“I call it the earth sound,” chuckles Aston “Family Man” Barrett warmly as he describes what drew him to the bass nearly 40 years ago. Back then he was a young bike mechanic and welder scratching out a living in Kingston, Jamaica. “Lloyd Brevett was one of my favorite bass players from Jamaica, and he played upright bass. I always tried to grab that sound, even when I am playing the electric bass. I decided to find out what key the earth tunes into. After a while, I realized the whole planet is tuned to Eb,” laughs Barrett. “When you play in that key, it makes you come to the center of the fretboard—you get a nice feel there for sure.”
Even Barrett’s voice resonates with an earthen timbre. His smooth baritone sounds just as round and full, one can imagine, as the vintage Fender Jazz he first plugged in with Bob Marley & the Wailers in 1971, right at the moment when Jamaican reggae was poised to go outernational. Marley gradually became the undisputed king—the scion of the Lion of Judah, as his loyal Rastafarian brethren might describe him—of the reggae style, swagger, and mentality. Meanwhile Family Man, along with his brother Carlton “Carly” Barrett on drums, helped to shape the Wailers’ modern sound. With an easy-handed and uncannily melodic approach to the instrument that reflects his love of upright bass as well as his ear for vocal harmonies, Family Man embodies the spirit and personality of reggae bass, as well as its staying power.
“I’ve been on the road from 1969 until 2007,” Barrett observes almost matter-of-factly; naturally, when I spoke to him, Family Man was in the middle of a yet another tour with the latest incarnation of the Wailers—a band that has continued to perform through all manner of adversity, including Marley’s death from cancer in 1981 and Carly Barrett’s murder in 1987. The current road trip will take “Fams” to Europe and back to the U.S. before summer’s end. “I’ve played before Bob, with Bob, and after Bob,” he says, “and along the way I create a whole new concept of bass playing. That’s just my thing. That’s my destiny.”
Original Rockers
That destiny has its roots in Jamaica’s ska and rocksteady era—a time, in the mid 1960s, when the Supersonics’ Jackie Jackson, the Skatalites’ Lloyd Brevett, and the Heptones’ Leroy Sibbles were among the island’s bass rulers. Even so, for Family Man (a nickname he chose for himself as a youngster to signify his intent to “keep everyone in the band together”), the bass was not necessarily his first point of entry into becoming a musician. “I loved singing,” he says, citing the classic soul of James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and Curtis Mayfield that drifted over from the U.S. to Jamaican radio, “but I never practiced to be a professional when it come to my vocals. When I’m playing the bass, it’s like I’m singing. I compose a melodic line and see myself like I’m singing baritone. And when I decide to listen deep into the music—to all the different sections and instruments playing—I realized that the bass is the backbone, and the drum is the heartbeat of the music. So in our early years, my younger brother Carlton took onto himself the drums, and I took on the bass and decide I’m gonna construct it much better the other way. So I first make my own bass.”
It wasn’t as if Fams had a choice. Musical instruments weren’t cheap or easy to come by in the hardscrabble streets of Kingston. Like so many others with a creative urge, but without the materials to express it, the two brothers relied on their ingenuity: Family Man fashioned a makeshift upright bass out of a length of 2-by-4, a cut piece of plywood, and a curtain rod (with an old wooden ashtray for the bridge), while Carly built a drum kit out of different-size paint tins.
“We begin to practice drum and bass,” Family Man remembers, “what we call dub. When I rest my bass on the floor, I get that bass effect—boom, boom, boom, you know? That’s where I begin to create a new concept of time and melody.” They didn’t know it then, but the Barrett brothers were on their way to becoming one of the premier rhythm sections in reggae history.
Upsetting The Status Quo
When Family Man finally got his hands on a Hofner 500/1 “Beatle” bass [see Changing Hands, below], he and his brother formed their first band, the Hippy Boys, with singer Max Romeo. It wasn’t long before other groups and producers came calling. Fams’ very first recording as a session bassist was for one of Bunny “Striker” Lee’s groups, the Uniques, on a song called “Watch This Sound”—a cover of Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth,” which had been a hit the year before in 1967. With a sinewy, infectious bass line that seemed to leap out of the mix, the song attracted the attention of an up-and-coming producer named Lee “Scratch” Perry.
“Lee Perry get a hold of me by hearing of my new concept of bass playing,” Family Man says proudly. “He was turning into a record producer, leaving from the old stable of Coxsone Dodd at Studio One. The first thing we actually did together was the drum-and-bass track called ‘Clint Eastwood,’ and that’s where dub was born. It was the first dub release not only in Jamaica but globally.”
