Independent Fire

When you start out with Bob Marley as your mentor, great things can’t help but follow. For Winston Rodney, the roots-reggae artist best known as Burning Spear, the road was long and rocky; but after more than 40 years of making music, the Jamaican-born, Queens-based musician has found his place in the sun.

With a new album, the self-released Jah is Real, and a month-long tour on the horizon, Spear, who’s living in what he calls a “retirement with discretion,” is ready to show fans a new side of his traditionally Jamaican music, now influenced by a recent trip to Africa.

“The early days with me and Bob, it was good,” he remembered. “My closest time with Bob was went I went to the studio to make my first recording, and Bob was on the scene and he was the one who said, ‘Spear, anytime, anything—just come to the studio and do what you have to do.’”

Working with Studio One, the Motown-like music factory that spawned a number of reggae stars, including Toots and The Maytals, Bob Marley and The Wailers and Lee “Scratch” Perry, that’s exactly what Spear did. “I did my first song in 1969. There were a lot of good things that Bob did for other people during the time he was in the business, a lot of us followed in his footsteps musically and we reached what we have today.”

In the following years, Spear released numerous successful albums and spent a lot of time on the road; but in spite of the recognition he got, by the early 1980s Spear found himself back in Jamaica struggling to provide for his family. After being swindled by labels, concert promoters and agents who failed to pay him for his work, he realized that he had to become an independent agent in order to gain control. Applying Jamaican hero Marcus Garvey’s teachings of self-reliance, economic independence and self-respect into business, Spear became successful on his own, and today he heads (with his wife and manager, Sonia Rodney) an eponymous record label that handles the sale and distribution of his records. 

“I always wanted to be independent,” he said, “and true independence is freedom. There were a lot of people who thought I shouldn’t be doing what I do by myself. They said that I should come through them, or that they could conduct business better than I can, but the truth is that nobody can do it better than me for myself.”

The desire to work for himself was what brought Spear to Queens in the first place. “Back in Jamaica, the [music] scene started to get rough and a lot of artists began to leave. Some headed for Canada, others for England and some for America. When I came here, I did so thinking about setting up my business.”

It wasn’t Queens, or even his native Jamaica, that inspired Jah is Real, an honest, straight-ahead disc of original compositions recorded with the collaboration of Parliament-Funkadelic founding members Bootsy Collins and Bernie Worrell, who enriched the music with their funk-inspired grooves.

“I wanted to travel to Kenya for quite some time, and I was thinking of going there for a vacation,” he explained. “Fortunately we got a call from the UN people to do a concert.”

“At that time Kenya was really rough, a lot of things were going on,” he recalled in his distinctive Jamaican accent. “So I been there and see the condition and situation, in which people were being put against people and I thought about their leaders—not only in Kenya but in Africa.”

He noted that people were spending their time talking about the past, instead of what the future had to hold. It was his frustration with the mind-set of the Kenyans he met that led to some of the record’s strongest lyrics.

“The past is not going to bring anything into the present,” he rationalized. “So that inspired me to do the song ‘One Africa.’  I think that by looking back at what you lost, it’s not going to bring you anything in the future, so I said [in the lyric] ‘don’t look back into your losses Africa/ don’t look back now/ only if you come together you can gain more than what you lost.’”

Looking forward himself, Spear will set out on a 30-day tour, beginning on August 31 at The Fillmore, and making stops in Vancouver, Denver and finally San Francisco. “In this country, once you decide to work honestly and to do the right thing,” he explained, “a lot of good things can happen.” Burning Spear himself is living proof.

Burning Spear Aug. 31 at The Fillmore NY at Irving Plaza, 17 Irving Pl. (at 15th St.), 212-777-6800; 8, $35.