So far I haven’t been very impressed with the reissues coming out of VP’s sister label 17 North Parade. A couple of Joe Gibbs compilations, some Cocoa Tea and Dennis Brown, whatever. Perhaps I’m just put off by their completely hopeless website.

But that’s all about to change, cause their latest project looks like a sure shot: Four CD:s of material from George Phang’s Powerhouse are in the pipeline. 150 tracks with Half Pint, Supercat and all the other late eighties superstars represented.

I’m curious to see how the liner notes will portrait Phang, a notorious PNP strongman from Arnett Gardens with both a shady past and present. The way The Rough Guide To Reggae describes how he got his career in music started kinda says it all: “George Phang’s real success was limited to the supply of Sly & Robbie rhythms built for him in 1984, reputedly in return for a favour involving the producer’s political connections”. If that’s not Tony Soprano enough for you add the fact that he was shot seventeen times — and lived — just a few years ago. Not a guy to mess around with.

Find of the week: Michael Rose’s “Hitler”, a 45 on Volcano from what I suspect is the late eighties. It’s on a nice update of the “Gunman” riddim with added digital drumbeats. The lyrics are somewhat understating (”Hitler! You have done so many wrongs”). Next thing on my list is of course to find a copy of the deejay version — Lt Stichie’s “Hail Hitler”.

Another case of West Indian musicians taking on everybody’s least favorite fascist dictator can be found on Bear Family’s big box set of nineteen-forties calypso. I haven’t heard any of these, but tracks like “Hitler Demanded Trinidad”, “Run Your Run Hitler”, “Germany Invade Poland” and “Send Hitler To St. Helena” should be pretty awesome.

DJ APR from San Diego’s Creation Soundsystem sent me an email pointing me to his podcasts. Check them out over at dj_apr.podomatic.com for some nice heavy roots and early dancehall selections.

It was the annual reggae night at the Hollywood Bowl yesterday. Usually I stay clear of shows that attract too many hippies who think reggae equals Bob Marley’s “Legend” album and nothing else. But this year Barrington Levy - one of my favorite singers - was on the lineup, so it seemed like a good idea to grab a bottle of wine and head up the Hollywood Hills for once.

Barrington opened the night and started off with solid hits like “Murderer” and “Under Mi Sensi”. The man sounds great, delivering the “skwidibadelidi-wouhoh”:s like he was still sixteen years old. Being the first act of the night at The Bowl is not the most thankful job though. The crowd were still finishing their picnic baskets when he came on, so the attempts at audience participation fell flat.

Still, when those kinds of tactics don’t work he has tunes to fall back on. The high point of the whole night was hearing him drop some of his Volcano era songs, like “Reggae Music”, “Prison Oval Rock” and “21 Girl Salute”. The backing band did alright, although it would be amazing to hear Levy in a pure soundsystem context instead sometime. One guy with a turntable and the Answer riddim on 45 outplays a jam band with four studio musicians any day of the week.

Second man on stage was Beres Hammond, who did a solid performance. Give him another twenty years and he’ll be the Tony Bennett of reggae. Big bonus points for bringing a real horn section.

Finally, time for headliners: UB40 took that stage just after sunset. After sitting through two unbearable songs it was time for me to go home. I assume the night ended with the crowd rioting and burning the whole place down during “Red, Red Wine”.

Note: That’s actually Barrington Levy on stage on the picture. Also interesting there were more street vendors selling bootleg tshirts with Obama print than Bob Marley outside the show.

Just back from a couple of weeks vacation in good old Sweden. The dollar is too weak for me to buy any records, but it seems like all the record stores in both Stockholm and Malmo have shut down since I was there last anyway. Not very surprising.

But we had to eat and actually ended up trying out a couple of good new Jamaican / Carribean restaurants. Of course that means I have to branch out into the field of restaurant reviews now:

First up was Back-A-Yard in Stockholm’s Sodermalm neighbourhood, recently opened by Papa Bull, who also used to deejay with the Trinity Soundsystem. Tasty food, home-cooking style — curry goat for me and ital stew for the wife. And they had a pretty awesome selection of habanero sauces to keep things interesting.

