Llewis hadn't seemed fazed at all by the idea that a person would come to Jamaica looking for Bunny Wailer with no concept of where he lived and only the vaguest intimation of interest or consent on Bunny's part. The way General Smiley said "poliomyelitis" was beautiful somehow he pronounced it like polya, polyamyelitis. The humidity was so high, it made the atmosphere sag, like the clouds were on your shoulders. The gas-and-garbage smell of the city, the starkness of Kingston's industrial shoreline, made you alert. It warned all those who would "worship vanities" that "these things unto Jah Jah not pleases." If you're intent on pursuing them anyway, It was lyrically disturbing and musically thrilling. We listened to Papa Michigan and General Smiley's "Diseases" from 1982.
He introduced me to some stuff from the early '80s I'd never heard. Llewis had been doing research and knew the locations of certain places that dealt in secondhand vinyl records. I didn't mind the van, though it gave a clear vantage point from which to see Kingston, passing through jerking freeze-frames of brightly colored intersections. We climbed into a white box-van, for which he apologized, saying his good car had been in the shop but would be out tomorrow. He later sent me a message saying his mother had seen it spelled that way in a book, though other people told him it was an error "LOL, I love it even if it's an error," he wrote.) I recommend his services to anyone visiting Kingston. At all other times he made conspicuous efforts at straightforwardness. They were the only two enigmas of that sort, however. I left Jamaica still curious about those things. Llewis never explained the no-sign/wrong-sign muddle in a way that made any sense, nor how he'd come to have two l's at the front of his name, a question to which he simply refused to speak.
"I was just holding that for a friend," he said, "doing him an honor." He carried the sign to the parking lot. In the States, rock 'n' roll is always on some level a move away from God into the devil's music, but in Jamaica the cultural conditions were different. Rastafarianism, when it took Kingston's emerging record industry as a means for expressing its existence and point of view, made this possible. It's spiritual pop-not in a calculated way, like Christian rock, but in a way that comes from within. The reason the great Jamaican stuff deepens over time, over years, not with nostalgia but with meaning and nuance, is that it's a spiritual music. Partly it's this yearning, a brilliant hungriness, that you hear. The majority of them came from the same housing projects and were singing in large part to get out of them.
You think of Ireland, for instance, a backwater in so many ways, and yet: Yeats, Beckett, Joyce, in one century-how does that happen? Consider that in Kingston, in one decade, you had the emergence of Bob Marley and the Wailers, Toots and the Maytals, Jimmy Cliff, Desmond Dekker, the Pioneers and the Paragons, the Melodians and the Ethiopians, the Heptones and the Slickers, the Gaylads, plus an index of people whose names you maybe don't know but who, once heard, are never forgotten. Isolation does seem to produce these intensities sometimes. I don't know what it is about Jamaican music, but creatively it just seems to take place at a higher amperage. It had long been a dream of mine to meet Bunny Wailer-a pipe dream, sometimes a literal one in the sense that I dreamed it while holding a pipe. If Elvis had walked in, Tosh might have nodded. Peter Tosh was a tall, purple sphinx with an inexplicably sweet falsetto. Possibly no group of musicians has ever looked flat cooler. All three of them look like they could have been in Fat Albert's gang. He's wonderfully dressed in a tasseled burgundy Shriner's fez and abstract Rastafarian sweater-vest. Bunny is off to Bob's left, singing the high part and doing a little repetitive one-two accent thing with brushes on snares. If you don't know who he is-and of the people who see GQ, surely a goodly percentage won't know to the rest it will seem asinine to ID such a major figure either way, though, this is worth doing-find a computer clip of the Wailers performing "Stir It Up" on The Old Grey Whistle Test, a music show that used to run on the BBC. In early July, I flew to Jamaica in hope of contacting Bunny Wailer, the last of the Wailers, Bob Marley's original band.