JOE HIGGS: I found out later that the publishings on some of the songs I made for Harry J were coming out under his own publishing company, and I never had a publishing agreement with him.
ROGER STEFFENS: Higgs cautioned the Wailers to be very careful in protecting their rights as they embarked on an intensive work schedule.
BUNNY WAILER: We had maybe ten days’ hard rehearsal. Then we went into Dynamic Sounds, the old West Indies studio, with Carlton Lee on the board and his young assistant Karl Pitterson. We started with the same instruments that we were rehearsing with, which was like next to be thrown away stuff. Sometime old instrument give a sound that no new instrument can ever give, and that was why Catch A Fire sounded the way it did, and no other Wailer album sounded that way. Because it was played under circumstances where some of these instruments, you had to hit them at some stage for them to start playing again.
And Family Man was a kind of genius when it came to taking old electronical things that you would automatically throw away. Family Man would take all these little things, put them together and get a sound or get something from it that maybe you couldn’t buy in a store. You couldn’t get new equipment that would sound like that. So you could call him a freak genius ’cause Family Man didn’t go to no electronic school. He was toning the bass so that it come out clean without having to mix that much, you don’t have to put it through no heap of equalization.
Carly Barrett was good at toning his drums, ’cause Carly was coming from playing pans, tin cans. So he worked to get the sound that suit the ear with that kind of rubbish kind of stuff. He was the first man I see put things in front of the drum and paste it down on it, like pad it so that when he hit it, it was finished, the sound didn’t go nowhere. He was the first man who used to take off the front of the drum.
We laid the raw riddims for two days. Five each day. Then we take a break, make sure of the tracks, then we go back in a week and we voiced everything in one day, because Wailers don’t need more than that. So in the space of about a month from we took the money from Chris, the album was ready for him to mix.
ROGER STEFFENS: Catch A Fire turned a lot of heads with its modern production techniques and lead guitar sounds, something new to reggae. Dermot Hussey heard the album early on. Known as the dean of Jamaican broadcasters, Hussey recorded a seminal interview with Bob Marley that was eventually released as a record. In the 1960s he had moved to England to take a course in directing at the BBC, and then studied another year at the London School of Film Technique.
DERMOT HUSSEY: When I went to England I was aware of the Wailers to a certain extent, but I think they came really forcibly into my consciousness when I met Bob. I’d heard the singles that they’d been putting out and topping the charts. And then of course being a follower of ska, because of the musicianship and all that, I got to realize that the Skatalites were really the backing band on a lot of those early releases, virtually everything the Wailers did on Coxsone. And then I had a chance to meet Bob personally at Dickie Jobson’s house in a place called Industry in Gordon Town. Joe Higgs was there, Chris Blackwell was there, Bob was there in his denims and he was just beginning to grow locks, around the end of ’72. Dickie had a copy of Catch A Fire and we played it.
DICKIE JOBSON: When I first met them Bob and Peter and Bunny weren’t talking. They had some quarrel before. It took several meetings for them to agree [to let me manage them].
Sirius/XM DJ and dean of Jamaican broadcasters Dermot Hussey, Washington, D.C., November 2014.
ROGER STEFFENS: Another witness to this period was Dr. Gayle McGarrity, a scholar, teacher, anthropologist and international development professional, who was also a good friend of Bob Marley’s. I first encountered her while presenting a Bob Marley show at the House of Blues in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in February 2000. Her unflinching insights into the people in Bob’s circle, from the highest to the lowest levels of Jamaican society, are noteworthy for the specificity of her personal memories. She explained to me why she believes that the Wailers were deliberately broken up, and spoke about the many influential Jamaican “society” people who wanted Marley eliminated.
GAYLE McGARRITY: I went home from the California Bay Area, where I was attending university, to Jamaica for Christmas in 1972. Dickie Jobson, who has always been like a brother to me, said that he wanted me to come with him out to Hellshire Beach. First he said, “Let’s go to the beach,” and then he said, “Oh, you know there’s these guys that we’re doing a record with, let’s go down there instead,” meaning Trench Town. Our usual haunt at that time was Hellshire Beach, which, of course, at that time was totally pristine. There was nobody there except for Countryman [who in 1982 would become the title character in a motion picture directed by Dickie Jobson] and his family, together with three or four other Indian fishermen families. I mean, you could go nude swimming there in privacy and cook out on the beach. There was hardly anyone around for miles. That day when we visited Trench Town, Peter was there, maybe Rita too, I can’t remember, but Dickie focused very much on Bob, as Chris Blackwell and Dickie have always done. He introduced me to Bob and Bob was very respectful and we found a place to sit—sort of like in the song “No Woman No Cry,” in a government yard in Trench Town. They brought a newspaper for me to sit on, so that I wouldn’t dirty my clothes, and you know, Dickie was talking to him—technical stuff about the music business—which I wasn’t really listening to. I was really just looking around at the surroundings and was just amazed at the level of poverty. Until then, for me Jamaica was always exuberant—flowers and trees, beautiful mountains and beaches and breezes—but down there, there was such a level of sheer sensory deprivation, that I remember being in total shock.
