BOB 
ARLEYMARLEY
By Garth Cartwright
Tuesday October 6, 1998
| On native American
reservations, they dance round totem poles in celebration of his spirit. Aborigines in the
Australian outback and Maoris in rural New Zealand look to him as a prophet against
oppression. During the Nicaraguan civil war, both sides rode into battle listening to his
music. In India, he is frequently depicted as a Hindu god. From Ireland to Israel, Italy
to Indonesia, Bob Marley is feted as a superhero, a symbol of emancipation. Norman Mailer once observed that the heavyweight boxing champion was the most famous man on the planet and, for Muhammad Ali, that surely was true. But as boxers rust, they are forgotten. Marley has been dead for 17 years and is much more famous now than he ever was while alive. His fame is not contained in the wealthy, record-buying first world, but has spread to all five continents. And while Elvis and The Beatles may have sold many more records (though more of Marley's were bootlegged), listening to both invokes a sense of period, while Marley sounds absolutely contemporary. Why? What makes a man who sold merely respectable amounts of records in his lifetime the most popular icon on earth after his death? To answer that, one must return to the early years of Marley's music-making, and no time is more appropriate than now: with the issue of The Complete Bob Marley And The Wailers 1967-1972 Part 1, a re-evaluation of Marley's pre-Island Records (thus pre-international recognition) work is about to begin. This three-CD set is the first of four (the following three will be issued at intervals across the next six months). They will gather over 200 songs by Marley and his fellow Wailers, Peter Tosh and Bunny Livingstone, recorded across a five-year period. Aficionados will note that Marley first recorded three songs as a 17-year-old solo artist in 1962 before forming The Wailers with Tosh and Livingstone in 1963. The Wailers met through the singer and ghetto philanthropist Joe Higgs, and initially were a flashy-dressing ska group noted for their fiery dance routines. Their second single, Simmer Down, showed Marley talking peace to the local rudeboys and it reached No 1 in the Jamaican charts. Recording for Coxsone Dodd - then Jamaica's leading producer - at Studio One, they released many strong-selling ska singles during 1964 and 1965. Not that they saw much reward for their efforts. Marley existed on Dodd's wages of £3 a week, and on February 11 1966, the day after he married Rita Anderson, he flew to the United States, where his mother had acquired a work visa for him. For eight months, he drove fork-lifts, waited tables and worked on the Chrysler assembly line, then he quit and returned to Jamaica, where things were noticeably different. Ska had cooled, rock steady's slower, heavier rhythms were forging what would be reggae, and the visit of Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, had left a profound impression on the Kingston music scene. Marley began studying Rasta doctrine, and attempted to sidestep the pirates who ran the Jamaican record business by setting up his own record label and shop, Wail 'N'Soul 'M. But, after just one release, the company was in financial trouble and Marley, Rita and her child Sharon moved back to St Ann to farm some land left to his mother. After failing to procure a tractor from his uncles, he moved back to Kingston and set about releasing more singles on Wail 'N' Soul 'M. This is where The Complete Wailers finishes - chasing up these obscure releases that The Wailers and Rita sold by hand in Kingston. Of course, the collection should start here, but the legal wrangling over Marley's estate continues to prolong even seemingly simple matters. |
| Marley, by now the
father of two children, was desperately poor until Danny Sims, a black American
entrepreneur who managed the soul singer Johnny Nash, heard about the precocious
songwriter and signed him and his fellow Wailers to a publishing and management deal that
saw them each receive a weekly retainer of $100. The Wailers kept recording for a variety of labels and producers, but further Jamaican success was elusive. This is where Part 1 starts, and the first CD is all Sims productions, with The Wailers accompanied by US sessionmen, including Hugh Masekela, as they try to forge a sound compatible with black American tastes - they even transformed James Brown's Say It Loud, I'm Black And I'm Proud into Black Progress. By 1970, frustrated by his lack of success, he shifted his family back to Delaware and returned to Chrysler's assembly line. Within months of settling, Marley received call-up papers from the American military. To avoid Vietnam, he once again returned to Jamaica and hooked up with the man who would become the most famous reggae producer of all time: Lee Perry. The Wailers met Perry when he was Coxsone Dodd's chief engineer. Having tired of Dodd's autocratic personality, Perry had branched out on his own, assembling some of the best young musicians in Kingston and dubbing them The Hippie Boys. In 1969 he scored a top five UK hit with Return Of Django. Teaming The Hippie Boys with The Wailers provided Marley with the backing band that would stay with him for