I was walking down the street in Baytown, Tx., only recently having been made aware of Reggae and Bob Marly, when I see this tall handsome you Rastaman walking down the street. I said “Hello” and directly established that both he and I had some weed and that we should smoke it.
His name was Rabbi. As we spoke we both acknowledged that we were musicians. I played bass and he was a percussionist and singer. I told him that my roommate was a guitar player and we both could play Reggae. We arranged a rehearsal. He invited a friend, Kelvin Adufo, who also played percussion and sang. ( And who, ended up, years later, on the FBI’s Most Wanted list for bank robbery.) They had a friend who was a drummer, “Steady”.
Oddly enough, I had only 2 weeks before jammed with my friend Bobby Threadgill’s band, auditioning as a bass player. The “Lead singer” in the band was “All hat and no cattle”, a total poser with medium talent, so I passed on the band. However there had been this AMAZING steel drum player, a guy in a straw “skimmer” hat at the rehearsal. He informed me that he had played in a steel pan orchestra with The Rolling Stones at Madison Square Garden…on ‘Sympathy For The Devil’……How cool is that?!! His name was….”Steady”.
“Steady” (Stedman Joseph, later Ras Iginga Tafari)
Steady and I were really stoked to see each other again. We became fast friends and stayed close through my first recording session with Keith Hudson and into the 1980’s in our Austin, TX based reggae band, PRESSURE.
The band was formed along with neighbor, keyboardist, Dan Curtis on keyboards. We started playing at a community center, really a long shack with a bar in the black, mainly West Indian part of Baytown. There were a lot of Trinidadians in Baytown who had come from working in the world’s largest Exxon plant there. We had a built in crowd. The place would pack to the gills to see us.
Somehow, that lead to us getting booked at the Blessing of the Shrimp Fleet festival on the Strand in Galveston. We were the headlining act. At the end of the festival, after they had shut down the P.A. people would not leave so we all, and I mean ALL, Rasta friends, girlfriends and family members just started playing all kinds of percussion instruments and we added another half hour to the festivities. It was a really glorious event. I had never played before that many people, a thousand or more….
At our rehearsal, one day, a man named Lord Brynner (Kade Simon) showed up. The Trinidadians all knew him as Brynner (At one time, pre short dreads, he went with a shaved head. Even though he got his name from Yul Brynner, the Trinis pronounced it BRYE-ner) a Calypsonian who won the Trinidad and Tobago Independence Calypso Contest in 1962. He also had a number of Ska hits in Jamaica during the mid-1960’s. (Interestingly, his wife was a nurse in Miami and one day he came to practice upset and told us his wife told him Bob Marley was dying of cancer. 3 years later this became true.). Brynner was a hustler and a shyster but he inspired the band to be better and to ask for money, when we played. He actually found me right after I moved to Austin and booked my first gig here, at Antone’s, where I met Courtney Audain (1981), still my best friend and musical partner in Bee Gees Songbook. For that gig Steady, Rabbi and Adufo all came up from Baytown to play.
That band broke up when Charlie and I decided to move back to Baltimore. For me, that was only about a year and I ended up in Austin and “The rest is history!’
David, Charlie Gatewood and me….on a raft at some hotel Brynner gig. 
Rabbi at the Blessing of the Shrimp Fleet, Galveston
My Entertaining Life-Steve Carter 