The Wailers break through beyond Jamaica with Catch a Fire and Burnin’, the latter featuring “I Shot the Sheriff” and “Get Up, Stand Up.”
With The Harder They Come, Jimmy Cliff seemed poised for stardom on both sides of the Atlantic, but it didn’t happen, perhaps due to his falling-out with Island Records founder Chris Blackwell on the eve of the film’s release in London.
Blackwell, white, was born in London in 1937, but his family moved to Jamaica when he was young. His mother was descended from one of the twenty-one families who controlled the country through rum and sugar. Blackwell himself sold liquor and cigarettes in school, but it got him kicked out. At age twenty, he began selling US records to Jamaican Sound System operators, then started producing his own artists. Realizing the Jamaican market was too crowded, he moved to London to sell ska records to the Jamaican immigrants. He named his company Island Records after the Harry Belafonte movie Island in the Sun, driving to record shops with his Afro-Jamaican girlfriend Esther Anderson to hawk records out of their Mini Cooper.
Island released Cliff’s records throughout the sixties, but Blackwell’s bread and butter gradually became white acts like the Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Cat Stevens, Mott the Hoople, and King Crimson (and later U2), and Cliff felt underappreciated. When the difficult Harder They Come production dragged on for multiple years, he ran out of money, and thus was tempted when EMI Records offered him $50,000 to switch labels. Blackwell promised Cliff that he would be able to give him a better deal as soon as the movie and soundtrack came out. When the film premiered in London, Cliff wanted the better deal from Island. But from Blackwell’s perspective, the American release had not yet been determined. “I can’t hang around no more,” Cliff sang in the brooding “Sooner or Later” on his 1973 Struggling Man album. He took the EMI deal.
Blackwell admitted, “It was a lot of money at the time. But I’d been putting a lot of energy into him. I was bitter.”1 Cliff was bitter, too, denouncing Blackwell in “No. 1 Rip-Off Man.”2 (Which itself ripped off the chorus of Elvis’s “Burning Love.”)
According to legend, it was a week after Cliff departed the label that Bob Marley walked through Blackwell’s door. “I transferred the whole plan I had for Jimmy over to Bob,” Blackwell said, “and was motivated to make it work.”3
Robert Nesta, Marley’s father, was a Syrian Jew from England who supervised plantation workers. He married Cedella Booker, an eighteen-year-old black Jamaican, then left the next day. He never saw his son much after his birth on April 6, 1945, and died when Marley was ten. Marley grew up sometimes ostracized for looking whiter than the others; he found solace in American radio.4
His mother took up with Thaddeus Livingston, and Marley befriended his son, Neville (nicknamed Bunny). They all moved in together, and the parents had a daughter. The two young men met Winston “Peter Tosh” Macintosh, a self-taught guitarist and keyboardist, and the three began singing together on Trenchtown street corners, like doo-woppers in America. (In photos Tosh is the one always wearing shades.)
Marley got a job as a welder, but when metal flew into his eye he vowed to make it as a singer.5 Fellow welder Desmond Dekker brought him to his label, run by Leslie Kong, and Marley released his first single, “Judge Not,” in 1962. Marley, Bunny, and Tosh formed the Teenagers, renamed the Wailing Rudeboys, then Wailing Wailers, finally Wailers circa 1966. Their first ska single, “Simmer Down,” was released in 1964.
Tosh taught the others how to play guitar. He alternated between guitar, piano, and organ, harmonizing with Bunny, who played bongos or conga, while Marley sang lead and played guitar. In 1970 they found their permanent rhythm section, Aston “Family Man” Barrett on bass and Carlton “Carlie” Barrett on drums.
Marley wrote songs for Johnny Nash’s breakthrough album, I Can See Clearly Now. In August 1972, while backing Nash on a tour of the UK, they decided to pop in on Blackwell’s Island Records. The Wailers’ Jamaican singles had been licensed by Island for release in England.
When the Wailers walked into his office, Blackwell said, “I must say they were an overwhelming presence. Incredibly charismatic. It was all three of them, Bunny Livingston, Peter Tosh and Bob Marley, that collectively and individually exuded this sense of power. I signed them on the spot.”6
All three had converted to Rastafarianism, and a Rasta once saved Blackwell’s life in his early twenties. He’d been caught by a storm in his small sailboat and “thrown up against some rocks along a barren stretch of isolated coast. I had been knocked unconscious, and when I woke up I had no idea how long I had been there and no idea where I was. The storm had passed and the sun was blaring and I was scarred and parched and felt like I would be overcome by thirst and dehydration. Then—and it seemed a miracle to me—out of nowhere, there was a Rastaman standing above me, with long thick dreadlocks. He led me to some shade and climbed a tree. He chopped down some coconuts and split them, and I felt like I was being brought back to life.… From that time I have always felt close to Rasta culture.”7
Blackwell gave them £4,000 to cut Catch a Fire, which alternated between Marley’s twin poles of politics and sex. The title came from “Slave Driver,” which advocating setting those who kept Jamaica “chained in poverty” aflame. “Concrete Jungle” lamented being trapped in the housing projects. “No More Trouble” exhorted his compatriots to stop warring among themselves. “Stir It Up,” on the other hand, languidly celebrated “pushing the wood” in his lover’s pot.
