Perry Mixes Antics With Reggae Rhythm

As one of reggae’s great record producers and songwriters, Lee “Scratch” Perry helped foster Jamaica’s early wave of Rastafarian musical prophets, including Bob Marley and the Wailers.

From his backyard studio, the Black Ark, came mid-’70s “dub style” recordings whose distinctive, wall-shaking bass has an echo in hip-hop. Perry’s echoing ambiences and cut-and-paste sound insertions and deletions were a prelude to the now-popular art of remixing.

Perry wigged out and burned down his studio in 1979. Now based in Switzerland, he’s assumed the role of a Holy Fool, comically eccentric to the point of risking dismissal as a possibly addled crank, yet still proclaiming prophetically on behalf of Jah and against Babylon.

At the Coach House in San Juan Capistrano on Monday, Perry, 62, was a cartoonish apparition, decked out like a bush-guerrilla Johnny Appleseed in camouflage vest, stars-and-stripes shirt and enough shiny baubles to start a jewelry booth at a Deadhead convention.

He moved with a spry bounce, conducted baptisms with bottled water, honked periodically on a bicycle horn that he never relinquished, issued contradictory proclamations casting himself as both prophet and charlatan, alluded to his supposed extraterrestrial connections, and played with the whole image in a tongue-in-cheek song called “I Am a Madman.”

Ironically, given the startling presence and definition-amid-chaos of his ‘70s studio achievements, Perry almost was undone by a murky sound mix. But absorbing rhythms, coupled with the most catchy of Perry’s sing-song incantations, were enough to make a significant chunk of the 90-minute show memorable for more than its eccentricity. Perry rates inclusion with Sun Ra, George Clinton and Dr. John the Night Tripper in pop’s elite line of costumed, myth-equipped eccentrics, albeit as the least of an entertaining lot.

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* Lee “Scratch” Perry plays tonight at Billboard Live, 9039 Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood, 8 p.m. $30. (310) 786-1712.