Joe Gibbs x Eroll Thompson

Folks that would wind up producing some of  the legitimately classic slabs of reggae and dub during JA music’s golden age at one time or another worked as electricians or as engineers. From the knob twittering and soldering together of wires and more wires apparently came some sort of insight into how to work out good music. Occasionally these electrically inclined folks weren’t granted enough renown – Errol Thompson, for instance, is better known for his middling singing than the production work that he put in along side Joe Gibbs.

But regardless of whose known for what, the tandem of Gibbs and Thompson were able to craft some of the deepest and most sensible – in contrast to the work of Lee Perry and the Scientist – dubs to be recorded during the latter portion of the ‘70s.

Gibbs is a name that’s better known to aficionados than the public. And while his work could be construed to be as seismic when examined alongside the players he worked with, Perry and other names usually dominate the discussion of dub.

That being said, Gibbs and Thompson put in time on a quartet of dub recordings during the middle part of the ‘70s which were released as the African Dub All-Mighty. The disparate volumes of the series were all stripped down drum and base numbers with snatches of Thompson’s eclectic sound effects littering the mix. On occasion, the offerings are criticized for being a bit obtuse even as no one seems to complain about the cow noises included on Perry’s production of the first Congos’ album. Either way, the forty plus tracks that comprise the Gibbs and Thompson collaboration are only a portion of the duo’s output.

Enlisting many of JA’s top tier performers, the production team would go back into the studio for sporadic sessions as Gibbs grew to be an in-demand personage. Of course some of the work that the duo sussed out was released on singles and the like with contributions coming from Tommy McCook, Sly & Robbie, Bingy Bunny and the like.

With such a large backlog of hits and misses, a retrospective compilation was warranted. And in 2002 the Pressure Sounds imprint cobbled together eighteen tracks in order to release No Bones For the Dogs (Dubs From 1974-79).

A great deal of the album is given over to tunes that folks should recognize from some previous interpretation of the song – “Roots Kunta Kintye” for example. But even on the tracks that people can whistle the melody to, Thompson was able to toss in enough found sound as to render an old track new again. The aforementioned track, in addition to its healthful dose of hand drumming, finds itself submerged beneath some revving car engines and the subsequent peel out.

Given the state of dub by 1974, there’s nothing that Gibbs and Thompson came up with that hadn’t been recorded before. But that doesn’t mean that the disc is anything less than a skankable piece of dub perfection. There’s a reason that all of these works survived for so long in various analog forms. Find out why.