Big Mountain

We wrote "Cool Breeze" around the time we left Giant, and I still had a chip on my shoulder that they never really accepted any of the songs that we wrote. We would kill ourselves trying to write hits for them. And they'd basically say, "Well, you know, I think we'd just better go with a cover or maybe we'll bring in a producer, and here's a couple songs by this songwriter." So it was after that, I would say, " I know we can write a fuckin' hit!" So "Cool Breeze" was our attempt at trying to be as commercial as we possibly could, with a few little rootsy exceptions. And it did well in Japan.

But with that type of record if you're gonna go after radio in the U.S., you need a lot of money. We would have to go after mainstream radio, and that's just not my desire. After that record, it was funny because we got all that major label type of shit out of our system. After that, I said, "You know what? I don't need to fuckin' be recording this shit." And, of course, things were hurting then too. We owed so much money, and we were in such dire straights that I wanted a payday. I was thinking, "There's no way we're gonna get out of this shit that we're in without having a hit." Well, we ended up getting out of it anyway. It took three years of just paying attention, living like a pauper and paying attention to bills. "New Day" was a completely different experience, man. "New Day" was "Hey, man, you know we're actually starting to get our head above water." We don't need to be putting together music for the radio. We just pay attention to how much money we're spending and be smart about our investment. So hence, "New Day" I think is a sign of what's gonna be coming in the future with Big Mountain with little exceptions here and there, because I'm not saying I don't like to sing pop music. It's just that major labels, once they peg you, they're really not interested in anything else. Once a major label says, "Well, you can sing a hit. That's what you should be singing. Why are you fuckin' trying to be Bob Marley? Sing a hit. Sell records."

SS: Dancehall style reggae acts like El General out of Panama have been popular with Spanish audiences throughout the 90's. With the Rastafarian-oriented group Gondwana emerging from Chile and Jamaican artists like Tony Rebel and Junior Reid voicing songs in Spanish, it seems Latin America is fertile ground for more conscious reggae. Most of your albums include a song or two en español. What kind of feedback or vibe do you get from Latin fans?

Q: You know, it's always really positive. I think that, like you said, it's a really emerging market. And it brings on its own set of interesting relations because reggae and Rastafarianism and all that plays everybody differently. The experience that Americans get from reggae music could very well be very different from the experience that Jamaicans get, of course. Well, the experience that Latin Americans get is very different from ours.

I really take the time to ask people in Latin America when we're down there what they expect reggae music to fulfill in their lives. And I like to take advantage of the opportunity to see how reggae music affects other people because I've always been fascinated by that. Maybe I was looking for it to fulfill things that it really doesn't fulfill. I was this revolutionary guy, and I said, "Ooh man, this guy's singing revolutionary music. This is the key to revolution." Where other people are going, "Well, I don't have any idea what the fuck you're talking about. This music is about weed to me. I like to get stoned." And other people say, "No, man, this is about God to me. It's about spirituality." And I think Latin America is going to add its own take.

This new album "New Day" is the first time we've put a Spanish song on there that was written in Spanish. Usually, it's translations--no, actually, I'm sorry, on "Cool Breeze" we did "Cosas Naturales." But this is the first one that was written in Spanish, and it was a political message oriented song. So it should be interesting to see the type of response because we've always gotten, "How come it's always love songs that you do in Spanish?" And, basically, it's because although I can speak Spanish relatively well and my accent is excellent, my grammar is horrible. So it's like just me being insecure about writing in Spanish.

I would love to write more in Spanish, but I would have to get together with people. When you're writing political stuff, it's almost like you have to find somebody who shares similar beliefs as you. If it's a love song, it's no problem. You can get together and write love songs with other people. But for me to write a political song in Spanish with somebody to help me like a fluent Spanish speaker or a Spanish lyricist, it's a little bit more personal. You're sitting here talking about, "Well, fuckin' let's burn down the factory." And they're looking at me going, "God damn, dude." So, yeah man, we plan on doing a lot more of that in the future. It's just a matter of getting all our ducks in order.

SS: The band has done some diverse cover tunes over the years: of course, Peter Frampton's "Baby, I Love Your Way," Gary Wright's "Dream Weaver," Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," and "Girl from Ipanema" to name a few. How does the band select the covers?

