(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Lawrence Peryer: I would like to learn a little bit about your origin story with this music. I've read a couple of the anecdotes. Tell me about your forays into reggae and dub.

David Katz: I had a transformative, life-changing experience on July 31, 1982. It was five days after my seventeenth birthday, and that's when I experienced the mind-boggling reality of Jack Ruby Hi-Power, who came to San Francisco and played at the Elite Club on the street where I was born.

Just a few blocks down from the hospital there. I just remember walking into the room and the bass hit me like a thunderbolt, and there were these handcrafted wooden speaker box stacks in the corners of the room, just pumping out this very warm, incredible sound. And the selector Fat Jaw was standing at this massive silver preamp, doing these tactics that were flabbergasting. He would hold the bass back and then clobber you with it when you weren't expecting it.

And he was playing songs by Gregory Isaacs and the Mighty Diamonds. They didn't sound anything like the record, so I just couldn't really understand what I was experiencing.

If you look behind me, I have the poster for this gig. If I took it out of its frame and you went on the back, it actually had a little explanation of what a sound system is, because out there on the West Coast in those days, the Bay Area, we had no idea. There were sound systems in New York and Miami.

Maybe there were some sound systems in Los Angeles, although I'm not aware of that. There was a small Jamaican community in the city of Oakland, but it was very small, very insular, and somewhat isolated, and as far as I'm aware, there weren't sound systems there. So this was just like a whole new experience.

In the flyer, you may notice it said Bobby Culture, Yellowman, and Brigadier Jerry. But in the end it was Bobby Culture, Louis Lepke, and Levi Cleef, these three vocalists doing these extemporaneous rhymes on the mic. I just didn't know what to make of it, and I was completely fascinated by it. And then as the evening wore on, he played a Bob Marley song and I recognized the lyrics, but I didn't recognize the melody.

And this was because he had a dub plate exclusive of a song that had not yet been released, called "Rainbow Country," which had been recorded at the Black Ark with Lee "Scratch" Perry.

It was eventually released as a 12-inch, somewhat clandestinely, on the Daddy Kool label here in London. But Marley had reused those lyrics for another song on one of the Island albums.

There were so many questions that I had. I just wanted to know everything about it. Also, that time, for the first time in my life, my feet were just compelled to move. I was compelled to dance, and it was not of my own volition. So it was like having an out-of-body experience.

Lawrence Peryer: You said a moment ago that he was playing records that you recognized, but they didn't sound like the records, and so that implies to me you were already into reggae. I'm curious how you wound up walking into the Elite Club to see Jack Ruby.

David Katz: Let me back it up a little bit. I was fortunate to be born and raised where and when I was. I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was born in 1965, and you have to picture my parents, who ended up in California under strange circumstances during the Korean War.

They went to see Janis Joplin where I attended nursery school, at the Unitarian Church in San Rafael. I grew up on the outskirts of San Rafael, on the other side of the Golden Gate Bridge. And so there was a lot of really amazing music happening at that time in the Bay Area. Santana were just breaking out.

I remember my dad bringing home the first Santana album when I was five years old, and my dad had a lot of Beatles records and so on. I grew up in a house full of music. My mother was really big on opera and classical music. My father was a huge jazz head. He also had Lead Belly 78s, or they were 10-inch records.

And then my mother had calypso 10-inches, which I still have, by Trinidadian artists who'd gone to record in New York.

Lawrence Peryer: Wow.

David Katz: And then my mother started to usher at the local concert hall, which was right next door to where she worked. The Civic Center in Marin County is an amazing place in some ways.

Angela Davis was jailed there. A lot of things happened there. But next door to there, there was this beautiful concert hall that was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and it had excellent acoustics. And my mother ushered there in her spare time because she had such a deep love for music. So I saw all kinds of classical music concerts there as a kid, but also Ali Akbar Khan, a musician from India, had come and started a music school in San Rafael.

So there were a lot of visiting high-caliber Indian classical musicians that came to perform there. So I saw them regularly. Now, alongside all of that, there was KTIM San Rafael. Picture me growing up outside of San Rafael city limits: there's only one radio station in that town, and that was KTIM.

And KTIM had a very progressive policy when it came to programming. I don't know what the age group is of your listenership out there, but I want everyone tuning into this podcast to cast your mind back to a time when there was no internet and no mobile phones. So KTIM had a punk show, and they had this hardcore reggae show called Midnight Dread that broadcast every Sunday night, 10:00 p.m. to midnight.

