BUNNY WAILER: Anything that Skill do to promote Wailers on the radio, him did fe him own personal reason. No do that on behalf of the Wailers, because we no support that. We never tell him at no time to beat nobody, hit no one! Intimidation, yes, because that was how the game was being played.
But as for beating people, Skill never beat nobody. Skill just walk with a couple of guys that were muscle guys, guys that you don’t talk to, guys that you don’t reason with, and when you see that, you don’t want Skill to send these kind of guys on you. So you just make sure records are played and everybody’s happy. And Skill would still give these guys a cut, give them some money. But it’s just to make sure that the records was played! ’Cause most of the time when he took these records to the radio stations, I was there. Nobody beat up on anybody. But was just intimidation.
ROGER STEFFENS: As Skill began to achieve more public exposure for the Wailers, Bob took up once more with Leslie Kong, who had produced his first two solo records in 1962. Since then Kong had great local success with the ska hit “My Boy Lollipop” and the equally popular first international reggae smash, “Israelites,” by Desmond Dekker and the Aces. The Wailers decided they would do something no one in Jamaica had done before: a thematic album like the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper and the Stones’ Satanic Majesties, whose subtext would be a pep talk by the group to itself to get back in the game, with “Soul Captives,” “Caution,” “Go Tell It On The Mountain,” “Cheer Up,” “Do It Twice” and “Soul Shakedown Party” among its uplifting tracks, cut in May 1970.
BUNNY WAILER: We shot the cover for the album on Leslie Kong’s Beverley’s label called Best of the Wailers, in front of a rock at Race Course in downtown Kingston. They had this big thing there that they thought they were going to carve something out of it, so we were standing there before they actually did the carving. We conceived it as an album project, not a bunch of singles. No one had ever done that before.
ROGER STEFFENS: The album was a way for the Wailers to leave behind the dashed hopes of their unions with Coxson, Planno, Sims and Nash and find a new start with Kong.
BUNNY WAILER: We were always ready to start again. Every time we go to sleep, the Wailers come fresh with new ideas, new harmony technique, and sounding stronger every time. So these things were like challenges to the Wailers, all these experiences, because we had no intention of stopping until we made our mark.
ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: Bob would rehearse in advance with the Wailers on Second Street in Trench Town. The word would get around, like close confidants would know and one or two people would be allowed.
BUNNY WAILER: When we were rehearsing and Bob a write, him no tolerate people around him. He no like people watch him sing. He only wanted the three of we work together.
ALLAN “SKILL” COLE: The scene outside was something, a lot of herb, and getting the vibes and the buildup thing like that together. [But] we didn’t crowd the studio much. Bob is alone in that recording studio. In the seventies when we were recording you’d find probably a little more brothers around the studio. But [at Kong’s] the discipline was there in the studio. It wasn’t a free-for-all thing. Bob was probably the most disciplined musician you’ll ever meet.
BUNNY WAILER: We did “Caution” about our own settings, so is like “Caution” definitely point to the Wailers ’cause “when it wet it slippery, when it damp it crampy.” The changes we did go through—Bob go through Coxson, go through Planno, is Beverley’s we try now, we go in another existence. “Crampy” means it’s frozen, slide, so he must have been experiencing winter, wet winter means you’re sliding, you step on your car brake when it’s wet, and it’s crampy too, because the earth is very cold with the water settled on it, and it’s slippery.
ROGER STEFFENS: For the Wailers, it was a time to reconnoiter and create a new sound with Leslie Kong, a proven hit-maker. They found a very different man from those with whom they had worked in the past.
BUNNY WAILER: He was a very feminine guy, I never seen him with a woman. His attitude, the way he talked, the way he moved, everything about him was really ladylike. Skinny Minnie, Skinny Ginny guy. Flat. Tall guy, maybe about six foot one.
ROGER STEFFENS: Kong’s keen attunement to the international pop scene helped to channel the Wailers toward new discoveries.