Q: Back in the Giant days, a lot of times the record executives were pitching us covers. Sometimes we pick them because they're songs that we really liked in the past. Sometimes somebody in the band-it's their idea. Lately, it's been because we find them a bit of a challenge. Like "Girl from Ipanema"--how do you make a samba into reggae? I know they've got this thing called samba reggae over in Brazil, but it really is a tricky thing to do. And that's like, "Aw shit, this is what we do. We know how to do this type of thing. So let's do it." I mean we know it's not gonna be the easiest thing to do in the world. We don't have a lot of claims to fame, but I think Big Mountain's claim to fame is our balance between being able to be roots, conscious, revolutionary, and at the same time, high quality and commercially applicable. I think that that's what we do a little better than what most people do. That's what I would say. We know how to do some conversions--maybe not as good as UB40.

SS: You scored a huge hit on the pop charts with "Baby, I Love Your Way," which was part of the "Reality Bites" soundtrack. How was it that you became involved with that project? Did the success of that cover affect your standing in the reggae community for better or for worse?

Q: Yeah, those are some good questions. It was actually RCA who hooked that up with us. They were doing the soundtrack to "Reality Bites," and the original version of "Baby, I Love Your Way" was in the movie. Ron Fair, the producer, who's now the president over at A&M, came up with the idea that he wanted a reggae version in the movie. So he gave the assignment to a few different bands to bring in a demo. It was Big Mountain, Inner Circle, and one other band, I think. And "Touch My Light" had just done really well in southern California in particular. In '92, you couldn't escape "Touch My Light" in L.A. It was top 5 in LA that year, which was a fluke….

So anyway, we ended up getting the gig, and it was a great experience. Of course that just threw us into the whole whirlpool of LA and managers, accountants, lawyers, sharks. I mean things just got so complicated and so confusing so quickly for me. I mean those were horrible years for me personally. Just looking back and realizing the amount of confusion and just not feeling good about what we were doing. And then there was my natural resistance towards doing a song like "Baby, I Love Your Way" because it was like, 'Baby, I Love Your Way?'" And then when the final came out, I was, "Oh my God, this sounds so fuckin' produced and so pop." And then finally I accepted it, and then I got into the swing of things. I started going out to dinner parties and hanging out with these creeps. And then it was a couple of years of hanging out in LA and doing that LA thing. And then it was like realizing, slowly but surely, that these people didn't have my back because it seemed like every time I'd go in and say this is what I wanna do, they'd just entertain me until I got out of the fuckin' office. And then it was like, "Yeah right, we're gonna do that." It's just not a nice place, man.

As a result, we really weren't able to maintain control over how they put us out there. Things got out of control. I mean once you get into that situation, there's no way you're gonna be able to keep a cap on things. There's just so much shit going out all the time on you whether it's interviews or ads or this or that, you can't keep control of your image or how you're portrayed. I think that in a lot of superficial ways, I've changed since then, but my core has always been the same. Like I got into Rastafarianism for a little while, and I considered myself a Rastafarian, an orthodox Rastafarian. And that's changed, of course -and a few of my views. But for the most part, I'm the same person I was when I was 14 years old and first stumbled upon Bob Marley.

SS: Maybe not how you want them to know about you...

Q: [laughter]

SS: It sounds like it was kind of an awakening experience where you realized you didn't want to be a big star.

Q: It is, man. You realize that life gets very fast, man. I realized you can only have so many friends. In those days, I had so many friends--people that I don't talk to now and would have no desire to talk to. Basically, all the money was lost and all of the fanfare and I came back to San Diego with a lot of things to think about. You know to just sit and think about, "OK, what did I just go through up there?"

For a while, I kept on going up there and trying to get record deals and knocking on doors asking favors of people I knew. To them, I was a "has been." It was like, "Get a grip. Go get yourself a job at Prudential. You are a 'has been,' bro. Reggae was a fluke. Just give thanks that you had your 15 minutes of fame and get on with your life." I thought, "This is what it's really all about, huh? I'm a god damn 32-year-old 'has been.'" So you got a lot of learning to do.

Fortunately, a woman named Donna Vader came by and she grabbed me and slapped me around a little bit, picked me up and said, "What the fuck you doin'? Come on, get yourself together. You still have a lot of music to put out, a lot of records." And we just started one little check at a time, one little errand at a time. We started cleaning everything up, pulling my life together. I needed a lot of maintenance with my personal life at that point. Once we got that under control, we started working on Big Mountain again.

SS: On the "Cool Breeze" album there are collaborations with Yami Bolo and the up-and-coming singer Natural Black. What was it like working with them?

