Toots Hibbert

Roger Steffens: Reggae’s Best Friend

By Harvey Kubernik

Echo Park, California-based Roger Steffens is the curator of the world's largest collection of Wailers memorabilia and recordings. He is also chairman of the Grammy reggae committee since 1985 and the co-author of Bob Marley: Spirit Dancer, a noted DJ, music historian, rock & roll scholar and actor, with voice-over credits in many movies, including Forrest Gump, Wag The Dog and The American President.

Steffens is the founding editor of North America's leading reggae/world beat magazine, The Beat, and has hosted hundreds of local, national and international radio and television programs focused on Reggae.

"If Bob Marley is Jesus in these times, then Roger Steffens is Peter," offers Carlos Santana. In January of 2009 several teachers from the Berklee College of Music and Steffens founded the Reggae School in Kapa'a, Kauai. His first session had a full complement of 15 students from different parts of the world, and was considered a huge, groundbreaking success. Since the beginning of 2009, Steffens has been working with Jonathan Demme as the music consultant to his major Hollywood documentary feature film, Marley, of which Ziggy Marley is the executive producer. In late 2007, Roger Steffens and Peter Simon assembled, co-wrote and compiled the mind-bending Roger Steffens and Peter Simon's Reggae Scrapbook which sold out and is now available in a second printing in 2009 by Insight Editions, an imprint of Palace Press international. Foreword is by Reggae icon Toots Hibbert and introduction by noted author Stephen Davis.

"Toots wrote the foreword because he is one of a handful of founding veterans, not just still touring but touring at his top peak form," Steffens mentions. "He is an old friend of both Peter and I. Toots and myself recently did an evening together at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame where he was treated like rock star royalty."   

The Reggae Scrapbook received Forward magazine's Silver Award for Best Music Book of 2007, presented at the National Book Expo in June of 2008 in L.A.

For more information on Reggae Scrapbook please visit www.insighteditions.com

The volume presented in chronological order, displays sidebar features on historic figures, styles, and events. Steffens brings in-depth interviews with such reggae legends as Peter Tosh, Jimmy Cliff, Lee Perry and Toots Hibbert.

Award-winning photographer Peter Simon presents evocative images, from Reggae's rough and raw beginnings to the latest festivals.

Reggae and its close relations ska, rock steady, dj, club, dancehall, ragamuffin are collected in this one-of-a kind portfolio. The surf and turf-driven Reggae Scrapbook spotlights an eye-catching four page gatefold timeline of Bob Marley's whole career and a plethora of artifacts, including Exodus period items, rare photos, off beat graphics, including the UPI bulletin of the assassination of Peter Tosh, and the bulletin of his killer's conviction, alongside an anti-apartheid benefit Peter did in Holland, a ticket to that benefit and a backstage pass in the form of Peter's sunglasses to a concert in Paris. It's also got choice reproductions and ticket stubs, photos, post cards, stickers, seven-inch singles, album covers, and autographed play lists.

"You see Peter's whimsy, you see him bare-chested on a unicycle with a big spliff lookin' like he's in heaven," muses Steffens. "You see Peter hangin' out with Bunny Wailer in a front seat of a car. You get a different image of Bunny from this book because we include the clipping from a dance hall concert where he was ‘bottled off' the stage and the editorial in a major Jamaican newspaper a few days later commented what happened that night. There's a lot of different faces of the music that is represented."     

Reggae Scrapbook allows the viewer to experience music and culture through a CD of rare and previously unreleased tracks and by pouring over a mesmerizing treasure trove of artifacts from Steffens' collection, that includes more than 30,000 photographs, 800 T-shirts, 3,000 buttons, 10,000 posters and fliers, and 11,000 records, tapes and CD's. 

Steffens had been in serious negotiations with the country of Jamaica to house his fabled archives in a museum there. "Because Jamaica would not agree to keep my reggae archives intact, the deal fell apart that I had been working on with them for the previous seven years to transfer my collection there to become the basis of a 
proposed National Music of Jamaican Music," explains Steffens. "Since then, several supporters and I have founded a non-profit organization, the Music Preservation Project, to fund the digitization of my collection, and 
other endangered music archives, in conjunction with various divisions of the University of Southern California. Our Honorary Board of Advisors includes film directors Oliver Stone, Jonathan Demme and Ron Shelton, Simpsons' creator Matt Groening, Doors' drummer John Densmore, South African master musician Vusi Mahlasela, and several Silicon Valley heavyweights."

"It's a book that is meant to appeal to everyone from the novice to the expert. There is something in the book that they will get and relate to. And, it's dense with stuff so that you can go through it 20 times and really not see everything," says Steffens.

"We wanted it to be mind-boggling. The best of Peter Simon's 30 years of reggae photos, and we wanted it to include some of the oddest and most eye-catching  memorabilia in my archives. We worked with the book company who came to the archives, they looked at Peter's photos and then we all picked out the ‘must-haves' for inclusion. It is the history of Jamaican music. We whittled the subject matter down to six basic chapters, sub headings for the different eras, and the prime artists that Peter had photographs. Then there were things that were photographed from my archives to support two pages on this artist, or four pages on another." 

The reggae personalities portrayed and displayed in the groovy print volume are vibrant in color and in black and white photos. "Everybody in Jamaica is a star. They even call each other star," Steffens laughs. "The visuals are cinematic. You get to see how things changed from the Sixties to the 21st century. How their own sense of themselves developed as the world grew to accept Jamaican culture and inspiration from Rastafari. We pay a lot of proper attention to Rastafari and its implicit order to utilize the herb for the healing of the nation.  We wanted to give a fair play to all the different eras of the music. Shavoovie, Rock Steady, Rastafari, Roots Rock Reggae, sound systems, the Marley kids."

"Ska, which still has implications today. The Skatalites are featured. They were the founders. They created the music and were the best exponents. You'll hear it in the birth of reggae and then Rock Steady. The horns and the harmony forces coming into the deep consciousness starting to enter into the pop lyrics. We've got a lot of internationalized stuff in the book. The wonderful dancehall section was written by a young woman, Molli Fire, herself, a writer, DJ, and performer. She made a real huge contribution to the book because Peter and I really don't know a lot about dancehall," acknowledges Roger.         

"The book shows you our relationship to the music of Jamaica. This is a scrapbook. This isn't an encyclopedia, or meant to be a guide to the world of reggae. This is a very peculiar and personalized look from two early white pioneers in America studying the culture and how it allowed us to get into its very soul, and how our lives were transformed by that. It's mainly anecdotes. I wrote 30,000 words in a week. (sighs). It's basically stories and encounters with the greats. It involves some of the columns of the last 25 years I've written for The Beat, it involves interviews from my old radio and television shows."

"The book is designed to make you smile," says Steffens, a man who has devoted a large portion of his life to reggae music. "It's supposed to make you feel like you've just walked into my house. Overwhelmed!  That's what we're trying to do with this book."