LargeUp Interview: Talking Dub and Vampires with Scientist

Words by Kieran K. Meadows—

As part of the Dub Champions Festival taking place in New York City, dub pioneer and mixing engineer Scientist will reunite tonight with the legendary Roots Radics Band to perform tunes from 1981’s crucial dub album Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires. If you love reggae but don’t recognize this album by its name, you’ve probably heard some of the songs from it at some point and not even realized it. Friday’s concert will be the first time the classic LO will be performed on the East Coast (having been performed only twice before in the last 30 years). If that’s not enough, they’re going to be joined onstage by special guest Johnny Osbourne. Musical support comes from our very own DJ Gravy, as well as Deadly Dragon and Subatomic Sound System.

As one of the most innovative engineers of his time and a protégé of dub’s founding father, King Tubby, Scientist released highly acclaimed dub albums throughout the 1980s and continues to do so up to the present. He spoke to LargeUp recently from his home in Los Angeles. In this very forthright interview, he discusses a wide range of topics, including how early he wants to sound check for Friday’s concert, how reggae deserves a lot more recognition within the music community for its role in the development of recorded music and the professional audio industry, and about the Vampires album being used in the video game Grand Theft Auto III. And he has quite a lot to say about what he says is the untold modern history of Jamaican reggae—learned from his time as an engineer at King Tubby’s Studio, then Channel One Studios, and later at Tuff Gong. And it might not match up with what you think you know. At times, he comes across as someone with an inflated ego and at others refreshingly humble for someone who was so integral to Jamaica’s sound during that period. Some of his claims may be viewed as controversial, but he asserts that you don’t need to take his word for it—he’s confident that the truth will eventually come out.

LargeUp: Can you talk about how the 1981 Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires project with the Roots Radics band came about?

Scientist: Back in those times, The Scientist versus Roots Radics [dub albums]–those albums were done mostly on my time when the producer was not at the studio. We used to give [Henry] “Junjo” [Lawes] free studio time because back in those times, Junjo and other producers couldn’t really afford studio time. They had this thing of “I’m learning and I’m an apprentice.” Ninety percent of the songs that you see come out on Greensleeves [Records], the producer wasn’t there. It was I and [Hyman] “Jah Life” [Wright] that was there most of the time mixing the songs. Junjo for sure wasn’t there.

Junjo or the producer would drop off the tapes at Channel One [Studios]. The Roots Radics would create the riddims. After the Roots Radics create the riddims, they were gone. They had nothing to do with it after that point. It would be I now who would have access to the tape [and] mix the music for further use. We’d have the recording session at Channel One where they made all the tracks and then the [producer would bring the] tapes to [King] Tubby’s where the artist would put their vocals, and then I would mix and then they would release those. King Tubby’s was primarily a mixing and voicing studio because we couldn’t track a session there. It wasn’t set up back then at that time to record tracks.

LU: You had the riddims and then decided to take all of the tracks together and create the project?

Scientist: Yes, that’s how it was done. And a couple of them were done with me and Jah Life. But that one specifically–Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires–that was done on my time. I practiced that. All of those producers back in those times, they were complaining: “What kind of weird sound is this? This is strange.” Everything now that is practically going on in remixing, I was getting chewed up like crazy by all these producers. They were saying I was crazy, they didn’t want to work with me because I was way ahead of them. You don’t have to take my word for it. That’s what history states. If you listen to King Tubby’s Roots of Dub and you listen to Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires, it uses the same [mixing] console. You can hear all kinds of things that were happening that was not happening in King Tubby’s time. But to those producers, all of these things were “strange,” it was “experimental,” “we don’t want to use it” because it was “madness.” Now at the same time, the label started pirating and found that people liked it, and that was when all them wanted to ride the bandwagon.

LU: Has Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires ever been performed live in its entirety?

Scientist: It’s been performed live before, yes, at a dub club in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

LU: What can people expect for this Friday’s show that’s being called Scientist Rids New York of the Evil Curse of the Vampires?

Scientist: Well, if I get my way, and they get me the equipment, and I have the sound check that I want, or what’s required to bring out that show, I want to be onstage with the musicians for communication purposes. I want us to do that because we work better, we can feed off each other that way. And whatever I am hearing, they are hearing the exact same thing.

[Regarding sound check] most of them expect, “oh it’s reggae,” just throw them a little nonsense – with reggae, we require the top here. The nonsense that I hear they’re doing in rock ‘n’ roll–you can’t just use any crappy amplifier or speaker to do that. I want to get there early. I personally want the sound check at 10.

LU: At 10… a.m.?

