“What kind of music you guys play?”“Reggae.” “Reggae?
Aah! Reggae!”
The Sublime Stylee took reggae, island music that floated
on good vibrations mixed with chords of dissidence, and mashed it up with punk
and rock to create an earth-shattering new sound grounded in 40-ounces and
phillie blunts. When this little interaction quoted above was dubbed into a
song on their second CD, “Robbin’ the Hood” the guy responds to them “I don’t
care much for reggae”. And at that time, a lost teenager in a blue blood feeding
tank, I didn’t care much for reggae myself. But I’ve changed. I’ve repented.
Sure, I may be limited to Tosh and Cliff and Damien and Ziggy and “Presure
Drop” but I get the joke, that such peaceful music is really an underground
expression of anger, frustration, and rebellion, laced throughout with the hope
for a better day. And the greatest part is that the white squares put it into
tourist commercials airing on travel planet and unknowingly get a little cooler
and more free-minded without knowing it.
“One good thing about music – when it hits you you feel
no pain.” – Bob Marley
Where’s this bastard going with this? Sublime and reggae
tastes and . . . just what the
fuck is Unkal Ryno talking about?
The Sublime Stylee is still straight from Long Beach and
since those demonic skater rockstars were the folks who first introduced me to
the jah sounds, it should only be fitting that I come full circle and find
myself in the parking structure of the Long Beach Convention Center on a cloudy
February day, wishing we had brought our wooden piece and whatever was left in
it from the night before.
The Long Beach Arena is a massive round holding tank that
smashes into a few square buildings on the harbor in Long Beach, an area much
more Miami than L.A.
We watched as the other cars and trucks pulled up, people
puffing joints and bowls in their driver’s seat, completely unworried by the
cop cars at the entrance.
We made brave steps out of the structure, past people who
were either younger or mellower or dreadlier than us. Certainly much more
stoned. We got in the line for Will Call to pick up my ticket as Bec’s friends
had hers. We lined up behind a short, fat black man with red eyes and a couple
college kids wearing colorful sweatshirts with shaggy hair and skate baseball
catp. We saw a crowd of three young boys and three girls. These were the bad
kids in high school, that little crowd who all the parents knew were trouble
and told their respectable, jock children to stay away from. One of the boys,
the shortest and the one who looked most distrusting of mainstream society, had
dreads. The girls all dressed wholesomely but with thick hemp necklaces and
Jerry Bear pendants. These were the high school stoners. Harmless, but
stigmatized nonetheless.
“Bec, was that you in high school?”
“Yeah. Kinda weird. We’re old.” And so we were as we waited
behind various assorted derelicts, more younger than older. A few older black
men walked around, usually walking with canes and an air of authority, the
grand poobahs of these things, reggae men of yesteryear with class and
presence.
We got the ticket and made our way back to the parking lot
when Bec’s friends arrived bringing good vibrations, a concert ticket, and two
fresh stalks of some dank. The one girl had been going for years, she said, and
as such knew the ins and outs of sneaking smoke into such a place.
They patted us down at the doors, long lines into glass
portals into a world of hippies and trustafarians, worshipers of the good king
Tafari every one. There were pigs posted at the doors too, tall bastards in
blue uniforms just waiting for the body searchers to snag an ounce of herbs off
some poor little high school kid, then throw him in the back seat and watch him
squirm as they talk about how his mom will look when she has to pick him up at
Long Beach central booking. Sure, I’ll take out my wallet and my cellphone as
you slide your hands up my legs – men checked men and women women, two lines as
it were – and then I was through the doors, in the main room and surrounded by
booths selling all sorts of hippie reggae shit a man could imagine. This was
the Ragga-muffins event, a Bob Marley memorial overflowing with little leather
wristbands in black and yellow and green and wooden head carvings and wall
hangings and posters, all the crap the campus stoners buy to decorate their
dorms.
Out back was where they kept the food vendors. It smelled
like the old Tex-Mex restaurant I cooked at in Steamboat Springs some 10-odd
years ago, fresh pork and beef and chicken being cooked over dirty grills that
showed us the way forward through pulsing throngs of stoners stuffing their
fatty faces with Jamaican jerk chicken and twelve-dollar Heinekens pints. A DJ
spun reggae riddims in the corner while a dreadlocked black man spat iry rhymes.