BUNNY WAILER: Even “Soul Captives”—“now’s the time when man must be free, no more burden and pain”—you can hear the rebirth even in our singing. We treated everything like part of the growth. That’s why we redid all those tracks that we had done with Coxson, because we wanted to see if we could better all those tracks with quality. It was only that we didn’t have the Skatalites. The Skatalites made a great, great difference to those music in those times. So with other people playing them, it didn’t outdo the original. Never, ever, can’t even come nearer. So that’s vintage, that’s forever, that’s done. They say what don’t break, don’t mend. Well, the Skatalites were unbroken. When we were doing over these tracks to get them better, we were trying to mend something that wasn’t broken, because they still outlive anything else we did afterwards.
ROGER STEFFENS: The breakup of the Skatalites following Don Drummond’s murder of his partner, dancer–singer Marguerite, allowed the Wailers to eventually link with musicians who would become a crucial foundation to their sound as members of Lee Perry’s studio band, the Upsetters. But for the moment they worked with Kong’s house band, brilliant studio stalwarts Mikey “Boo” Richards on drums, Jackie Jackson on bass, Hux Brown on guitar, Gladstone Anderson and Winston Wright on keyboards, all helmed by engineer Carlton Lee at Dynamic Sounds Studio. However, dissension rushed in when the subject of the album’s title came up. The resulting dustup has been elevated to myth because of a prophecy made by Bunny.
BUNNY WAILER: “Cheer Up” would have been a better title for the album, based on what the Wailers were going through at the time. So I told Kong, “Listen, I know that because you are not going to get another album, you might tend to want to use The Best of the Wailers. But don’t do that because The Best of the Wailers would only mean that this is the best we’ll ever sing—or you are finished, because you won’t be releasing another album. This would be your last album, and it would have been the best you would have heard of the Wailers, because you won’t be around to hear any more. So, you don’t use that title, none at all. Let’s find a title from the album and use that.”
The album came out. I was very vexed when I saw the album called The Best of the Wailers, everybody was very vexed, Bob, everyone, because everyone was present when the conversation took place. And then Leslie Kong died around Christmas about a week after the album release in England. The album went right back into limbo, went right back into sleep. We just wanted to get some money, to go ahead with our business, and we decided to go and do this album for him. We told him everything, we told him that’s what the whole aim was about. That’s why we didn’t want to do more than one album. It was just looking money for the Wailers to move on our own independent program. We got about five thousand dollars in advance.
ROGER STEFFENS: Kong’s sudden death was a devastating shock to the group, leaving their collaboration stillborn.
BUNNY WAILER: We learned he died from a guy when we went to pick up a stamper and he said to us, “Did you hear what happened to Leslie Kong? Kong die this morning. He just come into the studios to work on some records, felt bad, felt sick, went home and died at home.”
ROGER STEFFENS: In the summer of 1970 the Wailers changed their label’s name from Wail’n Soul’m to Tuff Gong. They were no longer involved with the Soulettes and wanted a logo that was strictly their own.
BUNNY WAILER: Our original title was Tuff Gang. We realized that it was a little too gangish, like is bad boy business too much, in the sense of presumptuous. We no want that. So we just say Tuff Gong. Gong is a cymbal that sends a sound as far as the ears can hear. A big cymbal. So we say Tuff Gong, ’cause it sounds to deal with sound.
CHAPTER 11
Lee Perry and Jamaican Politricks
R
OGER STEFFENS: From August 1970 through April 1971, the Wailers recorded around forty tracks for Lee “Scratch” Perry, the zany diminutive producer whose goal was “to hijack the world.” They had originally encountered him at Coxson’s studio. In late 1969 Scratch had just had a major hit in England with “Return of Django,” featuring the Upsetters band: guitarist Alva “Reggie” Lewis; keyboardist Glen Adams; drummer Carlton “Carly” Barrett; and his brother, bass player Aston “Family Man” Barrett.
