They didn’t think I was authentic, and thought I was just making pop music. He made me feel a part of dancehall and reggae royalty, and he embraced me.īecause of how I started, by making these hybrid-style records and having a lot of success, there were not a lot of people in dancehall and reggae that were quick to embrace me. I was a fairly new artist at the time, but my album Hot Shot was a huge success. He was there to work, and very present for all the scenes we shot, but also very pleasant. I really loved his work ethic, and he was pretty up in age by the time I got to work with him. Shaggy: The first time I really got to meet Toots was when he asked me to do a version of “Bam Bam.” We shot a video for it, and it was the first time that I really got to sit, smile, and laugh with him as a person. It’s gonna take years for me to get used to a world without Toots. He carried a Jedi force that was humbly fierce. Not to wax existential, but he carried the force of the universe, and I won’t be saying that about anyone else for a very long time.
I imagine it’s like being in a room with a Buddha. The song is already timeless, but that commitment to songsmith-ing and love … I was very touched. But he asked if we could change the chorus - because that way, the song would be timeless. The chorus on the original version is, “Love is gonna let me down.” He stopped mid-chorus, and said to me, “Ben, I’ve always wanted this song to be ‘Love’s Not Gonna Let Me Down.’ I’ve always wished I could change it.” In the studio, we did “Love Gonna Walk Out On Me.” We rehearsed it with just him and I, with Toots on acoustic guitar. Mavis Staples, Solomon Burke, and Toots Hibbert. That’s next level.Ĭan you imagine seeing him at the age of 10, and then getting to collaborate with him? If that was all that happened to me in my lifetime, I’d be able to dust myself off and be as proud as anybody. Not only was he three feet from the mic, but he was on a mic that traditionally you have to be right up on to sound decent. To project on a 58, you literally have to have your mouth on the screen. Not only did Toots have the mic a few feet away from his mouth, his mic of choice was a Shure 58! This is tech-geek stuff, but Shure 58’s are made for the stage so that nothing else comes through them but the voice. Everyone blended perfectly together, and it was super powerful. There were the rockers, that British punk component, and the straight-up rude-boy component. Even at a young age, what I really dug was the cross-sections of cultures and race in the crowd. And it was madness, as you would imagine, in 1979. For whatever reason, my parents, with their incredible taste in music, made sure I was at very important concerts at a very young age.
’It was like being in a room with a Buddha’īen Harper: I love Toots. Starkey (Ringo Starr’s son) also co-produced and performed on the album. In the weeks following his death, Vulture reached out to Toots’s friends, admirers, and musical collaborators - including Bonnie Raitt, Ben Harper, Ziggy Marley - and Trojan Jamaica founders Zak Starkey and Sshh Liguz, who released Toots’s last album Got to Be Tough on August 28, shortly before his passing.
Hibbert was laid to rest October 15 at Saint Catherine Parish in Jamaica in a small, private funeral surrounded by his wife, children, and loved ones. While he never achieved the massive crossover appeal of peer and friend Bob Marley, Toots never stopped touring and making music until the literal end. In 1972, through the smoky haze of midnight screenings, the Jamaican crime film The Harder They Come, with its iconic soundtrack by star Jimmy Cliff and two tracks from Toots and the Maytals (“Sweet and Dandy,” “Pressure Drop”), broke reggae into the American consciousness. Given the name “Little Toots” by an older brother, Hibbert became an early spokesman for social justice on tracks like “54-46 That’s My Number,” an anthem about a cop shakedown, penned in detention from a marijuana charge that left Toots behind bars for nine months. Born in May Pen, Jamaica, in 1942, the son of two Seventh-day Adventist preachers and the youngest of 14 children, Toots and his band The Maytals helped define the staccato, upbeat sound of ska, predating reggae by several years. When Toots Hibbert died last month, on September 11, the world lost not only one of the last living patriarchs of reggae (Toots was the first to use the word on his 1968 single “Do the Reggay”), but also a global ambassador - in life and song - for joy and positivity.