Max Romeo
Revelation Time (Sound Tracks, 1975)

The freshest forgotten albums of yesteryear. Not the usual fawned over suspects but albums that ‘net-trawlers and second hand record shop aficionados may come across and should snap up now.

This month Guy Oddy recommends the Rasta socialism of…

Max Romeo’s ‘Revelation Time’ is generally acknowledged to be the first concept album to come out of Jamaica. The album is made up of a set of reggae tunes from the roots era, played by members of the Soul Syndicate and Wailers bands, and a vision informed by both Rasta ideology and a socialist viewpoint. This is rebel music straight from the Kingston of the mid ‘70s.

Romeo’s recording career started in the late sixties, when he even scored a UK top ten hit with ‘Wet Dream’, pre-dating the ‘slack’ dancehall tunes of the ‘80s and ‘90s by some twenty years. However, despite a couple of other stabs at the big time with similarly risqué material, it was a style that Romeo soon abandoned in favour of one that was distinctly more ‘dread’.

As was usual in the reggae world of the ‘70s, Max found himself recording for a number of producers as the decade progressed, from Derrick Morgan to Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry, Winston ‘Niney’ Holness and Prince Buster. All of them titans of the scene. Despite employing a plethora of producers, Romeo’s vision and lyrics remained rock-solid, proclaiming the righteousness of Rastafari and railing against the injustices suffered by the Jamaican majority. Tunes such as ‘Let The Power Fall For I’, ‘Public Enemy No 1’, ‘Babylon’s Burning’ and ‘Coming Of Jah’ left no doubt as to which side of the fence Max Romeo stood.

By 1974, Max Romeo and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry had become firm friends, both inside and outside the legendary Black Ark Studio. Indeed, it was there that Romeo cut the hit singles (in Jamaica) ‘Revelation Time’ and ‘Three Blind Mice’ that were to form the pillars of the album that was originally to be called ‘Strictly Roots’, before the popularity of the ‘Revelation Time’ single caused a rethink.

The album was recorded under Clive Hunt’s direction at the Black Ark, where he also co-wrote a number of the tunes. Songs such as ‘Revelation Time’, ‘No Peace’ and ‘Warning Warning’ rivalled any of the protest songs recorded by the more commercially successful Wailers, but then Bob Marley never sang lyrics as direct as “Heads a go roll down Sandy Gully”! This was the imagery of violent revolution and not the more woolly viewpoint espoused by Bob Marley, especially after his parting with Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingston in 1974.

‘Tacko’ took on the more thorny subject of Haile Selassie’s overthrow by a Marxist coup the previous year, while ‘A Quarter Pound Of I’cense’ recommended the virtues of ganja as an escape from the stresses and madness of life in Babylon. It is, however, ‘Open The Iron Gate’, with its rhythm culled from ‘Iron Gate’ off Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry’s ‘Cloak and Dagger’ album, and its accompanying dub, which takes Babylon by the scruff of the neck and extols Jah to lead his people back to Africa. Not a point of view that you’ll hear in much reggae in 2007!

As with many reggae albums of the time, most of the tracks from ‘Revelation Time’ had previously been issued as singles in Jamaica, with their respective dub versions on the flip side. Some of these dubs appeared on the original Studio Tracks disc. As a complete album, however, these tunes were only briefly available in the UK and were reissued by United Artists in the USA for a similarly brief period. Nevertheless in 1999, reggae aficionados’ were again able to hear them all in their full glory, when Blood and Fire resurrected this forgotten gem, as part of the Max Romeo collection ‘Open The Iron Gate 1973-77’.

The ‘Revelation Time’ album provided the main body of this compilation with additional dub versions of the title track and ‘Warning Warning’, the rare-as-hens’-teeth single ‘Valley Of Jehosophat’ (which was also recorded at this time) and a number of other tracks which either pre-dated or followed the original album. It is a set which outshines the more commercially-successful follow-up, ‘War In A Babylon’, which was recorded with Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry at the controls, and one which emphasises a rare and magnificent vision that manages to successfully address both a Rasta viewpoint and revolutionary socialist ideals to a distinctly ‘dread’ bassline.

As Romeo, himself, said, “That album is really a revolutionary album. It came from 1972, when we had a revolutionary movement, with Mr Michael Manley trying to change society from capitalism to socialism. At that time I was socialist-minded – beca’ it’s the only form of poor people government, socialism.”

Filed under: Great Lost Albums, Music by Flexmaster Nylon
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