Tonight’s appearance of Toots and the Maytals, opening The Who’s Maple Leaf Gardens concert, completes the Jamaican-born Reggae sound’s invasion of Toronto which saw first appearances here earlier this year by Bob Marley and the Wailers and Jimmy Cliff.

Actually, Toots (real name, Freddie Hibbert), Marley and Cliff were first seen and heard through most of North America in Perry Henzell’s 1973 movie The Harder They Come.

Based on the legendary story of a young Jamaican who struck back at the system’s corruption the movie was the Jamaican equivalent of Marlon Brando’s The Wild One and James Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause.

And for the first time new Jamaican music by Jamaicans (and not by rockers like Eric Clapton or the Rolling Stones) reached a mass audience.

But some distinctions must be made. Jimmy Cliff’s Reggae, although he starred in The Harder They Come, is a watered-down variety streamlined for mass North American consumption. In Jamaica, though, it’s still Toots and the Maytals and Marley who sum up what the real thing’s all about.

And while Marley represents Reggae at its most sly and insinuating, Toots and the Maytals are Reggae at its gut level. Their’s is Reggae with a punch.

For Toots, the feeling in his music comes from his religious beliefs. Like many Reggae artists, he’s a Rastafarian, a uniquely Jamaican movement that traces its history back to the early ’30s and has centred on the worship of the late Haile Selassie, the former king of Ethiopia.