People Funny Boy
The Genius of Lee “Scratch” Perry
by David Katz
I love the Clash, and if your love of the Clash is true, you love reggae as well. And if you love both, you know who Lee “Scratch Perry is. And, if you know who Lee “Scratch” Perry is, you also know his reputation.
Super Ape, along with King Tubby Meets Rockers Uptown, changed my life and opened a whole new world to me. I just can’t get enough of dub as a genre, and even though I don’t want to treat it like high art, I will day that I love it, but I don’t understand it. But Lee “Scratch” Perry is more than just dub, and his Arkology collection helped me appreciate the man’s work as well as the genre.
I don’t think anyone would want to read People Funny Boy unless they were a fan. At most, I hoped it would give me insights into the man and his legacy, at the very least, I hoped it have some interesting stories about his life. I got a little of both, but quite honestly, I was a little disappointed.
The main problem I have with this book is how monotonous half of it is. It’s basically a catalog of what bands Scratch recorded, who the players were and where they came from. Katz gets an A for his efforts in cataloguing these records, but I’m not interested in reading liner notes. It’s just really tedious and doesn’t shed any light on Scratch himself. And why doesn’t Katz talk a little more about what dub is and how it became so prevalent as a genre?
Also, and this is no fault of Katz’s, I just don’t like the picture of Scratch this book paints. I’m sure it’s accurate, but he just comes off as a rambling, jealous, petty, vindictive, quick-tempered, destructive mad man, who had some productive and meaningful years, only to lose his grasp on reality and people. It seems like he was his own worst enemy, and yet he was quick to point fingers. The man had beef with EVERYONE. Scratch doesn’t need to go into a studio; he needs to go into a psychiatric hospital! The most sobering comments from the recipients are when they take the moral high road and admit, “that’s just Scratch being himself.”
Once he was passed his prime, the bar was set so low that all was required of him was to show up and ramble on some recordings and be allowed to destroy property in the name of his “genius.” It’s sad reading about all these people putting up with his destructive nature and negative energy just for the sake of “authenticity.”
That said, I did learn about his life, his motivations early on and a lot about Jamaican music. People Funny Boy gives insightful background on some important recordings Scratch was involved with and I’ll probably have great new records to listen to for the next 5 years. I guess it’s true what they say, you have to separate the art from the artist.
