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RELEASE DATE: AVAILABLE NOW
CD Edition limited to 5000 non-numbered limited edition copies.
The man with the gangster name was born Lester Bullock in Kingston, Jamaica in 1953. The renowned deejay is best known for his “toasting,” the reggae equivalent of stepping to the mic and rapping over a track, usually a dub track.
Dennis Alcapone, the star toaster on the El Paso sound system, was one of the better-established artists to pass Dillinger the deejay torch in the early 1970s. As Alcapone recalls, “Dillinger was living just across the way, so whenever the sound is playing, he always come right beside the amplifier. One night him ask me fi give him a talk over the mike; he wasn’t brilliant, but you could hear that there was something.”
Anxious to record, he began doing the rounds of Kingston studios, meeting with little interest until legendary producer Lee “Scratch” Perry cut his first sides at Dynamics in 1973. Dillinger was calling himself “Alcapone Junior” in homage to his mentor, and Perry is rather famously known for saying that he didn’t sound like Alcapone: he sounded like Dillinger. The name stuck.
CB 200, a tribute to Dillinger’s motorcycle, featured his rocket to reggae fame, “Cokane In My Brain.” It tells listeners “how we spell New York”: “a knife, a fork, a bottle and a cork/I’ve cokane runnin’ around my brain.” It’s a mesmerizing groove that set the bar for hip-hop artists that would follow in his wake. The follow-up album, Bionic Dread, didn’t quite catch the commercial wave that propelled CB 200, though it is a worthy musical successor.
The double album on one compact disc was remastered from the original master tapes in 2004 by the Grammy-winning engineer Gavin Lurssen.
Hipocrates Says:
Did You Know? Dillinger broke a seven-year retirement to record a song called “Say No To Drugs.”
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