Blackwell suspected Marley could be as big as Hendrix, but in his last eight years working in London, Blackwell hadn’t been able to score consistent hits with Jamaican artists, so he wanted to sell the Wailers like Sly and the Family Stone, War, and Earth Wind & Fire. “There were radio stations that would only play music by white artists, and then there were the R&B stations that would only play black music. The problem was that reggae didn’t fit either format.”8
Johnny Nash’s cover of Marley’s “Stir It Up” actually peaked at No. 12 on the US pop chart in April, but the Wailers’ laid-back shuffle was far less glossy. Both Nash and Jimmy Cliff frequently utilized flutes, strings, and horns. Nash started out as an R&B artist, and Cliff lived in the UK for half a decade and mixed his style with pop and R&B, recording in Muscle Shoals, with tracks like “Trapped,” produced by Cat Stevens. Marley made little attempt to dilute his accent, and whereas the others had haircuts that looked familiar to the West, Rasta dreadlocks were alien to most.
Blackwell strategized, “I felt initially that the Wailers would have a better chance to expand their audience beyond Jamaica by adding elements that would have some sense of familiarity to foreign listeners.”9
He remixed the album they delivered, sometimes repeating instrumental passages to make the songs longer. He enlisted John “Rabbit” Bundrick of Texas to add organ, clavinet, or synthesizer to all of the tracks. Bundrick had played on Nash’s I Can See Clearly Now album (and would later work on The Rocky Horror Picture Show). His clavinet work on songs like “Concrete Jungle” influenced the Wailers’ own keyboardist, Tyrone Downie.10
Also at the Island studio at the time was a twenty-year-old half-Cherokee guitarist from Muscle Shoals named Wayne Perkins, cutting a record with his group, Smith Perkins Smith. Blackwell grabbed him on the studio’s spiral staircase and told him he needed Southern Rock guitar. He hustled him into the basement, where, amid a fog of pot smoke, Perkins saw Rastas and heard reggae for the first time.
“Blackwell explained that the bass drum, sock cymbal, and the snare [drum] are on the one and three [beats],” Perkins recalled. “He told me to ignore the bass guitar because it was more of a lead instrument. It’s great music, but it’s kinda weird in that everything feels like it’s being played backwards. ‘Concrete Jungle’ was the very first thing that I was handed. That was the most out-of-character bass part I’d ever heard. But because the keyboards and the guitars stay locked together doing what they’re doing all through the song, that was sorta my saving grace.”11
He began to process the music as a combination of Appalachian, bluegrass, and the Twist and tried to figure out a countermelody.12 “I nailed that guitar solo down on the second or third take, I think. It was a gift from God, because I really didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And then Marley came into the recording room. He was cartwheeling, man, he couldn’t get over what had just happened to his song, he was so excited. I couldn’t understand a damn thing he was saying. And he was cramming this huge joint down my throat and wouldn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. He got me real, real high.”13
Marley dubbed him “the White Wailer.” Perkins also added guitar to “Stir It Up” and “Baby We Got a Date.” When the Stones later needed to replace Mick Taylor, they almost gave the job to Perkins before deciding to go with fellow Brit Ron Wood.
On later deluxe editions of the album, both Blackwell’s version and the original “naked” version are included so the listener can compare the two.
Along with the sonic makeover, Blackwell marketed Marley’s image as a lifestyle. “I was dealing with rock music, which was really rebel music. I felt that would really be the way to break Jamaican music. But you needed someone who could be that image. When Bob walked in he really was that image, the real one that Jimmy had created in [The Harder They Come].”14
Anderson became the band’s photographer and Marley’s new girlfriend. She recalled, “I was teaching Bob how to be a rebel, based on what I learned from living with Marlon Brando for seven years. In fact, I bought him a jacket just like the one Marlon wore in ‘On the Waterfront’ when he said he coulda been a contender.”15 (Though technically Brando did not wear leather in that scene.)
