Photo Credit: Alty Benjamin shot at Augustus Pablo's Rockers Int'l Record Shop--Kingston, JA
People have asked me this question many times in interviews. It's an obvious question. How does a white guy from San Francisco end up becoming a reggae artist? It's hard to answer in an interview so I give the abbreviated version but I'll spell it out in more detail here.
To answer this properly I have to go back to the beginning of my experiences with music. I named my publishing company Mooky Eddy. My father tells me this is what I would say to him as a young child when I wanted to hear him play me music. Mooky Eddy = "music Daddy!". My parents aren't musicians, far from it. They're not even really music buffs, but there was definitely music in the home. What I remember from when I was little was classical music, The Beatles, Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, some other folk music and apparently the soundtrack to Hair which was one of the things I'd request to hear. There wasn't a lot of what you'd consider "black" music being played in the house. I do remember my Dad buying "Songs In The Key Of Life" by Stevie Wonder and that blowing my mind though. To this day, I consider this album the single greatest masterpiece of modern music. My connection to music was a strong gravitational pull. Who knows how or why we are drawn to the things we are but I have to credit God for making me this way.
I got very deep into Michael Jackson and the Jackson 5 when I was little from seeing them on TV. This led to discovering groups like Earth, Wind & Fire (Spirit was one of the 1st albums I owned) and The Commodores. My childhood was pretty much marked by what was then called "Soul Music" and what I was playing ranged from Heatwave to Parliament/Funkadelic,Teddy Pendergrass, Chaka Khan, Luther Vandross, Stevie Wonder, The Whispers, Marvin Gaye, Shalamar and everything else in that category. That was my shit as they say...
So I knew I could sing but I grew up Jewish, not in the church, and there were no performers in my family or inner circle so I wasn't really getting any opportunity to sing publicly and I was shy about it too. I took piano lessons when I was young for a couple years, and then learned trumpet in Middle School but none of this, unfortunately, stuck with me and I wasn't disciplined to continue studying them. I wanted to be out in the streets playing basketball.
When I reached high school the British Ska revival was super popular and I got introduced to a lot of music that I hadn't been exposed to before then. These would be groups like The English Beat, Madness and The Specials. I learned of and became a big fan of other British crossover artists such as Elvis Costello, The Police, The Clash and a bunch of other acts that bridged the gap between Rock, R&B, Punk and Reggae. This began to expand my horizons and got me acclimated to the sounds of reggae.
Reggae was a thing back then, but none of my peers were really listening to it. One of my best friends parents would play reggae at their house when we were younger but we just didn't get it. So my Dad worked with a guy from Jamaica named Scotty. Scotty and I became friendly from my visits and some after school work I was doing at my Dad's office. Scotty knew I was a big music fan so one day he brought me a couple of cassettes. One was a Black Uhuru album, I believe it was the "Chill Out" album and then a Bob Marley & The Wailers album which may have been "Natty Dread". I was around 15 or 16 at the time and when I heard those I just about lost my mind. I was in LOVE. So after playing them out I returned them to Scotty. His work was done. :-)
I started really discovering Reggae at that point. Steel Pulse and Third World were big names and along with Black Uhuru, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and Burning Spear, I was on my way. Later in high school, one afternoon one of the coolest looking dreads shows up next door to our home. He's outside on the street and it turns out he's our next door neighbor's nephew. I introduced myself with much curiosity as a reggae fan and this started a long friendship. D.A., as was his nickname, was one of the coolest dudes I've ever met to this day. He was from L.A. and had spent a lot of time in Jamaica had known Bob Marley well and was, at one point, one of Peter Tosh's closest friends.
D.A. was a major influence on me like a big brother and also introduced me to reggae artists I'd never known about like Yellowman and Aswad. The one artist he told me about who really stands out in my memory the most though is Sugar Minott, who became one of my favorite artists and greatest influences when I started writing songs. D.A. and I remained friends for over 20 years. We lost touch at one point and after a couple years I made an effort to reconnect with him only to find out he'd passed away from cancer the year before. I was heartbroken. What a great guy...I look forward to reconnecting with my man on the other side.
Having grown up in San Francisco in the Haight-Ashbury district famous for it's musical history during the 60's and the Summer of Love, I of course began to discover some psychadelic and more rock oriented music from groups like The Doors, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and Santana. When I began college I started to begin appreciating Jazz and learned about Coltrane, Miles, Sarah Vaughan, Thelonius Monk and others. Hip-Hop was also now a big deal and we were mainlining Hip-Hop when I started college with groups like Whodini, Eric B. & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions, NWA, Ice-T and the like. But the thing that, at this point, I was gravitating to the most was my Reggae.
So by this time I had been exposed to a lot of musical styles and my musical influences were really varied. To this day, I feel I've learned more about songwriting, production and arrangements from listening to great music over and over again than anything else. From the stuff I was listening to the bar was very high. So towards the end of college I really started hearing melodies and lyrics begin to run through my head. I had been buying 7" records from Jamaica with the "versions" on the B-side, which were instrumentals and dub style versions of the backing tracks from the A-side. This gave me the standard "riddims" of that time to begin writing songs to. So I started. My natural vibe was what you call "Lover's Rock", Sugar Minott being the perfect example. It was very much R&B influenced, soulful vocal stylings with lover's lyrics over these reggae riddims. This allowed me to leverage my early love of Soul/R&B and mix it with Reggae naturally.
At the same time I started to go out to sing at some clubs in L.A. where I had finished college and was living at the time. This led to my meeting some producers and I had gotten linked up with a guy named Field (we remain friends to this day) who was a hustler and really into Reggae music. He saw my potential and was able to get me connected to some young producers who gave me tracks to write to. These tracks fell somewhere in between Hip-Hop, Reggae and R&B and whatever they were I would fuse the other elements into it to make a Reggae Fusion with my own style. The more I wrote, the better I got and the more I was able to define my own style and approach to Reggae. I was becoming a real "international" or "crossover" type Reggae artist. As my writing got better and a couple of the demos I cut had real vibes, I was able to land a record deal with Paul Stewart and PMP/Loud Records under the RCA label.
The story continues but that gives a pretty good background. I guess the answer to the question as to how I became a Reggae artist is that I got so attached to the music that it became an integral part of who I am and the more I lived it the more it became who I am. I've never felt I was manufacturing something that wasn't authentic or real cause the songs just flowed through me like water. I just do it the way I do it. I've never been the guy to try to talk Patois or spend years in Jamaica to act and talk more Jamaican--but I do love the culture and Jamaican people and they have embraced me for what I do which I appreciate deeply. The years since have been a constant flow of songs that I have written and recorded, most Reggae or Reggae Fusion and some not Reggae at all. I hope one day to be able to either release them all or allow other artists to record them.
Am I an International Reggae Artist, a Reggae Fusion artist or just a Reggae artist? I don't know, but I love what I do and I make music to resonate with real people with real hearts that love music. So whatever that may be I'm cool with that.