Keith Hudson's First LP from 1972

LINER NOTES FOR FURNACE

written by Vincent C. Ellis 

“The well dressed youth with the rude boy stare”

In the liner notes on the back of this album, Keith Hudson describes himself as ‘a Soul Communicator’. Never content to be defined solely by the genre of reggae, always pushing the limits of his musical talent to the extreme, Keith Hudson’s first LP from 1972 ,“Furnace”, is finally re-released by Secret Records on it’s 40th anniversary. It represents Keith Hudson at one of his most creative and formative periods. Three years earlier, Keith recorded his first record with Ken Boothe, the hit “Old Fashioned Way” on his Inbidimts label. Other hits followed, “Run Run” by Delroy Wilson and “Hurt My Baby” by John Holt. The Inbidimts label became Imbidimts, and more artists and tunes followed, including the DJ wave of U Roy, Philip Samual, Dennis Alcapone and the ubiquitous U Roy Jr. The mysterious label titles of Imbidimts and it’s predecessor Inbidimts are Jamaican patois for Embedment, a dental term meaning foundation. Keith was a dental technician prior to becoming a record producer and owned his own dental lab where he made and fitted dentures.

1972, the tenth anniversary of Jamaica’s independence, was a pivotal year for Keith Hudson. Having started in the studio on those earlier tracks knocking heads with the mature and no nonsense Glen Adams and other veteran session players, whom he dubbed with a bit of sarcasm as ‘The Old Ones’, then buying time with some borrowed rhythms from a producer known only by his initials as CB, Keith struck up an alliance with the youthful and energetic Soul Syndicate band led by George “Fully” Fullwood on bass. With his best friend Tony Chin on rhythm guitar, Carlton “Santa” Davis on drums and Earl “Chinna” Smith on lead guitar, the group had made a name for themselves among the new wave of producers looking for a fresh sound to ‘spark tings up’ in the studio. At first, things looked shaky for the boys and Keith. When they first met to discuss business in the backyard of Lester (Daddy) Fullwood’s house in the Greenwich Farm section of town, Keith’s new co-producer and appointed heavy Derrick “Stamma” Hobson tried to strong arm young Santa and Tony into recording some tunes with them. As Fully told me: “Stamma start to get tough with young Santa, so I run round back with my machete and Keith see me and him start to laugh and say let’s talk. So we reason with him and he tell me how much he admire our band and want to record with us and from there the relationship just start up”. Fully always admired the way Keith looked, very well dressed as he traveled around town delivering records. When he first saw the album cover last year after so many years when he visited with me, he did a double take when seeing the back cover. “Hmmm”, he said, as he gazed at Keith’s picture, “that rude boy stare that could stop you in your tracks”.

The collaboration proved fruitful as 1972 saw Keith Hudson having some of his biggest hits backed by Soul Syndicate, including “S90 Skank” by Big Youth, “The Hudson Affair” by Dennis Alcapone, “Fat Baby” by Augustus Pablo and “Riot” featuring Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore on trumpet. It was also the year Keith Hudson started to push himself more as a vocalist with songs like “Boost It Up”, “Crying In the Chapel”, and “True True To My Heart”. Soul Syndicate seemed to truly understand what Keith was trying to accomplish with his rhythms, Fully’s slightly uptempo bass lines and Santa’s shifting drum patterns combined with the interweaving guitar complement of Tony Chin and Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith captured a mood and sense of timing missing from some of Keith’s earlier rocksteady influenced work. Earl ‘Chinna’ Smith remembers: “Nothing else sounded like that, and that what I love about him as a producer, unique, like Scratch Perry but somewhere else, he’s dramatic, and when one is dramatic, not just his music, if you ever see him, the way him walk and move, a totally different approach from everyone else”.

For his first album, Keith spared no expense as far as graphics were concerned, and Furnace is a cornucopia of ideas both visual and aural. Similar in style to two Wailers album covers from 1971, “The Best of The Wailers” on the Beverley’s label which uses a huge W to frame Bob, Peter and Bunny, and Lee Perry’s Upsetter release of “Soul Revolution Part II”, which features Bob and the gang in military garb in various blocks around the cover, Keith takes his design a step further. Although called “Furnace”, the album’s title design is more complex than that, forming a word and symbol grid that says “Yes My Bredren, Yes My Companion, (we are together in the) Furnace”. Note the shape of the Y in the cover design for Y as in Yes. If you look on the back cover, the coda continues as next to IMBIDIMTS in the left corner is K4H6 Record, referring to the date Keith was born, 1946.

