Free Bob Marley!

[Jahfin]

By Field Maloney

Wednesday, May 11 is the 30th anniversary of legend Bob Marley's untimely death. In the 2006 article reprinted below, Field Maloney explored the musician's commercial afterlife.

Saving Bob Marley from his fans

Bob Marley's greatest-hits album, Legend, came out in 1984, three years after his death, at 36, of a cancer that spread from his big toe. It's one of the best-selling albums of all time, in the company of Michael Jackson's Thriller and Bruce Springsteen's Born in the U.S.A. During his lifetime, Marley's following outside Jamaica was mostly cultish and underground until his last years, when he acquired a modest international stardom. But Marley didn't really become a mainstream fixture—a singer instantly recognizable to anyone who's lingered over a fajita at Chili's or wandered through a freshman quad in the springtime—until after his death, and after Legend. Greatest-hits collections are notoriously bad showcases, but Legend was a doozy—a defanged and overproduced selection of Marley's music. Listening to Legend to understand Marley is like reading Bridget Jones's Diary to get Jane Austen.

Click here to read the rest of the article.

[Strider]

Thanks for that article, Jahfin. It's a pretty interesting take on Bob Marley and his legacy. I think Bob Marley is up there with Che Guevera as one of the most misused icons of the 20th century...especially among middle-class white kids.

[dazedcat]

Sorry but this Slate article is way off base. From the article: "Can Marley's legacy emancipate itself from an American following that wants a multiculti teddy bear?"

That's so insulting and pandering I can't even think of anything to say about it. Legend worked as a best of collection because Island Records took some of Marley's most commercial songs and sequenced them in a way that you just couldn't help but not to love it. Marley WROTE them while he was attaining stardom, so why such acid about it now?

Guaranteed, if Legend had tanked Slate would be blasting Americans for being ignorant as a society.

You can't win for losing.

[Jahfin]

I don't think Legend is bad either. What bothers me are those that buy it but don't seek out any other reggae beyond that. I think The Onion pretty much nailed that aspect of it in this article they ran back in 2002:

BOSTON—The American Council of College Administrators (ACCA) met Monday to discuss an emergency ban on the Bob Marley greatest-hits compilation Legend. "The situation grows more severe by the day," University of Michigan president Mary Sue Coleman told her fellow administrators. "At any given moment in Ann Arbor, it's impossible to walk down any street where there is undergraduate housing without hearing 'Get Up Stand Up' coming from five different porches." The ban would be the ACCA's first since a 1993 act restricting access to The Beastie Boys' Check Your Head.

There was also a piece that ran on WNYC's Soundcheck yesterday to which someone made these comments on their Facebook page:

"I could never figure out why Marley is so popular. The music is boring and uninspired. I get the feeling that he's mostly loved because of the drug connotations and because of the insatiable desire of young whites to applaud themselves for their racial tolerance."

"Boring and uninspired"? I think not. At least that wasn't my experience upon first hearing Marley back in the late 70s. It took me a while to get into his music at first but once it started to sink in I was hooked. Such is the infectiousness of reggae. My first Marley record was Bob Marley & the Wailers Live! but it wasn't long afterwards that I heard The Harder They Come soundtrack and was soon seeking out records by Toots & the Maytals, Burning Spear, the Itals, Third World, Black Uhuru, Peter Tosh, Steel Pulse and many, many others. I'd also say that my love of reggae helped pave the way for my appreciation of the likes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Tinariwen years later.

Edited May 12, 2011 by Jahfin

[Strider]

My first Marley record was Bob Marley & the Wailers Live! but it wasn't long afterwards that I heard The Harder They Come soundtrack and was soon seeking out records by Toots & the Maytals, Burning Spear, the Itals, Third World, Black Uhuru, Peter Tosh, Steel Pulse and many, many others. I'd also say that my love of reggae helped pave the way for my appreciation of the likes of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and Tinariwen years later.

"Bob Marley & the Wailers Live!" is an outstanding album. You were a fortuitous one, Jahfin, to have that as your entree into the world of Marley and reggae. It's obvious you have what I like to call, "open ears"...you hear something that you like and you have the curiosity to dig further into the roots and the subsequent fruit that develops from those roots.

I find it distressing sometimes when some people's musical tastes seem to run the gamut from AC/DC to Aerosmith. How many power chords and 4/4 beats can you listen to in one lifetime before it all gets a little stale? Not that I'm knocking hard rock, but man does not live on bread alone. You can see it in the people who bashed Plant's alliances with Alison Krauss and now, the Band of Joy...if it's not hard rock, it's not worth their time seems to be the gist of their complaints.

Which is ironic, given that it was getting into Led Zeppelin that led me to so many different strains of music: folk, bluegrass, krautrock, progressive, funk, metal, North African trance, blues, reggae...reggae, which leads to Bob Marley, which is the topic of this thread.

So let me get this train back on track...

