Dub Be Good To Me

In the fall of 2013 AB focuses on a new reggae sub-genre and its influence worldwide: dub. Just call it: the instrumental version of reggae. Dub came into being in 1968 – and so it's exactly 45 years old this year – thanks to the error (!) of one man: Osbourne Ruddock aka King Tubby. During the completion of a master tape, he accidentally forgot to mix the vocals into the whole. Dub (and versions aka instrumentals) was born. To honour this symbolic date, AB launches the series Dub Be Good To Me to provide an answer to the question: how (relevant) does dub sound in the year 2013?

The Wire, The Primer: King Tubby

For this new edition of The Wire Primer, Michael E. Veal will come sketch us a picture of King Tubby's musical career and his (incredible) importance for the dance- and electronic music that has been made since. Based on the most important albums King Tubby was involved in, we'll obtain a fine image of this unique unique sonic pioneer.

King Tubby, Osbourne Ruddock to the local registry office clerk, was born in ’41 in Kingston, Jamaica. He spent his youth stealing electronic parts from broken down cars. With that heap of 'rubbish' he started an electronic repair shop and built his own reggae sound system.
Around ’68 Ruddock worked as ‘disc cutter’ at Treasure Isle, the legendary studio of Jamaican producer Duke Reid. One evening Tubby made the mistake of his life, a slip-up that would provide him with worldwide fame. On that particular evening Tubby was working together with producer Bunny Lee on a master tape for a rocksteady song by Slim Smith. But he forgot just one thing: to open the channel with the vocal track. His first reaction was to stop the tape and start over, but Bunny Lee encouraged him to let the tape run and fade the vocals in and out.

The weekend after that, Bunny Lee played that flayed rhythm track on his sound system. Result: the audience super enthusiastically sang in the missing lyrics. The Ladies went gaga. Dub was born. Ok, it was by mistake, but that error did radically change the face of dance music, for good.
Time for Tubby to – well one doesn't reinvent the wheel every year – claim his fame and precede his name with King. King Tubby was born. A bit full of himself? Hey, didn't King Oliver, Count Basie and Duke Ellington do it too, in that other ultimate art form called jazz? What's more, didn't he look cute? On somewhat fuzzy photos from the '70's, invariably taken in the studio behind his mixing desk, he is often to be seen wearing a crown. A crown that later turned out to be pilfered from the local Burger King.

Tubby’s language was new and he began to apply it to pretty much every mastertape that passed through his hands. The musical 'space' created was filled by sending the drum and the bass – the beating heart of reggae – more to the forefront and pushing the echo content way up. What's more, this space was handy: these dub tracks (‘versions’, that later became standard on the B-sides of 7 inches) were ideal for sound systems when toasting.

Michael E. Veal presented his Primer in the March edition of The Wire and was immediately prepared to come bring us a live version of it for Dub Be Good To Me. He is a professor of ‘Music and African–American Studies’ at the Yale university, writer of ‘Dub: soundscapes And Shattered Songs In Jamaican’ Reggae’ and ‘Fela: The Life and Times of an African Musical Icon’, currently working on a book about Miles Davis, and is musician and bandleader of Aqua Ife Big Band