the rest of his life. Perry also encouraged Marley's songwriting to confront political and social injustice. Duppy Conquerer was issued as a 45 at the end of 1970 and immediately climbed the Jamaican charts. The Wailers were back, guided by a record producer who would 'plant' his new vinyl releases in his garden to ensure their health. Around this time, the Jamaican soccer star Alan Cole befriended The Wailers and helped finance their Tuff Gong record label. The title was a nickname for Marley, and its first single, Trench Town Rock, made it to number one in the summer of 1971. Danny Sims then flew Marley to Stockholm to write songs for the soundtrack of a film Johnny Nash was starring in, but the film project was a disaster and a promised tour supporting Nash never materialised. By 1972, the Wailers were in London, under threat of imprisonment because of a large package of marijuana that had been sent their way and intercepted by customs. Something drastic had to be done. Marley engineered a meeting with the Island Records boss, Chris Blackwell. Little did anyone realise that the deal agreed upon by a white and a black Jamaican would unleash the Third World's first superstar, one who, in eight brief years, would outshine all others. If this is where the Marley story most of us know begins, it is where the Complete Bob Marley And The Wailers ends. Marley's transition to international draw is a fascinating and well documented one. He would soon lose Tosh and Livingstone, develop a rock-flavoured reggae, and regularly ransack his back catalogue to provide songs for Island albums. |
| Authorities on reggae
consider the 1967-72 period to be Marley's finest, and, until now, it has been available
only in the most piecemeal form. The three men who set about the mammoth task of tracking
down all that the Wailers recorded during this five-year period are, appropriately, from
three different nations. Roger Steffens is from the US, Bruno Blum from France and Jeremy
Collingwood from the UK. All are Marley archivists and, for Steffens and Blum, it has
occupied almost every day of the last two years. On their treasure hunt, Steffens, Blum and Collingwood found 23 tracks that had never been released - some of which Livingstone (the only surviving Wailer; Tosh was murdered in 1987) had no recollection of recording. When the masters could not be found they had to transfer from the original vinyl single to Abbey Road's digital studio. 'We mastered everything in some indescribable confusion of different versions, wrongly titled songs, previously unreleased mixes, neurotic rival collectors and inaudible bootlegs,' Blum recalls. 'We tore our dreadlocks late at night, but all the piles of tapes and hyper-funky Jamaican singles were finally gathered, sorted, filed and at last saved in digitaldom.' Their obsession was such that when a master tape proved to have been erased, they would hunt down a copy of the missing single. One such single, Selassie In The Chapel, was a deft re-write of the doowop standard, Crying In The Chapel, and the first time Marley committed his Rasta beliefs to vinyl. It also appeared that only 26 copies had ever been pressed - they were used solely as gifts to Rasta households. Collingwood managed to track down a copy, although it set him back £1,000. "What I've learnt from this project - and I knew quite a lot beforehand - is what an incredibly prolific, hardworking individual Marley was," says Collingwood. So extraordinary was the brief life of this mixed-race country boy that it is difficult to discern fact from fiction: his posthumous Island compilation was simply and aptly titled Legend. Within his 36 years he pioneered and popularised a form of modern music that remains hugely influential, survived an assassination attempt, fathered between 11 (legally recognised) and 30 (friends' estimate) children, became a symbol of the uprisings in Rhodesia and in apartheid South Africa, and promoted unity both in strife-torn Jamaica and abroad. His mother, among many, helps spin Marley myths by saying he possessed visionary powers and at seven was refusing a local fortune teller's offer to read his palm with "Me don't do that no more. Me a singer now." And while legal battles rage round the estate - Rita Marley presented a fake will in an attempt to take total control; Bunny Livingstone is suing for a third of the current value of Tuff Gong although he left the Wailers in 1974 - the real Marley, his music and wisdom are as far from us as ever. The Complete Bob Marley And The Wailers 1967-72 takes us much, much closer. Artistically, it is the equivalent of stumbling upon Picasso's complete cubist works after years of having considered them little more than preparatory sketches for Guernica. "It's much more important than has been realised at the moment," says Collingwood. "What we see as the Third World will be a much greater force in the 21st century and Bob was a harbinger of that. Also, the fact that he's multiracial and brought people together, that's something I see for the future." On reservations as in suburbs, in the city and in the country, in the first, second and third worlds, people will continue to draw strength from the man who billed himself 'Soul Rebel'. |