The title “Furnace” is derived from the Biblical story of the three youths saved by divine intervention from the Babylonian execution of being burned alive in a fiery furnace. For not bowing down to the golden idol, King Nebuchadnezzar had Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego thrown into the fire. They emerged unscathed as four, joined by an angel of God. In his somewhat tortured liner notes, referencing the biblical story and crediting the musicians involved, Keith exclaims “He lives - all songs written by Hudson, voice and arrangement also. Music by Soul Syndicate. Val Bennett did the brass & Famble Man on base - They are the main persons in the Furnace”. Val Bennett was the saxophone player on the title track of “Furnace”, and Family Man Barrett played bass on a couple of tracks that were done prior to the Soul Syndicate, as part of an incarnation of the Hippy Boys that included the Barrett brothers, who would later work with Keith on the classic “Pick A Dub” album. Musically, Keith wanted the record to be a summation of his work as a producer and singer up to that point, and as such it’s a strong compilation mixing three instrumentals and one dub track by Soul Syndicate with a DJ track by U Roy Jr., four vocal tracks by Hudson himself, the aforementioned title track “Furnace” and another early instrumental called “Romper Room”, and the very moving and quite unexpected vocal of “Bad Harvest” by Dennis Alcapone.  

The young Keith Hudson made the mistake of having the album cover printed before the record was finalized, and so the original jacket had several tunes on it that were not on the actual album. Keith corrected this mistake by placing a white sticker on all the records with new titles, but the confusion continued as three of the record label tracks are given different titles than those on the jacket. Keith couldn’t remove the white labels to add new ones without damaging the sleeves, and that is how the album went out, but fortunately this Secret Records release finally puts things in their proper order. 

Jamaican artists were very influenced by american soul music and Keith had a particular fondness for Al Green. Al Green would incorporate his emotional being into the work, adding drawls and sighs, moans and groans into a song to create his ‘soul’ persona. As time went by, Keith adopted this style of ‘riffing’ and made it his own. In place of the sly catcalls and hesitations one would find on an Al Green tune like “Let’s Stay Together”, Keith would express a raw emotional edge closer to a Tom Waits than Al Green on covers such as “Never Get To Heaven” by Burt Bacharach and Al Green’s own “God Is Standing By” on his third album “Class & Subject”. The four vocal tracks herein are somewhat restrained compared to later works, but one can hear the influence on “Don’t Act So”, Keith’s cautionary turn the tables notice to a cheating woman.

Keith Hudson was a man full of ideas, ideas that often exceeded his level of education. The liner notes, which I referred to earlier as torturous, show an artist at work, trying to communicate his passion for music. Keith was well aware of his deficiency with words, and would spend hours pouring through the dictionary to discover items of interest. This fascination with words and higher learning shows in his choice of future titles like “Anode”, “Gamma Ray”, “Class and Subject” and “Write Me Your Resume”. This album was Keith’s first foray into the world of long play records but it would not be his last. With each successive record, Keith would explore new musical terrain including the first existential reggae album, the remarkable “Flesh Of My Skin, Blood Of My Blood”, and the epic “Rasta Communication”, which musically conveyed in a very personal way his love of Rastafari. He would also confound the critics who misunderstood his need to delve into pop, funk, disco, and even rock with outings like the much-maligned “Too Expensive” and the often overlooked “Steaming Jungle”. Keith Hudson was a transformative artist whose work was not fully appreciated in his lifetime. As he told Black Echoes in 1976, “These people (critics) you can’t satisfy them and I’m not planning on satisfying anyone. Like I know that the work I’m here to do I got to do, and when it’s the right time I’ll be doing all the things I got to do. I don’t mind what they want to write, the writer’s pencil is my reincarnation, you understand”.

Side One starts off with the title track followed by three Soul Syndicate tunes, including the hit ‘Riot’ and it’s dub companion, and ending with two tracks about unity and brotherhood.