Down in Malmo we went to Carib Creole, also newly opened if I understand things right. With Malmo standards this was fantastic and extremely crowded. Good jerk chicken, but the ribs Johan ate looked more interesting. They can mix some good Caribbean-style rum drinks too (Planter’s Punch, the obvious Mojito or anything else that involves rum, lime and mint). Great place to eat and kill a few hours if you don’t want to hang out in the dive bars around Mollevangstorget.

I once again missed this year’s LA Rumble, one of the few clashes happening on the west coast. An audio recording of the action is available over at Massive Productions website. Haven’t had time to listen to it yet, but it should be interesting.

By accident I actually ended up at the same venue as where the clash went down just the week before (The Joint, down in mid-Wilshire territory somewhere). It wasn’t reggae night though, instead I got to witness Dizzy Reed — you may know him as the keyboard player from Guns & Roses — and his band “Hookers and Blow” perform some classic rock covers. Class act. How can anyone not love Los Angeles? You can’t make stuff like that up.

June turned into a roots reggae month. I picked up three Blood & Fire classics I didn’t own before and that for some reason suddenly showed up at Ernie B’s: “The Heart of The Congos” on original double vinyl, the Big Youth triple-CD “Natty Universal Dread”, and Yabby U’s “Jesus Dread” in its mighty quadruple-LP box set incarnation (I got number 45 of 1000). It’s so cool that I almost don’t dare to touch it.

But there’s more exciting roots stuff on the way. Pressure Sounds’ new release looks nice. I don’t know anything about the Micron label, but it’s got a track called “Revolution Is For The Chinaman”. That’s something.

Even better: Shanachie’s new “The Mystic World Of Augustus Pablo: The Rockers Story” contains 4 CD’s and a live concert DVD. The track list looks great - 65 cuts total with three versions of “Cassava Piece”. There are few Jamaican musicians that I rate higher than Pablo, so this sounds like it’ll be a real treat. Nobody deserves a serious compilation like this more than him.

Now back to the European cup…

From the LA Times:

“The interest seems to be catching on. Turntable sales are picking up, and the few remaining record pressers say business is booming.”

Just cleared of gun charges, Mavado pulls a Hillary and delivers an endorsement of Obama. Unlike Hillary he does it in the form of a version of “On The Rock”, remade to “We need Barack”. The Heatwave blog links to the mp3. First time I’ve heard references to the US mortgage crisis in a bashment track.

I’m hoping for more in this style. Pretty much anything with the work “rock” in it would work (”Waterhouse Barack”, “Gangsta Barack”, “Prison Oval Barack”), but what we really need is Sister Nancy to do “O-bam-bam-a”.

It may not have been as inventive as the effect-laden stuff from the seventies, but “Dangerous Dub” is one of the heaviest records I know. Originally released in 1981 it featured Jah Screw productions, with King Tubby and Soldgie engineering, and the Roots Radics hammering out the riddims. All completely stripped down drum and bass and very little else. One of my favorite dub albums for sure.

Greensleeves recently released a follow-up, “Roots Radics Meets King Tubby - More Dangerous Dub”. It goes in the same style, but the riddims here are more well-known — it’s mainly classics like “African Beat”, “Dub Organizer”, “Darker Shade Of Black”, and “Here I Come” that get worked out. I’d say it’s a bit less exciting than the first chapter just because of that, but whatever. The sound is crisp and the bass is loud. The Roots Radics are always fantastic — I never miss an opportunity to praise their genius — and while Jah Screw is not a guy whose name gets mentioned a lot, he’s been behind plenty of good things (Greensleeves has a nice biography up on him right now, check it out here). Let’s just say you need this one too.

Speaking of underrated: Wycliff “Steely” Johnson is listed as the keyboard player on “More Dangerous Dub”. Now there’s someone that really needs some more credit. I think it’s about time a label like Pressure Sound or Soul Jazz put together a compilation of Steely and Cleevie tracks. In my book they’re on the top-twenty list of the most important Jamaican producers. They engineered so much of the good stuff at Jammy’s, they did fantastic things in the nineties that still hold up today, and had huge international success with Dawn Penn’s “No, No, No”. Steely’s sound Silverhawk ran things back in the day and is still considered one of the top systems ever. And who could forget when the Street Sweeper riddim was ruling the world? That’s some resume. So if anyone with some kind of record industry influence reads this, you know what to do.