The Sweeter It Is

IN THE FAR CORNER of the Orpheum's smoking room--a naked, exhausted, once elegant chamber--three punks snickered down on their joint. "We don't know much about Jimmy Cliff," one yellow-suspendered and hairy-lipped kid said, "but we like him." And at that moment last Saturday night Jimmy Cliff was giving himself to an audience neither young, punkish, nor unfamiliar with his music, but which also had a blind faith in the reggae singer. From his first number, Fundamental Reggae, the house was alive and poised on the brink of each high-throated, smooth verse, silent in the lyric wave of his high-pitched voice, screaming in the abatement of its flow.

It was a 60's group, now older, better-dressed, better-behaved, still predominately white, that came to Jimmy Cliff's first Boston concert. They were rewarded with a great performance. From his first appearance on stage, Jimmy Cliff showed his pleasure to be finally singing in Boston, long an isolated stronghold of reggae sentiment in this country. Bounding about the stage like Mosca, brandishing the screaming-white-starred shirt made famous in his Cambridge cult film, The Harder They Come, dancing and sliding in eels of black wire, he flung himself into his music with unabashed fervor.

"This is earth-feeling music," says Bob Marley, another Jamaican reggae star. In the sweep of the packed Orpheum, back across the misted edges of this vague, bent-spaced box of face-lost, swaying people, this power was realized, this music embraced.

And despite the frenzy of both the performers and the audience, the show retained its tightness and musical virtuousity. The numbers were delivered in fast sequence. The harmony was close and rhythm exact, the sound was solid and pure, and the show was unencumbered by excesses of lightsmanship. The first half of the concert was mostly composed of tunes from Jimmy Cliff's two albums, The Harder They Come and Unlimited. While the second half ran through his just-released album, Follow My Mind. For its first encore the band played Under the Sun, Moon and Stars, and the concert ended on Jimmy Cliff's first international hit. Wonderful World, Beautiful People.

By end the crowd, one of the largest and tamest the Orpheum has seen (according to police) was on its feet, stamping, singing, dancing in the aisles, on chairs. The lights went on and the show was over. The house was silent.

"Sixty percent of reggae is frustration of oppressed people," Jimmy Cliff told Andrew Kopkind of The Real Paper in 1973. "Forty percent is fantasy." Fantasy prevailed last Saturday night; little frustration showed. "We come from Jamaica with the message of peace and love," Jimmy Cliff announced during the concert, but such messages sound simple when separated from their roots. Reggae is street music from the West Kingston slum, Trenchtown, and springs from the mass of poor, disenfranchised black Jamaicans. On the one hand reggae is a transcendent music. On the other it is an extremely bitter and very political expression of social injustice. This transcendent quality comes in songs like Who Feels It, Knows It, from Jimmy Cliff's latest album:

Have you ever seen times

When hardships and pain, denial and strain,

Has made you to stay in the sunshine and rain?

But verily,

Fear not my love

Who feels it, knows it.

For those who pray

Shall be uplifted

Who feels it, knows it.

And though at very least the spirit expressed in such lyrics as

Remake the world,

With love and happiness

Remake the world,

If you put the conscience to the test,

was manifest at the concert, the bitterness in Jimmy Cliff was not. A complete song from his latest album, for example, is devoted to hypocrites:

Hypocrite,

Stinking hypocrite,

You're gonna pay the price some day.

Words you speak from the mouth,

But your heart is telling lies.

However, these sentiments had little power over the audience.

IT IS THIS sense of evil in the world, and the ultimate triumph over it, that gives Jimmy Cliff's music its vitality. This moral struggle between right and wrong, the forces of oppression and freedom, was missing from last Saturday's concert. Perhaps Jimmy Cliff was too happy a man to sing pain. A man who started his career back in 1962 and is just now cresting as a star, certainly deserves happiness. But most probably the crowd was too happy--happy getting it's money's worth from good music--to listen to pain and torment. In any case, the catharsis of Jimmy Cliff's music was lacking: the program was too easy and the audience too comfortable. "We sing a happy melody," says Jimmy Cliff, "but it's sad underneath." After peace and love was accepted and thrown back in approval, he (swallowed in dimming darkness, in burlap pants and Spirit of '76 belt-buckle) left his stage in the guard of redshirted kids.