Nearby was a booth handing out Hemp gummies, sour-
patched kids that tastes like
stems plucked form the bottom of the bag and a hemp tea which tasted like a
clean pothead’s gym socks. One of the guys I was with said that his man told
him that Joe’s Jamaican food stand was the best there and he got in line for a
jerk chicken kabob over rice and plantains served in a Styrofoam container that
a more opinionated person would point out ran contrary to the professed hippie
way of life. But maybe that was the whole tip here. These weren’t hippies, not
in the traditional vegan jamband Colorado-Birkenstock-wearing “save the
environment” way. These were reggae fans, revolutionaries who smoked pot, and
certainly it needs to be noted we were in Long Beach. I pointed to two cops
standing in the middle of the crowd, passersby giving them wide berth as the
swine’s jowls were twisted into smiles. This was like fishing from the ocean
floor for these bastards. I felt like they were just waiting for that moment
when some poor 17-year-old deviant in a tye-dye t-shirt with Che Guevara on it
would light up a spliff within eyeline so they could club the poor bastard into
a fetal position and throw him in the back of the car. My friend who ate the
chicken assured me they didn’t do that for weed but I wasn’t so sure.
Inside I perused the stands selling their hemp necklaces and
wooden pictures of Bob Marley. One stand was full of Barack Obama plaques. All
of them sold hippie t-shirts with pictures of Marley and weed and “Trenchtown”
and tie-dyed flowing dresses and sarongs and Jamaica sandals and hempen
wall-hangs, college dorm room stuff. A charismatic teenager came up to me and
told me that in the next room a doctor had set up a booth and for $100.00 I
could get my medical marijuana license. This was the spot, alright. We had been
there for over an hour and other than the DJ outside hadn’t seen any music. But
that wasn’t really what this was about for most of the people. This whole
reggae thing was a cover. What it really was, what most of the people were
really here for, was a celebration of weed smoking and what it means to us
bastards living in the unholy land of Southern California.
Eventually we decided to walk into a gymnasium where the
music was and the second we walked in the air was one massive cloud of THC and
all of my thoughts and prcognitions were vindicated. This place harkened back
to an old Bob Dylan classic, one embracing the lifestyle that these pot-smoking
derelicts had taken to with a renewed vigor of which even they were unawares.
At the Rag-a-muffins festival in Long Beach, everyone must get stoned.
It took a second for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. A
sea of bodies bobbing up and down, mostly white teenagers eschewing their
suburban splendor to pretend they were part of yet another culture which was
never meant for them. Not that it was to exclude them, but what was originally
based on the principles of a unified African and black community to strengthen
against the white oppressors had become the anthem of their children. It hadn’t
been meant for white middle-class teenagers with felt, psychedelic posters of
gnomes sitting on mushrooms hanging on their bedroom walls. But just like rap
and, before that, blues, it was looking like the white man was stealing even
that.
Just past the crowd The Wailing Souls, 3 aging rastas strong
with Jah, belted out some roots reggae as
our little group sat down in a circle
on the fringe of the crowd. My friend who ate the jerk chicken earlier, a big
man who said little because he didn’t need to say much, took out some papers
and placed them in his lap, on top of his Indian-crossed legs. His girl, a
spunky LBC local with hipster glasses
gave him one of the two tree stalks she
had snuck in for him by tucking it under her right tit. He crumbled off a
massive pile and rolled it up into a tight small cigar. I was looking around,
up into the stands and at the security guards by the doors 30 yards away, where
the slight bit of light streamed in, and then at the people dancing near us. I
felt exposed, like there was no way we would get away with this and I imagined
telling my boss I was late for
work on Monday for being in possession of
copious amounts of doge. But nothing happened as the thing was lit and passed
around to the chicken man’s sister and their LB local friend and the girl with
the hipster glasses and Bec and me. Coughing. Burnt windpipe. Then the edges
softening. Reactions slowed, smoothed out. No jerky motions. Just a simple flow
to everything within and without.