Dr. Gayle McGarrity, political scholar and teacher, who informed Marley’s political understanding, at the Reggae Archives, Los Angeles, December 2001.
Bob was very respectful to me. He struck me as being very humble and I remember thinking, too, how interesting it was that he was so light-skinned and yet he was living in this very black, very poor environment. In those days in Jamaica, it was still mostly brown and white people in the middle and upper classes, and overwhelmingly black people in the working and poorer classes. He welcomed me and said, “Nice for you to come here.” And, he added, “I’m sorry the place is so, you know, messed up and I don’t have a nice place here,” just very humble. Dickie said, “These guys really have a great sound and they’re really interesting. Chris and I are thinking about what we can do with them.” And then he showed me the Catch A Fire album.
ROGER STEFFENS: The album had a unique look, with curved edges and a middle hinge that allowed the sleeve to be pulled back, revealing a die-cut flame like a Zippo lighter. For the first time, reggae was being given a full-scale rock-act presentation. Indeed, Blackwell changed the name they had been using for years—Bob Marley and the Wailers—to simply the Wailers, indicating that they were a self-contained musical entity. Despite good initial reviews, the album sold fewer than fifteen thousand copies in its first run.
BUNNY WAILER: When we went back to England to promote Catch A Fire, because the Wailers looked so simple they say it couldn’t have been us that played the music. So The Old Grey Whistle Test TV show was introduced to prove to the whole of Britain, because if you are going to be a flop, be a big flop and done. So they took us through stages. At first they let us record live, play and sing. Then they made us record the riddims, and then we went and voiced on top of that. Then they played the riddim track of the songs through the speakers and we had to pretend to play. On that Old Grey Whistle Test, you see, we are pretending. We are not playing. We recorded the entire album. And a little short guy, who said he was in the business for fifty-one years, came out and said to us, “I like your noise. You got a good noise. You’re going to be the next Beatles. Since the Beatles your noise is the first noise I’ve heard that is a good noise.”
Family Man Barrett and Marley in the San Diego Sports Arena dressing room, November
24, 1979.
FAMILY MAN BARRETT: I can recall the time in London at the Greyhound Club, that was the most critical club. It was uptown London. This was between Catch A Fire and Burnin’ time, 1973. At that time we used to open with the “Rasta Man Chant.” And what the reviewers wrote up was very pleasing. They say the first number cast a spell and after that it was musical magic—from a spell to magic.
ROGER STEFFENS: Despite the onstage magic, privately things were more and more miserable for the bandsmen. They hated the dampness and bitterly cold weather. Their quarters were spare and impoverished. And the financial arrangements they were promised turned out to be so unacceptable that the group was on the verge of splitting up for good by the end of spring 1973, once the recording sessions for their follow-up album were complete.
*http://robbreport.com/sports-leisure/conversation-producer-who-discovered-bob-marley.
CHAPTER 14
Burnin’ Out in London
R
OGER STEFFENS: Burnin’,* the resonant final album by the original Wailers trio of Bob Marley, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh, had its beginnings in Harry J’s studio in Kingston, where all the basic tracks were laid. Mixing and overdubbing took place at Island Records’ Basing Street Studios in London during the spring of 1973, in between live dates the group played to support their critically acclaimed first international release, Catch A Fire.
BUNNY WAILER: The album should have been titled Reincarnated Souls, after a song I recorded for it, but because I dropped out of the group before it was released the album was retitled Burnin’, with “Reincarnated Souls” used only as the B-side of an English single. 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. The drums had just been finished out by Six Miles [in Jamaica] by a guy named Ferry. The bass was made from the wood of the wine barrel and the funde was made from the trunk of a coconut tree.
ROGER STEFFENS: In late April 1973, accompanied by these most rootical of instruments, the Wailers—Bunny, Bob, Peter, keyboardist Earl “Wya” Lindo, drummer Carlton Barrett and his bassist brother Family Man—landed in the foggy chill of England.
BUNNY WAILER: We were taken to a dump in a commercial district owned by Chris Blackwell, on King Street, above an Indian restaurant. There was a basement where we rehearsed, which was also a dump. When we weren’t cooking our food and we wanted a quick cook-snack, we would get it from the Indian store. There was not a bed in the place, there was just mattresses. Bob stayed around the corner with Esther Anderson in her flat most of the time.
ROGER STEFFENS: Anderson, Bob’s companion at the time, became the guide for the Wailers during their stay, and played a vital role in several of Bob’s compositions during the 1973–74 period.
