Brass Trax

There wasn’t much reggae on Jamaican radio in the 1970s. Although the music was almost literally everywhere else on the island, having infiltrated uptowns and shantytowns, tourist traps and political parties, censorious broadcasters judged it too wild to air. In a way, they had a point. Even when it wasn’t chanting down Babylon or extolling the virtues of marijuana, reggae still had that one drop beat—the sound of Rastafari in the hills—which was itself somewhat subversive.

Since broadcasters preferred imported pop to the homegrown product, there was no model for putting together a successful radio show when Michael Campbell started DJing for the Jamaican Broadcasting Company (JBC). Better known by his on-air moniker Mikey Dread, Campbell created the rules for broadcasting reggae from scratch, and his innovations—non-sequitur samples, exclusive remixes, and freaky sound effects—would become the template for the mix show, a new radio format became commonplace in the urban U.S. and U.K. by the mid-eighties.

Though his 1978 vocal album Dread at the Controls sold more copies, a new reissue of the contemporaneous African Anthem: The Mikey Dread Show Dubwise might have been the greater achievement. A studio creation mixed to recreate Campbell’s radio show, African Anthem demonstrates how Mikey Dread could string together a series of dubplates into a seamless and propulsive performance: the sort of thing you might catch on the air by happenstance only to find that you can’t turn it off.

Campbell, who had grown up in the relative quiet of Negril, came to the radio studios of the JBC through university, where he learned sound engineering. A man long attracted to reggae—and impressed by the self-taught studio alchemy of dub pioneers Lee Perry and King Tubby—Campbell prevailed upon his bosses to give him a shot at an all-reggae radio show. Dread at the Controls featured a stream of hit songs and lesser known roots material that couldn’t be heard elsewhere, but the most compelling reason to tune in week after week were the exclusive dubplates that Campbell either wrangled from producers like Perry or King Tubby or cooked up himself.

Campbell had a better ear for melody and harmony than Perry did and a finer appreciation of the absurd than Tubby. His dubs, as heard on African Anthem, represent the finest work among the second generation of dub producers. “Headline News” shows how the two sensibilities can work together. The track opens with its original organ line, a standard reggae shuffle, which Campbell lightly mocks with a squelching analog synthesizer. He quickly drops the organ out of the track and replaces it with wild and goofy synthesizer effects, which coalesce into a goofy improvisation only to emerge as droning two note riff that harmonizes with the original organ melody.

Listen to “Headline News”

Or consider his kitchen sink approach to “Pre-Dawn Dub,” a track that evokes either the relentless distraction of insomnia or an attack of barnyard zombie animals. In either case, the track is unsettling—and hilarious.

Listen to “Pre-Dawn Dub”

Campbell’s skills behind the mixing board were tremendous, but it was what he could do in the DJ booth that kept his shows moving. In the seventies, the art of DJing hadn’t developed in Jamaica quite as substantially as it had in, say, the South Bronx. Soundclashes between rival dance crews would involve some DJ skills—beat matching to run riddims together, for instance—but the repertoire was rudimentary. Campbell’s radio show, which consisted of more or less continuous mixes, had to remain interesting without the tricks that would later come to define the trade. That meant that Campbell had to make due with nothing but prerecorded drops and his own voice to smooth each segue.

But his pre-recorded drops were groundbreaking. The ubiquitous “Brand new and good for you” snippet that he would drop into song after song remains a staple in reggae DJ sets. It makes an appearance on African Anthem in the track “Comic Strip Dub,” a Mikey Dread showcase that opens with a sample which demands, in thick Brooklynese, “Is that a turntable? Then get on it. It’s your turn.”

Listen to “Comic Strip Dub”

Campbell’s drops also brought a tongue-in-cheek sexuality to his sets. The female voice at the end of “Saturday Night Dub” that claims “Ooh, my gosh. The music just turns me on” is only a typical example of the campy sexuality that Campbell would use to propel his set from one song to the next. This gambit would later be used in the mid-eighties when house DJs like Frankie Knuckles brought live mixing and gay camp to late night Chicago radio.

Listen to “Saturday Night Style Dub”

Mikey Dread sometimes provided his own vocal samples, chatting, with various degrees of improvisation, about his own skills behind the wheels of steel. Clever call-and-response couplets about his radio show would be another element that mix DJs would later swipe for broader consumption; it’s still a widely heard element of reggae and hip hop radio shows.

On the strength of Dread at the Controls and African Anthem, Campbell would go on to become a hit among English punk rockers, producing a handful of tracks for the Clash and introducing the band around Jamaican musical circles. When he died in 2008, of a brain tumor, many of his obituaries in the U.S. and U.K. emphasized his crossover work. It’s a fair assessment in a climate where radio, even independent radio, has lost its prominence. But African Anthem reminds us that Mikey Dread’s legacy is more nuanced. His radio show provided a template for good segues and clever mixing that would endure for two decades.

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