him, "I have never ever worked for Trojan or written for them."

Mr Dodd seemed to have a heavy beef against all concerned at that British label. So once we cleared up the fact that Steffens wasn't Steve, things relaxed, and he took us on a tour of the building, posed for a picture with me at a mic in his big, high-ceilinged studio, offered us t-shirts, even asked if there was anything else I wanted.

Well, one thing, I said, that I was trying to find out. "When Bunny Wailer sang Dreamland, do you know how the tune came about?"

"Oh yes," he said firmly. "I gave him that song from America. A group on Vee-Jay recorded it named El Tempos, only it was called My Dream Island." He spoke of his plans to reanimate the famous place, attract new talent, and record some of his legendary artistes with the classic and timeless 'riddims' that his team had created, tunes that had been versioned literally tens of thousands of times throughout the world.

If he got rich off it, he could never let it show. But, no matter - he was rich in music, earth's highest art, and his abundant contributions will live as long as there are any of us left on earth with ears to hear the celestial sounds of Jah made manifest.

Roger Steffens - curator, Roger Steffens' Reggae Archives, Los Angeles

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