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Hey Toots
So Toots & the Maytals are this year’s Booker T/John Fogerty/old farts that are still on top form.
Recentclips show them still putting on a great show, which is amazing for a group that’s been together for nearly 50 years. Even more amazingly, though they’ve released 28 studio albums, they only have 5 songs: Pressure Drop, Funky Kingston, 54-46 Was My Number, Sweet & Dandy and wasn’t there another one?
For those of you who only know Toots and the Maytals as the people who made a fifth of one of the greatest soundtracks of all time, here’s ten other things you should know:
1) The band holds the record for number one hits in Jamaica.
2) They were the undisputed superstars of Jamaica’s music scene from the mid ‘60s until Bob Marley.
3) The band became famous in Jamaica by winning the inaugural Jamaica Song Festival in 1966 with “Bam Bam”. They won the next year, too, with the now much more famous “Sweet & Dandy”. After winning the third year, they decided not to enter again.
4) Toots is really Fred Hibbert, the youngest of 14 children. Both his parents were dead by the time he was 14.
5) The band won a Grammy in 2006 for an album of collaborations with some of the greatest musicians of all time, plus Shaggy.
6) Toots is a Jamaican country bumpkin and used to walk 5 miles to school each day. His cover of John Denver’s “Country Road” switched West Virginia for West Jamaica.
7) A lot of ska is about dancing, shooting or pleasuring ladies, but early Maytals ska includes some tunes about the Bible, including one that gives shout outs to the various books of the Old Testament. “You have Genesis, and Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, Deutoronomy and Joshua, Judges and Ruth.”
8 ) One of Toots’ producers asked him to write a song about how ugly his brother is. So he wrote “Monkey Man”.
9) Toots & The Maytals were the original Diana Ross and the Supremes. Mr Hibbert wasn’t the frontman until Island Records boss Chris Blackwell told him he was. The rest of them (name one) couldn’t have been too miffed because they’ve been playing as his band for five decades since then. The ones you’ll see at Fuji Rock are the ones you heard on The Harder They Come.
10) Chris Blackwell was also sort-of responsible for the track Funky Kingston. After Funky Nassau went huge, Blackwell figured that it was the combination of Funky + City Name in the title that made it such a hit, so he asked Toots to make another one. And because apparently Mr Hibbert will write a song about anything you like, he obliged. It never became the phenomenon that Funky Nassau still is, but it’s a bloody great record.
So check them out at Fuji Rock. And if you catch Toots wandering around, why not ask him to write a song about an ugly relative or whatever else you like? He seems pretty open to ideas.