Scientist: Yeah. 10 a.m., not 10 p.m. Because I don’t know what I’m going to run into. I don’t know what’s happening the night before. And it doesn’t give us enough time to maneuver to solve the problems. It’s not an orthodox set-up that somebody would set up for rock ’n’ roll or anything like that. The type of set-up I’m talking about is not in the books.

LU: It sounds like your own sort of “secret” set-up.

Scientist: Anything anybody else doesn’t know, you can call it a secret if you want. There’s a lot of knowledge, and that’s why you find that after I left Jamaica, it has not been able to produce that type of sound like with the Roots Radics. None of them down there have been able to duplicate that sound.

LU: What is your relationship like with the Roots Radics?

Scientist: Well, I would say that if they had a problem with me, they wouldn’t look to come to New York to work. They came to L.A., they did a show with me, and we never had any problem. I’m the one who has been telling them what’s been going on with their money and how a lot of people have been stealing their money.

LU: You’ve used an analogy of a conductor of an orchestra to describe the role of the dub producer/mixer. Can you elaborate?

Scientist: What is a conductor’s role with an orchestra? He’s the person who directs the band what to play, when to play, and for how long to play it. He’s using a stick and giving basically sign language to communicate, right? A dub artist is basically using the console and the slides to do the same thing. We’re rearranging the music from its original form.

LU: Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires was released in 1981 and then a year later, Michael Jackson’s Thriller came out utilizing some of the same B-Horror movie sound FX and samples. When you heard Thriller, what did you think?

Scientist: [Laughs] You really want to know what my honest opinion was? The composition is good. But I really wish I could get those tapes of Thriller to really make Michael Jackson–hear how he really sounds. Here’s what the gospel truth is: Thriller is a form of electronic music that came out of reggae. I am a person who created hi-fidelity and set the standard and the benchmark. So when I hear Michael Jackson’s music–to people in that time, because it was new to them, it was like “Wow,” but I could hear all the defects. Just like I could hear all the defects in Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” song. You should google ‘Scientist Marvin Gaye’ to hear the remix I did. The whole world knows that song. But when that song came out about the same time, I could hear all the weakness that Motown was putting on it, because people never heard that music in any other way and they grew up listening to it like that, they believe that’s what it’s supposed to sound like.

The evidence is when you go back and listen to the exact same track that I remixed–it’s just a rough mix–the original mix comes nowhere near to it. The same exact instruments. Reggae is what set the benchmark for these other genres. It’s not the other way around like what people who are trying to confuse the world to think. So when I heard Thriller? Oh, great Michael! Good composition! But the mix? It could have been a whole lot better. There was unknown knowledge to make it happen, but these guys don’t know anything about that set-up. Remember, Jamaica’s the place where a recording console became an instrument.

LU: Can you talk more about why Jamaican reggae and dub have has been so important to the development of hi-fidelity music and also important, in fact, to the professional audio industry?

Scientist: Again, nobody has to listen to what I say. The record can bring out the definitive truth. It’s the same thing that I learned when I was a technician learning how to build amplifiers. I would build a transistor amplifier. And if I play rock ’n’ roll through it, the amplifier would play, no problem. The transistor would just be moderate heat. That same amplifier, I start to play a song from King Tubby’s at the same volume as the rock ‘n’ roll, all of sudden the transistor started to get hot, and transistors hate heat. That caused me to build a better amplifier.

It’s the same thing with speakers. Back in those times they were using these thin paper cone speakers and when I’d get a speaker to repair, we used to spread paint on the cone to make it thicker. We’d use a double “spider” [a disk attached to the speaker cone that provides spring so that the cone returns to its resting position after being moved by an input signal]. Sometimes we’d cut out the gap between the magnet and the coil so we could put extra winding [of the coil]. When you pull down a car speaker, they’re doing the exact same thing we were doing 20 years ago. When you look at these cones now they’re putting on speakers, it’s thick. Some of them are made out of aluminum with thick rubber. We were doing that stuff 20 years ago that they’re just catching on to.

With the other genres, they would not have needed to develop those kind of speakers. Why? Because rock ‘n’ roll and those other genres don’t have what I call “jackhammer” drum and bass, they don’t have the bandwidth to put the speakers to the extreme so that the speaker manufacturers can gather the data to know what’s really going on.

I don’t know what it is, but everybody wants to make reggae seem like it’s under the other genres. No, reggae is 100 times harder to mix than other genres. Anybody that can mix reggae can mix the other genres with a breeze. That’s why when rock ‘n’ roll engineers get reggae, they all go back to kindergarten. It shows off all their weaknesses.