BUNNY WAILER: We did twenty-odd polytechnic colleges, and one or two big nightclubs, including four nights at the Speakeasy, which was our breakthrough. We were like the biggest thing with reggae coming in town, ever since Jimmy Cliff or Desmond Dekker. The Wailers were now definitely the stars of the lot. Each night at the Speakeasy was better than the one before [despite the fact that the aristocratic crowd was virtually all white]. It was the Catch A Fire tour, but we were still singing tracks from the Burnin’ album. And when there were break times, days off, we were in the studios doing the Burnin’ album. No days off. We spent our days off in the studio, that’s the only time we would get to relax.
FAMILY MAN BARRETT: I would listen to everyone’s ideas, and then we’d try to take it to the tape. We would record the backing tracks, making them special; we were all there during that stage. Then the three singers would sing, and Tony Platt and Phil Brown [the engineers] would listen technically. They were always having a good time. But the studio was kind of . . . smoky. And you never see smoke without something burning.
ROGER STEFFENS: Fams is definitely not talking spliffs here. Both Peter and Bunny spoke often in later years about their concern that their creations were not being given proper exposure in the Wailers, being passed over in favor of Bob’s, which cut them out of the lucrative writer’s royalties that were beginning to pile up. It was for this reason that Peter was asked by Bob to contribute the “bullshit” verse he sings on “Get Up Stand Up,” giving him the opportunity for a cowriter’s credit on the album’s anthemic opener.
“Get Up Stand Up” was also one of those tracks on which the stunningly beautiful Anderson played a role. A successful actress who had costarred with Sidney Poitier in a film called Warm December, she had met with Bob in New York through a young film director named Lee Jaffe. In February 1973, she found herself hopscotching across the Caribbean from Jamaica to Trinidad to Haiti and back to Jamaica in a plane chartered by Blackwell. In a 2001 phone call from her home in Cornwall, England, Esther spoke of her early collaborations with Bob.
ESTHER ANDERSON: Bob and I wrote “Get Up Stand Up” in twenty minutes flying from Haiti to Jamaica. 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.
BUNNY WAILER: “Get Up Stand Up” was the final song recorded for the Wailers’ final album, left for last because it was the easiest track on the album, just unison singing.
ROGER STEFFENS: Eric Clapton’s worldwide smash cover of “I Shot The Sheriff” brought the final ray of attention necessary to shine the global spotlight on the Wailers. Ironically, the Jamaican radio stations favored Clapton’s version over the local fellows’, and it wasn’t until some of Marley’s friends threatened physical retribution that they began to play Bob singing his own composition. Several people claim a hand in its creation.
Esther Anderson, Marley’s companion throughout 1973, took the pictures in the centerfold of Burnin’. At the Reggae Archives, Los Angeles, December 2000.
BUNNY WAILER: From the start it was intended to have that kind of cowboy ballad vibes, like Marty Robbins.
ESTHER ANDERSON: The storyline came from me in my bedroom in London. It’s about birth control. Bob was always after me to “breed” and have a baby with him. He kept asking me why after I’d been with him for a month already I hadn’t got pregnant yet. I told him I was on the pill and this led to the line “Every time I plant a seed he said kill it before it grow”—you see, the sheriff is the doctor. It was the third song we collaborated on.
ROGER STEFFENS: More details emerged from lengthy interviews with Lee Jaffe for our book One Love: Life with Bob Marley and the Wailers. Lee lived with the Wailers in Kingston at the time, acting as Bob’s “beard” for his relationship with Esther, allowing Bob to tell Rita and others that Esther was actually Lee’s girlfriend. His account of the birth of reggae’s finest anthem differs from Esther’s.
LEE JAFFE: 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. I wrote down all the lyrics that Bob was singing, and I was excited ’cause I knew it was a big song and I felt I was integral to its conception. And then I came up with the line, “All along in Trench Town, the jeeps go round and round.” ’Cause the poli
ce and military drove jeeps and I was thinking of the curfews that were being called in the ghetto and what it was like for the poor people, the sufferers, to live in a militarized zone and to have the basic freedom of walking in the street taken away. I think of what a genius Bob was for coming out with the line “I shot the sheriff” because, though it was funny, it was also so poignant, so relevant to the global repression. Later he changed the line to “all around in my home town” and that was better, because it made the point that these violent interventions into everyday life in the shantytowns of Jamaica were intrinsically foreign-influenced. And when I said, “But you didn’t get the deputy,” it was ironic and slightly self-deprecating, because what it was saying was yeah, I got the balls to shoot the sheriff, but I don’t have it together to get all his backup. And this is going to be a long tragic struggle that’s going to need a lot of everyday heroes.
ROGER STEFFENS: One of the album’s most misunderstood songs is “Burnin’ And Lootin’,” after which the album is named. It was, according to Bob, “about burning illusions,” not material things.
So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley Page 17
