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When a few young musicians first heard reggae at a Victor barnhouse in the early 1970s, they were hooked.
They shifted from playing covers and trying to emulate Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention to aligning with Bob Marley and the Wailers and creating their own reggae sound.
They formed Bahama Mama, which went on to tour with reggae groups Toots and the Maytals and Burning Spear. They later morphed into a successor group, the Majestics, which was inducted into the Rochester Music Hall of Fame in 2023. Their embrace of the genre at the time marked them as part of the earliest wave of American reggae music.
“It was like a siren call for all three of us,” says frontman Ron Stackman. “We weren’t trying to be traditionalists. We knew we were coming from a different background. But once it got into our bloodstream, it was like we couldn’t help but reflect the influence in our own music.
“At that time, I’ll bet there were five or six Jamaican-run record stores in the city. We’d go out every week after getting paid and spend our money on records,” he adds. “We never wore matching red, gold and green outfits or anything like that. We just loved the music. Jamaican people, for the most part, really dug that fact that these white guys from Upstate New York were so into this stuff.”
One of Stackman’s favorite memories was playing at a West Indian nightclub in Montreal where he says the band and their version of the music was embraced.
Bahama Mama will reunite on Sept. 19 to play an anniversary show at Photo City Music Hall, with longtime fan and Abilene Bar & Lounge owner Danny Deutsch a key supporter of the event.
“They are hometown guys that have a roots-reggae sound like no other,” Deutsch says.
Stackman is the first to admit the band members do not have the same “piss and vinegar” as 50 years ago. But he believes it’s a positive development that lets them think differently about songs so familiar to them.
“We’re not trying to create them like when we did them back then. We’ve all got a lot of miles under our belt now,” says Stackman. “Obviously we’ve mellowed and aged. But that’s one advantage about playing with the same guys for so long. You get to go through that whole development together. It kind of interlocks you without thinking about it.”
Stackman says the founding members, bassist Jim Schwarz and drummer Lou LaVilla, have been trying to convince guitarist and principal songwriter Jim Kraut to do a reunion show for a long time now.
However, Kraut, whom Stackman calls “the engine” of the band, approached them last fall about doing a concert in Rochester. What convinced him this was the time to perform these songs is “the state of the world,” and he sees many similarities to when they first formed the group.
“The stuff we wrote back then, you could write it now, as far as dealing with what the world is dealing with,” Stackman puts it.
He remembers, for example, playing their song “Future Fear” at an anti-nuclear rally in the late 1970s. The song touches on anxieties about the future as well as skepticism toward people in positions of power.
Similar political messages ingrained in reggae music were, in fact, what attracted Bahama Mama to the genre in the first place. Even on a goat farm in Victor, those political elements transcended geography for the band members.
“It was the lyrical content of the stuff. The equal rights and justice, the spiritual side, acting right, being right, eating right,” recalls Stackman. “All those things that we embraced because we were all pretty much living off the farm life back then. We were young and idealistic and we were just all about the music.”
Bahama Mama’s 50th Anniversary Show will be held on Sept. 19 at 7:30 p.m. at Photo City Music Hall. Tickets can be purchased at Abilene Bar & Saloon, Don’s Original, or online for $25 in advance or for $30 the day of the concert.
Jacob Schermerhorn is a Rochester Beacon contributing writer and data journalist.
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