y best friend Trevor and I had been planning a road trip to check out some of California’s finer universities. I could go into detail about how I could care less what school I get into, my general dislike of school in general, but then I would never get to the music. Anyway, choosing the schools that we were to look at during our three-day weekend was not as important to us as choosing what we listened to along the way.


Soul Jazz, this record label out of London decides to reissue a series of reggae classics. It is very fortunate that Tom Ewing (possibly online music journalism’s greatest asset) decides to write a glowing review of the series, inspiring me to check out the third volume, 300% Dynamite. The CD soon found its way into regular rotation in my computer. The CD was dubbed to tape for our travels, as Trevor’s van does not have a CD player.


The compilation itself is pretty astounding, containing fifteen strong tracks, no less than five of which are excellent. Althea and Donna’s ecstatic ‘Uptown Top Ranking’, Prince Buster’s supremely confident ‘Cincinnati Kid’, Wayne Smith’s ‘Under me Sleng Teng’, and Hopeton Lewis’ revitalizing ‘Take it Easy’. Possibly the most enticing of these is Sister Nancy’s mind-blowing ‘Bam Bam’.


Here’s where the song comes up in our trip. It’s a long, level drive from our spot in the central valley to the mountains north to Santa Cruz, through this portion we slog through the Strokes and the White Stripes, each a little dated in their own ‘it was cool before it hit MTV’ kind of way, we got tired of them before too long. I popped the reggae tape in. We reached the mountains. A couple songs in and Trevor is sufficiently impressed. ‘Bam Bam’ begins. The horns squeak in inconspicuously. Sister Nancy begins singing, the song really gets cooking. The infinitely reverberating rhythm section crashes and explodes right as we get to the highest point of the mountain, the echo beginning as the ocean comes in to view.


This is what you would call a religious experience. With the entire ocean jumping out at us, trees jutting down from the ledge below, and Sister Nancy crooning at the top of her lungs, projecting to the entire world, we could tell that this would be a great weekend. Mind you, this is BEFORE we nearly got into a fight with those drunken frat guys outside on the Santa Cruz strip, spent most of our gas money at a Watsonville flea market, and frantically fled from Berkley. Everything was perfect for a few minutes there.


‘Bam Bam’ is a strange song. The focus is Sister Nancy’s voice, floating above a ridiculously low bass, a guitar that strikes like an ice pick on the upbeats only when you aren’t expecting it, and pounding drums. She squeaks some wonderfully quotable lines, (regardless of the fact that you can’t figure out what she’s saying most of the time) “emcee is my ambition”, one of the more audible ones.


Thanks partially to Sister Nancy’s zeal, the tape has been granted tenure in the van’s tape deck along with our nearly worn-out cassette copies of Gilberto Gil’s 1968 album and Jonathan Richman’s “I, Jonathan”.