FURNACE

The album opens with Val Bennett on saxophone over an instrumental version of the ‘Bumball’ rhythm first used by producer Derrick Morgan for a Lloyd and Devon tune called ‘Red Bumball’. This LP version would be Keith Hudson’s fourth cut of the rhythm. He first used it on a 1970 Audley Rollen track called ‘Oh My Darling’ on the Stamma label, followed with a DJ cut by Dennis Alcapone called ‘Ball of Confusion’ on the Inbidimts label, and then a Rebind release called ‘Skillball’ by U Roy Jr. The album version was also released in the UK in 1972 on the Koos Records label as ‘Koos At The Control’ without artist credit.

TYE TYE

This instrumental track by Soul Syndicate was adapted from the Heptones ‘Why Did You Leave Me to Cry’ done for Studio One Records producer Coxsone Dodd. This would become one of Keith’s favorite rhythms, as he recorded eight cuts to it, including Dennis Alcapone’s ‘Egg Cup’, Keith’s own vocal ‘Boost It Up’ and I Roy’s ‘Hot Stuff’. The album version title is from the nickname given to Keith’s son Rickey, seven years old at the time. He was called Tye Tye after a famous brand of weed from Thailand.

RIOT 

In 1972, Keith had the Soul Syndicate cut this dynamic cover version of ‘Riot’ by Hugh Masekela. Featuring Johnny ‘Dizzy’ Moore on trumpet, this record went on to become one of Hudson’s all time best sellers. Keith originally didn’t have this record on the album, as it wasn’t recorded when he first planned the LP and so isn’t listed on the original back cover. Keith put it on the record, followed by it’s dub version as the next track. He would also do a version of it on the ‘Entering The Dragon’ LP as ‘Man From Shooters Hill’ and did a wicked cut of it with Bongo Herman called ‘Bongo Riot’. It would also be the backing track for ‘The Hudson Affair’ by U Roy. One of Keith’s greatest gifts as a producer was knowing how to get the most mileage out of a particular rhythm that proved popular with the public.

RIOT VERSION

A dub version of ‘Riot’ without the trumpet of ‘Dizzy’ Moore, where one can appreciate the ‘Now Sound’ of Soul Syndicate.

TRIBAL WAR

‘So you want to build a Tribal War (wall?), youth against youth...

we would be the man of tomorrow, there will be no sorrow’

Adapted from Junior Byles ‘Beat Down Babylon’ by Junior Byles, a Lee Perry production from the same year, this one-off DJ version by U Roy Jr is sometimes called ‘Freedom Train’ because of the line “Get on the Freedom Train my brothers and sisters, this train never return, straight on to Zion” . But this is only because it first appears on an Imbidimts blank label copy, Keith titles it ‘Tribal War’ on the album, as does the UK Koos Records release also in 1972. Interesting as the word ‘war’ appears to be ‘wall’ when listening to it on the record. 

DON’T START IT UP

‘Don’t start it up...no, no, no, don’t start it up...

let peace abide, in your mind...’

One of Keith’s greatest tunes, this plea for peace among his fellow bredren with a call to ‘rally round the red, gold, and green’ follows on nicely from the previous song’s theme of unity and freedom. This is the second time Keith voiced over this rhythm, the first time a year earlier with a different tune called ‘Popular’, a song about a girl who wants to be popular at her own expense. This is one of the famous borrowed rhythms Keith acquired in 1970, in the sense that he acquired and used existing backing tracks from a Rocksteady era producer known only by his initials CB. This particular rhythm can be traced to a rare UK Pama record by The Termites called ‘Show Me the Way’. 

Side two starts off with two songs about love, both pro and con. A bit out of place on an album rich in righteousness, but fascinating for their lyrical content. These are followed by an uncredited instrumental, another Soul Syndicate track and two Gospel themed vocal tracks, the first by Dennis Alcapone, the last by Keith Hudson. 

DON’T ACT SO

‘You have found someone new...

and I have found someone who love me much more than you,

likewise...don’t act so, don’t act so’

Keith originally recorded Dennis Alcapone doing “Out Of This World” on this rhythm in 1970 over an unknown vocal on the Rebind label. He recorded a new version of the track with Soul Syndicate for the album. It’s Keith singing to a woman who is cheating on him, and has a nice sense of humor about it as he tells her he has found someone new as well. A very entertaining tune that prefigures several songs to come on the theme of a difficult woman.

