Blackwell Chris - Islander : My Life in Music and Beyond (9781982172718): My Life in Music and Beyond

The Islander

My Life in Music and Beyond

Chris Blackwell with Paul Morley

Thank you for downloading this Simon & Schuster ebook.

Get a FREE ebook when you join our mailing list. Plus, get updates on new releases, deals, recommended reads, and more from Simon & Schuster. Click below to sign up and see terms and conditions.

CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP

Already a subscriber? Provide your email again so we can register this ebook and send you more of what you like to read. You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox.

For all those who traveled with me in my life: those who are still here and those who are no longer here

I was eighteen years old when a Rastaman saved my life.

I have sometimes embroidered the first part of this story to make me look a little less stupid and give the narrative a dramatic boost. Ive said that I was out to sea in a tiny sailboat, all by myself. That I got caught in a violent storm. That I thought I wasnt going to make it. That the mast was struck by lightning and the boat had split, and I was holding on to a charred piece of the splintered hull and eventually was thrown up against some rocks along a barren stretch of isolated coast, whereupon I was knocked unconscious.

The truth is a little more prosaic. I wasnt on my own. It wasnt a sailboat. I was out in a motorboat with a male friend from England who was in the Jamaican Regiment whose name I cannot recall, and a female companion who I do remember, Lorraine. It was 1955. I was a directionless Anglo-Irish-Jamaican boarding-school flameout who, for kicks, decided to take a boat ride on the Caribbean with his mates. We set off from Kingston Harbor, passing the sleepy fishing village of Port Royal, a remnant of the colonial city of the same name that provided the setting for Captain Blood, the lavish, jolly 1935 swashbuckler that made a film star of Errol Flynn.

Three hundred years before our little voyage, the English navy had invaded Jamaica and claimed it from the islands previous colonizer, Spain. Under British rule, Port Royal became the largest English-speaking city in the New World outside of Boston: a privateers paradise, home to pirates, beggars, prostitutes, and sundry other gold-chasing chancers of loose morals. But its infamy was brief: in 1692, as if by divine retribution, Port Royal was finished off by a tsunami, exacerbating a demise already begun by fires, earthquakes, and hurricanes.

I am ashamed to say I hadnt filled up my boats tank with enough petrol, and we soon ran out of fuel. We pulled up on an unfamiliar stretch of shore then, a long way past Hellshire Beach, just southwest of Port Royal. This didnt initially strike me as a problem. It was about five in the afternoon, not yet dark, and civilization was surely only a matter of minutes away. After all, this very area had once been the commercial center of the world, even if we were now a fair way from Kingston or Montego Bay.

I directed my English friend to head inland on foot, assuming he would soon come across a road. I stayed behind with Lorraine. For an hour or two, we bided our time blithely, thinking it wouldnt be long before he found help. But then events took a turn that requires no exaggeration to make dramatic.

My friend suddenly reappeared, his face pained, his body covered in scratches and streaks of blood. He hadnt found anything but dense jungle. Theres no way out, he said. The tide was coming in and we were huddled upon a small, shrinking sliver of beach. It was now past seven. I made an executive decision: we would lie down on the driest area of sand, and in the morning I would walk along the coast to find help.

We slept under the stars as best we could. We didnt have much fresh water to drink, and we were hemmed in between the sea and what turned out to be not a proper coastline but a treacherous mangrove swamp. In the right light and conditions, the mangroves are beautiful, a dense tangle of flora providing shelter for hundreds of animal species. But to us, they were more menacing than anything else. The bird and insect sounds that normally seemed a gentle, dreamy part of the coastal ambience now seemed to be warnings of impending doom.

In the morning, I set out. At low tide, when the ground was cracked and dry, it was easy to walk amongst the roots. But soon the crusty surface gave way to thick mud. The mangroves became a combination of labyrinth and quicksand, exceedingly difficult for me to navigate.

I somehow managed to walk for hours, looking for any kind of clearing, shouting for help. I had foolishly set off without taking any of the water we hada cocksure white boy who, to this point, had never thought of Jamaica as anything but a delightful Eden. The sea was always a liberation, never a trap. Even during this walk, the water was a lovely teal color under the green canopy of the mangroves. But there was no safe harbor to swim to.

A deep thirst started to kick in. At one point I reached a small section of beach that seemed to be moving. I thought I was delirious, hallucinating under the hot midday sun. Eventually I realized the moving beach was actually thousands of crabs, a writhing mass of them crammed together between the sea and the mangrove forest. As I moved closer, they got excited, darting around my feet as swiftly as lizards. I had no defenses; if they chose to come after me as hungry predators, I was a definite goner. What an exit: death by crab.

By late in the afternoon I was still walking, still searching, losing hope. My thirst had advanced from serious to desperate, and I was scarily weak. But then: in a small clearing, I spied a tiny, lopsided wooden hut held together with bits of string. It was the first sign of life I had seen for hours. We might be saved after all! Adrenalized, I walked towards the hut and looked through a little window, really just a crude cut-out hole.

To my terror, I laid eyes on the first Rastafari I had ever seen in my life.

He was a bearded and inscrutable man. His hair was long, stiff, and matted, as if made of bark. He looked as though he was somewhere between being as old as time and as young as me. He was wearing the kind of basic shirt and trousers that didnt seem to have ever been bought in a shop. Maybe hed made them himself, or found them at the side of the road. Badly dehydrated, utterly lost, and near collapse, I now stood face-to-face with one of the black heart men that white Anglo-Jamaican parents warned their kids about.

I had heard a little about the so-called cult of Rastafarianism. The Rastas were eccentrics who swore allegiance to the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, whom they believed to be the messiah incarnate. They traced their origins to the 1930s, when a Black Jamaican preacher named Leonard Howell became the first person to call himself a Rastafari. Howell grew out his beard after seeing a photograph of Haile Selassie on the cover of Time, bearded and handsome in a brocaded uniform and sash. Haile Selassies civilian name was Tafari Makonnen. Ras was a noble honorific. Ras + Tafari = Rastafari.

If you grew up in white Jamaican society in the 1940s and 50s, as I did, you were conditioned to regard these men more as a violent gang than as a new religious order or social movement. The colonial government viewed the Rastas as a threat, and there were folkloric horror stories of them capturing, burning, and sacrificing children. They spoke in a mangled, cryptic dialect that signaled a headstrong disregard for English rule. They wore their hair in matted plaits called dreadlocks, which made them look intimidating.