The eight months spent under Lee Perry’s direction would be pivotal for the Wailers’ development, as it introduced them to their main musical collaborators, the rhythm section of the Barrett brothers, who would stay with Marley to the end of his life, writing and arranging the backing tracks for his hugely successful international albums.
Their cousin George Barrett recalled how long it took for the Wailers to break through to a more mainstream audience.
GEORGE BARRETT: In the seventies, now, people just get to know the Wailers. Before that, when Family Man and his brother Carlton were in a band called the Hippy Boys, they used to play on a place they call Langston Road, East Kingston.
ROGER STEFFENS: Family Man and Carly’s first band was named the Drive-In Cracker Boys, although other sources claim they were called the Jiving Crackerballs. Jon Masouri, in his exhaustively brilliant biography of the Barrett brothers, Wailin’ Blues: The Story of Bob Marley’s Wailers, reports that Fams built his first primitive upright bass out of a couple of pieces of wood and used a curtain rod for the one string it contained, while his younger brother Carlton created his initial drum set out of empty paint and kerosene cans.
DJ George Barrett, cousin of the Wailers rhythm section’s Aston “Family Man” Barrett and Carlton Barrett, in Vancouver, Canada, February 1997.
When Carly and Fams heard “Simmer Down” on a jukebox as teenagers, they felt they were hearing their future—that if the Wailers could play music like that they could too. Family Man, who worked as a welder, made his debut backing singer Max Romeo at a Christmas gig, and formed his first band with Romeo shortly thereafter, in early 1968, calling themselves the Hippy Boys. Glen Adams and Reggie Lewis soon joined them. Around this time, the still childless Aston gave himself the nickname Family Man, boasting of his talent in organizing things for the band as a kind of family unit.
Producer Bunny Lee helmed the first recording session that involved the rhythm team of Carly and Fams on a song that marked the transition from rocksteady to reggae, “Bangarang” by Stranger Cole. Soon they were among the island’s most in-demand session musicians. Among their most successful producers was Lee Perry, who had begun as a singer and A & R man at Studio One years earlier, and had gone on to record novelty songs of his own, borrowing Bunny Lee’s studio band and calling them the Upsetters. Fams became a hugely sought-after hit-making musician, playing guitar, piano and organ as well as his irresistibly propulsive bass for producers like Duke Reid, Sonia Pottinger, Lloyd “Matador” Daley and many others.
Organ great Glen Adams, inspired by a visit to New York in 1969 where he saw New Orleans’s the Meters playing funk-style, brought this new inspiration to Perry, using it on a series of medically titled singles. The band’s instrumental smash, “Return of Django,” spent fifteen weeks on the British charts, climbing to number five in October 1969.
Jamaican politics were getting hot, too. The iron grip that the right-wing Jamaica Labor Party held on the island was being tested by the socialist-oriented People’s National Party, and gunfire was heard nightly in the ghettos of West Kingston.
Dennis Thompson is a live sound mixer, one of the best in the world. Dennis was the man chosen by Bob to mix the Wailers’ sound for their live performances from 1976 to the last show in Pittsburgh in September 1980. He remembered working with the Wailers in the early 1970s at Randy’s Studio, where Lee Perry did the recordings for the band’s seminal albums, considered by many critics to be the trio’s finest work.
DENNIS THOMPSON: I met Bob when he used to come to Randy’s Studio in Kingston, where I was doing mastering. One Saturday we had a Wailers and Count Ossie. Those tapes, don’t ask me about, I’ve never heard them again. They were done for Bob at Randy’s around ’70, ’71. “Mellow Mood,” the greatest “Mellow Mood” in the world! We start three o’clock on the Saturday and finish Sunday morning. The air conditioning unit never worked again from that day. [Perhaps because of the monumental amount of ganja being smoked continuously in the narrow confines of the room.]