I HAVE A FAITH

‘I have a faith...can remove any mountain, if you want me to,

...all I want is you... I can turn your little mind, I can make you love me...

yes I can, yes I can’

This song is the first taste we get of Keith’s simmering sexuality and his supreme confidence with women. Ras Charles Jones, who sang back-up for Keith in the early eighties told me in an interview: “He had that look that was piercing. And, he would get women to look down. And you know, they didn’t want to look at him in his face. He used to say ... ‘you can have anyone of them when they can’t look at you in the eye’.  I said well maybe for you, doesn’t work that way for me.”  

ROMPER ROOM

This instrumental is the most unusual track on the album in that it is credited on the label as unknown. Keith first used this backing track on two Dennis Alcapone toasts in 1970 and 1971 called ‘Zaka Za-Za’ and ‘Cheesy’. I credit it in my discography as the ‘Zaka Za-Za’ rhythm, as this was the earliest incarnation of it by Hudson, but I am not sure if the unknown credit refers to the writer or the artist, as Keith usually gives proper credit to either the artist or the writer on the track. But I wonder when and where this tune was first recorded, perhaps it was another borrowed rhythm. 

I.D. PARADE

This lively Soul Syndicate instrumental was originally done by the Viceroys as ‘Ya Ho’ for Studio One Records. Keith also did a vocal version of it in 1972 with Bunny Gale called ‘In The Burning Sun’. The shortened title stands for Independence Day Parade.

BAD HARVEST

‘Than my father would go down to the field, and he’d come up and say... dear mother, 

the harvest is not right, and there is no fish in the river...dear God, hear my prayer’

This first person ballad by Dennis Alcapone about the effects of a bad harvest on a family of farmers is the highlight of the album. He told me: “That song is about my youth in Clarendon. My father was a farmer and as a youth I would farm a little too and I would sell a bit of tomato and cucumber to make a shilling or two for money. That was how things used to be, you had good crops and bad crops, good seasons and bad.” The sweet backing vocals on this song were sung by Audley Rollen. The track was first released as an Inbidimts single in 1971.

CLOSER WALK

‘Father keep me from all wrong...I’ll be satisfied in glory, as I walk dear God, close to thee..’

The album closes with Keith’s heartfelt rendition of a famous gospel song written sometime in the 1920‘s called “Just A Closer Walk With Thee” that was covered by several notable artists including Louis Armstrong and Patsy Cline. It was also released as a blank in Jamaica in 1971 and in the UK on the Lord Koos label in 1972.

UPDATE ON MY ORIGINAL LINER NOTES

When I first wrote these liner notes in 2012, I was still in the process of interviewing and finding out more information about Keith Hudson, a process that never ends. I discovered there is an additional, more topical, inspiration for the album’s title. In a 2018 interview with Paul Khouri, the son of Ken Khouri, who owned Federal Records, he told me there was a fire at Federal Records, believed to be arson, that took place sometime around 1970. The fire destroyed the recording studio but the master tapes room was saved, and it took nearly a year to rebuild the recording studio. He doesn’t remember the date exactly, and I could not find a reference for the fire in the news in The Daily Gleaner archives. However, the Roots Knotty Roots database shows the following output for Federal during the years in question: 1968 - 450,1969 - 500, 1970 - 200, 1971 - 300, 1972 - 700. The output indicates the fire happened sometime in mid 1970 and the studio was back on track sometime in mid 1971, given the numbers, as 1968 and 1969 were on the rise, and there was a dip in 1970 and 1971, then a big bounce in 1972. 

Keith Hudson started recorded at Dynamic Studios in 1969, doing 12 tracks. He first used Federal in 1970, doing 9 tracks at Federal and 6 at Dynamic. He recorded no tracks at Federal in 1971, returning to Dynamic for 13 tracks. In 1972, his busiest year, he returned to Federal for 22 tracks, and the recording of his first LP ‘Furnace’. He also recorded 27 tracks at Dynamic Studios. The absence of any recording at Federal in 1971, after recording several tracks there in 1970, lends credence to the fire taking place in 1970, with the studio out of commission for most of 1971. It also makes me wonder if the recording of the album at Federal and the title of the album are a veiled reference to the fire, and the fact that all of his masters survived the hot furnace that was Federal Records during the blaze. I hope to find a more direct reference, but this theory corresponds to the mixture of serendipity and creativity I have come to see in Keith Hudson’s work.