One Love: Roger Steffens' 'Reggae Scrapbook'

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ROGER STEFFENS NEEDS some room. In fact, he needs a lot of rooms.

The obsessive reggae collector has so many records and artifacts that he's had to move houses — twice — just to accommodate his treasures.

"[The collection] now fills six rooms, from four to ceiling. I can hardly move in the place," Steffens said. "Everything is getting added to it all the time; people are constantly sending me stuff. My wife used to call our other houses 'House of Piles'; now this one is becoming another House of Piles."

While he's been in long negotiations to sell the collection and have it sent to Jamaica, it's not been an easy process.

"A guy up in Canada [billionaire Michael Lee-Chin] was going to buy it and give it to Jamaica as a gift, but we could not come to a proper agreement," Steffens said. "My bottom lines are that it be kept intact forever and be made available to anyone who wants to make use of it. ... It's an instant museum for Jamaica."

Until a proper deal can be worked out, Steffens has put his collection to good use in the new "Reggae Scrapbook" (Insight Editions), a lavish coffee table book featuring iconic photos by Peter Simon.

The heavy-duty edition comes with a DVD of interviews and features remarkable facsimiles of everything from concert posters and 7-inch records/sleeves to a yellow-and-torn dot-matrix printout of UPI's newswire notice for Peter Tosh's death (as well as one announcing his killer's sentencing).

While those sorts of items will wow reggae fanatics, the book also acts as an introduction to Jamaica's national sound, with short biographies about the music's prime movers, eras and genres.

Many of the artifacts featured in "Reggae Scrapbook" are inscribed to Steffens, which can be a dealbreaker when a collector tries to unload his booty. But the DJ, actor and founding editor of The Beat magazine makes no apologies for his superfandom and remembers why he never passes up an opportunity to have his collection personalized by musicians' signatures.

"[Bob Marley] let me go everywhere with him during the 'Survival' tour in November 1979, and I just didn't want to be a pain in the ass to him," Steffens said. "I kept waiting for a 10-minute window of opportunity where I could hand the bag to him and say, 'Can you sign my records?' And he was never left alone; people were hitting on him day and night. ... I never got any of my records signed directly by Bob."

BONUS Q+A

» EXPRESS: With all the complications that have come up with the sale of your collection, do you think you'll ever be able to complete the transaction?
» STEFFENS: There's a new government in Jamaica that is far more favorably disposed to completing the deal. I'm in talks with the new government to bring this to a conclusion. ...

It's an instant museum for Jamaica. They have done virtually nothing to preserve their own reggae culture, and they're looking to me, basically, to provide that for them. And that's what I've always hoped would happen to it, too, because so many people have given me stuff, from all over the world, with the idea that someday it would go to the museum. I feel a real responsibility to those people.

» EXPRESS: But is there a cultural shift toward preserving some of this history in Jamaica?
» STEFFENS: Yes. Absolutely. When people learned, years ago, that I was offering $25 for those big two-foot square wall posters we reproduce toward the back of the book — the Pum Pum Posse and the Punany Poets. Shortly after I left Jamaica, they wrote a newspaper article about the fact that I was paying $25 for these things, so there was a wave of people tearing these posters off of telephone poles across the island and the promoters were getting very upset. I would never take a poster off a pole until the concert was over. But if you look closely at those posters [reproduced in the book], almost every one of them has one or two holes in it and that was nailed to telephone poles.

They are more aware of their music now that the island has basically been stripped bare of the old records. If the Japanese didn't get it, the German or the Italians did — or the British before anybody. And if you look up the prices of things on eBay, the prices of things are astronomical.

» EXPRESS: Ever since your regret of not having your Bob Marley LP signed, you've been very dogged about making sure you never make that mistake again.
» STEFFENS: I figured I may never see this guy again; with the lifespan of Jamaican musicians being among the shorter ones on Earth, I was like stink on s**t with everybody who came afterward. I got over 100 records signed by Peter Tosh. All my [Bunny Wailer records] are signed. Cornell Campbell came through last year and I brought him 49 records — and he signed every one of them.

