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OSSIE ALL-STARS: “LEGGO DUB”

I had just finished up a piece I wrote in Dynamite Hemorrhage #2 that included my purported “Top 10” Jamaican 70s dub platters of all time when I heard “Leggo Dub”, like, the same day. If I’m not buying someone I already know & love, I’ll tend to buy 70s dub based on how ridiculously obscure or cut-rate the sleeve looks. There is no shortage of wild and wacked-out finds to be sourced that way, this CD from OSSIE ALL-STARS included. It has a cartoon high-top basketball shoe on it, the words “Leggo Dub” and little else.

Now, having done a little research beforehand, I knew that “Ossie” was Ossie Hibbert, a producer and keyboard player who mined his trade in the two great dub backing bands of the day, The Aggrovators and the Revolutionaries. The latter supply all the drop-out rhythm on this one. So do “Ossie’s All-Stars” = “The Revolutionaries” in this case? I guess! Another one of 70s dub’s great mysteries. I bring up that Top 10 list I made because a case could easily be made for this thing to be on it. It’s as foundationally great as The Revolutionaries’ “Earthquake Dub”, and that’s pretty goddamn great.

The original 10 tracks from the 1978 LP are here (an LP conceived as a “dub LP” from the get-go), along with six 45rpm b-sides also cooked up by Ossie and his teams (not always the Revolutionaries). Most are taken from backing tracks on a Gregory Isaccs LP that Hibbert had a hand in. The original instrumental ten are beautifully sparse and layered, with lots of popping and cracking and super-distorted echo at the end of most riffs. He gets a little too wacky in parts, adding in ringing telephones, babies crying, cars traveling through tunnels and that omnipresent “boooooing” sound effect that Jamaican dubsters loved so much around this time. I posit that Mikey Dread mined this sort of tomfoolery far better, but it does add a bit of bonus flair here.

There are some stunning examples of the form across this one, as in the title track that I’ve posted here. The 6 extra tracks on the CD take a different approach, letting in some vocal snippets vs. the pure croaking & droning instrumental tracks from the original LP. An excellent find that I’m gonna add to my Dub Top 11.

#Ossie's All-Stars #Ossie Hibbert #Leggo Dub #Revolutionaries #dub