The man who presented that show, Doug Wendt, was a real ambassador for the music and culture of Jamaica. He traveled frequently to Jamaica. If you listen to Eek-A-Mouse live at Reggae Sunsplash, he gets a name check by Eek-A-Mouse on stage. That kind of gives you a sense of his standing. So I just started tuning in to Midnight Dread every week religiously.

And I just had my little clock radio at my bedside and a little handheld tape recorder that I borrowed from a friend. This is pre-Walkman days. It was this kind of bulky yellow thing, and I would just press record and record the show and listen to it all week until the next week's show, and then do that again.

So he had guests from Jamaica. He had a dub poet explain what dub poetry is, explain what Nyabinghi is. I just learned so much from that show. I remember the Wailing Souls when the Firehouse Rock album came out. He had them in the studio the week the album came out, singing "Kingdom Rise Kingdom Fall" a cappella, live on the air.

And the hair stood up on the back of my neck.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

David Katz: And he had Mutabaruka on the show. He had all kinds of guests on the show. He had Lee "Scratch" Perry on the show, probably a little earlier than I started tuning in, or around about that time. Another thing about that show is that it was really easy to win tickets, especially once we upgraded our phone from a rotary dial to the push button.

I had the seven digits memorized. I could punch them in really quickly, so I won a lot of tickets even though I was underage. Sometimes they weren't that stringent about checking your ID, and we had a little thing going with the ID where you could put chalk over the last digit and change the five into a zero, so you could magically become twenty-one overnight.

And then another tactic in those days was copying the hand stamp. Somebody would pay to get in, and you'd lick your hand and duplicate the hand stamp.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

David Katz: I won tickets to see Jack Ruby Hi-Power, and I went with my friend from high school, Stacy Luce.

My jaw hit the floor. It was like revelation after revelation. And also I'd seen Jack Ruby in the film Rockers. I couldn't fathom what it meant exactly, when you're there and you're physically feeling the sound with your body. And then also how they were manipulating everything with the EQ. It was just endlessly fascinating.

And then a few months after that, I bought my first dub albums. Not that long after that as well, I went to the UK for the first time, because it was about nine months after that concert. I'd taken a test to get out of high school a year early, and I got a job at the local community college where my sister had been working.

And I was a fast typist because I'd taken a typing class in summer school. So I was doing data entry and I was earning good money and I was still living at home and I wasn't paying tax. If I worked evenings, I got time and a half, and if I worked weekends, I got double time. So I saved some money up and I came to London for the first time about three months before I turned eighteen.

And I spent a good few months in Europe. I guess I spent two and a half months in London and a couple months traveling around. And then I came back and started attending SF State.

Lawrence Peryer: Hmm.

David Katz: Coming to London was just like a whole other series of revelations. There was this huge Jamaican community here, very visible and audible, and sound systems all over the place.

And record labels and record shops. And I remember seeing Aswad at a very interesting venue, the Commonwealth Institute, which is no longer there, on Kensington High Street, in a very kind of posh neighborhood. And it was this very strange place on two floors that had all these exhibitions of all the former colonies, including Jamaica and the other English-speaking Caribbean islands.

And in the middle of the two floors was this circular stage. So Aswad were there on the circular stage, and it was at that time when they had the extended horn section: these three Jamaican horn players, Eddie "Tan Tan" Thornton, Michael "Bammi" Rose, and Vin Gordon, the great trombonist. That show was absolutely incredible, and they were supported by DBC.

The Dread Broadcasting Corporation was a sound system, and it was also a community radio station, what is sometimes referred to as pirate radio. And DBC was started by Rita Marley's brother Leroy, known as Lepke, The Dread Outta Control. So I got to know Lepke later down the line and ended up buying quite a lot of records off him, but not on that first trip.

These were all stepping stones to my education. The other thing I should mention is, in the early days in San Francisco, I discovered a publication called the Reggae Calendar, which was edited by a gentleman called Corbett Harvey Bowers III. So the Reggae Calendar listed every reggae show that was happening, but it also listed every reggae radio show in the Bay Area.

So this is how I got introduced to Tony Moses, the chanting master who was on KPOO in San Francisco. Tony was a Jamaican who'd moved to the Bay Area and ended up in a group called the Rastafarians, and Tony was a dynamite radio host, and he just had all the latest records from Jamaica.

