Chris Blackwell is the man behind the success of Bob Marley and the Wailers. His memoirs, co-written with Paul Morley, are set for release next month (June 7) and he dishes all the juicy details of the early days trying to launch Bob Marley as an international icon. In an excerpt from the book, he recalls he experience in making the band’s first Island records album “Catch A Fire”. From the beginning Blackwell said he wanted to “take the music out of Jamaica without taking Jamaica out of it.”
“They were immediately something else, these three — strong characters. They did not walk in like losers, like they were defeated by being flat broke. To the contrary, they exuded power and self-possession. Bob especially had a certain something; he was small and slight but exceptionally good-looking and charismatic. Bunny and Pete had a cool, laid-back nonchalance.”
Bob, Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh were from the same neighborhood in Trench Town Kingston. The were closely tied by more than music. Bob Marley’s mother and Bunny Wailer’s father had a relationship. Their fate in Chris Blackwell’s story came at a time when Blackwell himself needed another Jamaica star to replace Jimmy Cliff who had just exited relations with Island records.
“As I took the measure of them, I thought, Fuck, this is the real thing. And their timing was good. Jimmy Cliff had just walked out on me a week earlier. Maybe it was kismet, I thought — just when Jimmy stormed out, Bob, Pete, and Bunny strolled in,” he said.
Blackwell’s belief in the group came with contrary remarks because like most Jamaicans even to this day, they wanted their music to be played on the black America radio stations. However Blackwell had other plans for the group; get them on the rock music scene.
I knew I could do something with them — move them away from where they were and make their music attractive to college kids who were otherwise ignorant of or indifferent to Black music. I asked the Wailers what they wanted to happen with their music. Bunny said they deserved radio play in America, Bob and Peter nodding in convinced agreement. They were shocked when I said that there was no way their music as it currently sounded would get played on US radio. This pissed them off, as if I were criticizing their music rather than noting the realities of the marketplace. It was just a fact. In that era, there were radio stations that played only rock music and R&B stations that played only Black music. And neither category of station played reggae.
I told them they needed to come over like a Black rock act. There were no precedents for this kind of thing in Jamaica, and barely anywhere else, except maybe in the US, which had Sly and the Family Stone. Being a “rock act,” I told them, did not have to mean selling out or surrendering their identity. Pete and Bunny were skeptical, but Bob was immediately intrigued. Black Jamaican music was always evolving, from ska to rocksteady to reggae, and reggae was poised to evolve further.
I had never seen the Wailers perform. I asked them if they were any good live, and Bob immediately replied, “We’re great.” The way he said it, I believed him. I offered then and there to give them some money, asking them how much it would take to make an album, which was still rare in singles-driven Jamaica. They asked for much more than they actually needed to make an album, but it still wasn’t that much, £4,000. I said yes. I didn’t ask them to sign anything, which was a risk, but it seemed right in this instance. They had been so fucked over and had so many scores to settle that it seemed correct to do it this way.
Some of my Island colleagues thought I was crazy, and that I would never again see the Wailers or my money. I was told that they were known to be impossible to work with, big troublemakers. But I figured that what these guys were really doing was standing up for themselves. In my experience, when people are described as difficult, it usually just means that they know what they want.
Wailers collected me there and took me to their studio, Harry J’s. What they played me was what became Catch a Fire, their first Island album. It sounded great and they sounded like a group — it was a tremendous progression from other Jamaican music.
The first song they played me was “Slave Driver.” Before feeling anything else, I felt excitement and relief that they had recorded anything at all. Very encouraging! In hindsight, that first track was a masterful piece of songwriting and playing, setting the tone for what was to come over the next few years — light and dark, heavy and easy, pleasure and pain, love and resistance, an angry, deeply spiritual song sneaking up on you, the fury of it all lying in wait.
Catch a Fire is the most polished of Bob Marley’s records for Island, deliberately. It was an introduction for those not used to reggae. The albums started to roughen up a little once we had an audience — even by their second Island album, Burnin’ — but the way to get an audience first was to give it a more refined production, to produce the Wailers as you would a guitar band. In a way, I was treating them as a Black guitar band.
It didn’t seem a weakening or a pasteurization to market the Wailers as you would a rock act. There was no sellout. It seemed more compromising and condescending to continue to market reggae as niche music or some kind of exotica. So I took what I had learned working in rock and applied it to reggae, just as I had taken what I’d learned from producing and selling Jamaican music and applied it to running a rock label. It was coming full circle, really.
Catch a Fire didn’t immediately sell a huge number of copies, about 14,000 in the first year. I approached the release with confidence, but there was still a hesitancy at the label. In its first few months, it sold only 6,000 or so copies. I was extremely disappointed, but the prevailing attitude was: “That’s good for a reggae record.” My retort: “Don’t think of it as a reggae record. It’s a rock record. It’s a record that has the chance to be something important if we get behind it.”
We eventually put a lot of money and promotional muscle behind the album. In Britain, the Wailers played in large venues, opening for Traffic and other Island acts. Across the Atlantic, the Wailers opened for a highly touted new CBS act named Bruce Springsteen at some introductory shows at Max’s Kansas City in New York.
It may not have sold a huge amount, but Catch a Fire got great reviews, especially for a music that still wasn’t taken seriously by most of the rock press. And over time, Catch a Fire carried on selling. As was the case with a lot of great Island records, it didn’t open big but it sold forever.