My first Bob Marley album was "Burnin'", which I got in 1974 after hearing Eric Clapton's "I Shot the Sheriff" on the radio that year. After finding out that it was a cover of a Bob Marley song, that led me to seeking out Bob's version, which I discovered was on the "Burnin'" album, which had just been released late in 1973.

My prior knowledge of reggae to this point was limited...I had seen "The Harder They Come" in 1973, and had the soundtrack album, so I knew about Desmond Dekker and the Maytals and Jimmy Cliff. But being a kid, I had limited funds, so I didn't have the spending money to be able to explore the reggae section of the local record store.

Then, after "Houses of the Holy" came out in late March 1973, many reviews mentioned the band's take on reggae, "D'yer Mak'er", most of them unflattering, but I liked the song. Then, later that year, Elton John released his opus, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road", which also had a reggae-inflected track called "Jamaica Jerk-Off", so you could see that, at least among the Brits, reggae was becoming the latest "hot thing".

I believe it was also around this time, either 1973 or 1974, that Creem magazine ran a reggae article, sort of a guide to reggae, that further primed my interest. So by the time Eric Clapton's "I Shot the Sheriff" hit the radio, I decided it was time to further explore the whole reggae genre, and since Bob Marley was the name on everyone's lips, I started there.

Naturally, it helped that the first Marley album I bought, "Burnin'" was one of his best.

And that led me to his earlier albums and to put him on my list of people I wanted see in concert. Which I finally did in 1975, when he played a week of shows at the Roxy in Hollywood around my birthday.

[Jahfin]

The so-called "fans" that slam Plant are more about selfishness in regards to Zeppelin reforming than the actual music. They can't find anything else to use against him so all they have are their half hearted attempts at bashing him for music they, in all likelihood, have never even bothered to listen to. If the music were the case they would know that Plant's last two records have just as much in common with the roots of the band as Zeppelin's blues influences did.

I knew of reggae and Marley through the years but it took having an older brother that was really into him for me to have a fair chance of actually spending some time with the music in order to appreciate it. I also credit the same brother with turning me onto Waylon Jennings pretty early on. I think that may be what it all comes down to with me as far as my openness to a variety of different kinds of music goes. I grew up the youngest of six in a family that enjoyed country, folk, bluegrass, hard rock, psychedelic rock, gospel, R & B, etc. That's something I feel very fortunate for. It's very frustrating when I run into fellow Zeppelin fans who are unable to grasp the vast reach of all of their various influences. There was so much more to them than just hard rock or even acoustic based music. That so few seem to get that is very disheartening, particularly when it comes to Plant's excursions into what helped formed the musical basis for Led Zeppelin to start with.

[Strider]

^ ^ ^

Well said

[dazedcat]

I did the same as you Jahfin, my first actual Marley experience was via the "Rastaman Vibrations" LP and it went from there. 70's Reggae music was remarkable. I was lucky because back then upstate New York where I live actually had some pretty good FM radio stations. WRPI was the big college radio station then and they had two guys every Saturday who came in and played nothing but reggae and ska. From noon until late afternoon if you turned in that's all you'd hear. It was epic.

[Jahfin]

I did the same as you Jahfin, my first actual Marley experience was via the "Rastaman Vibrations" LP and it went from there. 70's Reggae music was remarkable. I was lucky because back then upstate New York where I live actually had some pretty good FM radio stations. WRPI was the big college radio station then and they had two guys every Saturday who came in and played nothing but reggae and ska. From noon until late afternoon if you turned in that's all you'd hear. It was epic.

I think Rastaman Vibration was my second reggae album. Believe it or not, a friend gave me his copy, which just so happened to be in pristine condition. To this day, it features what I consider one of my favorite liner notes of all time in the inscription that says, "this album jacket is great for cleaning herb" (yet another thing you can't do with an iPod). On the radio tip, during my tenure at a local college (where I was majoring in Broadcasting) I started up a reggae show I hosted on Saturdays called Roots, Rock Reggae. Thanks to a friend, it continued on even after I graduated.

[Deborah J]

Love this thread! I went to Bob Marley's Resort and I will tell you it is a spiritual place.

http://www.marleyresort.com/

While I was there I took this picture of his Les Paul. This room alone was amazing!

[The Pagemeister]

http://youtu.be/xg98XdbZiLI

[Jahfin]

As I mentioned in the Movies thread in the Ramble On section of the board, I saw Marley over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. For me, it was a very short 2.5 hours as the film moved along very briskly and there were never any dull moments.

I was aware of Marley's father, Captain Norval Sinclair Marley but you learn even more about him in the movie. This article from the Daily Mail also provides a bit more background on him.

Revealed: The white ex-naval officer who fathered Bob Marley was a British captain from Essex

Smile: Captain Norval Marley was the father of singer Bob, according to local gossip; here he is pictured on horseback in Jamaica