A large black man danced in front of us with a 40-year-old
divorcee with too much plastic surgery trying to gyrate like she was a
Trenchtown local when the only time she had been to Jamaica was to stay at the
Negril Sandals. We spoke about the scene and Bec and I leaned in to whisper how
old we felt and how she remembered doing this so long ago. We talked about back
in the day when we would fight to the front of the pit, get in the crowd and
just dance for hours, off in our own stoney worlds amidst the chaos of a ganja-smoking
public that time had forgotten. We talked about crowd surfing. I think the last
time I crowd-surfed was 1995. Another lifetime. It felt strange to be back
there but on the outside looking in as none of us dared crawl into the group.
That was not our world anymore. Leroy Sibbles got up there and hit us with some
more dance hall sounding reggae, though it was certainly all blending together,
as was the air and the walls and the tall ceilings and even in the dark I felt
like my vision was able to pick up the sharpness of color difference, shade
difference, the observations gleaned at the benefit of the details of the
outlines of things.
The re-emergence into the outside world was a painful one.
Like a flop emerging from his dank basement epicly toasted, I found it hard
comprehending the world of light which existed outside the concert room’s
doors. My first stop was at a food stand where the girl behind the cash
register asked me what I wanted in slow motion. I struggled to mutter “2
waters” and gave her a $20, conscious as I was digging through my wallet how
long that was taking me, too long, I seemed stoned to be pawing through my
empty billfold like that. She gave me back change for a $10. I pointed this out
to here, wondering if it was because she thought perhaps it would slip past a
stoney red-eyed Caucasian. Or maybe not. She was young, frazzled, braces and
all. Probably first job. After some confusion and supervisor aid I finally got
my correct change and my waters. Bec and I finished them quickly as we hunted
for food outside on the patio.
The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, I thought to myself,
was navigate through this pulsing crowd. It was much more crowded than it had
been earlier, a maze where the walls were constantly closing and it didn’t help
that my depth perception was all thrown off, my motor skills hindered and my
judgment slowed. Bec and I had to hold onto each other because we were of the
same mind and all I could think was “Goddamn, that bastard has some
pharmaceutical shit.” It had been laced with purple and dipped in crystals, a
pothead sundae for the finest of connoisseurs. And it was precisely because of
this potent plant that I found myself in awkward situations where I was too
close to people while trying to navigate the place, trappied in the middle of
3-person conversations as I realized I chose the wrong way and found myself at
a human dead-end. I would tip my fedora and back up, lost, awkward, until I
could right myself, like a car pulling out of a spot, and then we were outside.
So many food options. All smelling good. All with long lines and lots of
strange people surrounding us. Bec and I froze at the head of the stream. This
was it. This is what all these freaks looked like.
“You always have to note, before you get into Orange County
from L.A. you have to go through Long 
Beach,” Bec said and I nodded. This was
it. The great crossroads, a city with its legs planted firmly on either side of
the LA/OC border. A strange conglomeration of all the freaks and geeks of a city
that hasn’t gotten its own reality TV show sandwiched by two which have, both
of which starred Lauren Conrad. LC won’t have a show in Long Beach any time
soon, I should think. A square couple, a tall, lanky white husband and wife
with short haircuts and khaki shorts and polo shirts – I think the wife was
even wearing a fanny pack – walked around, holding hands, cautious and scanning
like those National Geographic reporters when they first descend into a
primitive village. It was a beautiful irony. In the outside world these people
were it, they were the society and all the freaks had to play by their rules.
Wear conservative clothes with collars and maybe even leather dress shoes, with
white eyes and clean-shaven and all respectable-like. But now the mainstreamers
were in the land of the lost, a thriving sea of stoners and derelicts and this
was their world – the squares were guests and it was certainly a strange
feeling for them judging by their faces.
As I stood there, my body melted into the concrete and I
stood unmoving while my mind raced off to parts not visited for quite some
time. I thought about Hemingway’s shortest story, a 6-word tragedy he wrote as
a bet with his friends. “For Sale: Baby Shoes, Never Worn”. He said it was the
best story he ever wrote and as I thought about it I realized it was. Because
you could take those words and think deeper about it and you could find a story
of loss, of excitement turned into panic turned into despair turned into
sadness and then finally an emotional numbness that called for a woman to sell
the shoes she had bought for her miscarried child. Hemingway always said he
would leave certain details off the page but think about them enough while
writing so that the reader could feel them. I understood that now.