And then you had a dread called Drepemba, another Jamaican immigrant, who presented a show on KPFA in Berkeley. Drepemba used to do an annual harvest show with all the weed tunes. You had various other reggae radio shows. You had shows on KUSF, KPFA, and then KFJC. Some of these stations I couldn't always tune in that well, but the long and the short of it is that I started listening to different reggae radio shows every day of the week.

And then going to London: a lot of what I knew were all the Channel One recuts, Channel One and Joe Gibbs from the late seventies and then going into the early eighties. So when I went to London and I started tuning into the radio stations there and attending these sounds and dances, especially on a Sunday radio, you would hear all the vintage stuff, and they were playing the Studio One and Treasure Isle originals.

I was like, huh, I know this too, but what's this? It had obviously been recorded earlier. These were all stepping stones to my education. And I remember the early reggae books. So first there was Catch a Fire by Timothy White, a biography of Bob Marley. I didn't understand it when I read it at the time, but there were all kinds of problems with the text.

He'd lifted passages of dialogue from the dialogue in The Harder They Come, the film, and somehow turned that into Marley's journey from the countryside coming into Kingston. But at the time, it was a great read for me. And there was also a Marley biography by Stephen Davis, and then Stephen Davis and Peter Simon did a book called Reggae Bloodlines.

And then a few years after that they did a sequel called Reggae International. I just devoured those. That's how I ended up at that dance: listening to Midnight Dread, seeing the film Rockers, listening to Midnight Dread, won tickets, and then went to the show.

Lawrence Peryer: I love hearing about that journey, because the radio was so important. When you would find these stations or these programs on these college stations or listener-supported stations, it was like, oh, there are other people out there. Who are these people? They were on the radio, so there was a mystique around them.

They're just cats, and they just happened to get their way onto the radio, but they're the entry points into these universes. I love thinking about those times, and that process of discovery is so incredible. You'd come across a record store and learn about it and say, that's an hour away?

I got to go drive there. And sometimes you'd go and it was a bust, and other times you'd go and it was a gold mine.

David Katz: Right. And also you have to picture where I lived. We lived in this strange neighborhood. It was a bit like living in an Atom Egoyan film, and I never understood this until shortly before my father died.

But he explained to me that my parents bought a house that hadn't been built yet, and they'd been shown these architectural drawings that had a whole community with shops and amenities and things to do and places to be. They built the housing, but they never built any of the amenities.

So we were in this strange tract housing where every house was either an A-frame with a pitched roof or a B-frame with a sloping roof. And the A-frames had three bedrooms and the B-frames had two bedrooms. They were all identical. They had the same built-in Formica table in the kitchen-diner area, and they were also like fire traps.

I think now they're desirable, but at the time they were these affordable semi-prefabs, and it was the ultimate anonymous neighborhood to live in. We were the last turnoff before farmland. We were two and a half miles from the nearest bus stop, except for these commuter buses. And I didn't have a car.

Some of my friends had cars, but I didn't. And on those instances when I couldn't catch a lift with a friend, if I went to a gig I'd have to get myself to the bus stop, and then an hour and a bit to ride into the city, and then coming home I'd have to get off the bus on the side of the freeway at 2:30 in the morning and then walk two and a half miles to sneak in and hope that I didn't wake my mother up. So there was that whole aspect to it as well. I was lucky, though. There were some great record stores in San Rafael that had a load of reggae. And then when I moved back into San Francisco, right around the corner from me was this great record shop where I bought those first dub albums, and they were reggae heads as well.

And then later I got to meet Doug Wendt, after I'd moved to London more permanently and I had been appointed Lee "Scratch" Perry's ghost writer—that's two words, ghost writer, but that's kind of another story. But Doug, being the nice, generous, warm-hearted person that he is, he invited me to come to his apartment in San Francisco that he shared with his wife.

And he just let me tape on cassettes all these extremely rare Lee "Scratch" Perry records that he'd accumulated over the years, these kind of 7-inch blank 45s and so on. He was one of many people who gave me all kinds of help on that journey, trying to put that book together.

Lawrence Peryer: I want to ask you a little bit about King Tubby, Scratch, Prince Jammy, Scientist. There was this period of time where it seemed like every, call it five to seven years, another one of them would be the king. They're grouped as sort of the originators, right? I'm curious about the similarities and the dissimilarities and the contrast between them.

And I wonder, could you talk me through a little bit about those personalities and the music they make? Because I think by the time we get to Scientist, I think of it as much more modern, although dub is always this sort of quasi-futuristic thing.

David Katz: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: But Scientist feels so different than King Tubby in my mind.

