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Photo: ITAR-TASS / imago images
Lee "Scratch" Perry was considered a god.
Not in the metaphorical and hasty sense of how one declares musicians to be "gods" on the guitar or behind the drums.
But as a
real
God who walked among the living alive.
He belongs in a row with Baron Samedi, Maman Brigitte, Filomez, Ti-Jean Petro and other spirit beings from the Creole pantheon of voodoo, which is practiced in Jamaica, his homeland under the name Obeah.
He was born in 1936 in a hamlet called Kendal.
The paths are made of mud, the huts are made of straw and corrugated iron, the animals are very happy pigs.
The flies there are so big that the hummingbirds are hardly noticeable underneath.
And when they do, they look like dazzling elves.
Perry was born, as he puts it, "to redeem the world".
The father was a road worker, the mother toiled in the sugar cane.
The son leaves school at 15 and lives as a gambler, dancer and construction worker before trying his luck in the capital.
He wants to create the sounds that he used for money himself.
Against money.
He is a god, not a saint.
And yet everyone who rocks his foot at Bob Marley or nods his head to Dub unknowingly pays homage to him in hip-hop
the chanting, or rather the scratching, is interesting, can be achieved through a successful remix
happy or even moved to dance music.
He made it up or was there when it happened.
In the early 1950s, music was a daily business in Jamaica, depending on the audience's favor and brought to the public with mobile »sound systems«, boxes on wheels.
And plates, plates, plates.
At best, those that former guest workers from the USA bring with them to the island, rare specimens.
Jazz.
Rhythm'n'Blues.
The biggest record owner is Clement "Coxsone" Dodd.
The talented Mr Perry gets a job in his “Studio One”.
A young god from the provinces
Soon the young god from the provinces was working with all the well-known producers, because he could do magic: elicited bizarre sounds of a beauty and energy that the world had not yet heard from the ancient equipment, which was irreparably damaged by tropical humidity could not hear at this point. They did not sound in London or New York, but far away from them.
When the Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie visited the island in 1966, Perry stood in the admiring crowd.
The musician was nevertheless skeptical of the Rastafarian salvation movement, which, in addition to Haile Selassie, would later also count Perry's protégé Bob Marley among its prophets.
His role model was the Jamaican politician, civil rights activist and - as one would say today - anti-colonial activist Marcus Garvey.
Perry carried pictures of Garvey with him well into old age.
First of all, it is he who, from 1967 and soon on his own account, expanded the rocksteady, which had accelerated to ska, to include African rhythms - soon supplemented by organ sounds, African rhythms and excerpts from films or recorded noises.
Reggae was invented and together with the sample it saw the light of day.
The world, however, is a shark tank, no one indulges the other with butter on bread, least of all Perry - and so from 1973 he retires to his own studio. "Black Ark" is a gloomy concrete bunker behind his house in the then bourgeois district of Washington Gardens. Surrounded by chickens and tanks for fish, wrapped in a huge cloud of marijuana, Perry writes music history here.
He only has an old four-track device at his disposal, but his enthusiasm for innovation and creativity, which borders on madness, make the impossible possible. The drums are covered with wire mesh for a better sound, and microphones are buried in the ground to create a duller sound. In a room that is now full of bulky waste, Perry then housed a failed musician named Bob Marley - and gave him the idea to give reggae a try.
Lee "Scratch" Perry sees nothing of the fortune for his global triumph that marked the beginning of world music. The white Jamaican Chris Blackwell, whom Perry referred to as a "vampire" and who will mean it seriously, will become rich. Perry buries himself more and more in his studio, his productions become more and more bizarre. After inventing reggae with “People Funny Boy” in 1968, he is now inventing dub.
The technical basis for this is »Dubplate«, the bare rhythmic tracks of the hits, so to speak, that Perry still produces for other musicians.
After work he starts experimenting with the percussive basics.
Together with his band, the Upsetters, he puts reverb over reverb, incorporates echoes and thus, taking advantage of the void and in competition with his colleague King Zubby, creates a completely new style of music.
The basis and climax of the genre is "Super Ape", his 1976 album.
He saw the studio as an instrument
In »Black Ark« he not only produces Bob Marley and the Wailers, The Heptones, Augustus Pablo or Max Romeo.
He also lends a hand on the work of Paul McCartney, The Clash and Robert Palmer.
Analogous to the Beatles, Pink Floyd or Kraftwerk, Perry understood a studio itself as an instrument.
Or, as he put it in his own way: “Look, the studio has to be something alive.
The machine has to be alive and intelligent.
I feed my mind into the machine and the machine creates a reality.
The buttons are the brain, and I can transform it into a living person via the wires. "
This animistic approach, which wants to see the magic in the machine, leads to catastrophe in 1979.
Officially, it is still unclear whether Lee “Scratch” Perry set fire to his studio himself, whether it was arson.
His younger brother, who still lives in the dilapidated villa next to the charred ruins, was there and said: "It was Lee," for fear of demons or even just because of an overturned candle.
An era has come to an end, Perry literally flees to London - where he continues to be celebrated as the forefather of the genre and godfather of the emerging technoid dance music.
Above all, alcohol is not good for his health.
His salvation is Mireille, his second wife from Switzerland.
He lives with her alternately in Einsiedeln south of Zurich and in Negril on the west coast of Jamaica.
He keeps composing, touring, and releasing, sometimes an album every year.
He works with greats like Bill Laswell, Adrian Sherwood or Sly Dunbar, and influences entire generations of subsequent musicians - from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to The Prodigy to Aphex Twin and Autechre.
A clip from the studio of the British electronics technicians from The Orb, during the recording of "The Oberserver In The Star House", shows Perry at work. He giggles, ponders, types cryptic texts into his smartphone, dances, tirelessly tinkers with sculptures and makes nonsense - to jump up at the crucial moment and press the button with the right sample.
Clear words could no longer be elicited from him. You had to take Lee "Scratch" Perry for what he is - a playful child in the body of a jolly old man. He wears a mirrored peaked cap, jogging suit and a portrait of the English queen under the inserts of his motorcycle boots, which are also covered with shells and wire. In Switzerland he was a bird of paradise. In Jamaica, his element, people revered him like an emperor. He held court in the clubs, took demo tapes and distributed joints from the plantation of his house on the coast.
Perry remained largely unknown to the general public until the end of his life. His whole appearance was too bizarre, so advanced, too owl mirror-like, was his art. He fared like all old gods who slowly drift into oblivion. He has now died in a hospital in Jamaica at the age of 85.