The “new concept” that had attracted Perry’s attention was essentially the earliest example of a true reggae bass style—a melodic line that was locked into the downbeat. “I was improvising from the rocksteady feel,” Fams explains, “with a little tempo from the rocksteady and slowing it down from the ska—so the rhythm is in between the lines.”
As for what became known as the “dub style,” the echo-drenched, almost psychedelic mode of mixing invented by Perry and fellow producer King Tubby, it wouldn’t emerge until 1972—but “Clint Eastwood” is notable for Perry’s reverberating vocal intro and a stripped-down melodic arrangement driven entirely by the bass, much as later dub mixes would be. The track cemented the Barrett brothers’ relationship with Perry, who made them a permanent part of his house band, the Upsetters. In late 1969, he took the Upsetters and another group, the Pioneers, with him for a tour of England. It was Family Man’s first time outside his native digs and into the spotlight.
Enter The Wailers
By this time, a local singer who was looking to update his sound turned up on Perry’s doorstep. “When Bob [Marley] and Scratch meet,” Family Man recalls, “I would say it was a mental, spiritual, and physical connection. And the first track we do with the Wailers—with Bob, Bunny [Livingston], Peter [Tosh], and the Upsetters—was called ‘My Cup.’ It was the first time the Wailers get a real updated rhythm. It highlight them differently when everybody hear that beat.”
Again, the bass leaps out of the mix on “My Cup,” with Fams playing a buoyant, two-fingered stroke in the higher registers that offers a steady, insistent counterpoint to Marley’s soaring lead vocal. The chemistry between the Upsetters and the Wailers was so immediate, in fact, that the Barrett brothers decided to leave Perry’s stable and join the Wailers full time—a turn of events that rankled Perry for years afterward.
The move, of course, proved to be life-changing. The Wailers were soon signed by Chris Blackwell to Island Records, and in late 1972 they began recording Catch a Fire, quickly followed in mid 1973 by Burnin’. In fall ’73, the Wailers embarked on an American tour that paired them for nearly 20 dates with Sly & the Family Stone (earlier that summer, they had opened for Bruce Springsteen on a four-night stand at Max’s Kansas City club in New York)—but they were dropped from the bill after four shows because, according to former Island PR head Rob Partridge, they were blowing Sly off the stage. “That year was our first time in the United States performing,” Fams recalls, “and the Family Stone had that rock groove style. It was a thriller.”
One performance from this period captures how inspiring the Wailers were as a live unit. Recorded in 1973 on Halloween night for a small audience at the Record Plant in Sausalito, California, the music on Talking Blues [Island, 1991] features supremely funky versions of “Get Up, Stand Up,” “Slave Driver,” “Kinky Reggae,” and “Burnin’ and Lootin’”—the latter a death-dealing skank that mirrors Marley’s urgency by pushing the tempo to the breaking point. Throughout the set, Family Man lopes ahead, within and behind the beat, always conscious of what meshes with the song’s mood.
A clash of wills emerged among the three Wailers singers. By the end of the band’s first American tour, Bunny Livingston had quit; he was soon followed by Peter Tosh, prompting Marley to wonder aloud to Family Man what the group’s future would be. “Bob said to me, ‘What are we gonna do now? There’s only three of us left.’ And I said, ‘That’s the power of the trinity.’” The year was 1974, and Marley and the Barrett brothers, according to Fams, solidified their working relationship in the form of a contract before heading again into the studio—this time to record Natty Dread. Almost immediately, Family Man began applying new discoveries he’d made about folding his bass into the fabric—the message—of the song. “The message and the music come together,” he insists. “It’s all in the expression. We have this mission to accomplish, and we know thy will must be done by all means. So when we sing a song like ‘Revelation’—well, that’s a commanding, militant sound [sings the bass line]. You have to be as commanding as the lyrics, to let the lyrics stand out in the crowd.”
By this time, Family Man had fully committed to the Fender Jazz Bass (and sometimes a Precision, as seen in the photos that accompany the original Natty Dread LP); later he’d even remark with approval on how the Jazz was the preferred bass of Jaco Pastorius. “I was using Acoustic amplifiers with the Fender. I had two 18” cabinets and two 4x15 cabinets. You need them that big to get that sound, because reggae music is the heartbeat of the people. It’s the universal language what carry that heavy message of roots, culture, and reality. So the bass have to be heavy and the drums have to be steady.”
Dry & Heavy
Throughout the ’70s until Marley’s last sessions and live shows in late 1980, Family Man’s warm, full-bodied tone became a signature part of the Wailers sound. He would normally plug in with his tone controls set flat and the amps set at low gain; with the large cabinets he used onstage, his approach to bass was more about asserting a deep, low-frequency presence rather than in-your-face volume. “In the studio,” Fams explains, “sometimes we used more of a miked bass to get the real rhythm and the tone, and sometimes we used a DI. I listen to the drumbeat, and I listen to where the singer’s melody was going, and I take it from there. I use both my thumb and my two fingers—it depend on the track and the feel of the rhythm. In the early years, I used my thumb most of the time.”