David Katz: I completely agree. In the book Dub Revolution, I do my best to trace this evolution, and it's complicated. It's very complicated, I think, to appreciate what really happened. You have to look at the broader picture. And I would also encourage your listeners, anyone reading the book, before they start the book: everything they think they know about dub, just put it to one side.

That's what I had to do when I was researching the book. And this book draws on about forty years of research, and it took me about five years to put together. I really did have to put everything to one side, or even throw it out the window. And so there are a lot of complicated, complex, counterintuitive things that happen.

And in the book, I do have to trace it back, because dub is so tied up with sound system culture. I did have to wind it right the way back, to explore and try to illuminate more clearly what actually is sound system culture. How did it come about in Jamaica, and why?

Lawrence Peryer: Interesting.

David Katz: And the thing with researching the evolution of Jamaican popular music is that—and this is happening to me time and time again—things always happen earlier than you think. Or they, it certainly happened earlier than I thought.

I always considered sound systems to be a post-war phenomenon, the years following World War II, and then when I was researching this book, I actually discovered that as early as 1939 you could go to Stanley Motta's Appliance Store in downtown Kingston, or the Montego Bay branch, and you could purchase or hire something that was already termed a sound system, and it had an RCA amplifier and two speakers.

And then it turns out that actually even before that you had what's known as a radio phone—in the UK they called it a radiogram—and you also had these radio phone parties happening. And initially it's quite fascinating that they were happening at exclusive members clubs like the Bournemouth Club and a few other members-only clubs in Kingston.

Because those things were expensive, and they were a way to attend an orchestra dance without actually having to have an orchestra [present]. Then you had these developments that happened in 1947. Everything changed because Hedley Jones, who'd already built a solid body electric guitar himself, made an amplifier that was much better suited to reproducing prerecorded music.

Because most of the sound systems to that point were using PA systems, and the PA systems were really designed just to amplify the human voice. So they were distorting, and you were getting feedback, howls, and other issues.

Because he'd been in the RAF in World War II and he'd learned radar and sonar technology, he found this circuit design for an amplifier designed by D. T. N. Williamson. That circuit design really transformed amplifier building in the years following World War II. Hedley used that blueprint and built his own amplifier, and then flopped Tom the Great Sebastian—or in those days he wasn't the Great Sebastian yet.

It was just called Tom's sound system. Tom was preparing for a dance across the street from Hedley's shop. Hedley started blasting these Pérez Prado records on this new amplifier he'd built, and it totally flopped Tom's dance. So Tom went and bought an amplifier from Hedley, and then all the other sound system owners did as well.

Lawrence Peryer: That's the first sound system clash right there.

David Katz: Pretty much. It was unofficial, but yeah. I think the first official one was 1951 at the Pioneer Club in Jones Town. Then you had this thing that happened in the early fifties: from 1950 Count Machuki started to do these wisecracks, jive talk, a kind of jive talk slang that came from Dan Burley's book of Harlem jive, which he bought on Orange Street at Beverley's.

He started doing this kind of rhyming pattern in between records. And then Clement Dodd at Studio One, he said everything changed when he bought a two-track Ampex in 1964, because before that the recordings he was making were all monaural, monophonic, everybody crowded around one microphone. And I remember—I think it may have been Niney the Observer, or one of the musicians—had told me that in those days you had to really be good, because if you flubbed a note, everyone would have to stop and they'd have to wind the tape back to the start.

And if you wound the tape back too many times, it would deteriorate and you wouldn't be able to use it anymore. If the tape became unusable, it might delay a recording session by two or three months, because they would have to ship tape from overseas and it would come by ship. So Coxsone understood. Now that you have two tracks, he said, I decided to record the musicians first on one track.

And the singers could just do a guide vocal, and then once the musicians got their parts down right, I would do a different session later with the musicians. Because he said if you had them all together, there'd be a lot of stop and go. You'd have that same thing where somebody would flub a note, you'd have to wind the tape back. He would take too long.

So Coxsone understood, if I did this it was quicker and the result was better. And then once the vocal was isolated in one track, it was really easy to drop out that vocal. And he said the first one he tried it with was the song "Rudy," also known as "Jailhouse," by the Wailers, Bob Marley and the Wailers.

And then he removed the vocal and he had Roy Richards play a harmonica on it, and he released it as "Green Collie." And that was a success for Coxsone. And then also Lee "Scratch" Perry, the Wailers, put it on the first version that they recorded at Studio One. They removed the vocal of that, and Scratch did this rude alternate on it, "Rub and Squeeze," but it didn't really take off at that time.