LU: Yeah, you can often tell whether someone has experience with reggae, both on recordings and also live.

Scientist: It gets worse live because if you cannot do it in a studio, which is a controlled environment, you sure can’t do it live in an uncontrolled environment. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Hawaii Pipeline, but it’s a huge, 20-foot wave coming at you. That’s the equivalent to live. The equivalent to studio recording is you’re in a swimming pool. So if you can’t swim in a swimming pool, you sure can’t swim with 20-foot waves.

LU: And is this because of the very wide frequency range reggae music occupies?

Scientist: Audio frequency is 20 to 20,000 cycles. A low B in jazz or whatever genre is the same low B in reggae. A snare hit from Sly Dunbar and a snare hit from the Beatles or Rolling Stones drummer–it’s the same instrument that leaves here and goes to Jamaica–it’s the same snare hit. The question is why does one come out sounding one way and they still don’t get it? Because they did not create the formula and don’t know it. They can’t just say, Hey, some guys from Jamaica created this formula and we are still struggling to learn from them. Tell me why their kick or snare doesn’t sound powerful? Because they didn’t create the formula to do it.

LU: Many of your dub releases have names and artwork based on science fiction or horror themes and mythology. Any particular reasons for this?

Scientist: Well, that’s the easiest way to get to people and it was different from what everybody else was doing. Everybody else wanted to put their own personal photograph to promote themselves. If we have something more comical, it could stretch further then your own personal photograph. Because of that now, I can go develop a video game “Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Vampires” (laughs). If it was just my photograph on it, then all these things wouldn’t be as possible.

LU: Speaking of video games, how did you find out that your music from Vampires was being used in Grand Theft Auto III?

Scientist: Some kids who recognized me at a concert in San Diego happened to buy the game. They saw me in a supermarket shopping and asked me about the game.

So it was a total surprise to you?

Scientist: Yeah, it was what Greensleeves’ pattern is. They get all these artists and put out their stuff–because a lot of them in Jamaica don’t know anything about it–and keep making money off these artists’ names. They’re trying to tell people at the copyright that Henry “Junjo” Lawes wrote Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires. How is a producer going to write that? Even the musicians themselves can’t write that.

LU: So you knew right away that Greensleeves must have licensed that material?

Scientist: Yeah they tried to pretend and then when we got a lawyer to make them disclose everything, Grand Theft Auto made an out of court settlement with me and turned around and sued Greensleeves. Greensleeves told them that they owned it and they had full permission. Now the law in Jamaica is that in order for Greensleeves to own it, the producer, Junjo, has to have a contract with me. Junjo has no contract with me. It’s pretty much the same law in America. The producer can’t exploit your track [for example] as a drummer, unless you sign off on it. And when Grand Theft Auto asked Greensleeves to show that paperwork, they didn’t want to go to court with it, so they decided to pay me off and then turn around and sue Greensleeves. And then Greensleeves eventually had to sell to VP [Records].

LU: You’ve been very outspoken about record companies releasing material without first obtaining permission from artists and then not paying royalties to them after the fact. There’s a long history of exploitation of artists in the music industry, but why does it seem so much more common when it comes to reggae artists?

Scientist: Because most of them don’t have any representation. Most of them live in Jamaica. Most of them are desperate. Most of them are not academically smart and like most artists even in the U.S., you can take advantage of them. They know the artist just wants to get the record out there. They know that most of these artists are not going have any legal recourse from Jamaica.

[I’m not against all pirating of me] to some degree, let me give you an example. The other day I was at the fairground and I saw this guy, a vendor, with a bunch of Scientist CD’s. When I look at the guy and I saw what he was driving, what am I going to slow a guy like that for? The guy is using my CD to feed himself and his family. I’m going to encourage a guy like that as long as he is not moving thousands. He’s moving 10 here, 20 here and he’s making like what? Fifty dollars? One hundred dollars? And to feed his family. To me, that’s advertising for me.

LU: So is the lawsuit related to Grand Theft Auto finished now?

Scientist: In some sense, but I am “arming up” again and I’m going to launch my next surprise attack on them. I didn’t really like the idea of [my music being used] because it was endorsing violence. I know how powerful music is to influence people the wrong way. I was scared that some kid might find some thrill in it and the next thing you know is the driver starts to play the Scientist music and then we have a drive-by shooting station. I didn’t like that idea. There have been a lot of video games that have been linked to this type of violence before where a kid with Grand Theft Auto went inside a police station and shot all the police. So I really didn’t want to use it for that knowing how powerful the music can be and what type of influence it can have on people.

