When I was a teenager I loved going to reggae concerts. Deep in the thick of the crowd, moving my body to the easy rhythm and heavy bass, it was easy to forget every adolescent anxiety and just be me. Up on stage, the Rastafarians were like exotic birds with their long dreadlocked manes and fabulous accents. I felt they were singing directly to me, as if they knew exactly what I needed to hear. I would walk into the concert worried about a boy who didn’t care for me or a girlfriend who didn’t treat me as if I were part of the “in” crowd… and after a few songs it would all melt away.
The band would start off easy and sweet and then warm up until they reached a frenzied crescendo of spontaneous solo instrumentals — where each band member got a moment to show us his thing and we all screamed and applauded with delight, and even a bit of pride, as if that drummer or saxophone player was our own child performing in front of everyone for the first time. They knew we felt like family. I knew they knew because they would encourage us to wave our hands in the air in unison, even hold our neighbor’s hand and sing together some wonderful ditty like “Now that we found love what are we going to do with it?”
The band had traveled all of the way from Jamaica to give us a different kind of concert, where instead of being pissed at the tall guy in front of you or the weirdoes to the right that kept making out, you loved your neighbors. You forgave them their imperfections. You reached over and held their hands. And then the band would ask us what we were going to do with all that love. And I would hear it as a question. And I would answer that question. I would tell myself: I will love myself enough to not worry about that boy, I will help all of my girlfriends to feel like they are part of the “in” crowd.
So, you can imagine how thrilled I was when at the age of twenty-two I got a job being the assistant to the on-tour producer of a major reggae production.
