Thibodaux Regional Medical Center’s North Hospital project complete
October 20, 2006Reuben Williams has been working in the music industry for most of his life. As owner and manager of a successful management group, the Raceland native has promoted shows for and worked with many of childhood heroes the local greats including Tab Benoit, Cyril Neville and Raful Neal.
When Williams is not managing acts nationwide, he is known as Rudog and fronts the roots reggae band, The Uppressors. Rudog is not a complete alter ego from Williams’ daytime persona, as if the tattooed and goateed Williams could be mistaken for anyone else. He just uses it as a way to keep the name associated with his management group hidden from club owners that he has worked with before.
“I didn’t want people to remember me as a manager,” Williams says. “I wanted to play my music and have them remember me for that.”
The Uppressors, formed in 2002, are easy to remember because they just might be the only reggae group on the bayou. Country, blues, zydeco, jazz and all kinds of other bands sometimes seem to outnumber the stalks of sugar cane along the bayous of south Louisiana, but reggae groups are harder to find. “It really is a shame,” Williams says, explaining how reggae legends like Bob Marley credit regional artists like Fats Domino with influencing the sounds of Jamaica.
“The AM frequencies would skip across the water all the way to Jamaica,” he said, shedding light on the connection. “They would hear it coming in and out and that was where the upbeat sound came from.”
Williams, himself, has felt the power of reggae music his entire life. His dad introduced him to greats like Jimmy Cliff and Peter Tosh at an early age, and it stuck with him. “It captured me,” he says on the band’s Web site. “I don’t know why, but I made since out of it. It seems that reggae and dancehall feels the best to me.”
When Williams along with keyboardist Jah’n Lefort and bassist Jerry Martin set out to create the Uppressors, the group’s founder wanted to bring that reggae heart to south Louisiana, but mix it up with soul, R & B and funk, the reggae movement sprouted from in an island nation over 1,000 miles away. The mix was a sound that reflected both cultures, leaving listeners with the taste of Cajun gumbo made with jerk chicken in their mouth.
As the band’s music progressed, the group went through several lineup changes. Once touring started, it changed even more frequently, but the core of the band always remained Williams, Lafort and Martin. With a solid lineup in place by 2005, the Uppressors released their debut record, Fire Brain. One of the highlights of the album is a guest appearance by the Rev. Goat Carson, a Cherokee Christian minister who toured with Bob Dylan and has worked with Andy Warhol. Carson opens the record with an original poem titled “Bob Marley.” “The poem really sums up the record. It has this theme about worshipping God and trying to clean up addiction and just trying to be better people,” Williams said.
The band’s second record, White Star Legion, was recorded late last year, but it is “being held hostage” by the producer, according to Williams, who is still noticeably annoyed by the fallout and refuses to even mention the producer’s name.
“It was an important album to me,” he said. “It was centered around friends I had that died from overdoses because of the way pharmaceutical companies are run.”
Even with more than 30 originals under their belt n songs that can range from hard rock to smooth soul n Uppressors’ local shows are filled mostly with covers.
Covers with a funky reggae twist.
“Because the girls just want to dance,” explains Williams. But, the further the Uppressors get from the bayou, more and more originals creep into their set. “People around here are not receptive to new music as other places,” he said. “But, you don’t complain about it, you just give them what they want and have a good time.”
The latest additions to the Uppressors lineup have been the punk rock rhythm section of Jon Kelpsh, drums, and Jake Cenac, bass. The duo has helped shift the band’s sound into what they call “Trenchtown punk.”
“Both those guys are in a punk band called Speed of Sound,” the band leader said. “They come play shows with us right after practice, and they are full of energy from playing fast. It really comes through, that angst.”
The mix of reggae, funk, rock and now punk is easy to tie together even with the different backgrounds of the band members, according to Williams, because each genre and background comes from the same place musically.
“It is all jam-oriented music,” he said. “It is not really learning the song, it is knowing the song and then taking it where you want it to go. Sometimes we take it to an Otis Redding level. Sometimes we take it to a Metallica or Sex Pistols level.” Taking the jam approach, the Uppressors perform each show without a formal set list and move seamlessly through covers of the Commodores and Led Zeppelin, but it is all a little funky and a lot reggae.
The Uppressors will bring their brand of funky reggae to the Lafayette Reggae and Cultural Festival on Sept. 2, along with acts like the Meditations and Michael Black.
They will also be a featured act at the Voice of the Wetlands (VOW) Festival in October as part of the VOW at Nightclub crawl, an annual event that Williams co-organizes to raise awareness about coastal restoration.