ROGER STEFFENS: Thompson often mastered tunes for Perry. The Wailers and Scratch had a fifty-fifty verbal agreement outlining the ownership of their collaborations. They would both invest their money, and from day one all proceeds from their works would be split, half to the band and half to Perry. This verbal arrangement would lead to great disputes in the following years about who actually wrote what. Perry claims authorship of songs like “Small Axe” and others, which is strongly denied by Bunny who was there during the entire process.
BUNNY WAILER: Nobody no write songs with Bob. Scratch would come up with certain little talk and would say him want a song go so or him want song named so or him want a song what deal with an issue there and then Bob would write a song. But him never really sit down and write with we. All Scratch would do in the studio would beat his foot if the song suits him, and he would say, “Yes!” But him can’t tell you how to make it work. He didn’t write anything on those albums. Maybe one song, “Soul Almighty.” It have no substance to that.
ROGER STEFFENS: The song “Small Axe” is one of the disputed songs. Scratch came to visit the Reggae Archives in 2001 and signed my copy of “Small Axe”: “I Upsetter write this song. I am the small axe. Bob was not even there when I wrote this song.”
BUNNY WAILER: Bob Marley wrote “Small Axe.” It was Peter’s idea and Bob write the song. Coxson, Duke Reid and Federal had intended on forming an organization called the Big Three to manipulate, keep all the business with them, where all the artists would have to come to them. Well, the conversation was now, “We’ll make a song, deal with this t’ree.” Peter said, “All right, if them are the big t’ree, we are the small axe.” And Bob now go ahead and wrote the song.
ROGER STEFFENS: Third World’s Cat Coore witnessed a contemporary performance of the song.
CAT COORE: In the early seventies I first saw Bob at a high school concert, sixth-formers would put them on. I must have been about twelve or thirteen, and St. Andrew’s High School, one of the best girls schools in Jamaica, had a concert, and they had Bob on. Incidentally, my older brother who had turned Rasta before me, was playing akete drums in a group from Jamaica College, and they won the competition that year as a band, and they had to back Bob. So the first time I really saw him, my brother was playing with him, which was a real trip. Made big, big impression. It was Bunny, Bob and Peter, and two others. They were great, mon, great! Bob had a patch over his eye at the time. He did “Small Axe,” which was the big tune for him then.
ROGER STEFFENS: At the same time they were recording for Scratch, they also recorded songs to be released concurrently on their own Tuff Gong label.
BUNNY WAILER: In deciding which songs to keep for ourselves and which ones to give to Scratch, well, the thing about it is, we just choose songs. Scratch deals with things for the moment, and we a deal with songs what are eternal. If it’s gimmick and Scratch a look gimmick, we can always rough up some gimmick, we flexible. It’s just that Scratch got good songs that maybe should have been on Tuff Gong—and it go the other way round.
We always try and make the Wailers sound original every time. New, fresh. We always come creative every time, for is a challenge. And Bob write round the clock. The way how Bob write, is not that Bob haffe write out a song, like sit down and complete, start a song from top—Bob no do that. Bob write bits of songs, as the inspiration come him write, and then him just put them bits there together
. That’s how Bob do most of his songs. He played by ear, and sometimes you’re playing and your finger licks a note accidentally, that note says a lot and you go with that. It’s hard work because you have to be always in the position to hear that phrase, to hear that melody, you have to be playing your guitar a lot, every day, so that those things can come out of it. And then there are certain overtones and harmonics that come off, and accidents—because you’re in tune and listening, you hear every thing that’s happening within the sound. And Bob is a man what store them, little bits and pieces of melody and lyrics, and then later on which one did match with which, and put them together, as well as he wrote songs completely. He didn’t wait for one song to be finished to start writing the next one. He would have ten, fifteen different songs writing, start different ways, different chords, different progression. And then he puts bits, and fit progression with progression that can fit, and lyrics with lyrics that can fit, or move lyrics and change whatever along the way, he gets lyrics to complete some of them and he just keeps going. Like writing machine! The inspiration that comes today might come back next month, so what you gonna do? Might never come back.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 13