The Wailers’ Rastafarianism was in many ways identical to the hippie outlook, with wild hair representing an insistence on personal freedom. Both hippies and Rastas felt persecuted by conservatives who judged them on their appearance; both got pushed around by cops. They wanted to reject the rat race, stop sweating the small stuff, and take it slow, using music and cannabis to attain the mind-set. Thus Blackwell fashioned the album cover as a giant Zippo lighter that flipped open, a gimmick cover not unlike the Stones’ Sticky Fingers, which unzipped. When the Zippo cover failed to make its money back, Blackwell replaced it with Anderson’s shot of Marley toking on a gigantic spliff, guaranteed to freak out pot-fearing parents.
The album was released in April in the US and only sold about fourteen thousand copies, struggling to No. 171 on the Billboard chart. Today Rolling Stone ranks it as the 126th Greatest Album.
The Wailers returned to the studio in Kingston that month to record the follow-up, then overdubbed and mixed it in London between tours, though this time around Blackwell brought in no outside musicians.
Marley composed “Get Up, Stand Up” while flying over Haiti, musing on the nation’s history of slavery and poverty, similar to his own country’s. Like Cliff in “The Harder They Come,” Marley admonishes a preacher for encouraging his congregation to accept their lot and exhorts the listeners to fight for their rights.
In Trenchtown, the police/military enforced a strict curfew and constantly drove their jeeps through the ghetto. Marley wrote “Burnin’ and Lootin’” after Joe Higgs, who had given the Wailers free vocal lessons in their youth, suffered a police raid. Marley sings of rioting in the face of police brutality and lack of food. The song gave another shout-out to Cliff, asking how many rivers they had to cross before they could talk to the boss, which Bunny said was a reference to how the music business executives in Jamaica ripped them off, then tried to avoid them.
The Wailers’ call to arms was even more direct in the album’s most famous track, though they softened it slightly by couching it in the guise of a Marty Robbins cowboy ballad.16 “I want to say ‘I shot the police’ but the government would have made a fuss so I said ‘I shot the sheriff’ instead,” Marley explained. “But it’s the same idea: justice.”17
Their manager, Lee Jaffe, a New York photographer who worked for Island, recalled, “The song came out of me playing harmonica on a beach in Jamaica. Bob was playing guitar and he said, ‘I shot the sheriff,’ and I said, ‘But you didn’t get the deputy.’ It was a joke, because they don’t have sheriffs in Jamaica. Bob was funny, he was witty, so it was about him hanging out with this white guy, me, it was a comment about that. And yes, it came out of Western movies, which Jamaicans really love. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly was always playing somewhere in Kingston. So they’re into that whole attitude, and here Bob was hanging out with this white guy, so it was like being in some Western movie with me. I remember there was these two really, really fat girls dancing on the beach when Bob came out with that line. And then, it was like such a funny song, the beach wasn’t that crowded, but we had a whole bunch of people just dancing to that song.”18
The most paradoxical element of the Wailers’ music was that it sounded so mellow while advocating revolution, rioting, and cop killing. In the States, Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder had to go to war with Berry Gordy, and James Brown had been “blacklisted” from white radio, over far less radical songs.
The album’s title, Burnin’, like its predecessor, punned on uprising through fire, smoking the sacrament, and jamming on their instruments. “Small Axe” referred to how the Wailers took on the Jamaican music establishment with their own label, Tuff Gong, in the days before they signed with Island. The “Big Three” labels controlled the country’s industry, so the band called them “the big tree” and sang they were the tool to cut it down.19 According to legend, they used to make the rounds to radio stations with baseball bats to ensure the stations would play their records. Since they had not been paid for many of their early songs, Blackwell encouraged them to rerecord a number of them for the album, like “Duppy Conqueror”—duppies were evil spirits in Caribbean folklore.
The cover photo, taken by Anderson, was printed on orange wood for the album jacket. (The image was re-created years later on The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill; that singer had five children with Marley’s son Rohan.) The album was released on October 9 and has been included in the National Recording Registry by the Library of Congress for cultural significance.
The band toured the UK in April and May, appearing on the BBC and The Old Grey Whistle Test. They felt England finally starting to crack when they played the Speakeasy, a favorite of the rock elite from the Beatles’ era to Elvis Costello’s. Family Man recounted, “We opened the show with ‘Rastaman Chant.’ The first track cast a spell on them.”20
“Chant” was the climax of Burnin’, a traditional song performed in Rasta Nyabinghi drum gatherings. Bunny said, “We were coming to England on a mission. We were going to establish Rastafarian culture and reggae music. So I knew that we had to have the Nyabinghi drums so as to make the chant so that the people would understand that we had some foundation, that this music did not come out of nowhere.”21
They went on to Boston, then New York, where they stayed at the Chelsea and shared the bill with Springsteen at Max’s Kansas City in July. Pop artist Ronnie Cutrone remembered they “blew my mind. I went every night. Nobody knew who they were so I could watch them with ten people and they were raw and vital then. By the last few nights everybody was saying this music is insane, what is it? They were trying to disco and rock dance to it.”22
Writer Glenn O’Brien noted, “Ronnie just kept saying, ‘They are so noble.’”23
The band opened for Sly and the Family Stone for a couple of gigs until Sly determined they were upstaging him and dropped them from the tour. Nevertheless they kept touring the US, then returned to England in November.