This is what became known as version. It was a couple years down the line, '68 coming into '69. Suddenly every 45 released in Jamaica had an instrumental counterpart on the B side, and then the toasters on the sound system started to use these raw rhythms to do their rhymes. Then U Roy changed everything, because he came with a fluid toasting style where you would toast all the way through the rhythm.

All the other toasters that had started to record, like Count Machuki, Sir Lord Comic, they would just do these little interjections, and that was about it. Same with King Stitt. So U Roy changed the game, and he did that while he was a resident on King Tubby's Hi-Fi. So this brings us to King Tubby now. King Tubby, you have to picture, was an electronics specialist who was self-taught. He went to Kingston Tech and studied electronics there.

And then he did some correspondence courses with institutions in the US. Tubby started out by scavenging components that were thrown away from the department stores downtown. And he would cannibalize this, and then he started his own radio station, TRS, Tubby Radio Station, something like that.

And he had this little shack at the back of the family home in Waterhouse. The other thing with Tubby is that he wasn't from Waterhouse, he was from Central Kingston. So moving to Waterhouse involved crossing one of those boundary lines, because Kingston is a very divided place, and especially in those days there were neighborhoods that had strict allegiance to one of the two main political parties.

So Tubby went from a JLP area to a PNP area, but he was right on the border of the PNP area and the next JLP area. So that part of Waterhouse was affiliated with the PNP, and then Tower Hill was affiliated with the JLP.

Lawrence Peryer: Mm.

David Katz: These distinctions are important and part of the story. But Tubby had his sound system, which initially was a small affair, just known as a Hi-Fi. Small caliber, small wattage. Then he built it up, and it was partly when he had U Roy on the sound. It boosted U Roy's career and it boosted Tubby's sound system. At the same time, Tubby was servicing the machines at studios like Treasure Isle, so he had access to exclusive mixes and exclusive material that he could use on his own sound system.

A little further down the line, he built his own mixing desk. Not the one that we're familiar with, that you see in the photographs at his studio. Before that, he built a mixing desk that he was using to mix his own dub plates, first for his sound system, and then other sound systems came to him.

Apparently once a week was designated specifically for dub cutting for sound systems. Then Bunny Lee, the hit-making producer who came from Greenwich Farm, kind of an underprivileged area in western Kingston—Bunny helped Tubby acquire this mixing desk that Dynamic Sounds had dismantled, because Dynamic Sounds was doing a series of upgrades.

So Dynamic Sounds initially was a studio called WIRL, West Indies Records Limited, affiliated with a record label in Barbados of that name. Edward Seaga had it, and then Edward Seaga went into politics, and so he sold it. Clifford Rae and George Benson were running it, two figures there in Jamaica, and then eventually Byron Lee acquired it.

There'd been a fire at the pressing plant. Byron Lee acquired it and upgraded the equipment. So at one point Dynamic Sounds had two studios. They had an eight-track studio and a four-track studio that were running concurrently. Then at one point coming up to '72, they upgraded the eight-track; it became a 16-track for when the Rolling Stones were coming down to start working on Goats Head Soup.

And then the four-track became an eight-track in part of that process. Somewhere along the line, Bunny Lee helped Tubby get this board that had been there, and these two four-track machines and a two-track machine. And Striker said to him, you can do recording in here. And apparently Tubby was reluctant to do it.

This is how Cornell Campbell tells it, anyway. The singer said he went in there and Bunny was insisting that he record Cornell Campbell in there. And Tubby said he didn't want to do it because he didn't want people to laugh after him. And Bunny showed him that he could do it and insisted that he'd do it, and he did it.

And Bunny put the two songs out on an album that Cornell Campbell had done that was released by Trojan Records overseas. Then apparently Tubby understood that he could do it, and he padded up what had been the bathroom with egg boxes, egg cartons, and he turned that bathroom into a voicing room.

The control room where he was doing the mixing and everything had been his bedroom, but he'd moved out by then. So Tubby was this kind of reclusive, enigmatic figure, and one of the reasons why it was so hard to get convincing information about Tubby is that he gave very few interviews in his lifetime, and in a few of those interviews he's just paraphrased, or there's only a verbatim quote of about ten words.

If you go online, you can hear an audio interview that was conducted by Tero Kaski. It's brief, but you'll hear Tubby's firsthand account. Some say Tubby had antisocial tendencies. He was a deep jazz head who was a John Coltrane fanatic, and he had a lot of jazz records that were there underneath the amplifier.