Also, what I've tried to do now is that if it's a special record to them in some way, I try to have them inscribe it with a little story about it. A perfect example of that is the Cornell Campbell record ["You're No Good"] that we reproduce in the book. That's a legendary record and that was the first time he had every seen it. He said he had been hearing about it for 30 years or so. It's on page 85. [Singer] Slim Smith felt like he was ripped off for years by [producer] Bunny Lee and left Jamaica in disgust and went to England in '72. So, Bunny Lee liked the sound of Cornell Campbell's voice and thought he sounded a lot like Slim Smith and recorded "You're No Good" by him and put it out under Slim Smith's name. When Slim Smith found that out he wanted to kill [Lee]; he was so pissed off. So you can see [Cornell has written on the record sleeve], "This is Cornell Campbell voice. Not Slim Smith as mentioned. This is during the bandulu period." Bandulu is a thief.

Lee "Scratch" Perry's [signatures] are always fun. He signed his copy of "Small Axe" for me and he said, "I Upsetter am the Small Axe. I wrote this song. Bob wasn't even there when I wrote these words."

» EXPRESS: But being a white American who might have the world's most definitive collection of music and artifacts from a primarily black Caribbean country must be a touchy subject for some people there.
» STEFFENS: Oh, of course — from ignorant people who have never spoken to me, or been to see the archives, or don't know anything about me. It's inevitable. "The white boy ripping off black culture," when they don't realize it's cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars out of my pocket to work for free.

» EXPRESS: You travel the world now lecturing about Bob Marley. What's your relationship like with his family and his estate?
» STEFFENS: I think they appreciate what I'm doing trying to try to keep Bob's work alive. [Island Records owner and producer] Chris Blackwell was at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in February, and he said, "Roger Steffens has done more to keep the myth of Bob Marley alive than anybody on Earth." We don't always have the best relationship, for a variety of reasons, but he recognizes the work that I'm doing. And I think [the Marley family] understands that when I sit down and do my show, they sell a lot of Bob Marley records.

» EXPRESS: You write in the book, "... there are no facts in Jamaica." It's a statement that anyone who's written in depth about Jamaican music history will identify with, but explain how frustrating it can be as an archivist and historian of Jamaican music. Do you ever want to bang your head against the wall?
» STEFFENS: Oh, absolutely. When Leroy Pierson and I put The Wailers discography together, that took us 15 years. And to try and sort through all the people who swore they were there — you hear one drummer on a record and there's three drummers of great repute who all swear they're the drummer. I wasn't in the room; you weren't in the room; how are we going to decide?

A lot of the time spent putting that book together was trying to sort fact from fiction and publish what we thought was the best guess. And if there were conflicting statements, we would put them in the notes at the end of each of the songs and let history decide. ... But it is a tremendous frustration because there were no written records kept. To this day, there's virtually no written records kept in the studios in Jamaica. You have to go about it second-hand, and with matrix numbers, which is why we put [the release date of] "Simmer Down" about six months later than a lot of the people who have written biographies about Bob, who claim it came out Christmas in '63. But The Skatalites [band] were on it, and they didn't form until June of '64.

It's a frustration, especially when you admire and respect people, and they seem to have good memories about a lot of things, and then you have people telling you diametrically opposed stories about sessions.

Winston Grennan was a well-known reggae drummer who played on thousands of sessions and a whole lot of great songs. But he claimed that he made an album the night before [Ethiopia's Emperor Haile Selassie I] arrived in Jamaica on April 21, 1966. [Grennan] claimed he was in the studio all night long cutting an album with Bob Marley. He swore this to me; I have him on camera saying it.

And I challenged him; I said, "Bob was in America! Bob was in the States from February on to October of that year; he wasn't there."

"Oh, no, he was there — and Mortimer Plano was producing it."

Mortimo Planno was at the airport with a 100,000 Rastas waiting for Selassie to land; he wasn't in the studio making an album with Bob Marley.

"Yes he was! I was there! I know it!"

What do you do in a case like that? Just scratch your head, and shake it, and in my case, refuse to publish it, because you know it's bulls**t.

» EXPRESS: The final pullout in the book is a poster reproduction from a Polish reggae concert; was that to demonstrate reggae's worldwide influence?
» STEFFENS: Yeah. That was the whole point — the internationalization of it. ... That was done in 1989 — two years before the Communist government fell. It was an anti-apartheid/Solidarity/human rights reggae concert with Linton Kwesi Johnson, Aswad, The Twinkle Brothers and Polish acts, too. They paid the performers with potatoes. They gave them each $7,000 worth of potatoes, which they contributed to a sub-Saharan famine relief. But it's the only medieval reggae poster I've ever seen.

Roger Steffens photo by Peter Simon; Bob Marley photo by/reggae archives photo courtesy Roger Steffens