Many of us first heard him as backing vocalist in the Impressions behind Jerry Butler, singing "For Your Precious Love," but he really came into focus in Butler's next big hit, "He Will Break Your Heart," which was written by Mayfield and features his strumming electric guitar to a saucy tango beat that you can hear echoing in Ben E. If, in the late fifties and early sixties, you were drawn to that place on the AM radio dial where the rhythms, the grooves and the beautiful sounds of African-American soul were playing, you would have found Curtis Mayfield. Some journalist asked him, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" Lee Perry pulled down his pants and said, "Here's Jesus Christ!" Now that's punk rock.
Right after you played, there was this press tent where everybody would go and say their little something about the cause. We convinced him to play the second Tibetan Freedom Concert, in New York. He also had a video camera and was taping everything - the sky, the buildings, all of us except he had no videotape in the camera. He had on a shiny outfit with little things taped all over him: notes, a lot of pictures, studs, mirrors and bottle caps. He's a very little guy, like your craziest grandfather. We were on tour, and for some reason he was there. I had the pleasure of meeting Lee Perry a couple of times. It's part of his ritual, and being in the studio is a ritual. He blows smoke into the microphone so that the sound of the weed gets into the song. He's bugging out: screaming at the bass player, turning knobs, banging things. That's why punk rockers like the Clash wanted to work with him, because they can relate to the sparseness of the production. They're truly raw both shitty and beautiful at the same time, like a Modigliani painting. The early Bob Marley and the Wailers songs that Lee Perry produced, like "Mr. One thing the Beastie Boys do when we are finishing tracks is make sure that there's a Lee Perry part: some weird detail that's not supposed to be there but somehow makes sense. If someone else was making a song about the city, he might add traffic noise, but Scratch would add a baby crying he captures what's behind a song. What matters are the emotions and ideas you get from the sound. Scratch could do gorgeous, straight-ahead songs, but he would also toss away verse-chorus-bridge structure. He was behind dozens and dozens of classic reggae and dub songs in the Sixties and Seventies, but even more important, he was the first mad-scientist producer. There are only a handful of producers who can make a band sound interesting and different no matter who they are, and Lee "Scratch" Perry is one of them.
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