So if you listen to a lot of the way that Tubby mixed, some have likened it to jazz. It gets very confusing with King Tubby and his studio because he wasn't the only one who engineered there, and the chronology has been difficult to substantiate. Roy Cousins, who started out in the Royals as a singer and then became a producer, lived around the corner from Tubby.

So he spent a lot of time in the studio in the seventies. He said that for the first two years of King Tubby's studio, Tubby alone mixed there. So that's what Roy Cousins said, whether or not that's correct. Hard to say. Then we know that there were other engineers working there, like Pat Kelly, who was a singer of kind of soft, sentimental ballads for most of his career, but he also mixed some very hard dubs at King Tubby's studio.

You also had Philip Smart, who started to go there through his association with Augustus Pablo. Philip Smart had a small sound system he was associated with, so he went there to mix dubs, including Augustus Pablo's earliest productions, that Philip Smart was part of. And then eventually Tubby just told him, hey Jackson, mix this ya tune here.

And Philip found himself mixing there, and Philip Smart had a natural affinity for it. Philip is interesting because he had several tenures at King Tubby's studio. So did Pat Kelly. They weren't just there for one phase, they were there for several phases, so they would work there for a while, then Pat Kelly went to work at some other studios.

Then he came back. He was in the States for a while. He came back, he was at Tubby's again. Then he moved on. Philip Smart also left Jamaica and went to New York, and then he came back down and he was with Tubby in the later years in the seventies. So he overlapped with Scientist a bit, and then he went back up to New York permanently.

It's notoriously difficult to say who mixed what at that time. There are very few specific credits. Some retrospective credits credit Tubby when they're not genuine. It's a little hard. But what I can say most definitely is that when you listen to the early dubs that Tubby made, the first thing he used was reverb.

So those earliest dubs—and I talk about it in the book Dub Revolution—you can trace those back. Reverb is the first thing that Tubby used. Then Tubby started to use a homemade tape delay, where you go between two tape machines to create a delay, or, Scientist said later, you feed the playback head into the record head and you do it through the mixing desk.

That made a very distinctive delay sound at Tubby's, because it was fixed, you couldn't alter the pitch. Scientist explains in the book, you could only do it at seven and a half inches per second or fifteen inches per second, and nobody was doing it at fifteen, because if you did it at fifteen the tape would run out too quickly.

So that was it. And then the signature effect. When you know you're listening to King Tubby's studio is because the mixing desk that he got, this MCI, one of the early JH-series mixing desks, had this built-in high-pass filter. So it had these ten notch switches, where it would be a particular frequency that you could then manipulate the filter.

So Bunny Lee used to call it the Squawky, because it would make this squawking sound, like sk. And Tubby was just a master of that device. Chris Lane explains in the book—the journalist and producer Chris Lane—he would go to one frequency notch and tweak it for a while, and then maybe move up to another notch and then tweak that for a while.

And it has a very dynamic sound. It's a real signature effect. So the thing with King Tubby's studio is that probably more dub was mixed there than any other studio anywhere. In the seventies it was just the place to head for dub. So many producers mixed dubs there, had their dubs mixed there by Tubby and his team of engineers.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

David Katz: Like you were saying, Prince Jammy, when he came back down to Jamaica in 1976, he took over from Tubby at Tubby's request, because Tubby was too busy with his transformer business. One of Tubby's main concerns for his bread and butter business was winding transformers that transformed electrical current, because you had a lot of things—the British had installed the wiring, but then the Americans were sending equipment down, and the Canadians, and it didn't always work, so you needed a transformer to match the current.

So Tubby was the one that supplied and serviced and maintained these transformers. So he didn't really have a lot of time to mix. And then also Scientist explained Tubby got tired of mixing because there was so much smoking going on in the studio. And he didn't want his clothes to smell, because Tubby didn't smoke.

He didn't even smoke cigarettes.

Lawrence Peryer: Wow.

David Katz: And you would go in there and it would be this fog of ganja smoke. So yeah, that was another reason apparently why he stopped [mixing]. So Jammy had his own style. It was very different to Tubby's. Maybe Jammy incorporated more treble elements. For instance, Philip Smart explained some of the different devices.

He said he used the test tone as a kind of a repeat. You have a test tone to test the frequencies, and they started to use that as a percussive instrument. So Philip Smart was explaining they all had to have something that made their dubs distinctive. So he said, mine was the test tone.

