Legend: The Best Of Bob Marley and The Wailers spends another week at the top of the US Billboard Reggae Albums chart. 184 weeks at the top for an album first released in 1984 is not by chance but by design and it is the subject of Island Records Founder Chris Blackwell‘s memoir “The Islander: My Life In Music and Beyond.”
Chris Blackwell explains how Jimmy Hendrix’s tour manager, Dave Robinson’s eye for marketing and taking risks is responsible for making Bob Marley a household name.
Robinson was the music executive who headed Island Records between 1984 – 1986. Following Bob Marley’s death, many people around the world knew of the reggae star, but his records were not selling on par with his notoriety. Dave had found success with Stiff Records which he founded in 1976 inspired by Island. He then joined Stiff with Island to become the President of the company. He single handedly made the decision to use scientific data to find a market segment for Marley’s brand of music with a compilation album that will sell forever.
“The market research team asked three different age groups their thoughts (on the album),” Blackwell recalled.
“The casual record buyer liked the idea of Bob Marley, liked many of his songs, certainly the more ‘hookier’,more hummable ones, but didn’t like his image and didn’t get reggae as a genre,” he continued.
Trevor Wyatt, the person responsible for the reggae catalogue at Island Records who gave Dave Robinson a list of potential songs for a best of album and that became the subject of the market research. They made a conscious decision not to include any song’s from Marley’s militant 11th studio album “Survival” which had songs like “Africa Unite” and “Zimbabwe.”
Blackwell, now 86, says there was no mention of the word “Reggae” in the marketing of Reggae’s most successful album and the album cover was meant to present Bob as a “striking and inoffensive entertainer” rather than a sacred freedom fighter.
“Bob Marley had written money is not richness, my richness to walk barefoot on the earth, but Robinson wanted to sell him, not sanctify him,” Blackwell says about Dave’s approach to marketing Marley.
“Legend became the one Bob Marley album you had to own, it coulda gone badly wrong,” Blackwell continued.
In 2006, Robinson recalled his days at Island as a mistake in an interview with The Independent. “Island was in a bad financial state and I spent too much time worrying about his label and not enough about my own. I had a big hand in the success of Legend, the Bob Marley compilation;…Blackwell kind of double-crossed me after I’d essentially saved his arse.”
The album Legend, which got its name because everyone surveyed in the market research referred to Bob as such, has adapted to every form of music distribution platform and stands above all in the reggae genre. Between the original and the Deluxe versions, the album has sold more than 44 million units worldwide and amassed more than 8 billion streams on Spotify, making it Marley’s top set on the Platform and the most commercially successful reggae album of all time.