Q: You know what, man? I have to be honest. I never met the brethren. The drummer for Big Mountain and one of the chief producers, Paul Kastick, a big shot in the business, said, " I'd love to get some guest people on this record--record a couple people, hook it up." I was not aware of Natural Black, but I've always been a Yami Bolo fan so that was a given. I haven't had the opportunity to meet the brother, but I'm sure that we're gonna run into each other, God willing. But, yeah man, Yami is one of the brothers. He's been sticking to it all these years, such a talented writer. I really love his lyrics; they are just fabulous. And Natural Black, I love his shit. He's bad. I go for that brother.

SS: If you were to make up a list of artists with whom you'd like to perform, who would be some of the names at the top of that list?

Q: Wow. I know Frankie [Paul] has a lot of controversy around him, of which I don't really give a shit. Frankie has always been one of my biggest, biggest influences. And I've met him, and I actually hung out with him for a day. And we just sang songs and had a good old time. I'd love to do some work with him. I still think Scratch [Lee 'Scratch' Perry], man, he's still got some shit goin' on. You know, I don't wanna say everybody else in the world-Beres [Hammond]. I mean Beres is something else, man. There are just really no other singers out there that are able to do what Beres does in reggae music. Of course, it's the music he puts out, but I think it's just the fact that it's him. You know, everybody's just go so much respect for Beres, where most of the singers in reggae music right now are just basically getting squeezed out. And it's nice to see that Beres is holding on, and he's drawing. I'm a Freddie McGregor fan. I love Freddie, and I respect him very much. I did a couple of big tours with him--Reggae Sunsplash tours--when I was a lot younger, and he really took me under his wing. I really credit him for just giving me a lot of strength and confidence because he's a good brother and just he's got a good level head on his shoulders.

SS: I really like the song "Tierra Indigena" you did with Los Alacranes on "New Day." I was going to ask you for the benefit of non-Spanish speakers, if you could talk a little bit about that song--the message behind it.

Q: Yeah, "Tierra Indigena." It's about me asking my mother and saying, "I have so many questions--tengo preguntas, hay muchas preguntas, Mama. I have many, many questions about what happened. Cuantas memorias--how many memories and how many songs have we lost?" And then it goes, "I want to teach my children about their indigenous culture, Chichimeca culture. The Chichimecas are sort of the ancestral link of the Aztecs. There was a myth that the Aztecs, and it's pretty much well documented that originally the Aztecs came from the Blythe, California area, which is east of Los Angeles in the desert on the way to Arizona. They were known as Chicanos-Chichimecos--which evolved into Chicanos, and they started to make their legendary migration down to Tenochtitlan, which is where Mexico City is now.

The song is about indigenous culture, many struggles, the struggle of African people, the struggles of the indigenous people of the Americas, about being able to interpret history correctly, being able to decipher between what you're being taught--what's being taught for your benefit and what's being taught for your demise. You know, I'm a firm believer that the only way that we're gonna be able to make it so there really is true equal rights and justice is for us to be able to really go back into history, understand the relationships that have caused us to go so far astray from how human beings should be treating each other. You know what I mean? You gotta go back, and you gotta heal, man. You gotta heal first before you can move on.

Documenting history and teaching history correctly affects our youth. Trying to get that across to the status quo of the U.S. is really difficult because, of course, they just want to move on. We're saying, "Well, yeah, we need to go forward, but there are some things we need to fix up. There's some revision that needs to happen before we're gonna be able to go forward and actually function in this society. And it just gets difficult for minorities. It seems like every year we have less representation in universities--Chicanos especially. I know because I'm involved in a lot of Chicano organizations, and I see the statistics. I see the actual numbers. And it just doesn't make sense. You gotta sit there and go, "What the fuck's goin' on? Why are we not achieving? Why do we have so much trouble keeping our young men out of jail? Why are our young women getting pregnant and getting stuck in this situation where they're not able to live out their dreams because they're having to feed and take care of a young mouth?" There has to be a better way than just saying, "Well, fuckin' just deal with it, man. Grow up. You're living in the best country in the fuckin' world. What are you fuckin' crying about?" We've already heard that for so long. So "Tierra Indigena" means indigenous land, reminding people that there was a civilization before.

SS: Where are Los Alacranes from?