I put it on "The Clock" by John Holt. It was a version of an old rhythm-and-blues ballad. And he says, so I put it on there, bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep. That was a new thing. Then he said Scientist would do the spring reverb splash: sploing! And so it's like everybody had their device.

And then, like you were saying, when Scientist comes on board he revolutionizes things again. And I liked what Roy Cousins says in the book. He said most of the other engineers, they would mix a dub and then you'd say, okay, run it off to the quarter inch, and then you'd run it off and you'd go and master it.

But he said Scientist wouldn't leave it alone. He'd mix the dub and then you'd tell him, okay, run it off to the quarter inch, and he's still mixing it as he's running it off to the quarter inch, and he's manipulating it another time. So that was the thing that Scientist had, that more experimental edge. He wanted to push things to the limits, or maybe beyond the limits.

And then Scientist had this way of stretching the test tone. He would make it longer somehow. Instead of bleep, bleep, bleep, bleep, he would make it go like bleep, somehow. And then he would do stereo panning with it. Yeah, those dubs are phenomenal.

Lawrence Peryer: So you talk about the historical context of the music. I'm interested in the broader context that you put everything in, in terms of colonialism, post-colonialism, gang culture, all the fallout of independence, good and bad.

David Katz: Yes.

Lawrence Peryer: On the one hand we're talking about a technical mixing desk technique, if we want to be super reductive, but it's so rooted in this other swirling mass of social issues. And I wonder, could you tell me why those things are so connected?

David Katz: Jamaica has such a turbulent history that goes way back, as far as recorded. Even in the days of the Amerindians, you had one group of Amerindians battling it out with another group, and then when the Spanish come, they fail to make Jamaica a viable colony.

It doesn't really work out for them. However, in that process, they decimated the Amerindian population. It's a very brutal tale of colonialism, even though it was short-lived for the Spanish. Then the British take the island partly through piracy—that is how they gain control of Jamaica—and then the Brits, they turn it into a sugar factory.

But in that process, it's this extremely dehumanizing process of chattel slavery. Everything that happens in Jamaica after that is tied up in that whole colonial project and that dehumanization, and also all the kind of colorism and shadeism that you have, and the post-colonial mindset where the elites are looking to Britain and Europe as the model, or later to the United States.

And these are all problematic ways of nationhood, and a lot of that does come into the music. And we were talking before about King Tubby's studio, where it was positioned on the boundary of these two politically aligned neighborhoods.

A little farther down the line, it was a real war zone. It became a sanctuary and a safe space, but at a price to the people who were working there. And that's also true with Channel One Studio, where tremendous dub was also created, and where Scientist, when he left King Tubby's studio, went to Channel One.

And then Scientist explains in the book that he probably stayed at Channel One longer than he should have, because the neighborhood became unsafe and untenable. King Tubby also was in the process of building a proper state-of-the-art recording studio at his same premises in Waterhouse when he was murdered.

And partly it's that the neighborhood had become so unsafe that it had this endemic violence. All these things are part of it. And there's testimony from people like Fatman, the sound system proprietor, a Jamaican who lived in the UK. Ken Gordon was his right name. He also had a label, and he released a lot of dub in the UK that was mixed at Tubby's studio.

He talked about being in the studio one night, and you heard all these gunshots, and he said, I ducked down under the mixing desk and me and Pat Kelly's eyes made four. So it's like that. And then he said another night they were passing by Joe Gibbs studio, because they were going to do some work there.

And he said, oh, I saw one brethren under a tree taking a nap. And then in the evening when we left the studio, there was one big political rally and all this people out in force and chanting and marching. And he says, oh, I saw a guy walking up the road with a homemade gun. Guess who it was? The same brother we left underneath the tree when we went into the studio.

And then Peter Chemist, who was a protégé of Scientist—Chemist's story is quite fascinating—he grew up around the corner from Channel One, and he said, oh, the first time I went in the studio it was because my mother was the cleaner there. I think maybe he'd gone in once before to deliver a message to Joseph Hoo Kim. He ended up becoming a regular at the studio because his mother had been hired as a cleaner and he had to go and help her clean the studio.

He was just there as a barefoot boy, and then he observed everything that was going on. And then one day he tried to mix when Soljie Hamilton had drifted off. And the song he mixed was a number one hit, and he said, oh, and then the producer bought me my first pair of shoes. Chemist said Channel One became a kind of a sanctuary because it had all these grills and locks, so it was barricaded, so you couldn't force your way in there.

