Inner Circle’s Reality Check

Though known primarily for their 1987 crossover hit “Bad Boys,” which was used as the theme song for the television show COPS, Inner Circle had a long career before someone at the Fox network thought that armchair America might find it entertaining to sit and watch people getting arrested while they ate dinner. Ian, along with his brother Roger, formed Inner Circle in Kingston, Jamaica, in the late ’60s while the two were still in high school. In the ’70s, they teamed up with the inimitable roots singer Jacob Miller, creating a string of memorable hits that included the classic “Tenement Yard.” (If you want to see this lineup in its prime, track down a copy of the seminal 1978 Jamaican reggae movie Rockers, as their performance of this number is the film’s highlight.) Miller died in a car accident in 1980, right before the band was to embark on an American tour supporting Bob Marley and the Wailers, but Inner Circle regrouped a few years later in Miami and has since kept the core band of the Lewis brothers on bass and guitar and Bernard “Touter” Harvey on keyboards. Their studio, Circle House, has recorded the likes of Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Lauryn Hill and P. Diddy.

Considering that their biggest hit is synonymous in this country with getting busted, I ask them about the police in Jamaica.

“The police only deal with weed on two levels,” Roger explains: “big-money level, or if they want to harass you. In Jamaica, them don’t need no probable cause.”

“Sometimes, the police put up their own roadblock,” Ian adds. “They want some money. There was a Canadian man went back to Canada and said Jamaica has the best system he ever seen, where you pay for your ticket right on the road. Ya have to understand something: The police in Jamaica, their pay is very small, so in a day, if he can hit five, six people … every man have to survive.”

It’s no surprise, for a band who made their name in the highly competitive Jamaican music industry of the mid-’70s, that marijuana was an ever-present ingredient in their recording sessions.

“In Jamaica, the man used to say: ‘The vibe is nice and the studio cloudy,’” Ian remembers. “The studio was cloudy because before any session, a man would light the chalice and set the vibes in the air. That’s the blessing. A lot of people say it lowers sperm count – I can tell you about 200 of my dread friends have about a million kids, so I don’t know which doctor they talking to.”

One of the high points of Inner Circle’s career was their show at the One Love Peace Concert in 1978, wherein Bob Marley attempted to bring together Jamaica’s two warring political factions, the socialist People’s National Party, headed by Michael Manley, and the conservative Jamaican Labor Party, headed by Edward Seaga. The event was actually the brainchild of two rival gangsters who acted as a ghetto paramilitary force for the two factions, Bucky Marshall (PNP) and Claudie Massop (JLP).

“There are two incidents that happened that night that were very powerful, and they weren’t planned,” Touter remembers. “The first incident happened onstage with us. We were playing this song, ‘Peace Treaty Special,’ and in the middle of it, Jacob started calling up all these [rival gangsters] who, a few months before, these people would kill each other. But they all come together onstage with Jakes. And the second incident was with Bob, after he call [Manley and Seaga] to the stage at the same time. It was really electrifying.”

Honoring the 30th anniversary of Jacob Miller’s death, Inner Circle got together with friends Damian and Stephen Marley, Junior Reid, Luciano, Slightly Stoopid and Rasta poet Mutabaruka to create an old-fashioned roots album that would address such global issues as violence, poverty and hypocrisy. When I ask them about State of da World, they insist that I play the first track. I pop it into the CD player, cue it to “Interlude” and listen as Mutabaruka declares, over a soundscape of keyboards, chaos and bullets:

“Look at the world today, what can we really say? Children going astray, where will they play? When leaders fight for power, the clock is ticking, who knows the hour? Politicians playing a silly game, religious leaders doing the same. Now the people is to blame, fan the flame, fan the flame. People of the world caught between death and destruction, caught between politics and religion … we need a reality check!”

For Roger, reggae music and the quest for social justice are one and the same. “Rebel music, reggae music, freedom, freedom, freedom!” he proclaims. “That’s all our cry, from Marcus Garvey to ska, of our admission into the human family – because we have always felt and been treated like we have never been part of the human family. The blacker you are, the more worthless you are; the lighter you are – the establishment and the status quo, you can get a good choice. To me, we have made great strides. At least now, when a man in America cannot deny that education is the biggest criteria to put himself forward and skin is not to hold him back – Barack Obama. If you are educated and you can conduct yourself, you can go to the highest office of the land. So things have changed.”