"Once I heard King Tubby..."

Mick Sleeper talks to Gordie Johnson about the reggae influence on Big Sugar (June 1999)

Sleeper: The development of Big Sugar over the years has been from jazz/blues to rock/blues, and now you've got this cool rock/blues/reggae sound happening. Is that how you would describe the Big Sugar sound?

Johnson: Yeah, I'd say that's accurate. There's been a touch of country singing now and then, but that's pretty accurate.

Sleeper: Let's talk about the reggae influence on Big Sugar. Last time we talked, you mentioned that you've actually been into reggae longer than you've been into the blues. Where did that interest start?

Johnson: Well, I'm trying to think of the first time I was conscious of reggae music… I suppose I bought a Bob Marley record. You know, back in the punk era there was a lot of reggae and ska coming out from England, and as soon as I heard that I thought "whoa, wait a minute, there's gotta be an original source for this", so I started digging a little deeper. It worked the same way with blues music. I heard Eric Clapton and Led Zeppelin and Stevie Ray Vaughan and went "where does this come from?" I knew it had to be deeper than this, so I went digging.

Sleeper: I read somewhere years ago that you didn't really like what The Clash had done with reggae and dub. Care to comment on that again?

Johnson: It's not that I didn't really like it, it's just that I heard it, and like I said earlier, I knew there must be a deeper source, I knew that these guys didn't think it up. A lot of my friends thought The Clash invented that. I just knew, just from my experience with other forms of music, that it was a hand-me-down from some other source. And once I heard King Tubby, how could I go back to The Clash? The Clash stuff doesn't sound bad, it's pretty cool sounding, and it's really raw and it's unique in its own way, but like I said, it's hard to go back to the farm after you've seen the big city.

Sleeper: A couple of years ago I was talking to Pauline Black from The Selecter, and she told me this story of how a young fan was convinced that ska had been invented in California…

Johnson: Well, there's a lot of people who think that the blues started with Stevie Ray Vaughan. That's fine, everyone doesn't have to be a musicologist and understand every aspect of the history of a music to enjoy it. But me, being the creator of a thing, trying to entertain people with it, I think I need to get to the source, y'know, to gain an understanding of it.

Sleeper: With the dub tracks that Big Sugar has done, what I love about them is that everyone always associates dub with reggae, but really it's a studio technique that can be applied to any kind of music. So when you get that Big Sugar combo of hard rock and dub, it's really dynamite.

Johnson: Yeah, when you strip down our bed tracks, and take all the guitars out and take the vocals out, when it comes right down to bass and drums, the rhythmic elements of our music are suited very well to dub. It didn't really require that much of a stretch to make dub mixes of Big Sugar songs, because it was already underlying, you know?

Sleeper: So tell me more about Alkaline, the guy who dubs your music.

Johnson: (Laughs) What do you want to know? He's a vagrant! He's just shows up at the worst possible times of the day, after you've been in the studio for 12 hours working on the same song. It's nice to have people drop by the studio who are fresh and in a joking mood. He usually shows up with half a dozen people, and they just run the place. So at that point, you just have to make sure some of the insanity gets on tape.

Sleeper: So have you got any favorite dub artists? I remember you saying that Scientist was a favorite of yours.

Johnson: There's so many of them. Any of the guys from that 70s classic era of dub. I've just got rows and rows of vinyl and compilation CDs. So much great stuff has come out on CDs over the past few years. I know you're hip to the Blood & Fire catalog, Heartbeat and Mango has been re-issuing all their classic stuff... It's just so much easier to find now, and so much easier for people to get hip to it. I just love that.

Sleeper: Any particular favorite dub tunes?

Johnson: Not really. As a genre of music, it's not like you can have your favorite Delta blues song, or your favorite hip hop artist. Dub to me is like this nameless, faceless entity, it's like a fog that just permeates the room, slides effortlessly from one track to the next. And it just keeps you in a frame of mind throughout the course of an evening. I kind of love it for that.

Sleeper: So when Garry came to the band, did he bring the reggae groove or was that something you wanted to import into Big Sugar by getting him in the band?

Johnson: It was already there, I think. There's a lot of stuff on 500 Pounds that predates Garry's arrival in the band, which is very strongly influenced by reggae - "I'm A Ram", "Sugar In My Coffee", "It's All Over Now". A lot of tracks on that record that borrow or steal directly from reggae classics. Basslines, melodies, even lyrically. So I was already all about it, and getting Garry on board sort of gave me a greater focus and a greater drive to make it real, to make it as legitimate as I possibly could. And Garry is a collaborator - it doesn't have to be a conscious effort to do reggae, we just make music, and it tends to have natural tendency to lean towards that.

Sleeper: So judging from the video for "Turn The Lights On", you've got a Jamaican rhythm section now.

Johnson: Well actually, over the years we've used different drummers in the studio. And Raffa, who's played on a lot of Big Sugar stuff, was born in Jamaica, living in Canada. You know, he doesn't play anything but reggae music, so it was really a great deal of fun to work in the studio with those guys. Just put up some mics and have them play, I could make any number of songs out of a session like that. Al Cross, our original drummer, has been on tour with us for the past couple of months. He plays on 500 Pounds and the first album - all the records, actually - but he hasn't toured with us since 1995. So this is a momentous tour for us in that regard.

Sleeper: So what's the reggae scene like in Toronto right now? Is it swinging around to more of a roots scene again, or is it still kind of a dancehall, ragga thing?

Johnson: It's funny, the reggae scene in Toronto has really moved out of downtown. There was a spell there where there were a couple of clubs in the downtown core where you could go see reggae bands, catch one band's first set and then go catch another's second set. That doesn't seem to be the case anymore, reggae has really moved out to the suburbs, it's all in community halls and after hours things. Stuff that's not advertised, except in its own neighborhood. It's hard to just come into town and go find something, you know. You have to drive out to the 'burbs to get it. Garry's still really plugged into it, and he keeps me pretty up to date with what's going on. But it really has gone to the outer areas, it's not a downtown thing anymore.

Sleeper: I was just thinking that there have been a lot of famous Jamaicans like Lynn Taitt and Jackie Mittoo and Leroy Sibbles who have been living in Toronto at one time or another. I was just wondering how much of an influence people like that had.

Johnson: You know it's funny, there's a lot of people who are the sons and daughters of Jamaican immigrants who are making music in the Toronto area now, who aren't even aware of that rich, cultural heritage that's in their own city. I mean, it's as much their city as it is my city. But somehow I have become more aware of that heritage. I mean, Leroy Sibbles wasn't appreciated when he was there, and he was there for years, now he's gone back to Jamaica. And you know there are "youts" sitting somewhere in a studio sampling his basslines, and it's beyond their comprehension that they could actually meet the guy that originated these basslines. You know, dudes, he was here three years ago. He was right here in the band room, you could have walked in and shaken his hand. Jackie Mittoo worked all over, lived and played in Toronto and played at every studio and every club. He's dead and gone now, but at the time who thought to do anything about it?

I always draw a sort of parallel between the blues resurgence of the 60s with reggae music now, where mainstream culture just started to get hip to blues and the rich heritage that America had, this goldmine of great artists that were still alive. People give them up for dead, but they were still alive and you could dig up their records and find them playing in small clubs somewhere. They were old then, now they're gone. We have so few of the blues originators left - and with reggae most of them are still around, they're still walking the earth. You can still track them down and find them, and to me this is fascinating.

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