Toots and the Maytals: Funky Kingston : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

This is the first album by Toots Hibbert and the Maytals (consisting of singers Jerry Mathias and Raleigh Gordon plus various musicians) to be released in the States, despite their deified status in Jamaica, where Jimmy Cliff is regarded as having moved to England long ago and the Wailers are just another good band from the slums. Actually, the Maytals had already been singing together for five years in 1968 when Toots, needing material for a session, wrote a pulsing ditty called "Do the Reggay" that launched the whole movement. Hibbert is now more or less credited with having invented reggae, which must be an awesome exaggeration but at least puts him way up there in the pantheon of rude boys.

Funky Kingston has been compiled from Maytal material as old as 1970 and as recent as last year. They have released eight albums and literally hundreds of singles over their 12-year career; this is the cream of their crop, with a couple of exceptions. The gorgeous "Time Tough" leads off with the Maytals' specialty: Toots's repeating, rasping vocal riffs overlaying an hypnotic bass signature, backed by a buttery falsetto chorus from Mathias and Gordon. A reggae version of "Louie Louie" (Toots takes a writing credit, oddly) should be heard carefully to be believed, and the devastating "Pressure Drop," the granddaddy of reggae mojo, will be familiar to fans from the soundtrack of the film The Harder They Come, although the group's other contribution to the movie, "Sweet and Dandy," should have been included in this set as well.

A couple of tracks, "In the Dark" and "Love Is Gonna Let Me Down," fail because of gross overproduction. The further reggae gets from the primitive rawness of its basic slum-born sound, the more easily it becomes too slick and completely loses its impact. As the best reggae singles by obscure or unknown Jamaican groups (like Burning Spear) testify, the music is at its most powerful when kept simple and direct from the groin. Add horns, chimes and a big chorus, and even the toughest reggae dissolves into terrible schlock.

The rest of Funky Kingston is worthwhile. "Pomp and Pride" and "Got to Be There" are both authentic, with the latter's trancy figure being almost irresistible. The title song gets croaked out by Toots, who sounds in this session like someone used steel wool on his larynx. Even a version of John Denver's dippy "Country Road" is transformed into an attractive number that could be purely Jamaican if you didn't know better.

The Maytals may lack the tough politics and charisma of the Wailers and the glamour of Jimmy Cliff, their chief competitors for the reggae championship of the world, but in reality they come closer to the essence of the Afro-Caribbean culture that spawned reggae in the first place. And in Jamaica, where it counts, they still rule the roost.