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CARIBBEAN
NIGHTS/RAINBOW 77 - BOB MARLEY DVD
You will find
other liner notes with the DVD but these - a RadioREGGAE.com Exclusive from Roger
Steffens - are the "enhanced" version for increased overstanding!
BIG UP to Rojah.
We will have a PDF
file that you can download and print to put with your DVD soon.
by
Roger Steffens aka Ras RoJah
At the dawn of the new
century, the venerable New York Times, America's self-proclaimed
"newspaper of record," decided to build a time capsule to be
opened a thousand years from now, at the fourth millennium. Asked to
choose the one video most worth preserving for that distant audience,
Andrew Ross, an eminent NYU professor, chose "Bob Marley and the
Wailers Live at the Rainbow," shot in London at the beginning of June
1977. Rasta, he wrote "captured the attention and aspirations of
millions at a time when the world's old colonial maps were being redrawn,
and when the color of our minds began to dissociate from the color of our
skin. As a result, [Marley's concert] became the most evocative look of
the late 20th century." The Times went on to call Bob Marley
"the most influential musician of the second half of the
century."
The Rainbow shows, held over three nights in Finsbury Park, one of the
most racially mixed neighborhoods of London, were the hottest ticket in
town. And held under "Heavy Manners." There was a massive police
presence due to the controversies surrounding Bob's visits the previous
two years. At the Lyceum in '75, captured on the stirring
"Live!" album, the fire department had to be called out to spray
people off the theatre's steps. In '76 at the Hammersmith Odeon, an
infestation of pickpockets and hustlers ruined the evening for many.
But those who braved the gauntlet of "squads of police, barking
police dogs and menacing youths," as Ray Coleman wrote in his Melody
Maker review, saw a performance of unsurpassed power, fierce in its
restraint, and equally explosive. French reggae maven, Bruno Blum, was
there too. It was the first time the teenager had heard of reservations
for seats at the Rainbow. The show "wasn't as loud as usual and all
kinds of clean people came. Black and white, rich and poor, young and old,
square and hip, and dreads and punks too." "Absolutely,"
agrees famed photographer Kate Simon, whose cover portrait on the "Kaya"
album was chosen as one of "The One Hundred Images of the 20th
Century." Kate can occasionally be glimpsed in her khaki jacket
hovering in the wings to the right of the stage. "Bob would skank
toward me and give me a shot. In those days, London was Bob's 'home town.'
And everybody wanted to go to those shows. Chic types, rock people,
socialites, everybody! It was at the end of his European tour, so the band
was super tight, and the atmosphere was electric. Outside was a near riot,
and there was a huge police presence." Many of Kate's stunningly
intimate photos from the Rainbow gigs can be seen in her recent Genesis
book, a lushly extravagant tome called "Rebel Music: Bob Marley and
Roots Reggae."
Wailers' art director Neville Garrick, recalling those nights 27 years
later from his home in Los Angeles, agrees. "I was lighting the show
from the middle of the theatre, and I looked over and I saw these two old
white ladies in their 60s who had come by themselves, dancing in their
seats. It proved that Bob was reaching across all age barriers, not only
gender and class. When Bob came on stage the first night, which wasn't
filmed, someone had given him a red, gold and green crushie kind of scarf,
and he threw it over his head as he came on. I hit him with a spot, it
looked like a shroud, you couldn't see his face, and he launched into
'Natural Mystic.' He sang the whole first side of the 'Exodus' album,
which had only been in release for a few days, so the audience had never
heard any of these songs before. People were - I don't even know the
proper word to use - amazed, you would have to say. Can you imagine Bob
coming on with five songs that no one had ever heard before?"
Among the other discoveries at that show was the Wailers' highly animated
new lead guitarist, Junior Marvin, a Jamaican raised in the U.S. and the
UK. Introduced to Marley in the spring of 1977 in London by Chris
Blackwell, the owner of Island Records, they hit it off instantly, and
after a week of jamming with Bob and Tyrone Downie, the band's
keyboardist, Marvin was invited to join the group. A youthful veteran who
had played with Steve Winwood, Ike and Tina Turner and Billy Preston,
Marvin brought a lanky Yankee arena-rock attitude to the previously
controlled frenzy of the Wailers. At first, Bob had to tone him down a
bit. Laughing at the memory, Garrick explains, "Bob would call him
out for a solo, and he would play Hendrix-style, sliding on his knees. He
really had a ball." The band bond was immediate. "Junior had
come to Oakley Street where we were all living together for the first
time. We jammed all the time. Carley," the Wailers drummer, "and
I were the cooks. I don't think Junior had ever eaten that much food
before." Junior was thrilled to be working with people he considered
his heroes. "Plus," he told journalist Dave Ramsden, "I can
identify with rock as easily as reggae because I grew up with it. I always
felt it would be nice if there were no barriers, so if you're into the
bass you can relate to the roots bass, and if you're into the guitar you
can relate to a slight rock feel. I can enjoy playing two really good
notes rather than 20 which people wouldn't understand. Bob helped me a
lot. You could always tell when it's right because there'd be a big smile
on his face." During the mixing process, Marvin helped substantially
alter the arrangements of the "Exodus" material. The collection
went on to be chosen by Time magazine as "the best album of the 20th
century."
