POP MUSIC REVIEW : Taking It on Faith : Coach House Crowd Embraces Black Uhuru’s Reggae Songs of Struggle

About 300 Orange County teen-agers and young adults rose to their feet Wednesday night in response to a song expressing the creed of a messianic cult. Nearly all danced with delight. Many mouthed the chorus’s words of praise for a divinity that no major religion would view as anything but preposterous.

No, this was not a harbinger of another Waco in the making. It was just a reggae concert at the Coach House.

The band was Black Uhuru. Like almost all of the front-rank Jamaican groups, from Bob Marley and the Wailers onward, Black Uhuru proclaims a Rastafarian faith that has been crucial in shaping its music and its message.

The religion’s core belief is that Haile Selassie I (also known as Ras Tafari), emperor of Ethiopia from 1930 until a year before his death in 1975, was, as the New Encyclopaedia Britannica puts it, “a divine being, the Messiah, and the champion of the black race.”

“I Love King Selassie” was the title and refrain of Black Uhuru’s surging, chant-like show opener. In singing along, of course, the vast majority of the band’s fans weren’t endorsing a specific set of Rastafarian beliefs (the great majority of those fans were white, making them irrelevant at best, and inherently inferior at worst, according to certain Rastafarian tenets).

They were responding to the broader, more embracing vision that has made the best reggae a spiritually uplifting force in pop music since the Wailers brought it to the wider world’s attention 20 years ago.

Reggae bands tend to use Rastafarian symbols and catch-phrases in their lyrics, but the themes have been opened up to have universal appeal: the raising of the downtrodden, justice for the dispossessed, and visions of a world united in peace and love.

In Rasta circles, the only thing that is apt to go up in smoke is marijuana, the consumption of which is a sacrament. Judging from the aroma in certain quarters of the Coach House during the early show, this is one cultic practice that nonbelievers are willing to endorse.

Since its rise to popularity in the early 1980s, Black Uhuru has been known for it advocacy of social struggle, set against some of reggae’s most trenchant rhythms.

Singers Don Carlos, Derrick (Duckie) Simpson and Garth Dennis founded the band in the mid-1970s, and the same three make up the current lineup. But Black Uhuru’s fire of a decade ago has ebbed somewhat. The band hit its peak years after Carlos and Dennis had gone on to other musical projects, leaving Simpson to replace them with two dynamic singers, Michael Rose and the late Sandra (Puma) Jones.

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Still, the three albums Black Uhuru has issued since 1990 with the reunited original threesome are all enjoyable. Carlos, who sings most of the lead parts, has a reedy voice that gives songs a plaintive, yearning cast rather than a tone of clenched declaration.

Those three albums, including the current “Mystical Truth,” offer good variety, with lighter, more personal songs augmenting the chronicles of struggle. On stage, Black Uhuru didn’t mix it up nearly enough--not that it gave itself much of a chance to by playing a mere 55 minutes.

Dark, minor-key songs of struggle made up the bulk of the set. A fine, muscular-sounding five-man band set down hypnotic rhythms that implied laborious but surging and inexorable movement toward a goal.

The show crested with the dire “Iron Storm” and the gentler, but still emphatic “Imposter,” two of Black Uhuru’s most intense songs about barriers on the road to freedom (the sinister forces of “Babylon” in the former, hard drugs in the latter).

The three main singers were a self-contained bunch who said little and didn’t interact or offer much in the way of shamanistic performance in the Marley tradition.

Carlos, dapper in a double-breasted jacket embroidered with a G-clef, swayed and stepped rather circumspectly to the music. The tall, severe-looking Simpson cut an almost Lincolnesque figure--not just because he was bearded and wore a hat almost as tall as a stovepipe, but because he had the awkward movements of a man who isn’t entirely at home in his gangly body.

Dennis and a female harmony singer played a secondary role, not least because an imprecise sound mix left them almost inaudible. The show’s most exuberant moment came during a cover of “Hey Joe” that copied the Jimi Hendrix version, except with a reggae rhythm.

Having had to content himself with rhythm work while keyboards player Tony Brissett took all the solos, guitarist Vince Black finally got to wail away as he scampered about with his thigh-length dreadlocks flapping.

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Black Uhuru did lighten the mood with a pop-flavored encore, the idealistic “One Love” (not the Marley song). A few more along those lines would have helped vary the set and stretch it to a more acceptable length.

“One Love” featured guest rapping from Black Uhuru’s Mesa Records label-mate, Louie Rankin. Rankin’s gravelly voiced rhymes worked well in spicing the Black Uhuru song, when his toasting was one ingredient among many.

During his own 20-minute preliminary set, tedium quickly set in as he rolled off a steady flow of hard-to-make-out lyrics. Rankin, who wore his beaded, braided hair in roughly the shape of an upside-down flower pot, was not a shining stage presence despite his unusual coiffure and bright, glittering red pajamas.

For visual interest, he relied primarily on three female “dancers” whose job mainly involved pelvic grinds and bending over in their tight hot pants to present their posteriors for the audience’s inspection.

Andrew Tosh emphasized reggae’s spiritual dimension in his 30-minute opening set, turning one of his songs into an extended sermon/prayer in praise of the Rastafarian deity.

Tosh looked the part in a bright blue robe with tassels that made him look, if not quite priestly, at least like a choirmaster. Trying to follow the path of his late reggae pioneer father, Peter, the lanky Tosh performed a medley of his dad’s songs and showed a knack for dramatic movement and a good stage command.

But the younger Tosh doesn’t have a rangy or distinctive singing voice, a lack partly compensated by the shrewd call-and-response use of two female backup singers.