Watch the video Their bass bumps through the nightclubs, their bus runs clean on biodiesel and their musical message covers the bases of peace, love and understanding. So it's no surprise that the up-and-coming dub reggae band known as Dubconscious has a kinship with Bob Marley.
BobMarley.com caught up with Dubconscious -- which includes lead singer and rhythm guitarist Adrian Zelski, lead guitarist and vocalist James Keane, keyboardist and vocalist Jerry Hendelberg, bassist, horn player and vocalist Solomon Wright, drummer Matt Woolley, percussionist Scott Pridgen, sound engineer and bassist Roger Levine and vocalist Shelley Olin -- while the Athens, Ga.-based group was in the midst of a busy week of music and activism at the 2007 Bonnaroo Arts and Music Festival in Tennessee. Band co-founder Zelski said Bob's influence on Dubconscious isn't hard to trace.
"Bob was the patriarch of reggae's popularity, so ultimately it's always going to be important to reference Bob just to make reggae real," Zelski said. "I hope that America really picks up on the spiritual aspects and really takes it to that root affect."
Zelski says the band fell in love with dub reggae "in the style of King Tubby, Lee Perry, Black Uhuru and Bob Marley and just wanted to do it." Instead of playing the jangly rock, indie pop or legendary party tunes that ground-breaking Athens acts such as R.E.M., the Elephant 6 Collective or the B-52's became famous for, Dubconscious locked into a decidedly Jamaican groove with their 2003 debut album, Word of Life.
"We stopped doing the full strums and stopped doing the heavy drums and tried to learn how to do reggae," Zelski says. "It's very spiritually based and the lyrics are trying to be politically potent, socially concerned, and taking from the snippets of reggae's message to translate to an American audience."
The strategy is working very well. Dubconscious has landed Bonnaroo gigs plus big-name summer slots such as the High Sierra Music Festival in Northern California, Wakarusa in Lawrence, Kansas, 10,000 Lakes and many more.
"Being a touring band here in America, I see so many people loving the (reggae) rhythm," Zelski says. "So many bands I've gotten in touch with are like, 'Wow ... we just played one reggae song and the whole crowd danced.'"
And, as Zelski points out, a lot of that built-in admiration that fun-loving crowds already have for reggae is the love of the man who brought the sounds from the island of Jamaica to the rest of the planet.
"Bob Marley is the reference point for everybody," Zelski says. "He's as big as (Bonnaroo headliner) Sting, bigger in the minds of most people. Hopefully people will always be able to reference him but also grow into their newness, grow into a very new evolution of reggae music."
But as enjoyable as the bouncy rhythms and intense grooves can be, Zelski says his evolution as a reggae musician has truly blossomed in the form of his lyrical content. And that, he says, is the most important contribution Bob made to the world.
"Bob Marley's the poet laureate of my life," Zelski says. "He totally changed my way of thinking with lyrics. And I've traced from him to the Bible with the Psalms and with the Rastafarian text they draw from so much that it's so powerful and so incredibly important toward politics and toward social change.
"These really poor people in Jamaica made the government change in Jamaica for the better for them. In that reality, we want to do the same thing in America. So Bob Marley's incredible. He's the reason for me, ultimately."