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Sound System International *

King Tubby
1 disc

1. Dub Star
2. Kingston Dub Town
3. King of Kings
4. Joe
5. Dance Beat
6. Garrison
7. Red Moon
8. King Tubby's City Dub
9. Phantom
10. I for I
11. King Banga
12. Down Town
13. Uptown Shuffle Dub
14. House of Darkness
15. Tribute to Drumbago
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Additional Info

Manufacturer Part Number (MPN): 65
Credits

Producer Clancy Eccles
Engineer Sid Bucknor; Kevin Metcalfe
Personnel: Lorraine "Ranny Bop" Williams, Ernest Ranglin, Hux Brown, Radford 'Duggie' Bryan (guitar); Carl Bryan (alto saxophone); Dennis Campbell, Headley Bennett, Val Bennett (tenor saxophone); Johnny "Dizzy" Moore, Bobby Ellis (trumpet); Karl Masters (trombone); Gladstone Anderson (piano); Aubrey Adams, Winston Wright (organ); Hugh Malcolm, Joe Isaacs, Winston Grennan, Paul Douglas (drums); Larry McDonald, Denzel Laing, Uziah "Sticky" Thompson (percussion).
Liner Note Author: Harry Wise.
Arranger: Clancy Eccles.
Those with a casual interest in dub may find that this recently discovered album sounds a bit raw--but for aficionados of the genre, it's a treasure trove. It finds a young King Tubby (who would later become dub's most famous and celebrated practitioner) flexing his chops and experimenting with techniques that he would later hone to a razor sharpness: the wholesale dropouts with throbbing echo that are in full effect on "Joe"; tastefully selected scraps of vocals that float all over the place on "Kingston Dub Town" (a brilliant and strangely tender dub version of the Lord Creator hit "Kingston Town"); the reductions of backing tracks down to a dry and spare minimum, only to suddenly flower into echo-drenched blooms of sound -- all of these are techniques that Tubby either pioneered or perfected, and it's fascinating to hear them being applied to these late rocksteady and early reggae classics before he was fully in control of them. The appearances by DJ King Stitt are typical of his mid-'70s work (which is to say pretty good, but not great), but on those tracks you can hear Tubby holding back his wilder impulses in order to avoid upstaging the vocalist; where he cuts loose, the results are both rawer and more powerful. This album is ultimately something like a reggae textbook, one that will send the eager student looking for more advanced material