Reggae'd Out

The boyfriend at the time almost ruined reggae for me forever with yet another of his lengthy musical obsessions. At the time with him, it was reggae, reggae, and more reggae - morning, noon, and night, nothing but reggae. Every time I turned around, he was amassing more reggae albums, from Marley to Toots and the Maytals, from Pato Banton to Yellowman, and so very, very much more, playing them for hours upon hours in his apartment, taping them all to listen to them whenever we were in the car. For months, I couldn't get away from reggae.

Some might say I'm one to talk about being obsessive about music. Sure, I might play a song I like three or four or a dozen times before I'm finally ready to move onto something else. But if nothing else, I could at least mix in a little variety now and again. It doesn't have to be the same genre over and over again ad nauseum for eight months - yes, EIGHT MONTHS - at a time. I had liked reggae just fine, but after all of that, it just got to be repetitive to the point of wanting to bang my head against a wall every time he got hold of the record player or the portable cassette player we kept in the car.

To this day, I still feel a little negative twinge whenever I hear most Bob Marley or anything else reggae, or any island-y type music at all, because he just about drove me insane with it. It was fine for the first month or two, and then it just got unbearable, especially after we moved to Memphis and moved in together a few months later.

Fortunately, he mostly worked nights and I mostly worked days, so we weren't often at home at the same time and were left to our respective musical devices. The days we were both home at the same time, I would try my best to furtively slip the only album that, at that point, I could still stand on the record player - Bob Marley's Kaya LP.

Kaya holds dual memories for me - especially my favorite song on the album, "Misty Morning". Not only was the album my only relief from the rest of the music he was driving me nuts with in the midst of his obsession - especially once we'd shacked up - but it was one we had listened to often back in the early days when we first got together, still in that oh-so-happy and in love and crazy about each other stage. In East Tennessee at the time, we would often play the album on the many drives we made through the Great Smoky Mountains, going to this spot or that spot to cook out or go hiking, visit friends living up in the mountains, or just hang out. Driving along all the too-narrow, crooked and winding roads that wend their way through the hills going over to North Carolina, and driving back on those same crooked roads after dark when it was a little bit scary of a drive - I remember ol' Bob being somewhat of a comfort those nights driving on those sometimes terrifying little roads.

The Kaya album was our background music often in those happier times. We were together almost seven years, and I sadly have many more bad and negative memories of that relationship than I do good and positive ones. This is one of the few good ones.