Two heavy Sahibs are presiding over a small dinner party in the Jonkanoo Lounge of the Sheraton-Kingston. In the background, the house band is playing calypso versions of such Rum Culture standards as "You Go to My Head" and"I Get a Kick Out of You." They are Chris Blackwell, the young Jamaican Caucasian heir to a tea and spice plantation who founded Island Records, and Michael Butler, the "hip millionaire" who backed Hair.

Butler is in Kingston in connection with a new reggae musical he hopes to put on the Broadway boards by next fall. It will be called 'Irie' and presumably it will do for the Armageddon of the Rastas what Butler's previous production did for the Aquarius of the hippies.

Asked if he intends to hire a real Rasta cast, Butler yawns. "Well, I'd like to...but I don't know how many Rastas belong to Actor's Equity in New Yawk."

The two young millionaires look like two peas in a pod. But it becomes obvious that Blackwell is not all that thrilled about Butler's intention to translate his beloved roots music into a slick Broadway musical. Until a few years ago the rip-off on the grand scale was standard practice in Kingston, with greedy shyster producers paying musicians $10 or $15 for a session and pocketing the royalties themselves. Blackwell is credited with almost singlehandedly changing all that; he at least pays his artists advances and gives them a fair share of the royalties, and the precedent he set forced other labels to follow suit. He is also most responsible for spreading the gospel of roots beyond the Trench Town ghetto and the Third World. He did it by literally busting his hump — pedaling around London on a bicycle in the mid-Sixties with stacks of singles under his arm, personally delivering product to record stores and hustling disc jockeys to at least give a listen to this contagious roots music of the Jamaican Rude Boys.

There is this story they tell, possibly even true, about the incident that made Blackwell devote his life to spreading the fever. It seems that some years ago, Blackwell's car broke down in the Blue Mountains — Rasta country — and he was forced to seek shelter in one of their primitive encampments. Being white and growing up in Jamaica, Blackwell was understandably wary of the Rastas. But when the righteous brethren extended hospitality as though he were one of their own, he dedicated himself to making the indigenous roots music of these good and much maligned people a household word on both continents.

Thus, when it is suggested that it would be ironic if Michael Butler rather than Bob Marley finally breaks reggae in a big way in the States, Blackwell says, "Yes, that would be most ironic indeed."

Then Butler asks, "By the way, Chris, where does one go to hear some good live reggae music here in Kingston?"

A sly Cheshire cat smile spreads across Blackwell's face. "I'm afraid, Michael, that one doesn't," he answers. "You see, reggae isn't really what you would call a live music per se...The only place it really exists is on record."

Butler is crushed, but Blackwell isn't quite finished. "I'm afraid, Michael, that the only live music you're going to hear in Kingston is the kind of terrible tourist crap we're listening to right now," he concludes, as the house band climaxes, loud and cornball, its raucous calypso rendition of "When Irish Eyes Are Smiling."

Didn't my people before me
Slave for this country
Now you look me with a scorn
Then you eat up all my corn
-- "Crazy Baldhead," Rastaman Vibration

The first time I met Rastafarians in any significant numbers and felt the full impact of the wild, freaking frightwigs they call dreadlocks up close was over at Tommy Cowan's rehearsal studios, in a small stucco building surrounded by several dilapidated shacks on a back lot in North Kingston. Six or seven Rastas and three white visitors were crowded into a small room filled with ganga smoke, listening to a new single, "Babylon Queendom," by former Wailers rhythm guitarist Peter Tosh. There was a lot of sly signifying going on.