Melville Cooke My songs are a revolution, not smiling songs on the periphery of understanding the nature of existence (Mark of the Beast, Honorary Citizen Disc One). - Peter Tosh
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 1987, I sat before a battery-operated radio and a kerosene lamp with a 'Home Sweet Home' shade and listened to Peter Tosh's Creation over and over again.
That night Tosh's murder was the only topic on the two AM stations we could pick up at our home about two miles below Wilmington in St. Thomas and both JBC and RJR played Creation repeatedly.
I should have been in school, I guess. I had passed sufficient fifth form level subjects to enter sixth form at Munro College, which I did shortly after, and classes had started over a week earlier. But it didn't seem terribly pressing at the time. Compared to the night of September 11, it was not.
In retrospect, I am sure that those were the couple hours in which Tosh took on real significance in my life. My awareness of Jamaican music was shaped by radio and at that time there was precious little rebel music on the airwaves - Marley being the exception. It would be 14 years after that before I owned my first Tosh CD (Live at the One Love Peace Concert), but Peter Tosh took root in my heart on that night and Creation, all seven minutes of it until the cock crows three times, became a very, very special song.
A jury of his peers took 11 minutes to find Dennis Lobban guilty of Tosh's murder. Radio disc jock Jeffrey 'Free-I' Dixon was also killed that night, but it was Tosh's killing which had the impact.
Winston Hubert McIntosh was not a saint by any extreme stretch of the imagination. And, from what I have read of him, it would appear that many times he was an extremely unpleasant character. But pleasantries have no place in the issues he took a stance on.
Apartheid, marijuana, Jamaican 'politricks,' 'bad word' laws, the whole 's-tstem,' nuclear weapons.
And, armed with his M16-shaped guitar after 1983, Tosh tackled the 'shitstem' in a language all of his own. For him, when you go to school you 'grad-u-hate;' Kingston city became 'Kill-some City;' Chris Blackwell became 'Chris Whiteworst;' assassinations became 'ass-the-f-.ing-nations;' the Prime Minister was the 'Crime Minister.'
When put in sentences, they were things of sheer beauty. Tosh referred to the "Crime Ministers who s-it in the House of Represent-a-Thief," while America became "A-sadaca, because there is nothing merry about it."
Tosh exemplified the effective use of 'bad words.' His recording B-..o C-.t captured the essence of the matter and I was highly amused when I met a man from St. Lucia who used to play that record on air - until he found out what it meant. I also know someone, who is sure to read this, who used that song to silence a Christian neighbour who would insist on playing her Godly music at a very high volume every Sunday.
After a few renditions of the song it was peace, perfect peace.
His 'Tosh talk' was legendary. From that famous One Love Peace Concert performance comes this gem, one of many: "You see, most intellectual people in society think the word peace means coming together. Peace is the diploma you get in the cemetery, seen."
(Am I the only one who finds it strange that the media make sure we do not forget Marley intertwining Seaga's and Manley's hands on stage at that show, while by neglecting to even mention him it would appear that Tosh never performed?).
It was inevitable that Peter Tosh would come into conflict with the police. The most extreme of these came four months after the Peace Concert, when Tosh was beaten and left for dead on the floor of the Half-Way Tree Police Station. As a matter of fact, it was only when he pretended to be comatose that the savagery stopped.
However, it must be noted that the Stepping Razor's first recorded run-in with the law occurred in 1968 in Spanish Town. He and a brethren refused to come out of the road on the police's orders as they protested hangings by the illegal Ian Smith government in the then Rhodesia.
In life, Tosh probably realised that in death he would be much more respected outside the country of his birth than inside it. "I've been respected more outside of Jamaica than in Jamaica-I don't go to jail-I'm not being brutalised by the police-And I don't see so many bad-minded people who don't want to see our progress but want to see our destruction," he said.
I don't hear Creation much if at all on the radio these days. I have heard it played on a sound system very rarely, but to stand up in a dancehall and hear the harmony "King of Kings, hallelujah, hallelujah," the grumbling thunder, the twittering birds, the running water, the guitar and Tosh's deep voice intone "Jah is my life and my salvation" is to teeter. I an certain I will come close to that understanding on October 19.
For the 10th time, the life and work of the Stepping Razor will be celebrated in "Tribute to Peter Tosh", the venue this year being Central Park in Negril. Work or play, I will be there.
Me glad all the Prime Minister is here and the Minister of Opposition and members of Parliament. We can't make the little pirate dem come here and rob up the resources for the country. Because that is what dem been doing a long bloodbath time...I am not a politician but I suffer the consequences-Peter Tosh, One Love Peace Concert, 1978
NEXT WEEK: The third and final September 11 memory 1973.
Melville Cooke is a freelance writer.