By that point the original trio was falling apart, as the others chafed over the attention Blackwell lavished on Marley. Marley stepped aside to let Tosh sing his own compositions on both albums (“400 Years” and “Stop That Train” on the first, “Foundation Time” on the second), and his deeper, raspy voice made a nice contrast to Marley’s. He took the lead on the angriest verse in “Get Up, Stand Up” (“You can fool some people some time”). On Burnin’ Bunny got his chance to shine with his compositions “Pass It On” and “Hallelujah Time,” the influence of Curtis Mayfield’s falsetto evident.
But while Marley stayed in his girlfriend Anderson’s flat in England, Bunny said, “We were taken to a dump in a commercial district owned by Chris Blackwell, King Street, above an Indian restaurant. There was a basement where we rehearsed, which was also a dump.… There was not a bed in the place, there was just mattresses.… And when there were break times, days off, we were in the studios doing the Burnin’ album. No days off.”24
Perhaps since Bunny and Marley had shared a house as young teens, the sudden schism in their status was particularly annoying. Also, Blackwell booked them on back-to-back tours throughout the year, and Bunny resented that they were not going to be paid for touring. He refused to go to the US in the summer, believing the others would back him up, but they wanted to press on, so he quit, taking some comfort that his replacement was their old vocal teacher, Joe Higgs. Bunny went on to have his own storied career, releasing twenty-eight albums, picking up three Grammys.
By November, back in the UK, Tosh had the flu, hated the snow and low pay, and had dubbed Blackwell “Whiteworst.”25 When he wanted to release a solo album on Island, Blackwell declined because it would compete with the Wailers, so Tosh quit. “It was belittling my integrity. I taught Bob Marley. How can you compare the teacher with the taught? I and I and the devil are at war. The devil make Marley leader of the band.”26
One of the last songs Tosh and Marley worked on before the split was “No Woman No Cry,” captured on a London demo featured in the documentary Marley. Tosh provided gospel piano.27 It was a fitting farewell, with lyrics about sitting in a Jamaican housing project, sharing food, burning wood, remembering good friends lost along the way, but pushing on through the tears. Marley assigned the publishing rights to Vincent “Tata” Ford, a man in a wheelchair who ran a soup kitchen in Trenchtown, where Marley received food as a child.28
Tosh went on to release seven albums, many on the Rolling Stones’ record label, before a motorcycle gang murdered him in 1987.
Jerry Garcia saw the Wailers play San Francisco’s New Matrix in October, and reggae began to permeate the Dead’s stew of influences. When Eric Clapton’s cover of “Sheriff” climbed to No. 1 the following summer, Jamaica became an increasingly popular vacation destination for white hippies. Reggae-inflected drum circles became a regular fixture of hippie gatherings and, later, jam band festivals.
Punks like Johnny Rotten and the Clash also embraced the genre, which was natural, Lester Bangs wrote, since its songs consisted mainly of two or three chords, no solos, and a guy hollering things no white person could understand about class oppression and street war.29 England enjoyed a ska/reggae movement spearheaded by the Specials, English Beat, Madness, UB40, which climaxed with the Police’s mega-stardom. Australia’s adherents included Men at Work; America’s featured Fishbone and the Mighty Mighty Bosstones. Twenty years later, No Doubt, Sublime, and Rancid revived the revival. By then, Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre had taken up Marley’s cop-challenging, riot-celebrating torch/spliff.
Blackwell told Rolling Stone’s David Fricke in 2005 that Marley was disappointed black Americans did not embrace him during his lifetime. “But there was no market in black music then for a rebel. Black music in America has a different sensibility now—it’s all rebel.”30 In 2018, Forbes ranked Marley the fifth highest-paid dead celebrity, right after Charles Schulz and right before Dr. Seuss; his estate earned $23 million that year.31
Jimmy Cliff went on to play stadiums in Africa and South America, though he never matched Marley’s level of sales. The two remained friends until Marley’s death in 1981 from melanoma. Cliff reflected, “Even though we had similar revolutionary aspirations, spirits and thoughts, I’m a bit of a loner, and he loved all the people. And so he attracted the good, the bad and the ugly.”32 Perhaps Cliff was referring to the unknown gunman who shot Marley in 1976. “We had always talked together, what I was going to do, what he was going to do. The same thing with Desmond Dekker, especially when we were in London at the same time. So we stayed really close like artist brothers. With that love and respect for each other. All along the way.”33