Like Jamaica’s answer to Monty Python’s coconut banging “horses,” Lee “Scratch” Perry rides in from Echo Valley muttering, “Clip clop, clip clop, cloppity, cloppity, cloppity, high.”

This is how the ostensible title track from Perry’s phenomenally loopy, bug-fuck experimental 1978 album Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread opens. 

Awash in deeply manipulated organ, one drop rhythms, and body rattling bass, the song lurches in wobbly unison with Perry’s herb massaged freestyling - a bubbling word stew of island patois, Biblical references, jazz scatting, and of course, corn bread and roast fish. It is pure, uncut lunacy. But, as mad things go, it’s mighty infectious. 

Despite more than 20 albums and anthologies plus countless singles under his name at the time, Roast Fish Collie Weed & Corn Bread was Perry’s first release to feature his own beatifically stoned lead vocals on every track. Within his massive catalog, this may be the highest concentration Lee “Scratch” Perry available. 

The backing musicians Perry utilizes like a small orchestra of vibrant, unique sounds is beyond stellar including drum sorcerer Sly Dunbar, guitarist Earl “Chinna” Smith, and Hammond organ maestro Winston Wright. 

What Perry conjured in his infamous Black Ark Studio with these elements, a head full of THC tickled street poetry, and what one imagines a hay wagon of collie weed is as unique and timeless an album as the 70s produced.