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Perkins, the Muscle Shoals guitarist couldn’t understand the riptide of riddims. But as the song built to the break, Perkins cut loose with a bluesy torrent, culminating in a ringing sustain. Blackwell and engineer Tony Platt hit the echo machine and the note fed back, soaring up two octaves. “It gave me goosebumps, it was one of those magical moments,” Perkins says. 5 Marley, who had spent long, cold, destitute years in America pursuing his pop dream, thought so, too.
    Their album would only sell 14,000 copies in its first year, but the Wailers had taken the first step in turning their local music into an international phenomenon.
Catch a Fire
was a landmark moment in the globalization of Third World culture. Fulfilling the destiny the elder Rastas in Trenchtown had long seen for him, Marley was on his way to becoming a worldwide icon of freedom struggle and Black liberation—the small axe becoming the first trumpet.
Sounds and Versions
    The pop audience demanded heroes and icons, but reggae, perhaps more than any other music in the world, also privileged the invisible music men, the sonic architects—the studio producer and the sound system selector. Together, during the seventies, these two secretive orders emerged as sources of power in Jamaica.
    One center, though it may not have seemed so at the time, was an odd backyard studio in the Kingston suburb of Washington Gardens. Lee “Scratch” Perry, its eccentric owner, was a diminutive man with a feverishly large imagination. Beginning in December of 1973, and continuing night and day for five years, Perry recorded an unceasing parade of harmony groups, singers, and DJs in the tiny, stuffy, concrete structure that he called the Black Ark. The music emerging from the Ark—including Junior Murvin’s “Police and Thieves,” The Heptones’ “Mr. President,” and The Congos’ “Children Crying”—was mesmerizing and shocking, and would soon reverberate across the globe.
    It was a gloriously weird place, this Black Ark, another autonomous zone. Its exterior walls sported a blue, red, and white image of Emperor Haile Selassie and the Lion of Judah, surrounded by purple handprints and footprints like a child’s finger paintings. The interior walls were painted red and green, and were crammed with Rasta imagery, Bruce Lee posters, Upsetters album jackets, Teac equipment brochures, Polaroid shots, record stampers, horseshoes, and other ephemera, all covered over by a dense layer of Perry’s obscure, signifying graffiti.
    Behind a cheap four-track mixing desk, which by the standards of the time was hopelessly outdated, Perry whirled and bopped and twiddled the knobs, imbuing the recordings with wild crashes of echo, gravity-defying phasing, and frequency-shredding equalization. Influenced by his work with Osborne “King Tubby” Ruddock, Perry used aging analog machines like the Echoplex to turn sounds over and back into themselves like Möbius loops. Melodies became fragments, fragments became signs, and the whole thing swirled like a hurricane.
    Upon his arrival in Kingston from his native northern countryside in 1960, Perry had headed straight for the powerful sound systems to try to find work, eventually becoming a songwriter for Duke Reid, then moving on to become a scout and operator for Reid’s competitor, Coxsone Dodd. According to dancehall historian Norman Stolzoff, sound system culture had evolved in Kingston after World War II when the ranks of live musicians dramatically thinned due to immigration to the United Kingdom and the United States and the rise of the North Coast tourist industry. 6 By the time Perry came to Kingston, sound systems had largely replaced live bands.
    Outfitted with powerful amplifiers and blasting stacks of homemade speakers, one only needed a selector and records to transform any yard. The sound systems democratized pleasure and leisure by making dance