He also has a keen sense of what the key material is: the tracks on The Best of Studio One and Full Up: More Hits from Studio One are not largely obscurities. There is unreleased material here, but Wilson’s aim is to affirm Studio One’s legacy as the Motown of Jamaica.
Anyone whose exposure to classic reggae remains limited to Legend and The Harder They Come will be surprised by the versatility of Jamaican pop presented here. Studio One’s ’60s output centered around sweet, sophisticated songs, more akin to mid-century American pop standards than the repetitive vamps that would follow in James Brown’s wake. Bridges nestled between choruses, extended chord progressions, and intricate band arrangements support group harmonies that draw on doo-wop and American gospel as much as on Jamaica’s own Afro-Christian hymnal traditions. There are love songs, sad songs, and songs about songs — politics and ganja had yet to become primary topics. And then of course, there’s the unparalleled sound: the drums crack, the bass pounds, and the horns and voices, guitars and keyboards mingle in the mid-range, all bathed in a unique analog warmth that owes as much to the room on Brentford Road itself as the tape and amps and microphones and studio-engineer wizardry.
The two Hits discs extend to Studio One’s ’70s output, including performances by DJs such as Sugar Minott, Lone Ranger, and Michigan & Smiley, flowing “talk-over” style atop well-worn riddims. And though newcomers were re-licking these same riddims at the same time, Studio One always had the original tapes. Indeed, the discs’ sequencing occasionally calls attention to Studio One’s own practice of versioning, as when Lone Ranger’s “Love Bump” follows Slim Smith’s “Rougher Yet,” the former gleefully riding the riddim of the latter.
Wilson recognizes that Studio One’s legacy is built on the foundation of the riddims underlying the songs. Subsequent producers — from “Junjo” Lawes to Bobby Digital, Sly & Robbie to Steely & Clevie — have re-licked Studio One’s biggest riddims hundreds of times. The “Real Rock,” for example, which underpins Willie Williams’s “Armagideon Time” on Full Up, might be the most versioned riddim of all time, accounting for upwards of 500 subsequent recordings and — when you take into account the black market of “dubplates” — probably a lot more. To highlight this aspect of Dodd’s legacy, Heartbeat collected a good number of Studio One’s most popular and influential riddims on Killer Instrumentals.
The fourth release in the series is a double-CD comp of tracks Bob Marley and the Wailers recorded during their formative years at Studio One. The early, big hits are here (“Simmer Down”), as are older versions of familiar — or overplayed — songs (a gritty, uptempo “One Love”), while a cache of more obscure recordings (Bob Marley singing about Jesus?!) rounds out the set. With a wide palette of voices in Bob, Bunny, Peter, and Junior, and the day’s best arrangements by the day’s best band, the music bursts with exuberance. It’s soul, gospel, doo-wop, and rocksteady all at once. In the strict sense of the term, there’s actually very little reggae (as a formal style, it didn’t emerge until 1968). But the familiar elements are all here: heavy bass, snapping snares, sweet voices, and, sometimes, guitars strumming or horns bleating in between the beats.
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