It's not surprising that a Caribbean spiritual philosophy espousing peace, unity and love -- whose charismatic spokesmen delivered its message via a mesmerizing music, fueled by as much ganga as their lungs could hold -- found so many devotees in a mid-70s America that was still recovering from the divisive Vietnam War and race riots. This was also an America that was embracing gentle Easternisms and toking up with more and more frequency.
Even with the belief that Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie was something akin to the Second Coming, Jamaica's Rastafarianism and reggae music spoke to millions of Americans, including a white guy from Riverdale, New York, with a trust fund and a camera. Thirty years ago he became one of its most unlikely missionaries.
By the age of 28, photographer Peter Simon -- son of Simon & Schuster's late cofounder Richard Simon, youngest brother of singers Carly, Joanna and Lucy Simon -- had already chronicled new age communal life, the nude beach movement, anti-war demonstrations and rock concerts. After watching The Harder They Come dozens of times in Cambridge, Mass., in 1976 he and a writer friend named Stephen Davis traveled to Jamaica to document the roots of reggae. Their Reggae Bloodlines (Doubleday, 1977,) "was a landmark book that provided eye-opening insights for me and countless others in the States into the music and culture of Jamaica at a time when reggae was just beginning to make its presence felt outside the Caribbean," said C.C. Smith, publisher and editor of Beat Magazine, the preeminent reggae magazine in the U.S.
The book featured black and white photos of reggae's rising stars -- Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and others -- in the rough-and-tumble neighborhoods of their youth, along with rare in-studio and performance shots. For Simon, seeing Third World poverty for the first time was itself an eye-opener, having grown up surrounded
by wealth, the well-to-do and the well known.
In the years since then, Simon has hosted reggae radio shows, photographed several other reggae books -- including I and Eye -- and produced several CDs. But mostly he settled back into a comfortable life on Martha's Vineyard (where his parents had brought the family since the 1950s) with his wife Ronni and son Willie, shooting family portraits and weddings, taking pictures for the Vineyard's weekly newspapers and self-publishing three books about the Vineyard. In all, his byline has appeared on 12 books.
But "comfortable" did not provide much comfort for Simon in the face of
emotional frustrations, professional disappointments and physical
suffering, including a debilitating bout with candida, that eventually
led him down a slippery slope to alcoholism. His soul had unraveled and
it took personal crisis -- the threat of losing his wife, his home, his
career and his standing in the community he loves -- to stir Simon out
of his spiritual somnambulant state.
Now, after four DUIs, a 45-day stint in jail, three months in rehab and
six in a halfway house, and regular attendance to AA meetings, he
celebrates three years and five months clean and sober -- along with
the publication this month of Reggae Scrapbook (Insight Publications.
Calif.),
with words by reggae archivist Roger Steffens. With updated photos of
some of the hottest names in contemporary dancehall reggae, the book is
a highly designed full color coffee table book, a cross between
Griffin & Sabine and Be Here Now mixing and matching fonts, photo
montages and pockets containing actual full size postcards, CDs,
concert tickets and posters, DVDs and other memorabilia.
What Reggae Scrapbook does not document is Simon's own return from the spiritual abyss.
"I have finally learned humility and compassion," he says with, well, humility.
Among other sources of inspiration, he says, he found sustenance and new understanding, now informed by personal experience, in the lines of one of his favorite Marley songs, "Redemption Song":
"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery; none but ourselves can free our mind."
The Morrison Hotel Gallery, in Manhattan, will show a retrospective exhibition of his work Nov. 16-18. Simon will sign books and posters at the gallery on Saturday, Nov. 17, from 1 pm to 5 pm. The gallery is at 124 Prince St., New York; 212-941-8770.
Follow Perry Garfinkel on Twitter: www.twitter.com/Perry Garfinkel
If there is one album I recommend all Progressives to listen to, it's "Survival" by the King of reggae himself, Bob Marley. The lyrics are prophetic, as each song describes what we living through and experiencing today.
"The Babylon system is a Vampire, falling empire, sucking the blood of the sufferers...
Tell the children the truth, tell the children the truth..."
And as the late Peter Tosh sang to the world...
"Everyone is crying out for peace, but no one is crying out for justice. We need equal rights and justice."
Thank you Peter for the "Scrap Book", and thank you and Roger for keeping the music of Marley and Tosh, reggae pioneers, alive for the ages. Also give a listen to Bunny Wailer. One Love!
they didn't call it a "Conscious Party" for nothing ("conscious" meaning "aware").
Cool runnings, mawn, Cool runnings!
http://OsiSpeaks.com or http://OsiSpeaks.org
“The Rock” was our guy in Mo Bay and “Mothaless” the favored musician. Marley and all those other guys were mostly over in Kingston, but the brothers insisted that Mothaless was better than any of them anyway. I mean, they were able to book anyone they wanted at that time, being some of the real pioneers. Anyway, we could watch him live pretty much any time we were over there, so it was all good.
What wasn’t good, though, was the way weed business got done in Jamaica. Rastafarians are wonderful to party with, since they really don’t know anything else, but they just couldn’t get their heads around the whole business thing. They’d show us wonderful stuff when we were down shopping, but what came off the boat or plane would regularly be another matter entirely. They just couldn’t resist the temptation to load the oldest stuff on the shelf, when they really needed to ship the best they had to keep the whiteboys looking there instead of Colombia. They grew it, it was sacrament to them, and they were never able to compost the excess and move on. I’d say that we kept trying longer than most people we knew but the Colombians just had better weed, more weight, and the best terms so Jamaica never really became much more than a trippy little place for tourists.