The Harder They Come

Boston weather can be miserable in the winter, especially in the last century.

January 1973. I was walking up Mass Avenue in Cambridge on the way to Harvard Square. Underfoot a gray cold wet ankle high slush. In the air frozen rain. My sneakers and coast were drenched to the bone. I neared the Orson Welles Theater and spotted a poster promoting THE HARDER THEY COME. Charlie, a white college friend, a wasta from Jamaica, had introduced his classmates to reggae. We smoked huge spliffs and listened to Toots and Maytals, Bob Marley, and scores of other Jamaican artists singing in their dread dialect, a foreign langauge to our suburban ears, but we got it. The struggle against the oppressors existed everywhere.

I had seen the film Burn about a 19th Century slave rebellion in a mythical Portugese colony. Marlon Brando played the agent provocateur, who betrays the uprising for his sugar barons in London. It wasn't Jamaica, but I had read about the many revolts on that island. None had succeeded, except for the Maroons who lived free of the western world in the mountains. The first James Bond movie, Doctor No, was filmed on the island in 1969. None of us could forget Sean Connery sucked the urchin needle out of Ursala Andress' foot. This movie was not that one.

The poster was dominated by Jimmy Cliff playing a rude boy gunman brandishing two six-guns dressed in dance hall fashion ready for fast cars, motorcycles, and life. The hero looked warm. Jamaica was in the Caribbean. It had never snowed there. The next show started in ten minutes. I had nowhere to go, except here and paid $2 and entered the counter-culture theater happy to be out of the weather.

I sat in the middle with pop corn and a coke. The audience was small, mostly hippies as was I. THe lights went down. On screen the rough film caught an up-country bus heading into a city. Kingston. The capitol. Subtitles translated the Jamaican patois. Jimmy Cliff singing The Harder They Come. I wasn't warm, but I was getting there and almost two hours of gun fights with the police and criminal and church people I was dry and exited from the cinema a convert to the rasta criminal life by the Slickers' Johnny Too Bad and Cliff You Can get It If You Want It, ever knowing I was only a fan for life to the Rasta cause.

Reggae spread across globe from the island of Jamaica. Rastas lived in exile in New York, London, and Ethiopia. Other islanders adopted the lifestyle and the music. I never saw any on my circumnavigations of the planet, but paintings of Bob Marley along with Serpico adorned the trucks, buses, and taxis throughout South Easst Asia. The outlaw life appealed everywhere as freedom against the ruling classes.

In 1990 I jumped on bus in a Sumatran coastal market town bound for the Batak Highlands. The seats and aisles were packed with Sunday shoppers and I stood at the back door smoking a kretek cigarette. The clove and tobacco smoke mixed well with the diesel fumes from the bus' laboring engine. I studied the chattering passengers. Their smiling faces were ethnically different from the dour lowlanders and halfway up the mountain they sang a song which I recognized as BY THE RIVERS OF BABYLON. I loved the Melodians’ reggae version.

When I joined the impromptu choir, the closest passengers stared at me with amusement. At the end of the song an old man rose from his seat and shook my hand.

“Chretian?” He had several front teeth. They looked sharp.

“Christian,” I replied without hesitation. My atheism was a secret better kept from the devout. They didn't know Johnny Too Bad, but they played Bob Marley on the tape decks on the lake. The ganga was weak. Forbidden by the Jakarta government. Lake Toba belonged to the Bataks. Not the Javanese. Just like jamaica belongs to all the people of Jamaica. My good friend says that there is no white or black in Jamaica. Just Jamaicans and I'm good with that. Always and a day

RIP Jimmy Cliff - he started it all for me.

The movie was based on a real man according to Wikipedia Vincent "Ivanhoe" Martin (1924–9 September 1948), known as "Rhyging", was a Jamaican criminal who became a legendary outlaw and folk hero, often regarded as the "original rude boy".He became notorious in 1948 after escaping from prison, going on the run and committing a string of robberies, murders and attempted murders before he was gunned down by police. In subsequent decades his life became mythologised in Jamaican popular culture, culminating in the 1972 cult film The Harder They Come, in which he is portrayed by Jimmy Cliff. His nickname comes from the term rhyging, also spelled rhygin, a variant of "raging".[3] In Jamaican Patois it is used to mean wild, hot, or bad.