Anthems for the Mystery Kids

By JAY COCKS

The reggae reveries of Garland Jeffreys make a fine record

Marcellino Casanova. Johnny-one-arm. Little Angel from Laslow Street. Cinderella. Names that sound like Damon Runyon. Lives that feel like William Burroughs. These are Garland Jeffreys' mystery kids, and the extraordinary music that he makes about them seems to come straight from their lives.

Sometimes Jeffreys sings about these kids directly: the hard, hopeless downtown orphans whose hustle along the thin edge becomes a musical metaphor for political desperation and spiritual desolation. Often the kids lurk at the core of a lyric or, like phantoms, underneath a smart-stepping riff. Jeffreys does not always deal with them directly. His best tunes -- many of them, like Mystery Kids, to be found on his newest album, Escape Artist --have the cool anger and the anxious tenderness of a street blood. A Jeffreys record is like a fast cruise across the radio band. Reggae, jazz and full-tilt rock all blend with casual finesse. This is big-city soul music born of tough beginnings and hard realities. Soul music for sole survivors.

Garland Jeffreys knows this turf firsthand. He is 37 now, but he gives the impression that old scars are still fresh. For him, cutting a record is not just a matter of laying down tracks. It is a process of "exorcising my demons."

Those demons are stubborn, and the getaway referred to in the title of the new album is, he says, "an escape from fear." If Jeffreys seems to be more haunted than he should be, that may also be because he got a double dose of the fears. That's a lot, even for a mystery kid.

"I'm finally starting to say it's time to stop looking at what happened back there," Jeffreys mused recently during a break in his 19-city U.S. tour. "I'm now saying move on, your life is bigger." But there were times, growing up in Brooklyn, that life loomed so large that it threatened to swallow him up. He was a year old in the waning days of World War II, when his father, a sailor, skipped out and never showed up again.

His father was a mulatto, his mother Puerto Rican, and she remarried into a family in which the color line got crossed so many times that it turned into a sort of soft, beige blur. That condition may be fine for discussion in a sociology seminar, but it is rough in a classroom and punishing on the playground. Jeffreys was Roman Catholic, but the other Catholic kids would not hang out with him because he was black. The neighborhood blacks kept away from him because his skin was too light. He found a couple of Jewish friends but was forbidden to play with his own cousins, who were Italian.

Norman Lear TV sitcoms have made metropolitan racial melanges like this into laugh material for a more sophisticated and cynical generation. But growing up in the real situation, in a New York neighborhood where racial barriers were as inflexible as foreign borders, the laughs did not come easy. "I felt like I was being punished, cut off," Jeffreys remembers. "It made me lonely." And scared of the sound of his stepfather's foot on the stair.

Usually it is prudent to keep a little on guard when talking about the figurative batterings of childhood. In Jeffreys' case, though, that turmoil seems to lie at the core of his music. Certainly it is what turned him to music in the first place. He remembers his mother playing Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Billie Holiday and the Mills Brothers, and he remembers, too, singing along with those old 78s by the time he was four. As he got older, he started listening to rhythm and blues: Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson and, most of all, Frankie Lymon, whose high-flying vibrato could hang in the air like a white silk scarf. Music eased the loneliness. It was a neighbor, however, a painter who could talk knowledgeably about art and museums, who showed Jeffreys a way out.

It was a detour really. Jeffreys got into Syracuse University, then in his sophomore year landed a scholarship to study Renaissance art in Florence. That culture shock, he says, "changed my life. It gave me the feeling that there can be a better quality of life, a world where the string beans are fresh." After graduation, and another Italian interlude, Jeffreys settled in Manhattan, put his formal education in a corner and taught himself guitar. Sometimes he appeared with an old friend from Syracuse, Lou Reed. More often, he just tried to keep his career on the tracks.

There have been frequent derailments. After a couple of ragged but promising early albums, Jeffreys cut a great song, Wild in the Streets--about those mystery kids--and put out an album called Ghost Writer that was one of the standouts of the '70s. Great things were predicted. Subsequent records were like Hansel's trail of crumbs through the woods, attempts to clear away stylistic underbrush and find the path back.

Jeffreys has found it with Escape Artist, which is enjoying reasonably steady but not spectacular sales. It may be that Jeffreys' music is too highly charged for mass consumption and, perhaps, too overstuffed. Lyrically, the mystery kids show up side by side with Victor Hugo and V. Van Gogh. Jeffreys' ambitious and sophisticated synthesis of rock, reggae and jazz could easily become top-heavy.

The cool inflections of his passion, however, keep the songs strong and upright, buttressed both by a flair for elegant concert showmanship and a voice that sounds like Frankie Lymon with a college education.

In the past, Jeffreys used rock 'n' roll --a mainstream white music--to sing about his experiences as a black. On Escape Artist, the sound is more emphatically Jamaican. Indeed, Jeffreys may be the first off-island artist to have done reggae right. One of Escape Artist's best tunes is a fierce evocation of the Miami riots of 1980 done "dub" style. Dub is reggae dressed down, and Jeffreys has lately taken to wearing his hair in the braided dreadlocks favored by Jamaican Rastafarians. That is more than a gesture of style. It helps connect him a little more closely to the music. After all this time, it gives him a sense of community. Of belonging. Garland Jeffreys has found his own way home.

--By Jay Cocks.

Reported by Denise Worrell/New York

With reporting by Denise Worrell/New York

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