I-TAL in later years (with Dave Smeltz, center reaR) The first reggae band to make an impact in Cleveland.

1988. On the national record charts, metal bands like Def Leppard and Guns N' Roses, post-new wavers like INXS, pop stars like Whitney Houston and George Michael and flashes in the pan like Tiffany and Expose ruled the charts. In Cleveland clubs, Richard Marx lookalikes with lounge mullets and proto-alternative bands playing spirited originals beloved by scenesters struggled to draw crowds.

Though it was rarely mentioned in anyone's recitation of the hottest buzz bands in Cleveland, there was one band that had the buzz where it counted: on the street. Outside Peabody's DownUnder in the Flats, the city's top concert club at the time, a line snaked down Old River Road whenever Cleveland's First Light had one of its two-night stands there. College-age kids in cargo shorts, tie-dyed T-shirts and sandals mingled with older blue-collar types in jeans, both a contrast to the sorority girls and men on the make flocking into the surrounding dance clubs.

1988 was the year First Light began to surge to its prime. The group, at that point seven members strong, had soft-released its first full-length album, Reggae Meltdown, at the beginning of the year, sneaking some cassettes into peoples' hands before releasing it officially in June, one of the first local bands to release a CD. By then, most of the band's fans were already familiar with songs like "Situation," "Island Time," "Unity of Conscience" and "The Light," from the live shows.

On the momentum created by that album, which eventually became the best-selling self-released album by a Cleveland artist until Mushroomhead eclipsed it in the mid-'90s, First Light toured constantly, built a strong college following and showcased at the top industry music conference South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. It self-released a couple more albums, but never signed to a major label and it broke up in 1998, a victim of burnout, changing life priorities and singer/guitarist/percussionist Carlos Jones' desire to play a purer form of roots reggae than the hybrid First Light had developed.

Now, 10 years after its breakup and 20 years after the release of Reggae Meltdown, the Light will shine again at a headlining concert at the Plain Dealer Pavilion in the Flats at 8 p.m. Saturday, June 21, bringing the core members — Jones, guitarist/bassist Mike "Chopper" Wasson, guitarist/bassist/vocalist Gino Long, percussionist Bob Caruso, keyboardist Ed Marthey and drummer Rod Reisman — back together for the first time in a decade.

How did a reggae band become Cleveland's top band for nearly 15 years? Rewind to the mid-'70s: A small clique of out-of-town rock critics have dubbed the city "the new Liverpool," although resident music fans can't quite fathom why. On one hand, the big bar bands are fighting the rust-belt gloom by wearing satin and velvet and playing theatrical glitter rock. On the other, a tiny cadre of underground bands are celebrating that same decay in clamorous, mostly unheard music. And off to the side, some bands are playing what we'd call roots music now, preferring the timeless sounds of blues, folk, country and jazz.

FIRST LIGHT in the '80s. Their hybrid sound attracted a wide range of fans.

Meanwhile, over 1,600 miles away in Jamaica, a sound was catching on that would soon touch Cleveland, in the wake of the 1972 film The Harder They Come, starring Jimmy Cliff as an ill-fated reggae singer, and the international release the following year of the Wailers' debut album, Catch a Fire, featuring Wailer Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" (a huge hit for Eric Clapton in 1974).

Here and there in Cleveland, ears started perking up. Chris Dunmore first heard it when he was working at Record Revolution in Athens and then its parent branch on Coventry Road in Cleveland Heights in 1974. Shaker Heights High classmates Dave Smeltz and Bob Caruso saw The Harder They Come while visiting friends in Boston, friends who kept playing the album during their stay.

Dave Valentine opened a bar in University Circle called the Coach House in mid-1977. He was booking an eclectic assortment of bands and also playing in a blues band fronted by Gair Linhart, who lived upstairs. In early 1978 he took a trip to Key West and was blown away by a Bob Marley album a guy at another campsite kept playing.

These were some of the Clevelanders who planted the roots of Cleveland's reggae scene.

"When I got back to Cleveland [after the Florida trip]," Valentine recalls, "I started stocking the jukebox with reggae songs. I was the first bar in Cleveland to stock reggae songs. Word started spreading that this little bar in the circle had a reggae jukebox and people started coming to be near the jukebox. Not large crowds, a few dozen or so. Most people at that time had no idea what reggae was."

Meanwhile, Dave Smeltz had been hanging out at Dailey's on East 116th, a recently opened hub for the local Jamaican scene, and got bitten by the bug.

