Hey family, I just posted my most recent mix "Dub Train" up on Playloop.podomatic.com For most of you this will be seem an unusual mix for me. In reality though my foundation in music lays more strongly in Reggae than in house music. I've really only been spinning house since 2000 but I have been listening to reggae since the late seventies and started making reggae mix tapes in 1989. The first track on the mix "king tubby meets the rockers uptown" is not only a tribute to one of the pioneers of Dub style reggae but it was the first true dub track I ever heard.

My father owned two reggae records when i was growing up as a kid. One was the 1972 Jimmy Cliff's "Harder They Come" (which as a kid I appreciated more for the cover art than the music) and the second was an obscure cassette tape called "This is Reggae Music Volume 2" it came out on Island Music in 1976 and was a simply put together, yet quality collection. It gathered together well-known classic material like Augustus Pablo's "King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown," Burning Spear's "Marcus Garvey," and the evocative vocals of The Heptones' "Country Boy" alongside somewhat lesser-known tracks like George Dekker's "Time So Hard" -- with its bouncy digital chorus -- Desi Young's "I Don't Know Why I Love You" -- whose horn line is irresistible -- and Arthur Louis' version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door."

I was lucky to find a version on CD in the mid nineties. If anyone ever finds Volume 1 or 3 let me know. In all my years of music collecting I've never found another part to this collection. I remember staring at the picture of the shanty on the cassette tape with it's little faded "red Stripe" sign. It wasn't until i first went to Jamiaca when I was nineteen that I realized that Jamaica had changed so little in many years as I sat down and talked to the Rastafari and sipped my own Red Stripe as Burning Spear chanted away from a little boombox in the distance. To this day in many ways it remains unchanged.

I called this Dub Train, because on several levels both Rastafari and Reggae music was like the little train that could. It proved that it didn't matter what the rest of the world thought, that as long as one is true in one's beliefs and is dedicated, honest and willing to put in the hard work. No hill is too high to climb.

Also to me, in many ways, true Dub has always sounded like an old steam engine chugging away in the distance, repetitive and consistent, while echoing off the hills and landscape and breathing a sigh of release as it goes downhill. I hope you enjoy this music for there is a message in it. Always, Bless, LuvLee. May Jah guide and protect us all the days of our lives.