I climbed back into my body and stared out at the scene
unraveled before me.
Hipsters walked around next to fatties sporting hip hop
t-shirts and crew cuts and bloodshot eyes heavy in their sockets. A group of
high school kids, coping with being baked in public for one of the first times
in their lives, were followed by a white couple in their 20’s. The man had on a
t-shirt smeared in barbeque sauce with a gut bulging out underneath and a
scraggly goatee on a face with looked like that of a simple grossero made human while the woman was a little thinner but
certainly still thick by conventional standards with brittle, ringed hair and
too much foundation. They were followed by a black couple, a tall ripped man in
dark sunglasses and a Clippers jersey with a svelte little girlfriend with
large, natural homegrowns. A boy dressed in a giant felt hemp 
leaf walked around, advertising a weed legalization company I'd previously only seen advertised in Los Feliz, took pictures with random festival-goers and impressed impressionable young baked heinas. Bec and I did a lap of the food and still could not
decide. Bec said she would eat whatever I wanted so I went back to the stand
where my friend had bought his chicken earlier and bought some beef ribs which
you had to tear off the bone and they tasted great and made me feel carnal as I
savored the juicy flesh lathered with jerk seasoning. Bec didn’t want that –
she had hoped I would buy a dirty dog. She bought another 12-dollar beer and we
shared that.
The whole day had been soundtracked by the shout of grown
men 
hocking “Lemonade! Lemonade!”, a sweet concoction for the stoners who
wanted sugar in their water to quench their thirst and their sweet tooth at the
same time. One nearby was an older, thinner black man and he exuded more class
than most of the people I knew on the outside. Next to him a mom held the hand
of a 9-year-old boy whose eyes were dried and watering. It was obvious she had
taken him into the concert hall. He was small, no more than 60 pounds. All the
smoke that had congregated in the place would have easily pumped into his nose,
into his lungs and his bloodstream and it was probably a scary experience for a
boy in single digits to be stoned for the first time without knowing what it was.
He probably thought something was seriously wrong with him. Hell, sometimes I
think I’m dying off strong dank and I’ve been around it for almost half my
life. I looked around at all the other parents carrying babies or escorting
various other young ones and wondered if they got it. That perhaps the babes
aren’t ready for this life of compromised morals and freaky, THC-filtered
lenses. I saw her turn to the old man yelling “Lemonade! Lemonade! Lemonade!”
and buy a 
massive dose of the sugar water, which the kid downed quickly and
without fear.
It was getting late. We all decided to go back inside and
watch some of the next act before splitting out. We were tired. The ganj was
wearing off, wearing down, and it was certainly warm despite the fact that it
was cloudy. We had spent a lot of time on that back food patio staring at the
outside of the round arena, painted with a seascape reminiscent of a half-rate
aquarium and the whole grounds opening out to the scenic Long Beach harbor that
looked like Harborplace – or maybe more Annapolis. No, more Lauderdale. We had
eaten and drank. In fact, the thing we had done the least was listen to Reggae.
So it was once more into the auditorium, though now we ventured to the upper
deck to sit down in the stands instead of the floor, to take a load off.
Pressure was performing now, more of the same though he
threw in a riveting cover of “Three Little Birds” as the friend who ordered the
chicken rolled another blunt and passed it. From the top we could see down into
the crowd. The individual white kid, tripping on boomers, hopping around
without any thought or semblance of a connection to the rhythm of the music on
stage. A tall thin black man in an all white suit with a white robe and a hat
covered in what looked like white terry cloth walked through the place like he
owned the joint. We wondered if it was Snoop, in classic Doggfather mode like
we hadn’t seen him in years. The man spoke authority with his mere existence
and I thought that if he was a nobody outside of the Rag-a-muffins festival, he
was a goddamn king there.
