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Reggae Music’s Lee Scratch Perry’s ‘Comic Book Life’
This legendary reggae icon is the proud sum of his influences.
Sent to Earth from a doomed planet far, far away (no, not really), Lee “Scratch” Perry came to our world in 1936, as a babe in swaddling space clothes. The tiny rocket ship in which the toddler came crash-landed near his adopted home of Kendal, Jamaica.
Named Rainford Hugh Perry by the Earthling mother and dad who’d found and raised him, this strange being from another world grew up like all the other kids in the postcolonial slums of Jamaica: He went to school, played kids games, and prayed to ‘Jah’ regularly for the way out of abject poverty.
In the meantime, while waiting for deliverance, the young Perry often kept himself entertained with the wild tales that were regularly found in the pages of comic books from America. More than escapist fantasy, though, within the pages of those pulse-pounding publications, Perry would encounter strange and powerful beings with whom he could quite easily relate.
The tales would help to lay the foundation for the kind of person that Perry wanted to be when he grew up.
Childlike Fascination
It was as a teen in the late 1950s, when Perry began a lifelong career in music. He…