"Around 1978, I wanted to start playing the stuff," he recalls. "We tried to start a band, myself, Bob [Caruso] and a guy named Ralph Tubbs. On 71st and Euclid there were some lofts you could rent out. We rented a loft out and began practicing there. We had been going to Dailey's and they had a whole bunch of reggae records there and we started hanging around Jamaican folks more. They had chicken patties and curried goat, and overproof rum was a draw also. They had 12-inch records for sale, long versions of reggae songs. While we're there we met a couple of guys, Jamaican guys, named Beebo and Shadow who had a band called Black Lion. That was the first reggae band I know of in Cleveland."

SATTA One of the better-known Cleveland reggae bands among the many in late '80s.

He also stopped by the Sunday night jam sessions he'd heard about at the Coach House. Out of that emerged I-Tal, the band that kicked off the area's non-Jamaican reggae scene. "It was an amazing thing at the Coach House," says Caruso. "It was so laid back. They made hamburgers in the back. They had beer and wine, no hard liquor. Valentine said if we can get some kind of thing together, we'll play every Friday and Saturday so we had a guaranteed gig on weekends. And it took off, American guys playing reggae."

Ron Jarvis, who replaced Valentine on bass after the band's first year, recalls the sound that drew in a diverse audience.

"I-Tal itself brought its own sensiblity to music. They were very rootsy, very knowledgable, but being from Shaker Heights and around Cleveland, I believe everybody's heart still beat to that rock 'n' roll feel. We did what reggae was meant to do but did it with midwestern rock 'n' roll attitude, kicked the energy and excitement up a couple of notches. I think that was key to our success."

After establishing themselves as the Coach House's de facto house band, I-Tal started playing other clubs, opening up their nights for other bands which grew up in their wake. Soon Peabody's DownUnder was booking reggae shows and Peabody's in Cleveland Heights at the corner of Cedar and Taylor roads (now Platinum Dreams) established its Wednesday night reggae nights, which ran for 15 years.

"We started playing Peabody's Café," recalls Dunmore, who became I-Tal's drummer and booker. "A hundred, 150 people on a Wednesday night and it grew from there. That's what really pulled the scene together. It gave other bands a chance to play — Jah Messenger, Black Scorpio. We started playing Mother's in Kent, going down to Swanky's in Athens. We used to play Mother's in Kent upstairs in this absolute sweat box. Those nights used to be absolutely packed. It was a fire hazard. First of all it was upstairs, and the stage was all the way back in the back corner. It was a big college type of crowd. Then people would come home for the holidays and it slowly grew that way."

After Bob Marley died of cancer in 1981, his reputation grew to mythical proportions. His posthumous album Legend was released in 1984 and went on to become the biggest-selling reggae album of all time. Reggae wasn't a closely kept secret anymore. But at the same time there was turmoil in the ranks of I-Tal and early that year the group splintered, leaving Smeltz and a couple of other members on one side, and Dunmore, Caruso, Jones, Long and Chopper on the other. They soon formed the new ensemble First Light, while I-Tal continued, led by Smeltz, with various other members, into the early '90s, playing mostly outside Northeast Ohio.

Propelled by Marley's exploding popularity and the resulting increased familiarity of white audiences with reggae, and the band's own propensity for blending rock, soul, funk, pop and even jazz into their reggae base, First Light soon eclipsed I-Tal and piggybacked onto the same circuit I-Tal had started to play, with Dunmore now acting as their manager. Rod Reisman came on board to play drums and Ed Marthey joined on keyboards. With soundman Larry Rhodes, they formed the core of the band for virtually its entire existence.

Caribbean flavor in Euclid - A newer hotspot for reggae music.

"We had people coming out immediately," recalls Reisman. "I don't know if it was buzz from I-Tal or because the band knew so many people and so many different kinds of people. This music would have people who love heavy guitar to the best-looking women who came to see any band I was in, maybe because the guys in front had an exotic look for that time."

But more importantly, they had a sound that cut across genres and especially appealed to the growing legion of young jam-band fans turned on by musical hybrids. Certainly, they led with reggae: It was there in their name, their album title, their logo, the dreadlocks on their three frontmen. But their appeal to a wide cross-section of audiences earned them slots opening for Meat Loaf, the Clash and Living Colour as well as the more predictable shows with Toots & the Maytals, Steel Pulse and the Wailers.

"We played Pink Floyd's "Time' and it's not reggae but our influences would filter through," says Reisman. "Some rock is going to come through and some reggae is going to come through and some soul is going to come through. The audience would see dreadlocks and assume it was a reggae band. Even if we had become a different band, the reggae's always there because no matter what you do, you have to have a starting point and that was our starting point."

He explains how the band's modus operandi appealed to the nascent jam-band nation.