Of course, locked-up grooves came naturally to the Barrett brothers. An enduring example is the classic Marley anthem “Exodus,” which throbs along on a deceptively simple two-finger riff that swings hard with subtle grace-notes and accents—yet another facet of Family Man’s grasp of the bass from a singer’s perspective. “The bass is pushing, like the way Bob sings, ‘Movement of Jah people.’ It’s a very commanding pattern—exactly like you say, hypnotic. And I play in about two or three different style [variations] within that one concept.”
Another highlight is “Natural Mystic”—the opening track on Exodus—which offers a vintage taste of the “one-drop” style that the Barretts helped invent (beginning with “Duppy Conqueror” in 1970). “Most of the beats were like an upbeat,” Fams explains, “so we decide to come on the downbeat, and feel it on the one-drop [where the bass drops out on a bar’s downbeat], which is the heartbeat of the people—the reggae music. It’s a feel within the Jamaican concept of calypso, niyabinghi, kumina, samba, and soca, with soul and funk inside. Reggae music has all of those.”
Wailers International
With Bob Marley’s death in 1981, Family Man continued to tour and record with the Wailers band and took on the role of musical director. Now a youthful 60 and still recording and touring with the Wailers (he also has plans to make a new album using drum tracks recorded by his brother in the ’70s and ’80s), Fams still speaks of Marley today in respectful, even mystical overtones, but he can’t say the same of the Marley estate or Island Records. In 2001 he sued for unpaid royalties, claiming that he was owed more than $100 million dating back to the early ’70s. The suit was dismissed last year in London’s High Court, leaving Family Man himself in debt for an alleged $3 million in legal fees. “I don’t really want to say much. All I can tell you is that when Bob was alive, there wasn’t any problem. Everything was going cool and smooth, but after he passed, things got off track. That was created by greed. What’s supposed to come from anything bad like that? We won’t ever solve this problem—all this singing music, and saying [quoting Bob], ‘Where does it all begin, and where does it end? It seems like total destruction is the only solution.’ So I leave it there for now.”
Regardless of the conflict’s outcome, the Barrett brothers were primary architects of the Wailers sound, with Family Man a driving force behind its melodic and rhythmic complexity. And while Fams has also left his mark on a number of key sessions and albums that have become reggae and dub staples [see Essential Listening sidebars below], he’ll always be best known for his Wailers legacy, which will undoubtedly continue to influence music around the world. “The Rastaman vibration is a positive vibration,” Family Man says, quoting Bob Marley once more. “When we first decide to take reggae music to the next stage, we come together as singers and players to spread that message to the four corners of the earth. And we are still on the same mission today, no matter the crisis.”
Changing Hands: Fams & Robbie
As basses go, the Hofner “Beatle” bass is not a widely recognized part of reggae’s roots—that spot being reserved primarily for the Fender Jazz and Precision Basses—but it did figure prominently in Family Man Barrett’s early years, as well as those of another bass prodigy out of Jamaica. “I gave Robbie Shakespeare his first Hofner bass,” Fams recalls. “That was the one I had, and I when I give it to him, I tell him that when I’m out of Jamaica on the road with Bob and the Wailers, he must dominate the place with bass. And he did.”
Robbie himself remembers the exchange, as well as the importance of Barrett’s mentoring influence. “That’s who I get my teaching from,” he says. “Family Man, him say, ‘This the original bass Paul McCartney used to play.’ But the neck on it would bend, so it kind of hard to stay in tune, and the strings were pretty high off it. Over the years, if I play a regular bass, it would feel funny because I get used to that big bow [laughs]. But I had it for a long time because I love the sound. It just have a bass and treble [control]—my bass was always on and the treble always off.”
Shakespeare thinks he might have played the Hofner on the Wailers’ “Concrete Jungle”—one of the only tracks, over the course of eight years and nine studio albums, that didn’t feature Family Man on bass (although he did record a version, which is included on Island’s 2001 deluxe edition of Catch a Fire). “After I bring up Robbie as a bass player,” Fams explains, “I take him on sessions with me every time. I wanted to keep him away from the hot-stepper business. I didn’t want him to walk on the wild side [laughs]. When you’re young, there’s a lot of things to take you away. So I take him on the session and I tell Bob, this is the bass player I’m bringing up, and he’s good—let him play. And him play on some for Bunny and some for Peter, too. He was the first bass player for Peter Tosh’s band.”
