Marley in a blue work-shirt, eyes screwed shut, looked like a young messiah. The cover of the Wailers’ first album The Wailing Wailers, released in 1965, carried a picture of the three principals – Bunny Wailer, Bob Marley, and Peter Tosh – neatly groomed in tuxedos and bow ties above the strap-line “Jamaica’s Top Rated Singing Sensations.” Things had changed somewhat by the time the group made their first UK TV appearance on the Old Grey Whistle Test on May 1, 1973. The album’s most enduring song, “Stir It Up” – already a hit for Johnny Nash – was followed by the even more explicitly amorous “Kinky Reggae,” in which a certain Miss Brown was said to have “brown sugar all over ’er booga-wooga.”īut the emotional meat of the album was in the passionate, street-poet lyrics of protest songs including “Slave Driver” and “400 Years.” “No chains around my feet/But I’m not free/I know I’m bounded in captivity,” Marley sang in “Concrete Jungle,” the first of several searing cries on behalf of the oppressed and dispossessed of his homeland which echoed what used to be known as the “negro spiritual” music of previous generations. It was an album of two sides literally, in those days when vinyl was the only commercially viable format, but also in its lyrical preoccupations, which were evenly divided between a cry of anguish from the ghetto and the cry of a young man in pursuit of something else. It is often forgotten that the Wailers had begun life as a vocal group and now, aided by Rita Marley (Bob’s wife) and Marcia Griffiths, the band, including percussionist Bunny Wailer, wove a rich patchwork of harmony and counterpoint vocal parts around Marley’s and Tosh’s melody lines on numbers such as “Stop That Train” and “Baby We’ve Got A Date (Rock It Baby).” The keyboard parts, supplied by John Rabbit Bundrick, completed the sonic picture with organ, clavinet, and a sprinkling of modern electronic effects. So too were the incredibly intricate vocal parts. The irresistible rhythmic tug which this produced was a revelation to the great majority of listeners discovering the band for the first time. The bass and drum parts – supplied by Aston “Family Man” Barrett and his younger brother Carlton Barrett, respectively – were welded together by the distinctive staccato scratch-strokes of Marley’s rhythm guitar. The result was an album with a groove that was languid, soulful, and sun-drenched, yet lean and taut as a coiled spring. Adding overdubbed contributions from the session guitarist Wayne Perkins, Blackwell tweaked arrangements and adjusted mixes, rolling back some of the heavier bass-end parts and generally molding the sound into a shape that remained true to the band’s roots, but which would also sit comfortably in the mainstream rock marketplace of the day. Even so, when Marley returned to London to deliver the master tapes, Blackwell insisted that more work was needed and promptly took over the production reins. In contrast to previous recordings, they now had a budget that could do full justice to the songs, seven of which were written by Marley – who also produced the album – and two by the group’s other singer and lead guitarist Peter Tosh. The Wailers recorded Catch A Fire in three different eight-track studios in Kingston. Later the same year, Nash scored a Top 15 hit in both the UK and the US with his recording of Bob Marley’s song “Stir It Up.” The American star brought the Wailers over as a support act on his 1972 tour of the UK, where the band met up with Chris Blackwell who signed them to record an album for Island Records. The Harder They Come, a movie starring the Jamaican singer Jimmy Cliff, with a soundtrack of reggae songs performed by Cliff, Desmond Dekker, and others, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 1972 and became a slow-burning international success. In the UK, reggae had unfortunate associations with the skinhead boot-boy tendency and Max Romeo’s lubricious (and banned) Top 10 hit “Wet Dream.” In the US, occasional pop hits by American acts such as Neil Diamond (“Red Red Wine”) and Johnny Nash (“Hold Me Tight”) skimmed sweetly across the surface of the reggae/rocksteady tradition.īut this was about to change. Despite the rich and varied history of reggae and its antecedents of ska, bluebeat, and mento, only a smattering of reggae songs had ever made an impression on the charts outside the island. It is difficult to convey how little was known about Jamaican music in pre-Marley Britain and America at the start of the 1970s.
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