The Rainbow shows benefitted from the imaginative lighting of Garrick, who
also designed many of Marley's most famous album covers. "I think we
had five cameras. We used the Paul Turner lighting company, and I was the
director. The camera doesn't see the way the eye sees, especially red,
blue and green. If I had eight red lamps, I doubled it to 16 so it would
be more intense and you could really see the colors. It was also the first
time I had used a white overhead light on Bob, so that the photographers
who used to complain that it was too dark to shoot Bob's face could see
that the light created a more mystic shot because it cast shadows on his
face like a mask. Drama. I used more spotlights than before, amber and
straw colored. And when he sang lines like 'cold ground was my bed last
night,' the stage became dark blue and cold. It was the only time on the
tour that year I could do that grand a lighting scheme, because we
couldn't afford it."
Crucial to the overall impact of the Wailers' concerts in 1977 was the
presence of all the I Three. One or another would sometimes miss tours
because of pregnancies. But at the Rainbow, Jamaica's female version of
The Three Tenors - the magnificent trio of Jamaica's most precious
songstresses, Judy Mowatt, Marcia Griffiths, and Marley's wife Rita -
added an elegant visual and aural element. And when they sang, "One
day the bottom will drop out," they bent their knees and shook their
bottoms in girlish abandon.
As the last notes of Bob's performance were still echoing off the rafters,
the audience took up Bob's "whoa-oh-yoi" war cry, and danced
chanting into the streets on the rapturous high of one of those rare
moments when all the technical requirements for a perfect recording
coincided with one of the most magical performances of an artist's career.
This is it, and Jah willing, it will be there for our genetic inheritors
to thrill to, way off on that first misty morning of the year 3,000.
*******
"Caribbean
Nights" was initially
released in 1986. The week that Marley passed in May of 1981,
South-African born director Jo Menell, former head of the BBC's
documentary division (who had once been briefly engaged to the
granddaughter of Haile Selassie, the God of the Rastafarian faith), was
hired by Chris Blackwell to direct a film on Marley's life. The project
was still-born when many of those closest to Bob refused to be part of it.
Another director was brought in, only to be dropped himself. Five years
later, the Beeb pushed hard to make a Marley film of their own, and
suddenly, according to commentator Linton Kwesi Johnson, three thousand
pounds of films and videos showed up at their door. Lacking the full
story, however, Anthony Wall and Nigel Finch flew to Kingston to film more
footage. This was then combined with the Menell-directed interviews of
Blackwell, Rita Marley, Cedella Booker (Bob's mother), and the Bull Bay
Rasta community.
The program begins with Bob overlooking a harbor in New Zealand, where his
welcome had been like that of visiting royalty. (Later we see a Maori
greeting ceremony with Bob and his bemused band.) A bit of "No Woman
No Cry" is seen, recorded at the Amandla concert in Harvard Stadium,
on July 21, 1979, to raise money for freedom fighters in Rhodesia, Angola
and South Africa. It was one of the greatest shows of his life, during
which he made an impassioned series of speeches, and it remains mostly
unseen to this day.
Bob's father is often referred to herein as "English." That was
Norval Marley's background, but in fact he was born and raised in Jamaica,
from a family that had long lived on the island. The Gil Noble interview
used throughout the film, was considered by this respected New York
broadcaster as "the finest I ever did." Noble's own Jamaican
background established an easy rapport with the often-misunderstood
singer, something not that easily accomplished. Their conversation
produced one of the most quoted lines from the reggae prophet: "King
James edit the Bible. I don't think [h]im would edit it for the benefit of
Black people."
Memories often dim with time, so we now know, with the beneficence of
hind-sight, that "Simmer Down," the Wailers first record, was a
hit in early '64 in Jamaica, not two years earlier as Peter Tosh,
co-founder of the Wailers, asserts. And Bob actually purchased his
headquarters at 56 Hope Road from Blackwell for $25,000. The ethereally
powerful "War" speech that Bob set to music so memorably, was
first delivered to the United Nations by Haile Selassie on 4 October 1963,
not in 1968 as has often been claimed, the result of the words being taken
from a misdated poster. The injury to Bob's foot came during May of 1977,
when Bob was playing a soccer match between his band and a team of French
music journalists in Paris. When he was accidentally spiked by one of
them, he was taken to a doctor, which led to the discovery that he had
developed melanoma cancer. Bob played the rest of his 1977 European tour
with the big toe of his right foot heavily bandaged and protected and, in
fact, had to cancel the rest of his tour to North America and elsewhere
that year.
"Caribbean Nights" gives a clearer overstanding of what Bob went
through to achieve his successes, and also reveals how impossible it is to
tell even the broadest outlines of Marley's story in just 100 minutes.
Marley's political experiences include not just the One Love Peace
Concert, temporarily reconciling the two warring "politrickal"
parties in Kingston, or being the only performer on the main stage at
Zimbabwe's independence celebrations (perhaps because he brought it with
him), but also being the recipient of the United Nations Medal of Peace.
It was presented to him in New York in June of 1978, following the Peace
Concert, by the youth ambassador of Senegal to the UN, Mamadu Jonny Seka,
(who himself would also die at 36 from melanoma, the same age and disease
that took Bob).
Back in 1996, the chief pop critic of the New York Times, Jon Pareles, was
asked to choose a record that he thought would be great enough to survive
a hundred years into the future. He picked "Burnin' ", the last
album by the original Wailers trio of Bob Marley, Peter Tosh and Bunny
Wailer, explaining: Bob Marley became the voice of third world pain and
resistance, the sufferer in the concrete jungle who would not be denied
forever. Outsiders everywhere heard Marley as their own champion; if he
could make himself heard, so could they, without compromises. In 2096,
when the former third world has overrun and colonised the former
superpowers, Bob Marley will be commemorated as a saint."
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