Toots and the Maytals: Pass The Pipe : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In retrospect, it's beginning to look as though there were some sound reasons why the great reggae invasion never quite caught on in the States. On the most basic level, perhaps the rhythm itself, so hypnotic to fans, seemed too lazy and lopsided to most Americans (disco, at least, has an industrial thump! that hammers the back of your neck in a way that keeps you jumping from sheer anxiety, if nothing else).

Then, too, the Jah Rastafari-Marcus Garvey-Old Testament stuff in the lyrics soon became (even for white or non-Rasta aficionados) as big a formula as anything going, while the average listener hadn't the slightest idea what these guys were blabbing about. Surely, the everybody-smoke-pot business wasn't enough to make roots reggae more than a small cult in a nation (the U.S.) in which nobody seems overly upset about weed ingestion anymore anyway. Finally, and perhaps most crucially, reggae in Jamaica is a singles market, and since things like Max Romeo's classic "War ina Babylon" had about as much chance on stateside Top Forty as Ed Banger and the Nosebleeds, we've mostly received this music on albums that are not only predictably filler-stuffed but often disastrously remixed (like, for instance, War ina Babylon).

Even the import distributors have largely dropped reggae, so for the true fan living in the U.S.A., it's a matter of either seeking out certain specialty record stores or settling, once you've copped all the old imports, for whatever gets released by major American labels. If you love reggae and live in Kansas, you just might have to make do with one of the LPs under discussion here. If I lived in Kansas, I suppose I might be able to suck a little sustenance out of the withered mango that is Toots Hibbert's new album, but what real reggae vitality there is on this disc is stretched mighty thin. Pass the Pipe's lead cut is entitled "Famine," which about fits. The Maytals have apparently mistaken sluggishness for skank, and–believe me, it's no pleasure to say it–Toots simply sounds old and tired.

As for Peter Tosh, last year he changed goats in midstream, from apocalyptic militance to tinsel MOR about as pallid as Bob Marley's. Mystic Man is an improvement over Bush Doctor, though you're not quite sure whether it's because the music has a bit more force or you're just desperate for any decent reggae. The subject matter, of course, remains constant: Tosh bragging how marijuana has made him a macho man. There's more hard-core Rasta religiopolitics this time, however.

I'm very happy that Tosh doesn't eat fried chicken, hot dogs ("garbage") and hamburgers or drink "pink, blue, yellow, green soda," yet still you have to wonder about a reggae record whose hottest cut is a baldfaced (baldheaded?) shot at the disco market. "Buk-in-Hamm Palace" sets up an irresistible groove–not unlike Marley's "Exodus" (or, at one point, the Jackson 5's "Get It Together")–that'll lift and drive you for almost nine minutes. But when Tosh sings, "This is a true emancipation... Don't you let Disco get you down," you can't help yelling, "Aww, come on, man!"

Pick up on Tosh if you've just gotta have a fix, but if you can find reggae imports, there are at least two more-or-less recent masterpieces available: Culture's Two Sevens Clash and Doctor Alimentado's Best Dressed Chicken in Town. Next to them, Toots and the Maytals sound bone dry, and–no getting around it–Peter Tosh is whitewashed.