Q: They're from San Diego. They're one of the founding members of Chicano Park here in San Diego, and they were just real integral parts in the Chicano movement, the farm workers movement. They were Cesar Chavez' right hand band. When he needed some music, he asked for the Alacranes. So they're folkloric, Chicano, Mexican, folkloric protest type music.

SS: My favorite track from "New Day" is the "The House."

Q: All right! All right!

SS: I just wondered if there was a specific event or a series of events which put you in the frame of mind to write that song--or a lifetime?

Q: Well, you know, it's funny because I didn't really get to finish this album the way I wanted to, man. I mean there were supposed to be a few more songs that were going to tie in the whole message. And actually, the name of this album was supposed to be "The House," believe it or not. I really tried to make the first six songs relate to each other. And I don't wanna go too deep into it because through the lyrics, I let people understand exactly how they're all related. But in my mind I had an image of a house, and I was trying to tell the story of the United States-about the different people coming here and their stories and exactly how we're gonna deal with the fact that we're all very unique. We're not blending into this melting pot that everyone talked about in its inception. And there are a lot of problems and there is a lot of pain and misunderstanding going on--people not understanding themselves. And as Americans, you would think somebody's black and somebody's white in America. We've been here for how many hundreds of years now, and we still cannot seem to have a consensus about what America represents to us. If you can listen, it's really just based on the indigenous', the African-Americans' and the European-Americans' reality. The fact that basically at this point you can say that everybody in the world is working for the house. One way or another we're all hooked up and we're all connected and it doesn't matter whether or not somebody in, say, Nigeria is getting dissed. I mean this world is so small and the more complicated it gets, the more we realize that the fate of all of us is the fate of each one of us. And it's kind of a critique on global capitalism.

SS: It sounds like it's your favorite tune too.

Q: It is, besides my brother's tune, "Vibes Up Strong." I love that tune. I'm so proud of him, man, because he's really coming along. He's been doing just mainly background vocals and rapping. But I've always loved his singing voice so much, and I think that he's just getting going really. I mean he's such a tremendous singer, but he's always had to worry about singing background vocals for me. He hasn't gotten a chance to really bust out. But, yeah man, I really love his tune. Besides his tune, "The House," baby, because it has a little bit of that David Hinds vibe [of Steel Pulse], whom I forgot to mention, was a pretty big influence on me as well.

SS: If Big Mountain had a mission statement, what would it be?

Q: Our mission is to go where no man has gone before. [laughter] I would say our mission is to be controversial enough for people to listen, but loving enough for people not to be afraid of us. We say the things we say sometimes to get a reaction out of people, especially people that disagree with us. We want them to stand and say, "What the fuck are you talking about? This is crazy ass bullshit." But I would never be in a situation where I couldn't talk to anybody about this. I believe we gotta struggle with everybody. If you're gonna be a revolutionary, you gotta be dedicated to struggle. You can't just say, "Fuck you. We're never gonna agree." You have to be ready to struggle with people and to give them the impression that you really are trying to understand where they're coming from. The only way people are gonna change is if you show them that you really do care about what they think, and I do care. I do care about what people think. It hurts me when I see so many reactionaries out there just ready to give up on mankind--people that I consider my brothers and sisters. I take it seriously, brother, that we are all related. I take it seriously that we all come from Africa. I take it real seriously that somewhere back there, we all have a common mother. And she wasn't some Jewish lady that lived in Egypt 5,000 years ago. She was a little African lady that lived in equatorial Africa 80,000 years ago, and we all come from her. We are all cousins. Our DNA is just barely different. We are all one people.

(Toward the end of the conversation, this interviewer contrasts the accessibility of reggae musicians versus the inaccessibility of rock musicians, leading to the following comments.)

Q: You know, that whole scene--I don't know how people deal with it, man. I really give thanks I'm a reggae musician. But we got our problems, and we got our bullshit--the reggae community does.

SS: Yeah, everybody does.

Q: It's got its controversy and shit like that, but boy, I'm so proud of reggae people. I know that I've disappointed a lot of them, but my philosophy is that we all love this music, and this music means a lot to us. When I've been criticized in the past for doing this or doing that, I've never really been offended by it because I'm a reggae fan too. I realize that this music means a lot to a lot of people, and I can't expect them to love it any less than I do or not be protective of it. We're all worried about some asshole using reggae the wrong way, and I'm the same way, man. So it's all love. It's all love.

Steve Serpiente is a Chicago based freelance writer who contributes to various websites dedicated to reggae music. He can be contacted at serpiente97@yahoo.com