"We played together all the time and when you do that you're able to improvise. You can rehearse until your head falls off but it's not the same. We were just playing all the time and letting the music morph. I think "Situation' really encompassed a lot because Chopper, Gino, Carlos love that sound - Manhattans, Dramatics, the male vocal groups of the '70s. You'll hear that in that song, but it's also technically what they'd call lover's rock. If we were supposed to be a reggae band, that song encompasses a lot. I think on Meltdown we captured it well. I even dropped my stick on the take but I wouldn't stop playing, the feel was so good."

As First Light's popularity grew, other bands such as the Champion Bubblers and Satta, featuring early First Light bassist Chellis, sprang up. National reggae tours stopped in town more frequently. Packy Malley, who, like Dave Valentine, discovered reggae while on a camping trip listening to a Bob Marley tape over and over while it rained, started promoting concerts in Columbus while attending Ohio State and launched his Midwest Reggae Fest in 1993. And college radio, which underpins so many scenes in Cleveland, buoyed this one too. Rich Lowe, whose show Night of the Living Dread is heard on WRUW 91.1 FM from 7-9 p.m. Fridays, debuted his show on John Carroll's radio station in 1982.

He first heard reggae on Don Kirschner's Rock Concert television program. "They had Bob Marley on. I said wow, this is so unusual. I'd never seen anything like that. The dreads, the whole vibe. I started to go see I-Tal, Jah Messengers. I started going to Dailey's Mountain Inn and got a radio show when I was up at John Carroll. It was '78-'79 when I started listening to the music."

FIRST LIGHT TODAY Ready for their June 21 reunion show in the Flats.

Like Lowe, Tommy Fox, whose program, Rudie's Hi-Fi, is heard on WCSB-89.3 FM from 2-4 p.m. Saturdays, is a Cleveland white boy who became deeply immersed in Jamaican music. Although a rocker (known for his lengthy stint with the Mice), he'd been "mesmerized" by DJ Prince on WRUW and bought a lot of reggae records as a result. He briefly played with a local reggae band, Riddim Fish, in the late '80s. When he went back to school in 1999, a friend who was WCSB's program director suggested he get a program.

"I thought, I have all these great reggae records that no one else plays and I've been obsessed with it ever since. I started really embracing reggae in mid-to-late '80s and I've been going to shows ever since. In the '80s it was all roots music. Everybody wanted to be Bob Marley, everybody wanted to be Peter Tosh. Now more people are into Sizzla, Lovota, Capleton. There's a wider variety of reggae music out there. But the two paths never seem to intersect."

Fox is referring to a split in reggae in the '80s. While the older generation loved the politically and socially aware roots reggae of Marley that the white rockers had discovered, younger Jamaicans were listening to a raunchier version of reggae, dubbed dancehall or bashment. That music came to be embraced in Cleveland's Jamaican community about the same time First Light was packing clubs with Phish fans, creating two separate, parallel scenes that both Lowe and Fox traversed.

"When I started doing my radio show a friend of mine named Trevor came up to the station and he introduced me to the real Jamaican scene," says Lowe. "He introduced me to the sound systems and selectors — DJs. You'd go to clubs and the whole crowd would be Jamaican. It would be dark and everyone would dance until the floor got wet. It was slippery like someone spilled water but it was sweat. They played at a place called Playhouse East on Miles. They had dances at the Spectrum, they played reggae music at the Plush. They would have house parties in peoples' basements."

"Reggae music is always evolving and doing something different," he continues. "It's always moving ahead. I play music in clubs and you have the people that want to hear old rock-steady music and people that want to hear brand new Sizzla Kalonji and you have to kind of appeal to everybody and it's challenging."

Today, there's plenty of reggae, both old and new, on college radio, with about a dozen shows at any given time. "From about 1981 it's been just solid reggae music," says Lowe. "Radio has always pumped out good Jamaican music."

The Midwest Reggae Fest has grown into a three-day event at Nelsons Ledges Quarry Park in August. Dailey's is still the place to go for Jamaican food, music and culture. The Caribbean Flavor on Babbitt Road in Euclid joined the scene about five years ago. And although the plethora of live bands that played the clubs in the '80s and early '90s is gone, Carlos Jones's P.L.U.S. band is a reliable favorable at nearly every festival in town.

Rich Lowe looks back to that peak of the live-band reggae scene and First Light's role in it. "There were about 12 to 14 different bands. Splash in the Flats was around, Peabody's DownUnder. I would go to Peabody's at Taylor and Cedar with 8 to 10 friends. You had some smaller clubs here and there. Brothers Lounge, once in a while. You had First Light, Harambe, Satta. They stretched it, they were something that was very appealing to the masses. First Light were able to get into a lot of clubs and broadcast out. They used to jam, and it was a lot of fun. They made the music cross barriers and borders."