This is a follow-up to a previous post where I posted video footage of Peter Tosh performing “400 Years” at the Jazz Festival in Sao Paolo, Brazil. The video clip was shared by my friend Vinicius Brandao from Brazil. Well, I have tracked down more complete video footage of the performance.
This video clip is shared by my friend Enrique “Kikewas” Cabrera Romano.
This is a video clip from a different source.
Reasoning With Tosh by Roger Steffens
Early in September, Peter Tosh spent a few days in Los Angeles on business. On two separate evenings he found time to visit with Roger Steffens and Hank Holmes, both of whom are contributing editors of the Reggae News. On the first evening, Steffens found Tosh sitting in his hotel before a television set, something the former found rather ironic in light of Tosh’s constant condemnations of things Babylonian. Tosh laughed an explanation: “I love to watch television in Babylon, especially the news because it’s so full of corruption. I-man know there is so much corruption, there is bound to be an eruption!” Talk soon turned to music, and to the immense Reggae Archives that Holmes maintains in his Hollywood apartment. Tosh said he’d like to see them first-hand, and so they piled into a car and drove cross-town. The trip was worth it; Tosh finding more than twenty records released under his name that he had never known existed. Included in that number were three organ solos, as well as singles, attributed to “Peter Touch,” for which he had never been paid a cent. After a brief tour of The Stacks, we turned on the tape recorder. What follows is the bulk of our conversation that evening.
RS: Are people developing sinsemillia in Jamaica?
PT: What? Some blood-clat sinsemillia in Jamaica, mash up ya head mon … I was thinking of writing a song long time named “Sweet Sensemillia how good she make me feel-a.”
RS: The Soho News article in New York that I just read about your latest tour had an inane paragraph about “Where was Peter Tosh in the 60’s when the American Blacks were on the line, where was Peter Tosh in the civil rights marches?” Ha! You were living in Jamaica!
PT: Ras clat!
RS: And the spirit that existed in American music in the 60’s seems to have been lost in the swelter of disco in the 70’s and you’re one of the rare people who are willing to stand on stage publicly, and break the law for a belief…
PT: True. Serious T’ing.
RS: And I don’t think you got the proper recognition for that, it not just a stage pose, for you it’s a revolutionary, stance.
PT: Yes mon, most people don’t know that.
HH: An act of the minister.
PT: True
RS: The bush doctor himself. A year and a half ago you told Peter Simon pot was going to be legalized in two weeks. What happened?
PT: Well, due to the politrickal shitstem which governments only use these, what you call, strategies for politrickal achievements, seen? So that they can gain power, because the prime minister went to jail and released over three hundred people who were charged for small possession of herb.
RS. When was this?
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