At this point, there are an exhaustive amount of dub reggae reissues on the market, though 1982’s Dubbing in the Backyard has a bit more historical significance. Featuring three titans of the form—producer Bunny “Striker” Lee, engineer Osbourne “King Tubby” Ruddock, and mixer Lloyd “Prince Jammy” James—the trio had worked on numerous tracks throughout the 1970s. But soon after these sessions, Tubby would learn that his right hand man Jammy was using the famed studio to cut dubplates for other clients on the sly, and overnight he changed the locks on his doors. In 1989, Tubby would be murdered outside his home. This obscure album was one of the last occasions their names would all appear on the same sleeve.
Just don’t let the cover image of three gents in repose on a front lawn fool you. The photo was taken in England, not in Jamaica. And it doesn’t correspond to the disc’s main men, as only Bunny Lee appears in the photo, elbow on his briefcase. While the dubs were made at Tubbys studio, Jammy is the one turning the knobs. And rather than Lee’s house band the Aggrovators, most of the instrumentals here were laid down by the High Times Band, who had just a bit of overlap with the Aggrovators. But the photo is truthful in some way, in that this album indeed makes for ideal outdoor, sunstruck listening; there’s a halcyon sweetness to the 10 mellow yet sneaky grooves that comprise this set.
Three of the tracks are dubs from the corresponding ’82 Delroy Wilson album Go Away Dream (which the Pressure Sounds label includes as part of a two-disc set, though both albums are available separately on vinyl and digitally). And there are also dubs of tracks from the likes of Cornell Campbell, Jackie Edwards, and Johnny Clarke. Jammy keeps the rhythms crisp, striking the perfect balance between spaciness and proximity in the kit on “Adventure”; the snares crack an inch from your nose and then careen outwards towards deep space. The reverb and delay that opens “Hot Weather” piles up like a rockslide before Jammy spaces everything out to a more languid pace.
For most of the set, the instrumentals don’t flash their dub effects, and the sudden turns into abstraction are all the more thrilling for of it. Nod along to the loping pulse of “Relaxing Mood” and you might notice, nearly three minutes in, that strange bloops and whirrs spring around the track now. The tiny echo of keys at the start of “Natural Glow” suggests crickets (though with a vinyl transfer, there’s a fair amount of surface noise to be heard on the quieter parts here) before the bass gets to rumbling and a toy whistle whirls in the upper register. An organ lick ripples outwards, making the track feel like it might just drift away from the surface of the earth. “Hideaway” dribbles hand drum, plinky piano, and a gliding guitar figure across the rhythm, Jammy deftly yanking open chasms of space via the high pass filter of the board. As the notes tell it, soon after Tubby locked Jammy out, that high pass filter on Tubby’s board broke down and certain effects were never possible again.
In fact, this iteration of dub would soon vanish completely. Jammy might have been locked out of Tubby’s studio, but he soon set up shop for himself. Thanks to a demo presented to him by high tenor vocalist Wayne Smith, plunked out on a Casiotone MT40 keyboard, Jammy slowed the cheap digital sound down to a more reggae-friendly pace. The track they ultimately released in 1985, “Under Mi Sleng Teng,” dropped like an atomic bomb, introducing the era of digital dancehall in Jamaica. Nearly overnight, it rendered dub reggae as fashioned by a real band obsolete. Much as the title suggests, Dubbing in the Backyard is a perfect dub showcase for soundtracking those temporal summer afternoons, before the season irrevocably shifts.
