LINER NOTES: Bob Marley & The Wailers, Catch A Fire (1973)
To walk into Harry J's Kingston studio one hot evening in late September 1972, the night the Wailers were recording "Slave Driver," was to be ushered into a new musical universe. Within the single-story building at 10 Roosevelt Avenue, unprecedented sounds were cutting through the ganja haze. The loose, spacious one-drop rhythm, the chattering guitar, the urgent lead vocal set against cool harmonies, the startlingly militant lyric and the pervasive sense of timelessness added up to a formula for revolution.
A few months later, "Slave Driver" appeared as one of the signature tracks of Catch A Fire, the distinctively packaged album which introduced Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Livingston, the Barrett brothers and their new-wave reggae to the world. By the end of the decade their music had become a universal language, understood from Mali to Malibu, and Marley was being celebrated as a Third World hero, one whose art united cultural and political dimensions for a mass audience in a way that only Bob Dylan had done before. And Catch A Fire was where it began.
. . . Almost 30 years later the unity and integrity of the music are undiminished either by time or Blackwell's post-production work, the music and its message sounding every bit as uncompromising and imposing as they seemed back then to ears that had never heard such sounds before.
--Robert Williams
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