They just tried to get the maximum level onto the disk which was taken straight to the sound systems and played.Īnd Khouri introduced a package for the sound system operators that they could buy 100 45rpm records, what they called white label disks minimum costs, no printing on the labels and those disks were used for the sound systems which had now grown into multiple systems owned by sound system operators, but also associate sound systems who worked in the country areas who would come into Kingston and wanted to buy these recordings, which the sound system owners sold at a great profit. And remember they were first generation copies without mastering per se applied. So, what they did every week was go into the studios and make acetate disks copies of their recordings. Now Goodall tells an anecdote about when Ken Khouri first introduced, or offered the facility of being able to make records locally, in other words the stamper manufacturer he brought to Jamaica, which was previously very expensive for producers to think about making records. So between those two, that little group of engineers were very influential in the practices that emerged in the local recording industry. Graeme Goodall who was really, in many ways, I think of him as being the father of local audio engineering because he not only trained Sylvan Morris who went to work at Coxsone Dodd and Byron Smith, Smithy, who went to work for Duke Reid but Duke Reid in turn also trained Errol Brown who worked for Bob Marley, and of course Sylvan Morris recorded all of Bob Marley's early recordings. But of course in Jamaica at the start of the recording industry, records were not being made primarily for domestic consumption, or for being played on the radio, they were exclusive recordings that were played in the sound systems.
All the manufacturers who made record decks subscribed to this RIAA curve, and so the mastering engineers also did the same thing. it's the Recording Industry Association of America that sets an equalization curve for the mastering engineer, so that in coordination with record deck manufacturers what it means is that the mastering engineer can reduce the bass, which is the most difficult thing to put on a record and the record decks would emphasize the bass when it was played back on a domestic record player. And that is, in the international recording industry, the process of mastering is governed by a set of standards which includes something called the RIAA curve, which is. And in my research, in talking to Graeme Goodall, something came to light which kind of shed a new perspective on this. You know, if you had a record unless you had connections it was very difficult to get it played. And, all of the artists who I worked with and spoke to from the 60s and the 70s also supported that narrative. And, it's a perspective that at the time I also subscribed to, that appeared to be correct to me because it was very difficult to get records played on local radio, even when I arrived in Jamaica in 1981. So let me take an example if you think of the Jamaican popular music literature, there is a common narrative that says the radio stations in Jamaica, both RJR and JBC during the 60s and the 70s, had a reluctance to play locally produced music and Jamaican popular music. So I suppose the question would be what are those spaces between the dots that I try to locate. You know, the old adage if you only have a hammer them you see everything as a nail. Now having said that, I am as at fault as well as everybody else in terms of academic research and writing, there is nothing you do as a researcher that is ever one hundred percent foolproof, and I think all researchers if they try and maintain any level of objectivity will accept that there is a tendency to be limited by the range of your tools to how you apply them. And I was really interested in trying to investigate some of those areas and find out what this discrepancy was. not only academic, the general enthusiast literature as well, would tend to portray a picture of the music industry where the dots had been joined together as opposed to looking at what the details that fell between the dots. And, prior to becoming involved in academia, one of the issues that I had when reading the literature, was that very often an academic perspective.
My research on Jamaican popular music has largely been focused on recording studio practices and cultures, because it's an area that I understand from the inside looking out, as well as assuming an academic role where you try and look in.