In fact, when Shakespeare joined Peter Tosh and Word, Sound & Power, the Hofner was his main bass—he can be seen playing it in the photos that accompany Equal Rights [Columbia, 1977]. “Peter was supposed to go on tour for Legalize It,” Robbie recalls, “and we—Sly [Dunbar] and I—asked him to come out and see us, and we hooked up from there.”
Essential Listening
Bob Marley & the Wailers
Natty Dread [Island, 1974]
Bob Marley’s first album with his name in lights finds the Barretts stepping up their game as a rhythm section, with Family Man swinging hard behind the beat on “Them Belly Full” and waxing unusually funky on “Rebel Music,” the rocksteady-ish “Bend Down Low,” and the upbeat title track. “Natty Dread was a new concept of lyrics, melody, and rhythm for us,” says Fams. “That’s what let the first two albums on Island—Catch a Fire and Burnin’—begin to sell, beca’ we were doing something new in a different style.”
Burning Spear
Social Living [Island, 1978]
This timeless album—along with its tripped-out companion Living Dub Vol. 1 (beware the inferior Heartbeat remixes)—is one of the lesser-known jewels in Family Man’s crown. “I did a few albums with Winston Rodney [a.k.a. Burning Spear],” he points out. “My favorite songs from this one are ‘Mister Garvey’ and ‘Social Living.’” As one of the ultimate statements of pan-African idealism and rebel individuality, Social Living derives much of its staying power from the stellar musicianship of Fams, Robbie Shakespeare, and a host of Jamaica’s finest players.
Augustus Pablo
This Is Augustus Pablo [Impact, 1973]
Co-produced by Family Man Barrett with Clive Chin, this is a study in the tenets of dub, with Fams providing the foundation for Pablo’s haunting and often mournful melodica instrumentals (the opening “Dub Organizer” being the most memorable). “After that album, Pablo began to get popular,” Family Man recalls fondly. “He start emerging into his own sessions, and start a label called Rockers, and I partake with a lot of the early productions on Rockers, where I get busy my way and he get busy his other way.”
King Tubby & Friends
Dub Gone Crazy: The Evolution of Dub at King Tubby’s, 1975–1979 [Blood and Fire, 1994]
“I first met Tubby in the early years, when I was still doing bike mechanics,” Fams says. “We met by talking about bike riding. After I emerge in music and start to be on the road, when I come back, I not only hear of Tubby, I hear of King Tubby. He wire his own speaker cone himself. Him know the wattage and what wire to use and how many turns to give it. So he fix his speaker specially to his sound box, which we call House of Joy—high-power style.” This expertly curated compilation features some of Tubby’s more extreme dub mixes of original tracks by Bunny Lee’s Aggrovators, with Family Man and Robbie Shakespeare on bass.
Bob Marley & the Wailers
Exodus [Island, 1977]
Voted in 1998 by Time magazine as the Album of the Century, Exodus remains Marley’s most powerful album—a tour de force not only of righteous protest, Rasta transcendentalism, and romance, but of seamless grooves laid down by the Barrett brothers, from the propulsive title track to soulful gems like “Waiting in Vain” and “Jamming.” Reflecting the “movement” theme of the album, Family Man’s own journey on the bass touches new territory on the Motown-ish ballad “Turn Your Lights Down Low” and the Impressions-inspired “One Love/People Get Ready."
Current Gear
Bass
Hohner B-Bass with Steinberger pickups and Fender medium-gauge flatwound strings; vintage Fender Jazz Bass reissue (circa 1965) in the works
Rig
Two Eden WT-800 heads with 4x10 and 1x15 Eden cabinets; Tech 21 SansAmp Bass Driver DI; TARA Labs cables
“I’m in negotiations with Eden for them to build me a signature amp. I’m looking for a special kind of sweep within the EQ.”
’70s Gear
(with Bob Marley & the Wailers)
Basses
A revolving group of vintage Fender Jazz Basses; with the Upsetters (1968–71), Fams sometimes played a Hofner 500/1, a Kent, a Teisco (likely an EB-120, which was modeled after the Fender Jazz), or a borrowed Egmond (on the Uniques’ “Watch This Sound,” recorded in 1968). He strung his basses with Fender flatwounds.
Rig
Two Acoustic 370 heads with two 301 4x15 folded-horn cabinets; two 1x18 cabinets
Effects
Soundcraft parametric EQ, with signal split to each head
“I played more for the sensation of the bass, at medium volume. The whole thing is tone and color—not too much volume, otherwise you would get the sound come out muddy. It’s like painting a picture in red, gold, and green, with different shades of those colors. And I always tried to make sure to get the right amount of tightness in the bottom, so that when you play the note, you could feel it punching just like the foot drum.”