Toots & The Maytals Jimmy Cliff

Funky Kingston. Island

Follow My Mind. Warner Bros.

    More than anyone else Jimmy Cliff is responsible for reggae music's penetration in this country. This is mostly due to the great film he wrote, starred, and sang in, The Harder They Come, about the hard, often corrupt life in the big city of Kingston in Jamaica and one persons fight to "make it." After the film went over Jimmy was no  longer the Struggling Man he portrayed on screen.

 It's pretty apparent that success has, indeed, spoiled Jimmy Cliff. Follow My Mind is well-recorded, slick. and pretty empty. Jimmy continues to write songs about his hardship and pain but it just doesn't work.

    Toots and the Maytals, on the other hand, are still a cult taste. Funky Kingston, their first  American album release, is a kind of best of the albums they've recorded in Jamaica and England. It is throughly delightful and bursting with the rawness and  humor of a great band that has yet to make it, They blast right into each and every time like avenging heroes. Toots has a magnificently expressive voice that's remarkably reminiscent of Otis Redding. The uncredited drummer owes a lot of his stuff to Motown's "Pistol" Allen (dig especially opening figure of the title cut).