And it led to the next Wailers album on Island, Burnin’. I enjoyed playing records I liked to Bob, sometimes simply to share my enthusiasm and at other times to see if these songs inspired him. I was a big fan of Norman Whitfield, who was making bold uncompromising records for Marvin Gaye, Edwin Starr, and especially the Temptations. One day I played Bob the last group’s “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” a Whitfield cowrite, and I could see from his face that it had switched something on in his brain. When you played him something he liked, he would have a very visceral response to it, and process his own response very quickly. “Papa” was transformed through Bob’s mind into “Get Up, Stand Up,” the powerful political lead-off track of Burnin’. Listen closely and you’ll hear the influence; it’s right in the bass. Burnin’ was swiftly followed by Natty Dread, whose single “No Woman, No Cry” began to take Bob’s music to an international audience.
FROM THE MOMENT that Bob and I set to work remixing Catch a Fire in London, Peter Tosh and Bunny Wailer felt threatened. To them, it seemed it was now me and Bob. They were so protective of the three of them, which was understandable. It had always been their thing. They had fought hard to keep their band going when so much conspired against them, and then here, all of a sudden, was this white guy deciding for them that they needed to move in a different direction.
Even Bob didn’t initially understand my line of thinking until I took him to a show in America, an Island tour with Traffic, Free, and John Martyn. It was sold out, even though none of these artists had actual hits. They represented the new album market: white college kids into Led Zeppelin and Cream who thought pop was too superficial and throwaway. Their fans were believers in something more substantial and permanent. Appealing to this audience wasn’t a betrayal of your integrity.
Bunny, a fundamentalist Rasta, started getting anxious about the kinds of venues we wanted the Wailers to play, the rock clubs and colleges. He was unsure about the types of people who went to those clubs, their diversity. To him they were full of freaks, which freaked him out. He also never got used to the cold in Britain and the difficulty getting the vegetarian ital food. Whereas Bob took to exploring possibilities outside Jamaica with relish, sensing exciting ways he could maintain his Rasta beliefs while expanding his horizons, Peter and Bunny were uncomfortable.
Soon enough, the Wailers became known as Bob Marley and the Wailers, not least because, although Tosh and Bunny were formidable talents and had great rebel presence, Bob had by far the most charisma and the most songs. He was clearly the leader — and, in a wider sense, transcending music, a leader. He was always hungry for experience and loved traveling and seeing other parts of the world.
Peter Tosh didn’t like me. He suggested I favored Bob because Bob was half-white, with an English-born father. Behind my back, he referred to me as “Whitewell” and “Whiteworst.” All I can say is that his suspicions were misguided, as were those who accused me of exploiting Bob to make money. I never paid a Jamaican act a penny less in royalties than an English act. I was helpless without the artists. I wasn’t a singer or a writer; it made no sense to rip them off. I put my all into getting Bob’s music, and Jamaica’s music, into the mainstream.
The last Wailers single to feature the original Bob-Peter-Bunny lineup was “I Shot the Sheriff,” taken from Burnin’. Released in February 1973, it wasn’t a hit, reaching only number sixty-seven in the U.K. charts. But a smooth 1974 cover by Eric Clapton ended up being Clapton’s only number-one single in America and helped open more ears to Bob’s music.
By 1975, I felt it was time for a Bob Marley and the Wailers live album. We used the Rolling Stones’ mobile recording studio to capture the band at the Lyceum in London in the summer of 1975. They had just completed a long American tour promoting Natty Dread and added four British dates in what was fast becoming a home audience.
They were battle-hardened and at one with the music, which made the timing ideal for a bid to make them bigger still. For many listeners, Bob Marley and the Wailers were still a new act, and the departures of Tosh and Wailer weren’t a factor. The band still had its original rhythm section, drummer Carlton Barrett and bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, and they were now joined by Al Anderson on guitar, Tyrone Downie on keyboards, and Cuban percussionist Alvin “Seeco” Patterson, a father figure or big brother to Bob who had been in the first iteration of the Wailers in 1964. The harmonies formerly supplied by Peter and Bunny had been replaced by those of the I-Three trio: Bob’s wife, Rita, and Marcia Griffiths and Judy Mowatt.
The atmosphere at the Lyceum was electric, and I saw — and heard — the reaction of the audience to “No Woman, No Cry,” and how they started chanting the chorus over the organ intro and the I-Three even before Bob had started singing. This was quite a moment — the group hadn’t had a hit yet, but the white post-hippie college crowd was out in force and already knew the Wailers’ songs inside out. At the same time, the venue accommodated a large contingent of blissed-out local Black fans, which created a then extremely rare mixed audience. This was a time, remember, when dreadlocks still needed to be described in the mainstream press as “waxy plaits.”
The resulting album, simply called Live!, includes what have come to be thought of as the definitive versions of certain Bob Marley songs, “No Woman, No Cry” especially. I kept telling my engineers, “Give me more audience!” I wanted the home listener to hear the ecstatic roar and unison singing of that mixed Lyceum crowd as Bob urged them on. The live “No Woman, No Cry” became Bob’s first hit outside Jamaica, reaching number twenty-two in the U.K. charts. Thinking of Bob’s transcendent popularity now, that seems relatively low-key, but at the time it was a mind-blowing milestone. For all the lovely, infectious melodies of Bob’s songs, they were still about tyranny and anger — as rapper Chuck D has put it, “battle cries for survival.”
“Adapted from THE ISLANDER by Chris Blackwell with Paul Morley (Gallery Books, June 7, 2022), Copyright © 2022 by Blue Mountain Music Ltd”. Get the book here. From Blackwell’s “The Islander: My Life in Music and Beyond”
