AMG Review of Once Upon a Time at King Tubby's

Rick Anderson
All Music Guide

This strange and fascinating album documents one of the greatest reggae rivalries of all time: the extended duel between deejays Prince Jazzbo and I-Roy, both sides of which were carried out on recordings produced by the always commercially astute Bunny "Striker" Lee. Supported by top-notch rhythms by the Aggrovators and the Revolutionaries, the two chatters swipe at each other over the course of six singles (alternated here with dub versions and, strangely, a vocal cut of one rhythm by the great Johnny Clarke as well as a me-too toast by Derrick Morgan). The conventional wisdom is that the ultimate winner of this fight was Lee, who raked in the cash when the record-buying and radio-listening public got caught up in the fight. But as for the fight itself, it's hard to come away without the clear impression that I-Roy bested Prince Jazzbo hands-down; Jazzbo was a perfectly fine deejay, but while he did come up with the fine couplet "I Roy, you a bwoy/Imitate the great U Roy," his responses tended more along the lines of this lame and shapeless pronouncement: "So you tell the crowd that Prince Jazzbo is very ugly/But if I didn't ugly you wouldn't have the opportunity to call my name in your tune to get promotion." (Er.. snap?) The real stars here are the rhythms: "Rough Rider" and "Love I Can Feel" both make appearances, and the dub versions are excellent. This compilation is idiosyncratic enough that it will probably be of interest primarily to reggae specialists, but for them it constitutes a handy document of one of reggae's strangest episodes.