Some other girls had arrived earlier, friends of the girl in
the hipster glasses. They were much younger than us, back in the yesteryear of
the early 20’s when there are still no consequences but for the first time you
can buy booze without a fake. The wonder years. They turned around with a
bottle of vodka snuck in from a friend of theire working security for the
event. I said no, I had to drive but Bec, channeling her best Chelsea Handler,
grabbed the bottle, swigging it strong and shuddering after a heavy gulp of
vodka. As we sat there my head trembled under its own weight, falling onto
Bec’s shoulders as far away a black man with a British accent emceed the
evening and more black men with Jamaican accents released flowing rhythms
blending hip hop and island vibrations. With all signs pointing to the door we
said our goodbyes, hugged and thanked the kids who had gotten us out of our
normal zone and into the mayhem, and crawled out to the car.
We were there for almost 5 hours. Over that time we saw - I
mean really listened to and watched – about an hour of music. Even when we were
in the concert room that was mostly to roll blunts and hide from the sun and
foot patrols. In the end that’s the rub, I suppose. Music festivals aren’t for
the music, at least not exclusively. I thought about Bonnarroo and all the
little bastards running around all weekend tripping face far from where the
music was actually happening. It’s the scene, man. Music festivals, like everything
else in modern America, are no longer contained to or even centered around the
music. Like the people who go to Big Bear to put on snowpants and drink Bloody
Maries at the lodge, these assholes are here for the ancillary, a new dynamic
where the by-products are king. Just like HST first noticed at the Kentucky
Derby, nobody’s watching the horses anymore. Everybody’s just there to get
drunk in the infield. And that includes myself.
Now certainly there are still music fans who come to hear
Roots reggae, who know every song and every performer, sure enough. But based
on the disparity between the small numbers in the auditorium listening to the
bands amidst an all-engulfing cloud of blue smoke and the ravenous crowd
perusing the paraphernalia stands and food carts, I am led to believe very few
of the people there really gave a fuck about the music. It’s just a
neighborhood festival, like the Ventura County Fair but indoors and without a
large ferris wheel. As I dug deeper into a teeming convention center populated
by derelicts who all smelled like skunks it becomes apparent what the central
theme of this festival is. They say it’s reggae but that’s the smoke screen,
the secret word uttered by dopers all over for drug fest and goddamn! do we
show up in big numbers, all clambering to be stoned together, in a place where
we’re no longer the freaks, if only for a few hours. It’s like Mardi Gras for
potheads, a place where you can be publicly intoxicated on your habit of choice
and find it’s accepted if only because its an unspoken that the headfuck is
really what we’re all there for. Doctor's smoke it. Lawyers smoke it. Judges smoke it. It's good for tuburculosis. Good for halitosis. Fat Tuesday? Never heard of it. The Wailing
Souls? Wasn’t that Bob Marley’s group? No, they were the Wailers. Hmm.I have heard Peter Tosh's NORML anthem, though.
In the end, what we’re really all looking for is a departure
from the norm; from the tedium of a life spent working too hard, relaxing too
little, and too easily accepting the tedium of everyday life. Maybe the “Reggae
Fest” is a misnomer just as is “Sundance Film Festival” and “The Preakness”.
Sundance is really about the Hollywood scene taking a little ski vacation; The
Preakness is (or had been until the bastards just passed some rotten law
forbidding outside beer in the infield) really about getting violently wasted
in the sun in Pimlico, watching drunk private school girls flashing their tits,
and celebrating the beginning of the summer; and Reggae fest is about
celebrating the life of RasTafari and, more definitively, smoking a lot of
weed.
On our drive home we took Sepulveda up from Long
Beach instead of the 
freeway. I don’t know why I decided to take the longer
road, through little
neighborhoods I had never seen before. But nevertheless I
did. We bought some tallboy PBR’s for the road as we passed the lights of Long
Beach 
refineries and then small, dark communities far off the beaten trail of
Los Angeles proper.
We stretched out the day as much as possible. And maybe
what we really got from the reggae fest was a reminder of our youth. A reminder
that sometimes the experience is more important than the destination. And that
you make the best observations when you allow yourself to wander aimlessly and
slowly, deliberately, from time to time. And if there’s ever been a music that
fueled a lifestyle that’s about slowing down, feeling the flow, and appreciating
the now while hoping for a better future, it’s those sweet island riddims. It’s
always been about the reggae, even if it’s not necessarily about the music.
About Songs of freedom. Cuz all I’ve ever had . . . redemption songs.
