The Immortals - The Greatest Artists of All Time: 100) Lee "Scratch" Perry

There are only a handful of producers who can make a band sound interesting and different no matter who they are, and Lee "Scratch" Perry is one of them. He was behind dozens and dozens of classic reggae and dub songs in the Sixties and Seventies, but even more important, he was the first mad-scientist producer.

Scratch could do gorgeous, straight-ahead songs, but he would also toss away verse-chorus-bridge structure. What matters are the emotions and ideas you get from the sound. If someone else was making a song about the city, he might add traffic noise, but Scratch would add a baby crying; he captures what's behind a song. One thing the Beastie Boys do when we are finishing tracks is make sure that there's a Lee Perry part: some weird detail that's not supposed to be there but somehow makes sense.

The early Bob Marley and the Wailers songs that Lee Perry produced, like "Mr. Brown," sound like punk records. They're truly raw -- both shitty and beautiful at the same time, like a Modigliani painting. That's why punk rockers like the Clash wanted to work with him, because they can relate to the sparseness of the production.

I have videotapes of him in the studio. He's bugging out: screaming at the bass player, turning knobs, banging things. He blows smoke into the microphone so that the sound of the weed gets into the song. And, yes, that's stupid, but it's not. It's part of his ritual, and being in the studio is a ritual.

I had the pleasure of meeting Lee Perry a couple of times. The first was in Hong Kong. We were on tour, and for some reason he was there. He's a very little guy, like your craziest grandfather. He had on a shiny outfit with little things taped all over him: notes, a lot of pictures, studs, mirrors and bottle caps. Each thing had a meaning to it. He also had a video camera and was taping everything - the sky, the buildings, all of us -- except he had no videotape in the camera.

We convinced him to play the second Tibetan Freedom Concert, in New York. Right after you played, there was this press tent where everybody would go and say their little something about the cause. Some journalist asked him, "Do you believe in Jesus Christ?" Lee Perry pulled down his pants and said, "Here's Jesus Christ!" Now that's punk rock.

[From Issue 946 — April 15, 2004]

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