So he said sometimes it was safer to be at the studio than to be at home, because he said every day we would look at a body and people who we knew were being killed. It would be easy to listen to this music for years and have no idea that's what was happening when this music was being made.

On the other hand, if you listen to the dub versions of "Don't Wanna Be a Rude Boy" by Johnny Clarke, or some of those other songs, they've been stripped of the vocals, but the music holds all the tension. That was another part of the dub practice. Dub is revealing that the musicians are delivering the same message as the lyricists.

They're doing it through the music. You wouldn't necessarily hear it in the same way if you're just listening to the vocal, because you're paying attention to the words. I invite the listeners to listen to some of their favorite songs in dub form and see if they can follow what I'm positing there.

I think also for me, in the introduction, there's a quote from Isis Semaj-Hall, who's a Jamaican academic known as the Dub Doctor. She's written widely about dub.

Lawrence Peryer: Yeah.

David Katz: She talks about dub as being this kind of process in memory where the vocals are stripped away, but you still hear the lyrics in your head.

Also, it's all tied up with identity and memory and transformation. And so in its way, dub is also fighting back against colonialism and these post-colonial hangovers. So that's part of dub's purpose as well, in a symbolic sense.

Lawrence Peryer: It's always so fascinating to me about Jamaican music and dub in particular. There's this recursive nature, because the music sort of steals from itself.

David Katz: Yeah.

Lawrence Peryer: It's such a deeply self-referential music. It does all get lost and mixed and put into the stew. And a book like this inevitably balances being expansive with—there just has to be some figures or scenes that you can't get to the bottom of, I would imagine. And I'm curious if there's someone or something that eluded you that you wish you could have gotten there with.

David Katz: So obviously I was never fortunate enough to interview King Tubby. He died before this project began, so that's something missing, I guess. And then the other problem, in that sense, for this book, was that it had a word limit.

It would be easy for me to expand on any of the chapters in this book and do a ten-volume set or whatever. But obviously one of the things that dub teaches us is that what's left out is as important as what's left in. So I didn't want it to be exhaustive and exhausting, even if I'm trying to tell as much of the tale as I can.

The book also leaves Jamaica, because of course dub traveled first with the diaspora. I got to interview many important figures here many times here in the UK: Adrian Sherwood, Dennis Bovell, Mad Professor. One that declined to be interviewed, which is, yeah, a little bit of a shame on my end, is Mark Lusardi,

who played an important role, somewhat overlooked. I'm not sure why he opted out, but fair enough. It would've been nice to have some testimony from him. And then it leaves the UK and it travels into what happened in Europe. Also, there are parts in Japan and Brazil, and a little bit in Mexico. If I had more space, it would've been nice to trace dub in Africa a little better.

Maybe Australia, New Zealand, places like that. I'm aware that there is a dub scene in Chengdu in China, but I haven't been there and I don't know anyone there. So those are maybe little omissions.

Lawrence Peryer: This book really does remind me of that time when we were younger, where you'd get one of those books and it was precious, because there wasn't a library shelf full of them.

It was like, to come across the Timothy White book, for all its flaws, it was like it washed up on the shore and I need to hold onto it. I think this book is very important in terms of building on the foundation and expanding from what Veal started. I very much appreciate the book as somebody who loves the music, and I would encourage people to go get it. So thank you so much.

David Katz: Thank you. You can order Dub Revolution: Jamaica's Sonic Innovators and the Birth of Remix Culture from your favorite bookstore, your favorite local bookstore. You can also go online. If people are in the UK, they can order it direct from the White Rabbit website. There are various retailers who will ship, including Rough Trade and so on and so forth.

But check it out and see what you think. Also, obviously we can't talk about this book without mentioning Lee "Scratch" Perry. Scratch had his own very distinctive niche in dub, and that comes about after he opens his Black Ark studio. A lot of people do get confused and they think that Scratch was mixing dub before that, and it really wasn't the case.

Then of course after the Black Ark, Scratch is involved in all kinds of other dub, mostly in collaboration with other people. But again, what Scratch achieved at the Black Ark—very limited equipment. Just the Teac four-track, a Mu-Tron Bi-Phase, and a Roland Space Echo. Absolutely astounding. It's interesting that Chris Blackwell gave him an eight-track and Scratch really didn't like using it. He preferred to use the four-track and to just bounce his tracks between a four-track and a two-track.

Lawrence Peryer: That's amazing. Thank you so much, David.

David Katz: Thanks very much. All the best.