Burning Spear - "Down By The Riverside"
Today, as a birthday present, my friend Kyle gave me the complete Studio One Burning Spear recordings. It was an impulse purchase, based on the front cover: a picture of Burning Spear looking straight ahead, his eyes smouldering, burning his pain into us, hotter than the serene sun setting behind his left shoulder. He is playing an ancient-looking guitar, dwarfed by his impressive, confident hands.
And, man, the music is so hot. It's intimate to the point of inducing claustrophobia. This gut-wrenching soul reggae, although for the most part concerned with Jamaican politics and the living of a righteous Rastafarian life, is astoundingly expressive of a broad range of human emotion, from desperate depression to manic joy.
"Down By The Riverside" is the intoxication of new love and the fragility and vulnerability that comes with it.
A guitar plays the steady familiar reggae rhythm. The organ sings the newborn connection. And the muted lead guitar line is the ecstatic beating heart of Burning Spear.
He pulls his love into him and points to the beating heart:
"Don't break this heart that loves you."
The heart is not within his control. It loves without his permission. And so he pleads. Not only an acknowledgement of love, it's an expression of his complete vulnerability.
It is with the same passion and focus that he sings of Jah and of Jamaica.
***
Arthur Lee was (and is still) a true pop auteur: the intricacy of his arrangements and the full realization of his vision are here to be heard on "Alone Again Or." The sunny folk of the acoustic guitar, the Spanish tinged solo and trumpet, the restraint of the ascending strings and the seamless vocal harmonies all combine to create a piece of elegant, transparent pop. Lee puts on a songwriting clinic in Forever Changes. Nothing is out of place. It is a truly ambitious and ingeniously constructed record.
Love was unjustly overshadowed by their California psych-pop rivals, the Byrds (as great as they are, is there not room for two genius jangle bands?).