LU: Let’s take it back in time a little bit to your own history. How did you get started? As a young man, you worked alongside King Tubby. Can you talk about your own beginnings as an electronics engineer?

Scientist: I was introduced to [King Tubby] by a friend that lived in my neighborhood. I used to come to King Tubby’s to buy parts for my amplifiers, like transformers and stuff like that. And I was telling King Tubby that I was attempting to build a console to mix. To him it was like a joke because I was about 16 [years old]. I started going to the studio regularly and then he gave me the keys to the studio.

LU: How did you get the name “Scientist”?

Scientist: Bunny Lee [gave it to me]. Everything you see that happened with the moving faders and all that, that was my original idea, but everybody thought I was crazy and thought I was smoking too much weed. Automation with total recall, virtual tracks–I spoke about all that in 1980 when they didn’t even have a computer. Again, you don’t have to take my word for it. You can go read Reggae International [a book published in the early ‘80s] – I describe just that.

LU: Speaking of new technology, what are you views on the new music technology that has allowed folks to record and mix music on their computers, laptops, iPads and even their phones?

Scientist: Analog is dead. Anybody that wants to say analog is better is dreaming. It’s not true, it’s not technically true and [digital] is here to stay. I personally am a big fan of digital. It’s way better than analog. Of course [I support the new technology]. It’s not going anywhere. It’s only going to get better.

LU: You moved to the U.S. around 1985. Why did you leave Jamaica?

Scientist: When I was working at Channel One, everybody and their grandmother was trying to take credit for the type of sound that was coming from down there. Everybody was watching me making too much money. And after I left Channel One, that place closed forever and didn’t open again. Then Tuff Gong [Studios] becomes the new place. Everybody who never recorded at Tuff Gong is now recording there and Tuff Gong has more bookings than it ever gets and then Channel One is history. I saw what happened to Peter Tosh and kept asking myself, When is my turn? Cause I could feel the vibe. Like some people only wanted to work at Tuff Gong at night time. But I wasn’t scared of them. I’d see all the neighborhood people and I’d always have some little guy in the hood watching my back. When I left Jamaica, I pulled the rug from beneath everybody’s feet. A lot of people went hungry. A lot of musicians went hungry. And the only thing that could save them was drum machines. That’s a fact of history. That’s when drum machines got popular. No one up until now can reproduce anything near that.

LU: How long have you lived in L.A.?

Scientist: Since 1995.

LU: How come you moved to L.A. specifically?

Scientist: All of my family is on the East Coast. I used to live in Manhattan, in the Village. But when I used to go to a studio in Brooklyn, I didn’t like how certain people who come from Jamaica were behaving in America. It was like I’m in Jamaica again. I didn’t leave Jamaica to come get mixed up with a bunch of them crabs. I didn’t appreciate it. So I left New York and the next music town where I don’t have to deal with so many cockroaches is L.A. [There are a lot of studios] but we don’t have the same type of Brooklyn crowd mentality.

LU: With the help of technology in the past few years, there’s been an explosion in the popularity of electronic dance music and dubstep — which many say is derived from dub music. Performances now often feature DJs doing some of the things dub mixers first pioneered in terms of effects, “knob-twisting” and remixing. Any thoughts on the new popularity of a producer/DJ/remixer as the featured performing artist?

Scientist: You know, I see a lot of people trying to act like they created it. I heard a lot of people saying they created the “remix”–that’s not true. I just hope these guys go there, have their time in the spotlight and just remember where it came from. Don’t try to rewrite history. Otherwise, I welcome it.

LU: What have you been doing or working on recently? What can we expect from the Scientist for the rest of the year into 2013?

Scientist: I just finished the Slightly Stoopid record, which is number one on [the] iTunes [reggae chart]. More dance, more electronic music and other genres. They’re way simpler and easier than reggae. Open up the unknown and let people hear hip hop and these different genres in a different way. Brings a new flavor to it.

LU: Is there anything you would like to add that we didn’t touch upon?

Scientist: The only thing is that I don’t want to see any cockroaches at my show. If I see any of them, I’ll quickly call security to escort them out. I don’t want any problems from them. I’m not looking for any gangster-runnings coming [to the show]. Please tell them to stay away from my concert. I don’t want that kind of mentality down there at 42^nd Street and Times Square. I just want everything to be good and chill. Everybody can go home peacefully. That’s the only thing I want.

The Roots Radics backing up the late Gregory Isaacs. Photo courtesy Roots Radics.

The views expressed in this interview are Scientist’s alone, not LargeUp’s or its contributors.